In the convention I have just spoken of there was nothing remarkable in the appearance of the members of either race. In another convention, however, where I spent a morning, this was not the case; for I did not see a single white who had at all the air of a legislator, or even the appearance of a respectable member of society. Here I heard a man who was black, or as nearly black as one could be, make several speeches. He assumed a kind of leadership, or at all events of authority in the assembly, to which, as far as I could judge, he was most fully entitled. He certainly was the best speaker I heard in the United States, or, indeed, ever heard anywhere else, as far as his knowledge went. He spoke with perfect ease, and complete confidence in himself, and at the same time quite in good taste. He said nothing but what appeared to be most reasonable, proper, and fair to both races. He was for putting an end at once to all ideas and hopes of confiscation on the part of the blacks, and to the fears of the whites on the subject, by some authoritative declaration; for he believed that these hopes and fears were giving false expectations to his own race, and causing much uncertainty in the minds of the whites, which prevented their setting about the re-establishment of cultivation on their estates. He had a good musical voice, and he could vary its tones at his pleasure. His thoughts were clearly conceived and clearly put. I must not, however, omit to mention that, though the traces of white blood were so slight in the colour of his skin, he had most completely the head and features of the European—a high forehead, a thin straight nose, and a small chin and month. His hair was woolly in the extreme. I afterwards understood that the whites in this convention, who were so greatly his inferiors in debate, were almost all Northern adventurers and ‘mean whites’; the whole of the upper class having declined to take any part in forming the new constitution. [Sidenote: _South Carolina Orphan Asylum._]