Though the majority of the colored students scoffed at the idea of preparing for work in Liberia their education for service in the United States was not encouraged. No Negro had graduated from a college before 1828, when John B. Russworm, a classmate of Hon. John P. Hale, received his degree from Bowdoin.[1] During the thirties and forties, colored persons, however well prepared, were generally debarred from colleges despite the protests of prominent men. We have no record that as many as fifteen Negroes were admitted to higher institutions in this country before 1840. It was only after much debate that Union College agreed to accept a colored student on condition that he should swear that he had no Negro blood in his veins.[2] [Footnote 1: Dyer, Speech in Congress on the Progress of the Negro, 1914.] [Footnote 2: Clarke, _The Condition of the Free People of Color_, 1859, p. 3, and the _Sixth Annual Report of the American Antislavery Society_, p. 11.] Having had such a little to encourage them to expect a general admission into northern institutions, free blacks and abolitionists concluded that separate colleges for colored people were necessary. The institution demanded for them was thought to have an advantage over the aristocratic college in that labor would be combined with study, making the stay at school pleasant and enabling the poorest youth to secure an education.[1] It was the kind of higher institution which had already been established in several States to meet the needs of the illiterate whites. Such higher training for the Negroes was considered necessary, also, because their intermediate schools were after the reaction in a languishing state. The children of color were able to advance but little on account of having nothing to stimulate them. The desired college was, therefore, boomed as an institution to give the common schools vigor, "to kindle the flame of emulation," "to open to beginners discerning the mysteries of arithmetic other mysteries beyond," and above all to serve them as Yale or Harvard did as the capstone of the educational system of the other race.[2] [Footnote 1: _Proceedings of the Third Convention of Free People of Color held in Philadelphia in 1836_, pp. 7 and 8; _Ibid., Fourth Annual Convention_, p. 26; _Proceedings of the New England Antislavery Society_, 1836, p. 40.] [Footnote 2: _Minutes and Proceedings of the Third Annual Convention of the Free People of Color_, 1836; Garrison's Address.]