In Young Ralph Waldo Emerson summed up and ignored the spirit of Negro youth. He captured their spirit as one of the strands in the brilliant movement of youth generally, as seen in their subjection of the frontier, in their cooperation with nature to insure prosperity, and in their filling the raw ideal with blood and sand. This union of youth was the only hope for America, since the ideal of a land of promise and opportunity sprung from a youthful, not an adult, dream, and could be accomplished only if youthful America stood by his dream. But Emerson did not mention the peculiar drive Negro youth were obliged to make in addition to their all-American contribution. He did not explore an oddity-the youth movement that had been going on among Negroes for many years before he wrote this revealing essay in 1841. He did not speak of its possibilities. If American was to mean the democratic struggle against insuperable odds, then this was more American than anything in Emerson's believe-it-or-not world. This was a movement of slaves, with the hearts of freemen, and free men. This was the quintessence of Joseph Conrad's: O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! This was literal do or die. In America, from the eighteenth century on, thousands of black slaves dreamed, dug, thought, and plotted freedom. The uprisings of the spirit in the British West Indies and Haiti were duplicated in the United States of America hundreds of times in the last two centuries of slavery. That they were partially successful in the former, and much less so in the latter, instance is no test of their quality. They welded thousands of slaves into an unbreakable union. They drove the slave masters to distraction. They inspired and aroused the abolitionist sentiment in North and South. By generating self-manumitted leaders and by calling the nation to arms, they became, quite definitely, the major factor in the dissolution of the slave power in America. The above paragraph may seem extravagant until it is placed beside the life stories of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, William Wells Brown, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and dozens of people like them.' According to their evidence, supplemented by that of the historianseven pro-Southern historians like Ulrich B. Phillips-this gigantic movement was sponsored and pushed by young people. In 1860, almost 50 per cent of the slaves were between the ages of 10 and 30, and 85 per cent of them were under 40.