Gen. Cameron and the African.

From the Washington Chronicle.

General Cameron, American minister to St. Petersburg, now in this city on official business, is known to be a very agreeable and entertaining talker.  One incident which he relates with great humor, deserves reproduction in the columns of the Daily Chronicle.

Arriving at a small German town on the evening of Whitsuntide – which is a famous and favorite holiday with the Lutherans – he was struck with the descent and comfortable appearance of the people who crowded the streets; but what most interested him was a tall, stout and impressive negro, far blacker than Othello, even before he was represented as a highly colored gentleman.  Supposing him to be an American negro, Mr. Cameron went up to him and said: “How are you, my friend?” using the Pennsylvania German, in which the General is a sort of adept, when to his infinite horror, the colored individual turned upon him and said, in good guttural Dutch, “I am no American; “I am an African; and if you are an American, I do not want to talk to you.  I won’t talk to any man who comes from a country professing to be free, in which human beings are held as slaves.”  And this was said with a magisterial and indignant air that would have been irresistibly comic.  General Cameron made his escape with the best grace possible from his stalwart and sable antagonist, and supposed he had got rid of him, but on passing into an adjoining room with his secretary, Bayard Taylor, to take a glass of lager beer, he was again confronted by the German African, who reopened his vials of wrath, concluded by turning to the general and asking him in broad German, “Sag bin ich recht, or bin ich unrecht?” which means, “Say, am I right or am I wrong, answer me?”  General Cameron made inquiry as to the negro, and ascertained that one of the nobility in the neighborhood who had spent some years in Africa, on a scientific and hunting tour, brought back with him to Germany a very handsome native, who, in the course of time, developed into the individual that sought the opportunity to administer a rebuke to an American who lived in a country professing to be free, yet recognizing the institution of human slavery.

— Published in The Fremont Weekly Journal, Fremont, Ohio, Friday, December 5, 1862, p. 4