The results of emancipation where the slaves had been carried to free
states, were, on the whole, not much more encouraging.
Professor MacMaster, of the University of Pennsylvania, referring to
the condition of the free negroes in those states at the time of the
Missouri Compromise, writes: "In spite of their freedom they were a
despised, proscribed, and poverty-stricken class."[229]
Mr. Clay, speaking December 17, 1829, said:
"Of all the descriptions of our population and of either portion of
the African race, the free people of color are by far, as a class,
the most corrupt, depraved and abandoned. There are many honourable
exceptions among them, and I take pleasure in bearing testimony to
some I know. It is not so much their fault as the consequence of
their anomalous condition."[230]
Dr. Leonard Bacon, in a sermon before his congregation in New Haven,
Conn., July 4, 1830, said:
"Who are the free people of color in the United States, and what are
they? In this city there are from eight hundred to one thousand. Of
these, a few families are honest, sober, industrious, pious and in
many points of view, respectable. But what are the remainder? Every
one knows their condition to be a condition of deep and dreadful
degradation, but few have formed any conception of the reality. The
fact is, that as a class, they are branded with ignominy.... There
are in this country three hundred thousand freedmen, who are free
men only in name, degraded to the dust and forming hardly anything
else than a mass of pauperism and crime."[231]
The biographers of William Lloyd Garrison have recorded that at the
North, prior to the Civil War:
"The free colored people were looked upon as an inferior caste to
whom their liberty was a curse, and their lot worse than that of the
slaves, with this difference, that while the latter were to be kept
in bondage 'for their own good' it would have been very wicked to
enslave the former for their good."[232]