In 1833, the Legislature of Connecticut, endeavoring to prevent the
establishment of schools in that state for non-resident negroes,
enacted a law prohibiting such schools, except with the consent "of a
majority of the civil authority and also of the selectmen of the town
in which such school, &c.,"[244] is to be located. The preamble of
this act justifies its passage by declaring that the establishment of
such schools "would tend to the great increase of the colored
population of the state, and thereby to the injury of the people, &c."
The negro populations of Vermont and New Hampshire had actually
decreased in the half century between 1810 and 1860, while that of
Massachusetts had increased less than three thousand.
The biographers of William Lloyd Garrison record the fact that there
existed a—
"Spirit which everywhere at the North, either by statute or custom,
denied to a dark skin, civil, social and educational
equality,—which in Boston forbade any merchant or respectable
mechanic to take a colored apprentice; kept the colored people out
of most public conveyances; and permitted any common carrier by land
or sea, on the objections of a white passenger, to violate his
contract with 'a nigger' however cultivated or refined."[245]
The states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania had by statutes
deprived free negroes of many of the privileges enjoyed in the period
immediately succeeding the Revolution. Thus, New Jersey in 1807, and
Pennsylvania in 1838, deprived them of the right of suffrage, and New
York in 1821 required of them as a prerequisite to voting a much
higher property qualification than was required of the white
citizens.[246] Professor A. B. Hart declares: "These exclusions
branded the negroes as of a different caste, even in the North, and it
was backed up by other unfriendly legislation."[247]
But it was chiefly in those free states on the same lines of latitude
as Virginia and Maryland, and in which the free negroes would
therefore be most liable to settle, that the laws obstructing or
forbidding their immigration were most pronounced.