FIGHTING IT OUT ON FREE SOIL
How, then, was this increasing influx of refugees from the South to be
received in the free States? In the older Northern States where there
could be no danger of an Africanization of a large district, the coming of
the Negroes did not cause general excitement, though at times the feeling
in certain localities was sufficient to make one think so.[1] Fearing that
the immigration of the Negroes into the North might so increase their
numbers as to make them constitute a rather important part in the
community, however, some free States enacted laws to restrict the
privileges of the blacks.
Free Negroes had voted in all the colonies except Georgia and South
Carolina, if they had the property qualification; but after the sentiment
attendant upon the struggle for the rights of man had passed away there
set in a reaction.[2] Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky
disfranchised all Negroes not long after the Revolution. They voted in
North Carolina until 1835, when the State, feeling that this privilege of
one class of Negroes might affect the enslavement of the other, prohibited
it. The Northern States, following in their wake, set up the same barriers
against the blacks. They were disfranchised in New Jersey in 1807, in
Connecticut in 1814, and in Pennsylvania in 1838. In 1811 New York passed
an act requiring the production of certificates of freedom from blacks or
mulattoes offering to vote. The second constitution, adopted in 1823,
provided that no man of color, unless he had been for three years a
citizen of that State and for one year next preceding any election, should
be seized and possessed of a freehold estate, should be allowed to vote,
although this qualification was not required of the whites. An act of 1824
relating to the government of the Stockbridge Indians provided that no
Negro or mulatto should vote in their councils.[3]
That increasing prejudice was to a great extent the result of the
immigration into the North of Negroes in the rough, was nowhere better
illustrated than in Pennsylvania. Prior to 1800, and especially after
1780, when the State provided for gradual emancipation, there was little
race prejudice in Pennsylvania.[4] When the reactionary legislation of the
South made life intolerable for the Negroes, debasing them to the plane of
beasts, many of the free people of color from Virginia, Maryland and
Delaware moved or escaped into Pennsylvania like a steady stream during
the next sixty years. As these Negroes tended to concentrate in towns and
cities, they caused the supply of labor to exceed the demand, lowering the
wages of some and driving out of employment a number of others who became
paupers and consequently criminals. There set in too an intense struggle
between the black and white laborers,[5] immensely accelerating the growth
of race prejudice, especially when the abolitionists and Quakers were
giving Negroes industrial training.
The first exhibition of this prejudice was seen among the lower classes of
white people, largely Irish and Germans, who, devoted to menial labor,
competed directly with the Negroes. It did not require a long time,
however, for this feeling to react on the higher classes of whites where
Negroes settled in large groups. A strong protest arose from the menace of
Negro paupers. An attempt was made in 1804 to compel free Negroes to
maintain those that might become a public charge.[6] In 1813 the mayor,
aldermen and citizens of Philadelphia asked that free Negroes be taxed to
support their poor.[7] Two Philadelphia representatives in the
Pennsylvania Legislature had a committee appointed in 1815 to consider the
advisability of preventing the immigration of Negroes.[8] One of the
causes then at work there was that the black population had recently
increased to four thousand in Philadelphia and more than four thousand
others had come into the city since the previous registration.
They were arriving much faster than they could be assimilated. The State
of Pennsylvania had about exterminated slavery by 1840, having only 40
slaves that year and only a few hundred at any time after 1810. Many of
these, of course, had not had time to make their way in life as freedmen.
To show how much the rapid migration to that city aggravated the situation
under these circumstances one needs but note the statistics of the
increase of the free people of color in that State. There were only 22,492
such persons in Pennsylvania in 1810, but in 1820 there were 30,202, and
in 1830 as many as 37,930. This number increased to 47,854 by 1840, to
53,626 by 1850, and to 56,949 by 1860. The undesirable aspect of the
situation was that most of the migrating blacks came in crude form.[9] "On
arriving," therefore, says a contemporary, "they abandoned themselves to
all manner of debauchery and dissipation to the great annoyance of many
citizens."[10]
Thereafter followed a number of clashes developing finally into a series
of riots of a grave nature. Innocent Negroes, attacked at first for
purposes of sport and later for sinister designs, were often badly beaten
in the streets or even cut with knives. The offenders were not punished
and if the Negroes defended themselves they were usually severely
penalized. In 1819 three white women stoned a woman of color to death.[11]
A few youths entered a Negro church in Philadelphia in 1825 and by
throwing pepper to give rise to suffocating fumes caused a panic which
resulted in the death of several Negroes.[12] When the citizens of New
Haven, Connecticut, arrayed themselves in 1831 against the plan to
establish in that city a Negro manual labor college, there was held in
Philadelphia a meeting which passed resolutions enthusiastically endorsing
this effort to rid the community of the evil of the immigration of free
Negroes. There arose also the custom of driving Negroes away from
Independence Square on the Fourth of July because they were neither
considered nor desired as a part of the body politic.[13]
It was thought that in the state of feeling of the thirties that the Negro
would be annihilated. De Tocqueville also observed that the Negroes were
more detested in the free States than in those where they were held as
slaves.[14] There had been such a reaction since 1800 that no positions of
consequence were open to Negroes, however well educated they might be, and
the education of the blacks which was once vigorously prosecuted there
became unpopular.[15] This was especially true of Harrisburg and
Philadelphia but by no means confined to large cities. The Philadelphia
press said nothing in behalf of the race. It was generally thought that
freedom had not been an advantage to the Negro and that instead of making
progress they had filled jails and almshouses and multiplied pest holes to
afflict the cities with disease and crime.
The Negroes of York carefully worked out in 1803 a plan to burn the city.
Incendiaries set on fire a number of houses, eleven of which were
destroyed, whereas there were other attempts at a general destruction of
the city. The authorities arrested a number of Negroes but ran the risk of
having the jail broken open by their sympathizing fellowmen. After a reign
of terror for half a week, order was restored and twenty of the accused
were convicted of arson.
In 1820 there occurred so many conflagrations that a vigilance committee
was organized.[16] Whether or not the Negroes were guilty of the crime is
not known but numbers of them left either on account of the fear of
punishment or because of the indignities to which they were subjected.
Numerous petitions, therefore, came before the legislature to stop the
immigration of Negroes. It was proposed in 1840 to tax all free Negroes to
assist them in getting out of the State for colonization.[17] The citizens
of Lehigh County asked the authorities in 1830 to expel all Negroes and
persons of color found in the State.[18] Another petition prayed that they
be deprived of the freedom of movement. Bills embodying these ideas were
frequently considered but they were never passed.
Stronger opposition than this, however, was manifested in the form of
actual outbreaks on a large scale in Philadelphia. The immediate cause of
this first real clash was the abolition agitation in the city in 1834
following the exciting news of other such disturbances a few months prior
to this date in several northern cities. A group of boys started the riot
by destroying a Negro resort. A mob then proceeded to the Negro district,
where white and colored men engaged in a fight with clubs and stones.
The next day the mob ruined the African Presbyterian Church and attacked
some Negroes, destroying their property and beating them mercilessly. This
riot continued for three days. A committee appointed to inquire into the
causes of the riot reported that the aim of the rioters had been to make
the Negroes go away because it was believed that their labor was depriving
them of work and because the blacks had shielded criminals and had made
such noise and disorder in their churches as to make them a nuisance. It
seemed that the most intelligent and well-to-do people of Philadelphia
keenly felt it that the city had thus been disgraced, but the mob spirit
continued.[19]
The very next year was marked by the same sort of disorder. Because a
half-witted Negro attempted to murder a white man, a large mob stirred up
the city again. There was a repetition of the beating of Negroes and of
the destruction of property while the police, as the year before, were so
inactive as to give rise to the charge that they were accessories to the
riot.[20] In 1838 there occurred another outbreak which developed into an
anti-abolition riot, as the public mind had been much exercised by the
discussions of abolitionists and by their close social contact with the
Negroes. The clash came on the seventeenth of May when Pennsylvania Hall,
the center of abolition agitation, was burned. Fighting between the blacks
and whites ensued the following night when the Colored Orphan Asylum was
attacked and a Negro church burned. Order was finally restored for the
good of all concerned, but that a majority of the people sympathized with
the rioters was evidenced by the fact that the committee charged with
investigating the disturbance reported that the mob was composed of
strangers who could not be recognized.[21] It is well to note here that
this riot occurred the year the Negroes in Pennsylvania were
disfranchised.
Following the example of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh had a riot in 1839
resulting in the maltreatment of a number of Negroes and the demolishing
of some of their houses. When the Negroes of Philadelphia paraded the city
in 1842, celebrating the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, there
ensued a battle led by the whites who undertook to break up the
procession. Along with the beating and killing of the usual number went
also the destruction of the New African Hall and the Negro Presbyterian
church. The grand jury charged with the inquiry into the causes reported
that the procession was to be blamed. For several years thereafter the
city remained quiet until 1849 when there occurred a raid on the blacks by
the _Killers of Moyamensing_, using firearms with which many were
wounded. This disturbance was finally quelled by aid of the militia.[22]
These clashes sometimes reached farther north than the free States
bordering on the slave commonwealths. Mobs broke up abolition meetings in
the city of New York in 1834 when there were sent to Congress numerous
petitions for the abolition of slavery. This mob even assailed such
eminent citizens as Arthur and Lewis Tappan, mainly on account of their
friendly attitude toward the Negroes.[23] On October 21, 1834, the same
feeling developed in Utica, where was to be held an anti-slavery meeting
according to previous notice. The six hundred delegates who assembled
there were warned to disband. A mob then organized itself and drove the
delegates from the town. That same month the people of Palmyra, New York,
held a meeting at which they adopted resolutions to the effect that owners
of houses or tenements in that town occupied by blacks of the character
complained of be requested to use all their rightful means to clear their
premises of such occupants at the earliest possible period; and that it be
recommended that such proprietors refuse to rent the same thereafter to
any person of color whatever.[24] In New York Negroes were excluded from
places of amusement and public conveyances and segregated in places of
worship. In the draft riots which occurred there in 1863, one of the aims
of the mobs was to assassinate Negroes and to destroy their property. They
burned the Colored Orphan Asylum of that city and hanged Negroes to
lamp-posts.
The situation in parts of New England was not much better. For fear of the
evils of an increasing population of free persons of color the people of
Canaan, New Hampshire, broke up the Noyes Academy because it decided to
admit Negro students, thinking that many of the race might thereby be
encouraged to come to that State.[25] When Prudence Crandall established
in Canterbury, Connecticut, an academy to which she decided to admit
Negroes, the mayor, selectmen and citizens of the city protested, and when
their protests failed to deter this heroine, they induced the legislature
to enact a special law covering the case and invoked the measure to have
Prudence Crandall imprisoned because she would not desist.[26] This very
law and the arguments upholding it justified the drastic measure on the
ground that an increase in the colored population would be an injury to
the people of that State.
In the new commonwealths formed out of western territory, there was the
same fear as to Negro domination and consequently there followed the wave
of legislation intended in some cases not only to withhold from the Negro
settlers the exercise of the rights of citizenship but to discourage and
even to prevent them from coming into their territory.[27] The question as
to what should be done with the Negro was early an issue in Ohio. It came
up in the constitutional convention of 1803, and provoked some discussion,
but that body considered it sufficient to settle the matter for the time
being by merely leaving the Negroes, Indians and foreigners out of the
pale of the newly organized body politic by conveniently incorporating the
word white throughout the constitution.[28] It was soon evident, however,
that the matter had not been settled, and the legislature of 1804 had to
give serious consideration to the immigration of Negroes into that State.
It was, therefore, enacted that no Negro or mulatto should remain there
permanently, unless he could furnish a certificate of freedom issued by
some court, that all Negroes in that commonwealth should be registered
before the following June, and that no man should employ a Negro who
failed to comply with these conditions. Should one be detected in hiring,
harboring or hindering the capture of a fugitive black, he was liable to a
fine of $50 and his master could recover pay for the service of his slave
to the amount of fifty cents a day.[29]
As this legislature did not meet the demands of those who desired further
to discourage Negro immigration, the Legislature of 1807 was induced to
enact a law to the effect that no Negro should be permitted to settle in
Ohio, unless he could within 20 days give a bond to the amount of $500 for
his good behavior and assurance that he would not become a public charge.
This measure provided also for raising the fine for concealing a fugitive
from $50 to $100, one half of which should go to the person upon the
testimony of whom the conviction should be secured.[30] Negro evidence in
a case to which a white was a party was declared illegal. In 1830 Negroes
were excluded from service in the State militia, in 1831 they were
deprived of the privilege of serving on juries, and in 1838 they were
denied the right of having their children educated at the expense of the
State.[31]
In Indiana the situation was worse than in Ohio. We have already noted
above how the settlers in the southern part endeavored to make that a
slave State. When that had, after all but being successful, seemed
impossible the State enacted laws to prevent or discourage the influx of
free Negroes and to restrict the privileges of those already there. In
1824 a stringent law for the return of fugitives was passed.[32] The
expulsion of free Negroes was a matter of concern and in 1831 it was
provided that unless they could give bond for their behavior and support
they could be removed. Otherwise the county overseers could hire out such
Negroes to the highest bidder.[33] Negroes were not allowed to attend
schools maintained at the public expense, might not give evidence against
a white man and could not intermarry with white persons. They might,
however, serve as witnesses against Negroes.[34]
In the same way the free Negroes met discouragement in Illinois. They
suffered from all the disabilities imposed on their class in Ohio and
Indiana and were denied the right to sue for their liberty in the courts.
When there arose many abolitionists who encouraged the coming of the
fugitives from labor in the South, one element of the citizens of Illinois
unwilling to accept this unusual influx of members of another race passed
the drastic law of 1853 prohibiting the immigration. It provided for the
prosecution of any person bringing a Negro into the State and also for
arresting and fining any Negro $50, should he appear there and remain
longer than ten days. If he proved to be unable to pay the fine, he could
be sold to any person who could pay the cost of the trial.[35]
In Michigan the situation was a little better but, with the waves of
hostile legislation then sweeping over the new[36] commonwealths, Michigan
was not allowed to constitute altogether an exception. Some of this
intense feeling found expression in the form of a law hostile to the
Negro, this being the act of 1827, which provided for the registration of
all free persons of color and for the exclusion from the territory of all
blacks who could not produce a certificate to the effect that they were
free. Free persons of color were also required to file bonds with one or
more freehold sureties in the penal sum of $500 for their good behavior,
and the bondsmen were expected to provide for their maintenance, if they
failed to support themselves. Failure to comply with this law meant
expulsion from the territory.[37]
The opposition to the Negroes immigrating into the new West was not
restricted to the enactment of laws which in some cases were never
enforced. Several communities took the law into their own hands. During
these years when the Negroes were seeking freedom in the Northwest
Territory and when free blacks were being established there by
philanthropists, it seemed to the southern uplanders fleeing from slavery
in the border States and foreigners seeking fortunes in the new world that
they might possibly be crowded out of this new territory by the Negroes.
Frequent clashes, therefore, followed after they had passed through a
period of toleration and dependence on the execution of the hostile laws.
The clashes of the greatest consequences occurred in the Northwest
Territory where a larger number of uplanders from the South had gone, some
to escape the ill effects of slavery, and others to hold slaves if
possible, and when that seemed impossible, to exclude the blacks
altogether.[38] This persecution of the Negroes received also the hearty
cooperation of the foreign element, who, being an undeveloped class, had
to do menial labor in competition with the blacks. The feeling of the
foreigners was especially mischievous for the reasons that they were, like
the Negroes, at first settled in large numbers in urban communities.
Generally speaking, the feeling was like that exhibited by the Germans in
Mercer County, Ohio. The citizens of this frontier community, in
registering their protest against the settling of Negroes there, adopted
the following resolutions:
_Resolved_, That we will not live among Negroes, as we have settled
here first, we have fully determined that we will resist the settlement of
blacks and mulattoes in this county to the full extent of our means, the
bayonet not excepted.
_Resolved_, That the blacks of this county be, and they are hereby
respectfully requested to leave the county on or before the first day of
March, 1847; and in the case of their neglect or refusal to comply with
this request, we pledge ourselves to _remove them, peacefully if we can,
forcibly if we must._
_Resolved_, That we who are here assembled, pledge ourselves not to
employ or trade with any black or mulatto person, in any manner whatever,
or permit them to have any grinding done at our mills, after the first day
of January next.[39]
In 1827 there arose a storm of protest on the occasion of the settling of
seventy freedmen in Lawrence County, Ohio, by a philanthropic master of
Pittsylvania County, Virginia.[40] On _Black Friday_, January 1,
1830, eighty Negroes were driven out of Portsmouth, Ohio, at the request
of one or two hundred white citizens set forth in an urgent memorial.[41]
So many Negroes during these years concentrated at Cincinnati that the
laboring element forced the execution of the almost dead law requiring
free Negroes to produce certificates and give bonds for their behavior and
support.[42] A mob attacked the homes of the blacks, killed a number of
them, and forced twelve hundred others to leave for Canada West, where
they established the settlement known as Wilberforce.
In 1836 another mob attacked and destroyed there the press of James G.
Birney, the editor of the _Philanthropist_, because of the
encouragement his abolitionist organ gave to the immigrating Negroes.[43]
But in 1841 came a decidedly systematic effort on the part of foreigners
and proslavery sympathizers to kill off and drive out the Negroes who were
becoming too well established in that city and who were giving offense to
white men who desired to deal with them as Negroes were treated in the
South. The city continued in this excited state for about a week. There
were brought into play in the upheaval the police of the city and the
State militia before the shooting of the Negroes and burning of their
homes could be checked. So far as is known, no white men were punished,
although a few of them were arrested. Some Negroes were committed to
prison during the fray. They were thereafter either discharged upon
producing certificates of nativity or giving bond or were indefinitely
held.[44]
In southern Indiana and Illinois the same condition obtained. Observing
the situation in Indiana, a contributor of _Niles Register_ remarked,
in 1818, upon the arrival there of sixty or seventy liberated Negroes sent
by the society of Friends of North Carolina, that they were a species of
population that was not acceptable to the people of that State, "nor
indeed to any other, whether free or slaveholding, for they cannot rise
and become like other men, unless in countries where their own color
predominates, but must always remain a degraded and inferior class of
persons without the hope of much bettering their condition."[45]
The _Indiana Farmer_, voicing the sentiment of that same community,
regretted the increase of this population that seemed to be enlarging the
number sent to that territory. The editor insisted that the community
which enjoys the benefits of the blacks' labor should also suffer all the
consequences. Since the people of Indiana derived no advantage from
slavery, he begged that they be excused from its inconveniences. Most of
the blacks that migrated there, moreover, possessed, thought he, "feelings
quite unprepared to make good citizens. A sense of inferiority early
impressed on their minds, destitute of every thing but bodily power and
having no character to lose, and no prospect of acquiring one, even did
they know its value, they are prepared for the commission of any act, when
the prospect of evading punishment is favorable."[46]
With the exception of such centers as Eden, Upper Alton, Bellville and
Chicago, this antagonistic attitude was general also in the State of
Illinois. The Negroes were despised, abused and maltreated as persons who
had no rights that the white man should respect. Even in Detroit,
Michigan, in 1833 a fracas was started by an attack on Negroes. Because a
courageous group of them had effected the rescue and escape of one
Thornton Blackburn and his wife who had been arrested by the sheriff as
alleged fugitives from Kentucky, the citizens invoked the law of 1827, to
require free Negroes to produce a certificate and furnish bonds for their
behavior and support.[47] The anti-slavery sentiment there, however, was
so strong that the law was not long rigidly enforced.[48] And so it was in
several other parts of the West which, however, were exceptional.[49]
[Footnote 1: _The New York Daily Advertiser,_ Sept. 22, 1800; _The
New York Journal of Commerce,_ July 12, 1834; and _The New York
Commercial Advertiser,_ July 12, 1834.]
[Footnote 2: Hart, _Slavery and Abolition,_ pp. 53, 82.]
[Footnote 3: Goodell, _American Slave Code,_ Part III, chap. i; Hurd,
_The Law of Freedom and Bondage,_ I, pp. 51, 61, 67, 81, 89, 101, 111;
Woodson, _The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861,_ pp. 151-178.]
[Footnote 4: Benezet, _Short Observations,_ p. 12.]
[Footnote 5: Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, pp. 143-145.]
[Footnote 6: _Journal of House_, 1823-24, p. 824.]
[Footnote 7: _Journal of House,_ 1812-1813, pp. 481, 482.]
[Footnote 8: _Ibid._, 1814-1815, p. 101.]
[Footnote 9: _United States Censuses_, 1790-1860.]
[Footnote 10: Brannagan, _Serious Remonstrances_, p. 68.]
[Footnote 11: Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, p. 145; _The
Philadelphia Gazette_, June 30, 1819.]
[Footnote 12: _Democratic Press, Philadelphia Gazette_, Nov. 21,
1825.]
[Footnote 13: Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, p. 146.]
[Footnote 14: De Tocqueville, _Democracy in America_, II, pp. 292,
294.]
[Footnote 15: Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, p. 148.]
[Footnote 16: Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, pp. 152, 153.]
[Footnote 17: _African Repository,_ VIII, pp. 125, 283; _Journal of
House_, 1840, I, pp. 347, 508, 614, 622, 623, 680.]
[Footnote 18: _Journal of Senate_, 1850, I, pp. 454, 479.]
[Footnote 19: This is well narrated in Turner's _Negro in
Pennsylvania_, p. 160, and in DuBois's _The Philadelphia Negro_,
p. 27.]
[Footnote 20: Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, pp. 161, 162.]
[Footnote 21: Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, pp. 162, 163.]
[Footnote 22: Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, p. 163; and _The
Liberator_, July 4, 1835.]
[Footnote 23: _The Liberator_, Oct. 24, 1834.]
[Footnote 24: _Ibid._, October 24, 1834.]
[Footnote 25: Jay, _An Inquiry,_ pp. 28-29.]
[Footnote 26: _An Act in Addition to an Act for the Admission and
Settlement of Inhabitants of Towns._
1. Whereas attempts have been made to establish literary institutions in
this State for the instruction of colored people belonging to other States
and countries, which would tend to the great increase of the colored
population of the State, and thereby to the injury of the people,
therefore;
Be it resolved that no person shall set up or establish in this State,
any school, academy, or literary institution for the instruction or
education of colored persons, who are not inhabitants of this State, nor
instruct or teach in any school, academy, or other literary institution
whatever in this State, or harbor or board for the purpose of attending or
being taught or instructed in any such school, academy, or other literary
institution, any person who is not an inhabitant of any town in this
State, without the consent in writing, first obtained of a majority of the
civil authority, and also of the selectmen, of the town in which such
schools, academy, or literary institution is situated; and each and every
person who shall knowingly do any act forbidden as aforesaid, or shall be
aiding or assisting therein, shall for the first offense forfeit and pay
to the treasurer of this State a fine of one hundred dollars and for the
second offense shall forfeit and pay a fine of two hundred dollars, and so
double for every offense of which he or she shall be convicted. And all
informing officers are required to make due presentment of all breaches of
this act. Provided that nothing in this act shall extend to any district
school established in any school society under the laws of this State or
to any incorporated school for instruction in this State.
3. Any colored person not an inhabitant of this State who shall reside in
any town therein for the purpose of being instructed as aforesaid, may be
removed in the manner prescribed in the sixth and seventh sections of the
act to which this is an addition.
3. Any person not an inhabitant of this State who shall reside in any town
therein for the purpose of being instructed as aforesaid, shall be an
admissible witness in all prosecutions under the first section of this
act, and may be compelled to give testimony therein, notwithstanding
anything in this act, or in the act last aforesaid.
4. That so much of the seventh section of this act to which this is an
addition as may provide for the infliction of corporal punishment, be and
the same is hereby repealed.--See Hurd's _Law of Freedom and
Bondage_, II, pp. 45-46.]
[Footnote 27: So many Negroes working on the rivers between the slave and
free States helped fugitives to escape that there arose a clamor for the
discourage of colored employees.]
[Transcriber's Note: The above should probably be "discouragement of
colored employees."]
[Footnote 28: _Constitution of Ohio_, article I, sections 2, 6.
_The Journal of Negro History_, I, p. 2.]
[Footnote 29: _Laws of Ohio_, II, p. 53.]
[Footnote 30: _Laws of Ohio_, V, p. 53.]
[Footnote 31: Hitchcock, _The Negro in Ohio_, II, pp. 41, 42.]
[Footnote 32: _Revised Laws of Indiana_, 1831, p. 278.]
[Footnote 33: Perkins, _A Digest of the Declaration of the Supreme Court
of Indiana_, p. 590. _Laws of 1853_, p. 60.]
[Footnote 34: Gavin and Hord, _Indiana Revised Statutes_, 1862, p.
452.]
[Footnote 35: _Illinois Statutes_, 1853, sections 1-4, p. 8.]
[Footnote 36: In 1760 there were both African and Pawnee slaves in
Detroit, 96 of them in 1773 and 175 in 1782. The usual effort to have
slavery legalized was made in 1773. There were seventeen slaves in Detroit
in 1810 held by virtue of the exceptions made under the British rule prior
to the ratification of Jay's treaty. Advertisements of runaway slaves
appeared in Detroit papers as late as 1827. Furthermore, there were
thirty-two slaves in Michigan in 1830 but by 1836 all had died or had been
manumitted.--See Farmer, _History of Detroit and Michigan_, I, p.
344.]
[Footnote 37: _Laws of Michigan_, 1827; and Campbell, _Political
History of Michigan_, p. 246.]
[Footnote 38: _Proceedings of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Convention_,
1835, p. 19.]
[Footnote 39: _African Repository_, XXIII, p. 70.]
[Footnote 40: _Ohio State Journal_, May 3, 1837.]
[Footnote 41: Evans, _A History of Scioto County, Ohio_, p. 643.]
[Footnote 42: _African Repository_, V, p. 185.]
[Footnote 43: Howe, _Historical Collections_, pp. 225-226.]
[Footnote 44: _Ibid_., p. 226, and _The Cincinnati Daily
Gazette_, Sept. 14, 1841.]
[Footnote 45: _Niles Register_, XXX, 416.]
[Footnote 46: _Niles Register_, XXX, 416; _African Repository_,
III, p. 25.]
[Footnote 47: Farmer, _History of Detroit and Michigan_, I, chap.
48.]
[Footnote 48: There was the usual effort to have slavery legalized in
Michigan. At the time of the fire in 1805 there were six colored men and
nine colored women in the town of Detroit. In 1807 there were so many of
them that Governor Hull organized a company of colored militia. Joseph
Campan owned ten at one time. The importation of slaves was discontinued
after September 17, 1792, by act of the Canadian Parliament which provided
also that all born thereafter should be free at the age of twenty-five.
The Ordinance of 1787 had by its sixth article prohibited it.]
[Footnote 49: In 1836 a colored man traveling in the West to Cleveland
said:
"I have met with good treatment at every place on my journey, even better
than what I expected under present circumstances. I will relate an
incident that took place on board the steamboat, which will give an idea
of the kind treatment with which I have met. When I took the boat at Erie,
it being rainy and somewhat disagreeable, I took a cabin passage, to which
the captain had not the least objection. When dinner was announced, I
intended not to go to the first table but the mate came and urged me to
take a seat. I accordingly did and was called upon to carve a large saddle
of beef which was before me. This I performed accordingly to the best of
my ability. No one of the company manifested any objection or seemed
anyways disturbed by my presence."--Extract of a letter from a colored
gentleman traveling to the West, Cleveland, Ohio, August 11, 1836.--See
_The Philanthropist_, Oct. 21, 1836.]