University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER II

A TRANSPLANTATION TO THE NORTH

JUST after the settlement of the question of
holding the western posts by the British
and the adjustment of the trouble arising from
their capture of slaves during our second war
with England, there started a movement of the
blacks to this frontier territory. But, as there
were few towns or cities in the Northwest during
the first decades of the new republic, the
flight of the Negro into that territory was like
that of a fugitive taking his chances in the wilderness.
Having lost their pioneering spirit in
passing through the ordeal of slavery, not many
of the bondmen took flight in that direction
and few free Negroes ventured to seek their
fortunes in those wilds during the period of the
frontier conditions, especially when the country
had not then undergone a thorough reaction
against the Negro.

The migration of the Negroes, however, received
an impetus early in the nineteenth century.
This came from the Quakers, who by the
middle of the eighteenth century had taken the
position that all members of their sect should
free their slaves.[1] The Quakers of North Carolina

and Virginia had as early as 1740 taken up
the serious question of humanely treating their
Negroes. The North Carolina Quakers advised
Friends to emancipate their slaves, later prohibited
traffic in them, forbade their members
from even hiring the blacks out in 1780 and by
1818 had exterminated the institution among
their communicants.[2] After healing themselves
of the sin, they had before the close of the eighteenth
century militantly addressed themselves
to the task of abolishing slavery and the slave
trade throughout the world. Differing in their
scheme from that of most anti-slavery leaders,
they were advocating the establishment of the
freedmen in society as good citizens and to that
end had provided for the religious and mental
instruction of their slaves prior to emancipating
them.[3]

Despite the fact that the Quakers were not
free to extend their operations throughout the
colonies, they did much to enable the Negroes
to reach free soil. As the Quakers believed in
the freedom of the will, human brotherhood, and
equality before God, they did not, like the Puritans,
find difficulties in solving the problem of
elevating the Negroes. Whereas certain Puritans
were afraid that conversion might lead to
the destruction of caste and the incorporation

of undesirable persons into the "Body Politick,"
the Quakers proceeded on the principle
that all men are brethren and, being equal before
God, should be considered equal before the
law. On account of unduly emphasizing the relation
of man to God, the Puritans "atrophied
their social humanitarian instinct" and developed
into a race of self-conscious saints. Be
lieving in human nature and laying stress upon
the relation between man and man, the Quakers
became the friends of all humanity.[4]

In 1693 George Keith, a leading Quaker of
his day, came forward as a promoter of the religious
training of the slaves as a preparation
for emancipation. William Penn advocated the
emancipation of slaves, that they might have
every opportunity for improvement. In 1695
the Quakers while protesting against the slave
trade denounced also the policy of neglecting
their moral and spiritual welfare.[5] The growing
interest of this sect in the Negroes was
shown later by the development in 1713 of a
definite scheme for freeing and returning them
to Africa after having been educated and trained
to serve as missionaries on that continent.

When the manumission of the slaves was
checked by the reaction against that class and it

became more of a problem to establish them in
a hostile environment, certain Quakers of North
Carolina and Virginia adopted the scheme of
settling them in Northern States.[6] At first,
they sent such freedmen to Pennsylvania. But
for various reasons this did not prove to be
the best asylum. In the first place, Pennsylvania
bordered on the slave States, Maryland
and Virginia, from which agents came
to kidnap free Negroes. Furthermore, too
many Negroes were already rushing to that
commonwealth as the Negroes' heaven and
there was the chance that the Negroes might be
settled elsewhere in the North, where they
might have better economic opportunities.[7] A
committee of forty was accordingly appointed
by North Carolina Quakers in 1822 to examine
the laws of other free States with a view to determining
what section would be most suitable
for colonizing these blacks. This committee
recommended in its report that the blacks be
colonized in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.

The yearly meeting, therefore, ordered the
removal of such Negroes as fast as they were
willing or as might be consistent with the profession
of their sect, and instructed the agents
effecting the removal to draw on the treasury
for any sum not exceeding two hundred dollars
to defray expenses. An increasing number

reached these States every year but, owing to
the inducements offered by the American Colonization
Society, some of them went to Liberia.
When Liberia, however, developed into every
thing but a haven of rest, the number sent to the
settlements in the Northwest greatly increased.

'The quarterly meeting succeeded in sending to
the West 133 Negroes, including 23 free blacks
and slaves given up because they were connected
by marriage with those to be transplanted.[8]
The Negro colonists seemed to prefer
Indiana.[9] They went in three companies
and with suitable young Friends to whom were
executed powers of attorney to manumit, set
free, settle and bind them out.[10] Thirteen carts
and wagons were bought for these three companies;
$1,250 was furnished for their traveling
expenses and clothing, the whole cost amounting
to $2,490. It was planned to send forty or fifty
to Long Island and twenty to the interior of
Pennsylvania, but they failed to prosper and reports
concerning them stamped them as destitute
and deplorably ignorant. Those who went
to Ohio and Indiana, however, did well.[11]

Later we receive another interesting account
of this exodus. David White led a company of
fifty-three into the West, thirty-eight of whom

belonged to Friends, five to a member who had
ordered that they be taken West at his expense.
Six of these slaves belonged to Samuel Lawrence,
a Negro slaveholder, who had purchased
himself and family. White pathetically reports
the case of four of the women who had married
slave husbands and had twenty children for the
possession of whom the Friends had to stand a
lawsuit in the courts. The women had decided
to leave their husbands behind but the thought
of separation so tormented them that they made
an effort to secure their liberty. Upon appealing
to their masters for terms the owners, somewhat
moved by compassion, sold them for one
half of their value. White then went West and
left four in Chillicothe, twenty-three in Leesburg
and twenty-six in Wayne County, Indiana,
without encountering any material difficulty.[12]

Others had thought of this plan but the
Quakers actually carried it out on a small scale.
Here we see again not only their desire to have
the Negroes emancipated but the vital interest
of the Quakers in success of the blacks, for
members of this sect not only liberated their
slaves but sold out their own holdings in the
South and moved with these freedmen into the
North. Quakers who then lived in free States
offered fugitives material assistance by open
and clandestine methods.[13] The most prominent

leader developed by the movement was
Levi Coffin, whose daring deeds in behalf of
the fugitives made him the reputed President
of the Underground Railroad. Most of the
Quaker settlements of Negroes with which he
was connected were made in what is now Hamilton,
Howard, Wayne, Randolph, Vigo, Gibson,
Grant, Bush, and Tipton Counties, Indiana,
and Darke County, Ohio.

The promotion of this movement by the
Quakers was well on its way by 1815 and was
not materially checked until the fifties when the
operations of the drastic fugitive slave law interfered,
and even then the movement had
gained such momentum and the execution of
that mischievous measure had produced in the
North so much reaction like that expressed in
the personal liberty laws, that it could not be
stopped. The Negroes found homes in Western
New York, Western Pennsylvania and throughout
the Northwest Territory. The Negro population
of York, Harrisburg and Philadelphia
rapidly increased. A settlement of Negroes developed
at Sandy Lake in Northwestern Pennsylvania[14]
and there was another near Berlin
Cross Roads in Ohio.[15] A group of Negroes
migrating to this same State found homes in
the Van Buren Township of Shelby County.[16] A

more significant settlement in the State was
made by Samuel Gist, an Englishman possessing
extensive plantations in Hanover, Amherst,
and Henrico Counties, Virginia. He provided
in his will that his slaves should be freed and
sent to the North. He further provided that the
revenue from his plantation the last year of his
life be applied in building schoolhouses and
churches for their accommodation, and "that
all money coming to him in Virginia be set
aside for the employment of ministers and
teachers to instruct them." In 1818, Wickham,
the executor of his estate, purchased land and
established these Negroes in what was called
the Upper and Lower Camps of Brown
County.[17]

Augustus Wattles, a Quaker from Connecticut,
made a settlement in Mercer County, Ohio,
early in the nineteenth century. In the winter
of 1833–4, he providentially became acquainted
with the colored people of Cincinnati, finding
there about "4,000 totally ignorant of every thing
calculated to make good citizens." As most of
them had been slaves, excluded from every avenue
of moral and mental improvement, he established
for them a school which he maintained
for two years. He then proposed to these Negroes
to go into the country and purchase land to
remove them "from those contaminating influences
which had so long crushed them in our

cities and villages."[18] They consented on the
condition that he would accompany them and
teach school. He travelled through Canada,
Michigan and Indiana, looking for a suitable
location, and finally selected for settlement a
place in Mercer County, Ohio. In 1835, he made
the first purchase of land there for this purpose
and before 1838 Negroes had bought there about
30,000 acres, at the earnest appeal of this benefactor,
who had travelled into almost every
neighborhood of the blacks in the State, and laid
before them the benefits of a permanent home for
themselves and of education for their children.[19]

This settlement was further increased in 1858
by the manumitted slaves of John Harper of
North Carolina.[20] John Randolph, of Roanoke
endeavored to establish his slaves as freemen
in this county but the Germans who had settled
in that community a little ahead of them started

such a disturbance that Randolph's executor
could not carry out his plan, although he had purchased
a large tract of land there.[21] It was necessary
to send these freemen to Miami County.
Theodoric H. Gregg of Dinwiddie County, Virginia,
liberated his slaves in 1854 and sent them
to Ohio.[22] Nearer to the Civil War, when public
opinion was proscribing the uplift of Negroes
in Kentucky, Noah Spears secured near Xenia,
Greene County, Ohio, a small parcel of land for
sixteen of his former bondsmen in 1856.[23]
Other freedmen found their way to this community
in later years and it became so prosperous
that it was selected as the site of Wilberforce
University.

This transplantation extended into Michigan.
With the help of persons philanthropically inclined
there sprang up a flourishing group, of
Negroes in Detroit. Early in the nineteenth
century they began to acquire property and to
provide for the education of their children.
Their record was such as to merit the encomiums
of their fellow white citizens. In later
years this group in Detroit was increased by the
operation of laws hostile to free Negroes in the
South in that life for this class not only became
intolerable but necessitated their expatriation.
Because of the Virginia drastic laws and especially

that of 1838 prohibiting the return to that
State of such Negro students as had been accustomed
to go North to attend school, after
they were denied this privilege at home, the
father of Richard DeBaptiste and Marie Louis
More, the mother of Fannie M. Richards, led a
colony of free Negroes from Fredericksburg to
Detroit.[24] And for about similar reasons the
father of Robert A. Pelham conducted others
from Petersburg, Virginia, in 1859.[25] One
Saunders, a planter of Cabell County, West Virginia,
liberated his slaves some years later and
furnished them homes among the Negroes settled
in Cass County, Michigan, about ninety
miles east of Chicago, and ninety-five mileS
west of Detroit.

This settlement had become attractive to
fugitive slaves and freedmen because the Quakers
settled there welcomed them on their way to
freedom and in some cases encouraged them to
remain among them. "When the increase of
fugitives was rendered impossible during the
fifties when the Fugitive Slave Law was being
enforced, there was still a steady growth due
to the manumission of slaves by sympathetic
and benevolent masters in the South.[26] Most
of these Negroes settled in Calvin Township,
in that county, so that of the 1,376 residing there

in 1860, 795 were established in this district,
there being only 580 whites dispersed among
them. The Negro settlers did not then obtain
control of the government but they early purchased
land to the extent of several thousand
acres and developed into successful small farmers.
Being a little more prosperous than the
average Negro community in the North, the
Cass County settlement not only attracted Negroes
fleeing from hardships in the South but
also those who had for some years unsuccessfully
endeavored to establish themselves in
other communities on free soil.[27]

These settlements were duplicated a little
farther west in Illinois. Edward Coles, a Virginian,
who in 1818 emigrated to Illinois, of
which he later served as Governor and as liberator
from slavery, settled his slaves in that

commonwealth. He brought them to Edwardsville,
where they constituted a community
known as "Coles' Negroes."[28] There was another
community of Negroes in Illinois in what
is now called Brooklyn situated north of East
St. Louis. This town was a center of some
consequence in the thirties. It became a station
of the Underground Railroad on the route to
Alton and to Canada. As all of the Negroes
who emerged from the South did not go farther
into the North, the black population of the town
gradually grew despite the fact that slave
hunters captured and reenslaved many of the
Negroes who settled there.[29]

These settlements together with favorable
communities of sympathetic whites promoted
the migration of the free Negroes and fugitives
from the South by serving as centers offering
assistance to those fleeing to the free States and
to Canada. The fugitives usually found friends
in Philadelphia, Columbia, Pittsburgh, Elmira,
Rochester, Buffalo, Gallipolis, Portsmouth,
Akron, Cincinnati, and Detroit. They passed
on the way to freedom through Columbia, Philadelphia,
Elizabethtown and by way of sea to

New York and Boston, from which they proceeded
to permanent settlements in the North.[30]

In the West, the migration of the blacks was
further facilitated by the peculiar geographic
condition in that the Appalachian highland, extending
like a peninsula into the South, had a
natural endowment which produced a class of
white citizens hostile to the institution of slavery.
These mountaineers coming later to the
colonies had to go to the hills and mountains because
the first comers from Europe had taken
up the land near the sea. Being of the German
and Scotch-Irish Presbyterian stock, they had
ideals differing widely from those of the seaboard
slaveholders.[31] The mountaineers believed
in "civil liberty in fee simple, and an
open road to civil honors, secured to the poorest
and feeblest members of society." The eastern
element had for their ideal a government of interests
for the people. They believed in liberty
but that of kings, lords, and commons, not of all
the people.[32]

Settled along the Appalachian highland, these
new stocks continued to differ from those dwelling
near the sea, especially on the slavery question.[33]
The natural endowment of the mountainous

section made slavery there unprofitable
and the mountaineers bore it grievously that
they were attached to commonwealths dominated
by the radical pro—slavery element of the
South, who sacrificed all other interests to safeguard
those of the peculiar institution. There
developed a number of clashes in all of the
legislatures and constitutional conventions of
the Southern States along the Atlantic, but in
every case the defenders of the interests of
slavery won. When, therefore, slaves with the
assistance of anti-slavery mountaineers began
to escape to the free States, they had little difficulty
in making their way through the Appalachian
region, where the love of freedom had
so set the people against slavery that although
some of them yielded to the inevitable sin, they
never made any systematic effort to protect it.[34]

The development of the movement in these
mountains was more than interesting. During
the first quarter of the nineteenth century there

were many ardent anti-slavery leaders in the
mountains. These were not particularly interested
in the Negro but were determined to keep
that soil for freedom that the settlers might
there realize the ideals for which they had left
their homes in Europe. When the industrial
revolution with the attendant rise of the plantation
cotton culture made abolition in the
South improbable, some of them became colonizationists,
hoping to destroy the institution
through deportation, which would remove the
objection of certain masters who would free
their slaves provided they were not left in the
States to become a public charge.[35] Some of
this sentiment continued in the mountains even
until the Civil War. The highlanders, therefore,
found themselves involved in a continuous
embroglio because they were not moved by reactionary
influences which were unifying the
South for its bold effort to make slavery a national
institution.[36] The other members of the
mountaineer anti-slavery group became attached
to the Underground Railroad system, endeavoring
by secret methods to place on free
soil a sufficiently large number of fugitives to
show a decided diminution in the South.[37] John
Brown, who communicated with the South
through these mountains, thought that his work
would be a success, if lie could change the situation
in one county in each of these States.

The lines along which these Underground
Railroad operators moved connected naturally
with the Quaker settlements established in free
States and the favorable sections in the Appalachian
region. Many of these workers were
Quakers who had already established settlements
of slaves on estates which they had purchased
in the Northwest Territory. Among
these were John Rankin, James Gilliland, Jesse
Lockehart, Robert Dobbins, Samuel Crothers,
Hugh L. Fullerton, and William Dickey. Thus
they connected the heart of the South with the
avenues to freedom in the North.[38] There were
routes extending from this section into Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois and Pennsylvania. Over the
Ohio and Kentucky route culminating chiefly in
Cleveland, Sandusky and Detroit, however,
more fugitives made their way to freedom than
through any other avenue,[39] partly too because
they found the limestone caves very helpful for
hiding by day. These operations extended even
through Tennessee into northern Georgia and
Alabama. Dillingham, Josiah Henson and Harriet
Tubman used these routes to deliver many
a Negro from slavery.

The opportunity thus offered to help the oppressed
brought forward a class of anti-slavery
men, who went beyond the limit of merely expressing

their horror of the evil. They believed
that something should be done "to deliver the
poor that cry and to direct the wanderer in the
right way."[40] Translating into action what had
long been restricted to academic discussion,
these philanthropic workers ushered in a new
era in the uplift of the blacks, making abolition
more of a reality. The abolition element of the
North then could no longer be considered an insignificant
minority advocating a hopeless cause
but a factor in drawing from the South a part
of its slave population and at the same time offering
asylum to the free Negroes whom the
southerners considered undesirable.[41] Prominent
among those who aided this migration in
various ways were Benjamin Lundy of Tennessee
and James G. Birney, a former slaveholder
of Huntsville, Alabama, who manumitted
his slaves and apprenticed and educated some
of them in Ohio.

This exodus of the Negroes to the free States
promoted the migration of others of their race
to Canada, a more congenial part beyond the
borders of the United States. The movement
from the free States into Canada, moreover,
was contemporary with that from the South to
the free States as will be evidenced by the fact
that 15,000 of the 60,000 Negroes in Canada in
1860 were free born. As Detroit was the chief

gateway for them to Canada, most of these
refugees settled in towns of Southern Ontario
not far from that city. These were Dawn, Colchester,
Elgin, Dresden, Windsor, Sandwich,
Bush, Wilberforce, Hamilton, St. Catherines,
Chatham, Riley, Anderton, London, Malden and
Gonfield.[42] And their coming to Canada was not
checked even by request from their enemies that
they be turned away from that country as undesirables,
for some of the white people there welcomed
and assisted them. Canadians later experienced
a change in their attitude toward
these refugees but these British Americans
never made the life of the Negro there so intolerable
as was the case in some of the free
States.

It should be observed here that this movement,
unlike the exodus of the Negroes of today,
affected an unequal distribution of the enlightened
Negroes.[43] Those who are fleeing
from the South to-day are largely laborers seeking
economic opportunities. The motive at
work in the mind of the antebellum refugee was
higher. In 1840 there were more intelligent
blacks in the South than in the North but not so
after 1850, despite the vigorous execution of the
Fugitive Slave Law in some parts of the North.
While the free Negro population of the slave

States increased only 23,736 from 1850 to 1860,
that of the free States increased 29,839. In the
South, only Delaware, Maryland and North
Carolina showed a noticeable increase in the
number of free persons of color during the
decade immediately preceding the Civil War.
This element of the population had only slightly
increased in Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri,
Tennessee, Virginia, Louisiana, South Carolina
and the District of Columbia. The number of
free Negroes of Florida remained constant.
Those of Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas diminished.
In the North, of course, the migration
had caused the tendency to be in the other
direction. With the exception of Maine, New
Hampshire, Vermont and New York which had
about the same free colored population in 1860
as they had in 1850 there was a general increase
in the number of Negroes in the free States.
Ohio led in this respect, having had during this
period an increase of 11,394.[44] A glance at the
table on the accompanying page will show in detail
the results of this migration.

Statistics of the Free Colored Population of the United
States

                                                                                               

State	Population
	1850	1860
Alabama	2,265	2,690
Arkansas	608	144
California	962	4,086
Connecticut	7,693	8,627
Delaware	18,073	19,829
Florida	932	932
Georgia	2,931	3,500
Illinois	5,436	7,628
Indiana	11,262	11,428
Iowa	333	1,069
Kentucky	10,011	10,684
Louisiana	17,462	18,647
Maine	1,356	1,327
Kansas		625
Maryland	74,723	83,942
Massachusetts	9,064	9,602
Michigan	2,583	6,797
Minnesota		259
Mississippi	930	773
Missouri	2,618	3,572
New Hampshire	520	494
New Jersey	23,810	25,318
New York	49,069	49,005
North Carolina	27,463	30,463
Ohio	25,279	36,673
Oregon		128
Pennsylvania	53,626	56,949
Rhode Island	3,670	3,952
South Carolina	8,960	9,914
Tennessee	6,422	7,300
Texas	397	355
Vermont	718	709
Virginia	54,333	58,042
Wisconsin	635	1,171
Territories:
Colorado		46
Dakota		0
District of Columbia	10,059	11,131
Minnesota	39
Nebraska		67
Nevada		45
New Mexico	207	85
Oregon	24
Utah	22	30
Washington		30
Total	434,495	488,070