University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER III

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 Orplan
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
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
country 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]