irginia, 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 dissip