crime," and yet this law remained upon the statute books of the
State long after it had ceased to be in accord with the feelings and
practices of the community and was only repealed in 1834.[298] The
hesitancy of the legislators of the different free States to pass
express acts of abolition and thus formally to pronounce slavery
illegal may have been due in part to the fact that slavery was
sanctioned to a certain extent by the constitution and was the
"peculiar institution" around which centered the social and economic
life of a large number of sister States.

The great industrial expansion of the North and West toward the end of
the second decade of the century and the increase of population
through immigration in time reduced the Negro in the North in point of
number to an almost negligible factor. He was swept along with the
rising tide of the growing industrial democracy and shared in the
general benefits of citizenship accorded to all. But it would give a
very superficial idea of the real status of the Negro in the North
during this time if we were to base our judgments upon the statistics
of slave and free, the various acts for manumission or the vigorous
anti-slavery agitation from 1830 on. A closer acquaintance with the
actual conditions of the time shows that there was a striking contrast
between the theoretical rights and privileges which the Negro was
supposed to enjoy by virtue of the constitution and bills of rights
and those he really did enjoy.

This was a subject of frequent remark by foreigners travelling in
America. Captain Marryat, writing of conditions in Philadelphia in
1838, says, "Singular is the degree of contempt and dislike in which
the free blacks are held in all the free states of America. They are
deprived of their rights as citizens; and the white pauper who holds
out his hand for charity ... will turn away from a negro or
colored man with disdain."[299] DeTocqueville, in a remarkable
characterization of the relations between the races based upon his
observations in the early thirties, says that as the legal barriers
fall away in the free States those of race prejudice are drawn all the
sharper. Wherever the freemen have increased the gap has widened
between them and the whites. "The prejudice which repels the negroes
seems to increase in proportion as they are emancipated, and
inequality is sanctioned by the manners while it is effaced from the
laws of the country. Though having the fr