anchise the Negro may not
exercise the right for fear of his life;[300] his rights before the
law are pronounced upon by white judges only; his children may not
attend the same school with the white's and gold can not buy a ticket
for him in the same theater; he lies apart in the hospital, worships
at a different altar and must bury his dead in a different
cemetery."[301]

Harriet Martineau, writing in 1834-35 and commenting upon the
statement of a Boston gentleman that the Negroes were perfectly well
treated in New England in the matter of education, the franchise, and
otherwise, states that while they are nominally citizens, "yet their
houses and schools are pulled down,[302] and they can obtain no remedy
at law. They are thrust out of offices, and excluded from the most
honorable employments, and stripped of all the best benefits of
society by fellow-citizens who, once a year, solemnly lay their hands
on their hearts, and declare that all men are born free and equal, and
that rulers derive their just powers from the consent of the
governed."[303] Fanny Kemble, the English actress, writes in 1838-39
of the treatment of the free blacks at the North, "They are marked as
the Hebrew lepers of old, and are condemned to sit, like these
unfortunates, without the gates of every human and social sympathy.
From their own sable color, a pall falls over the whole of God's
universe to them, and they find themselves stamped with a badge of
infamy of Nature's own devising, at sight of which all natural
kindness of man to man seems to recoil from them. They are not slaves
indeed, but they are pariahs; debarred from all fellowship save with
their own despised race--scorned by the lowest white ruffian in your
streets, not tolerated as companions by the foreign menials in your
kitchens. They are free certainly but they are also degraded,
rejected, the offscum and the offscouring of the very dregs of your
society; they are free from the chain, the whip, the enforced task and
unpaid toils of slavery; but they are not the less under a ban."[304]

There was in fact throughout this entire period a remarkable paradox
in the social mind of the North with regard to the Negro, for we find
everywhere the strongest antipathy to the Negro personally and general
discriminations against him socially and politically, united with the
greatest enthusiasm for his rights in the abstract. Even the best
spirits of the time did not escape it. Fanny Kemble