egroes_, p. 115.]

[Footnote 4: Redpath, _The Roving Editor_, p. 161.]

[Footnote 5: Adams, _South-Side View of Slavery_, pp. 52 and 59.]

[Footnote 6: Dresser, _The Narrative of Amos Dresser_, p. 27; Dabney,
_Journal of a Tour through the United States and Canada_, p. 185.]

[Footnote 7: Parsons, _Inside View of Slavery_, p. 248.]

CHAPTER X

EDUCATING NEGROES TRANSPLANTED TO FREE SOIL

While the Negroes of the South were struggling against odds to acquire
knowledge, the more ambitious ones were for various reasons making
their way to centers of light in the North. Many fugitive slaves
dreaded being sold to planters of the lower South, the free blacks of
some of the commonwealths were forced out by hostile legislation,
and not a few others migrated to ameliorate their condition. The
transplanting of these people to the Northwest took place largely
between 1815 and 1850. They were directed mainly to Columbia and
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Greenwich, New Jersey; and Boston,
Massachusetts, in the East; and to favorable towns and colored
communities in the Northwest.[1] The fugitives found ready helpers
in Elmira, Rochester, Buffalo, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania;
Gallipolis, Portsmouth, Akron, and Cincinnati, Ohio; and Detroit,
Michigan.[2] Colored settlements which proved attractive to these
wanderers had been established in Ohio, Indiana, and Canada. That most
of the bondmen in quest of freedom and opportunity should seek the
Northwest had long been the opinion of those actually interested in
their enlightenment. The attention of the colored people had been
early directed to this section as a more suitable place for their
elevation than the jungles of Africa selected by the American
Colonization Society. The advocates of Western colonization believed
that a race thus degraded could be elevated only in a salubrious
climate under the influences of institutions developed by Western
nations.

[Footnote 1: Siebert, _The Underground Railroad_, p. 32.]

[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, pp. 32 and 37.]

The role played by the Negroes in this migration exhibited the
development of sufficient mental ability to appreciate this truth.
It was chiefly through their intelligent fellows that prior to the
reaction ambitious slaves learned to consider the Northwest Territory
the land of opportunity. Furthermore, restless freedmen, denied
political privileges and prohibited from teaching their children, did
not always choo