6); and Bassett, _Slavery in North
Carolina_, pp. 67 and 68.]

[Footnote 4: Coffin, _Reminiscences_, p. 106.]

[Footnote 5: Birney, _James G. Birney and His Times_, p. 139.]

The importance of this movement to the student of education lies in
the fact that it effected an unequal distribution of intelligent
Negroes. The most ambitious and enlightened ones were fleeing to free
territory. As late as 1840 there were more intelligent blacks in the
South than in the North.[1] The number of southern colored people who
could read was then decidedly larger than that of such persons found
in the free States. The continued migration of Negroes to the North,
despite the operation of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, made this
distribution more unequal. While the free colored population of the
slave States increased only 23,736 from 1850 to 1860, that of the
free States increased 29,839. In the South only Delaware, Georgia,
Maryland, and North Carolina showed a noticeable increase in the
number of free persons of color during the decade immediately
preceding the Civil War. This element of the population had only
slightly increased in Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee,
Virginia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia. The
number of free Negroes of Florida remained practically constant. Those
of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas diminished. In the North, of
course, the tendency was in the other direction. With the exception of
Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York, which had about the same
free colored population in 1860 as they had in 1850, there was a
general increase in the number of Negroes in the free States. Ohio
led in this respect having had during this period an increase of
11,394.[2]

[Footnote 1: Jones, _Religious Instruction of the Negroes_, p. 115.]

[Footnote 2: See statistics on pages 237-240.]

On comparing the educational statistics of these sections this truth
becomes more apparent. In 1850 there were 4,354 colored children
attending school in the South, but by 1860 this number had dropped
to 3,651. Slight increases were noted only in Alabama, Missouri,
Delaware, South Carolina, and the District of Columbia. Georgia
and Mississippi had then practically deprived all Negroes of this
privilege. The former, which reported one colored child as attending
school in 1850, had just seven in 1860; the latter had none in 1850
and only two in 1860. In all other slave States the number of pupils
o