T. Tanner obtained much
of their elementary education in the early colored schools of that
city.[2] J.C. Corbin, a prominent educator before and after the Civil
War, acquired sufficient knowledge at Chillicothe, Ohio, to qualify in
1848 as an assistant in Rev. Henry Adams's school in Louisville.[3]
John M. Langston was for a while one of Corbin's fellow-students at
Chillicothe before the former entered Oberlin. United States Senator
Hiram Revels of Mississippi spent some time in a Quaker seminary in
Union County, Indiana.[4] Rev. J.T. White, one of the leading spirits
of Arkansas during the Reconstruction, was born and educated in Clark
County in that State.[5] Fannie Richards, still a teacher at Detroit,
Michigan, is another example of the professional Negro equipped
for service in the Northwest before the Rebellion.[6] From other
communities of that section came such useful men as Rev. J.W. Malone,
an influential minister of Iowa; Rev. D.R. Roberts, a very successful
pastor of Chicago; Bishop C.T. Shaffer of the African Methodist
Episcopal Church; Rev. John G. Mitchell, for many years the Dean of
the Theological Department of Wilberforce University; and President
S.T. Mitchell, once the head of the same institution.[7]

[Footnote 1: This statement is based on the accounts of various
western freedmen.]

[Footnote 2: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p. 113.]

[Footnote 3: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p. 829.]

[Footnote 4: _Ibid._, p. 948.]

[Footnote 5: _Ibid._, p. 590.]

[Footnote 6: _Ibid._, p. 1023.]

[Footnote 7: Wright, "Negro Rural Communities in Indiana," _Southern
Workman_, vol. xxxvii., p. 169.]

In the colored settlements of Canada the outlook for Negro education
was still brighter. This better opportunity was due to the high
character of the colonists, to the mutual aid resulting from the
proximity of the communities, and to the cooeperation of the Canadians.
The previous experience of most of these adventurers as sojourners in
the free States developed in them such noble traits that they did not
have to be induced to ameliorate their condition. They had already
come under educative influences which prepared them for a larger task
in Canada. Fifteen thousand of sixty thousand Negroes in Canada in
1860 were free born.[1] Many of those, who had always been free, fled
to Canada[2] when the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made it possible
for even a dark-complexioned Caucasian to be reduced to a state of
bondage. Fortun