A Century of Negro Migration | Page 8

or as might be consistent with the profession
of their sect, and instructed the agents effecting the removal to draw on
the treasury for any sum not exceeding two hundred dollars to defray
expenses. An increasing number reached these States every year but,
owing to the inducements offered by the American Colonization
Society, some of them went to Liberia. When Liberia, however,
developed into every thing but a haven of rest, the number sent to the
settlements in the Northwest greatly increased.
The quarterly meeting succeeded in sending to the West 133 Negroes,
including 23 free blacks and slaves given up because they were
connected by marriage with those to be transplanted.[8] The Negro
colonists seemed to prefer Indiana.[9] They went in three companies
and with suitable young Friends to whom were executed powers of
attorney to manumit, set free, settle and bind them out.[10] Thirteen

carts and wagons were bought for these three companies; $1,250 was
furnished for their traveling expenses and clothing, the whole cost
amounting to $2,490. It was planned to send forty or fifty to Long
Island and twenty to the interior of Pennsylvania, but they failed to
prosper and reports concerning them stamped them as destitute and
deplorably ignorant. Those who went to Ohio and Indiana, however,
did well.[11]
Later we receive another interesting account of this exodus. David
White led a company of fifty-three into the West, thirty-eight of whom
belonged to Friends, five to a member who had ordered that they be
taken West at his expense. Six of these slaves belonged to Samuel
Lawrence, a Negro slaveholder, who had purchased himself and family.
White pathetically reports the case of four of the women who had
married slave husbands and had twenty children for the possession of
whom the Friends had to stand a lawsuit in the courts. The women had
decided to leave their husbands behind but the thought of separation so
tormented them that they made an effort to secure their liberty. Upon
appealing to their masters for terms the owners, somewhat moved by
compassion, sold them for one half of their value. White then went
West and left four in Chillicothe, twenty-three in Leesburg and
twenty-six in Wayne County, Indiana, without encountering any
material difficulty.[12]
Others had thought of this plan but the Quakers actually carried it out
on a small scale. Here we see again not only their desire to have the
Negroes emancipated but the vital interest of the Quakers in success of
the blacks, for members of this sect not only liberated their slaves but
sold out their own holdings in the South and moved with these
freedmen into the North. Quakers who then lived in free States offered
fugitives material assistance by open and clandestine methods.[13] The
most prominent leader developed by the movement was Levi Coffin,
whose daring deeds in behalf of the fugitives made him the reputed
President of the Underground Railroad. Most of the Quaker settlements
of Negroes with which he was connected were made in what is now
Hamilton, Howard, Wayne, Randolph, Vigo, Gibson, Grant, Rush, and
Tipton Counties, Indiana, and Darke County, Ohio.

The promotion of this movement by the Quakers was well on its way
by 1815 and was not materially checked until the fifties when the
operations of the drastic fugitive slave law interfered, and even then the
movement had gained such momentum and the execution of that
mischievous measure had produced in the North so much reaction like
that expressed in the personal liberty laws, that it could not be stopped.
The Negroes found homes in Western New York, Western
Pennsylvania and throughout the Northwest Territory. The Negro
population of York, Harrisburg and Philadelphia rapidly increased. A
settlement of Negroes developed at Sandy Lake in Northwestern
Pennsylvania[14] and there was another near Berlin Cross Roads in
Ohio.[15] A group of Negroes migrating to this same State found
homes in the Van Buren Township of Shelby County.[16] A more
significant settlement in the State was made by Samuel Gist, an
Englishman possessing extensive plantations in Hanover, Amherst, and
Henrico Counties, Virginia. He provided in his will that his slaves
should be freed and sent to the North. He further provided that the
revenue from his plantation the last year of his life be applied in
building schoolhouses and churches for their accommodation, and "that
all money coming to him in Virginia be set aside for the employment of
ministers and teachers to instruct them." In 1818, Wickham, the
executor of his estate, purchased land and established these Negroes in
what was called the Upper and Lower Camps of Brown County.[17]
Augustus Wattles, a Quaker from Connecticut, made a settlement in
Mercer County, Ohio, early in the nineteenth century. In the winter of
1833-4, he providentially became acquainted with the colored people