A Century of Negro Migration | Page 9

of
Cincinnati, finding there about "4,000 totally ignorant of every thing
calculated to make good citizens." As most of them had been slaves,
excluded from every avenue of moral and mental improvement, he
established for them a school which he maintained for two years. He
then proposed to these Negroes to go into the country and purchase
land to remove them "from those contaminating influences which had
so long crushed them in our cities and villages."[18] They consented on
the condition that he would accompany them and teach school. He
travelled through Canada, Michigan and Indiana, looking for a suitable
location, and finally selected for settlement a place in Mercer County,

Ohio. In 1835, he made the first purchase of land there for this purpose
and before 1838 Negroes had bought there about 30,000 acres, at the
earnest appeal of this benefactor, who had travelled into almost every
neighborhood of the blacks in the State, and laid before them the
benefits of a permanent home for themselves and of education for their
children.[19]
This settlement was further increased in 1858 by the manumitted slaves
of John Harper of North Carolina.[20] John Randolph of Roanoke
endeavored to establish his slaves as freemen in this county but the
Germans who had settled in that community a little ahead of them
started such a disturbance that Randolph's executor could not carry out
his plan, although he had purchased a large tract of land there.[21] It
was necessary to send these freemen to Miami County. Theodoric H.
Gregg of Dinwiddie County, Virginia, liberated his slaves in 1854 and
sent them to Ohio.[22] Nearer to the Civil War, when public opinion
was proscribing the uplift of Negroes in Kentucky, Noah Spears
secured near Xenia, Greene County, Ohio, a small parcel of land for
sixteen of his former bondsmen in 1856.[23] Other freedmen found
their way to this community in later years and it became so prosperous
that it was selected as the site of Wilberforce University.
This transplantation extended into Michigan. With the help of persons
philanthropically inclined there sprang up a flourishing group of
Negroes in Detroit. Early in the nineteenth century they began to
acquire property and to provide for the education of their children.
Their record was such as to merit the encomiums of their fellow white
citizens. In later years this group in Detroit was increased by the
operation of laws hostile to free Negroes in the South in that life for
this class not only became intolerable but necessitated their expatriation.
Because of the Virginia drastic laws and especially that of 1838
prohibiting the return to that State of such Negro students as had been
accustomed to go North to attend school, after they were denied this
privilege at home, the father of Richard DeBaptiste and Marie Louis
More, the mother of Fannie M. Richards, led a colony of free Negroes
from Fredericksburg to Detroit.[24] And for about similar reasons the
father of Robert A. Pelham conducted others from Petersburg, Virginia,

in 1859.[25] One Saunders, a planter of Cabell County, West Virginia,
liberated his slaves some years later and furnished them homes among
the Negroes settled in Cass County, Michigan, about ninety miles east
of Chicago, and ninety-five miles west of Detroit.
This settlement had become attractive to fugitive slaves and freedmen
because the Quakers settled there welcomed them on their way to
freedom and in some cases encouraged them to remain among them.
When the increase of fugitives was rendered impossible during the
fifties when the Fugitive Slave Law was being enforced, there was still
a steady growth due to the manumission of slaves by sympathetic and
benevolent masters in the South.[26] Most of these Negroes settled in
Calvin Township, in that county, so that of the 1,376 residing there in
1860, 795 were established in this district, there being only 580 whites
dispersed among them. The Negro settlers did not then obtain control
of the government but they early purchased land to the extent of several
thousand acres and developed into successful small farmers. Being a
little more prosperous than the average Negro community in the North,
the Cass County settlement not only attracted Negroes fleeing from
hardships in the South but also those who had for some years
unsuccessfully endeavored to establish themselves in other
communities on free soil.[27]
These settlements were duplicated a little farther west in Illinois.
Edward Coles, a Virginian, who in 1818 emigrated to Illinois, of which
he later served as Governor and as liberator from slavery, settled his
slaves in that commonwealth. He brought them to Edwardsville, where
they constituted a community known as "Coles' Negroes."[28] There
was another community of Negroes in Illinois in what is now called
Brooklyn situated north of East St. Louis. This town was a center of
some consequence