Mr. Jefferson doubtless expressed the sentiments of a large class of thinkers when he said: "As far as I can judge from the experiments which have been made, to give liberty to, or rather to abandon, persons whose habits have been formed in slavery, is like abandoning children."[[228]]
Experience with respect to emancipations made prior to the Civil War strongly tended to confirm these views. The conditions, moral, intellectual and physical, of the free negroes of Virginia contrasted, as a rule, most unfavorably with that of their brethren still in bonds.
CONDITION OF FREE NEGROES, 1830-1860
The results of emancipation where the slaves had been carried to free states, were, on the whole, not much more encouraging.
Professor MacMaster, of the University of Pennsylvania, referring to the condition of the free negroes in those states at the time of the Missouri Compromise, writes: "In spite of their freedom they were a despised, proscribed, and poverty-stricken class."[[229]]
Mr. Clay, speaking December 17, 1829, said:
"Of all the descriptions of our population and of either portion of the African race, the free people of color are by far, as a class, the most corrupt, depraved and abandoned. There are many honourable exceptions among them, and I take pleasure in bearing testimony to some I know. It is not so much their fault as the consequence of their anomalous condition."[[230]]
Dr. Leonard Bacon, in a sermon before his congregation in New Haven, Conn., July 4, 1830, said:
"Who are the free people of color in the United States, and what are they? In this city there are from eight hundred to one thousand. Of these, a few families are honest, sober, industrious, pious and in many points of view, respectable. But what are the remainder? Every one knows their condition to be a condition of deep and dreadful degradation, but few have formed any conception of the reality. The fact is, that as a class, they are branded with ignominy.... There are in this country three hundred thousand freedmen, who are free men only in name, degraded to the dust and forming hardly anything else than a mass of pauperism and crime."[[231]]
The biographers of William Lloyd Garrison have recorded that at the North, prior to the Civil War: