Throughout the North as well as in Virginia there were thoughtful men who knew that here was the difficulty. Slavery might be abolished, but the presence of two non-assimilable races, separated by centuries in their stages of development, endeavoring to live in peace under a Republican form of government—these conditions presented the problem which would tax to the utmost their resourcefulness and patience.
How strong was the sense of danger among the people of the free states, which would result from such conditions, may be read in the provisions of their constitutions and laws.
Probably in New England the laws were more favorable to free negroes than in any other part of the North; but, even there, conditions were far from normal, and certainly not such as to encourage the immigration of the free blacks from Maryland and Virginia—where they were most numerous.
LAWS AGAINST FREE NEGROES
In 1833, the Legislature of Connecticut, endeavoring to prevent the establishment of schools in that state for non-resident negroes, enacted a law prohibiting such schools, except with the consent "of a majority of the civil authority and also of the selectmen of the town in which such school, &c.,"[[244]] is to be located. The preamble of this act justifies its passage by declaring that the establishment of such schools "would tend to the great increase of the colored population of the state, and thereby to the injury of the people, &c." The negro populations of Vermont and New Hampshire had actually decreased in the half century between 1810 and 1860, while that of Massachusetts had increased less than three thousand.
The biographers of William Lloyd Garrison record the fact that there existed a—
"Spirit which everywhere at the North, either by statute or custom, denied to a dark skin, civil, social and educational equality,—which in Boston forbade any merchant or respectable mechanic to take a colored apprentice; kept the colored people out of most public conveyances; and permitted any common carrier by land or sea, on the objections of a white passenger, to violate his contract with 'a nigger' however cultivated or refined."[[245]]
The states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania had by statutes deprived free negroes of many of the privileges enjoyed in the period immediately succeeding the Revolution. Thus, New Jersey in 1807, and Pennsylvania in 1838, deprived them of the right of suffrage, and New York in 1821 required of them as a prerequisite to voting a much higher property qualification than was required of the white citizens.[[246]] Professor A. B. Hart declares: "These exclusions branded the negroes as of a different caste, even in the North, and it was backed up by other unfriendly legislation."[[247]]
But it was chiefly in those free states on the same lines of latitude as Virginia and Maryland, and in which the free negroes would therefore be most liable to settle, that the laws obstructing or forbidding their immigration were most pronounced.
EXCLUDED FROM VARIOUS STATES