[Footnote 25: This code provided that all male Negroes under fifteen, years of age either owned or acquired must remain in servitude until they reached the age of thirty-five and female slaves until thirty-two. The male children of such persons held to service could be bound out for thirty years and the female children for twenty-eight. Slaves brought into the territory had to comply with contracts for terms of service when their master registered them within thirty days from the time he brought them into the territory. Indentured black servants were not exactly sold, but the law permitted the transfer from one owner to another when the slave acquiesced in the transfer before a notary, but it was often done without regard to the slave. They were even bequeathed and sold as personal property at auction. Notices for sale were frequent. There were rewards for runaway slaves. Negroes whose terms had almost expired were kidnapped and sold to New Orleans. The legislature imposed a penalty for such, but it was not generally enforced. They were taxable property valued according to the length of service. Negroes served as laborers on farms, house servants, and in salt mines, the latter being an excuse for holding them as slaves. Persons of color could purchase servants of their own race. The law provided that the Justice of the County could on complaint from the master order that a lazy servant be whipped. In this frontier section, therefore, where men often took the law in their own hands, slaves were often punished and abused just as they were in the Southern States. The law dealing with fugitives was somewhat harsh. When apprehended, fugitives had to serve two days extra for each day they lost from their master's service. The harboring of a runaway slave was punishable by a fine of one day for each the slave might be concealed. Consistently too with the provision of the laws in most slave States, slaves could retain all goods or money lawfully acquired during their servitude provided their master gave his consent. Upon the demonstration of proof to the county court that they had served their term they could obtain from that tribunal certificates of freedom. See The Laws of Indiana.]
[Footnote 26: Masters had to provide adequate food, and clothing and good lodging for the slave, but the penalty for failing to comply with this law was not clear and even if so, it happened that many masters never observed it. There was also an effort to prevent cruelty to slaves, but it was difficult to establish the guilt of masters when the slave could not bear witness against his owner and it was not likely that the neighbor equally guilty or indifferent to the complaints of the blacks would take their petitions to court.
Under this system a large number of slaves were brought into the Territory especially after 1807. There were 135 in 1800. This increase came from Kentucky and Tennessee. As those brought were largely boys and girls with a long period of service, this form of slavery was assured for some years. The children of these blacks were often registered for thirty-five instead of thirty years of service on the ground that they were not born in Illinois. No one thought of persecuting a master for holding servants unlawfully and Negroes themselves could be easily deceived. Very few settlers brought their slaves there to free them. There were only 749 in 1820. If one considers the proportion of this to the number brought there for manumission this seems hardly true. It is better to say that during these first two decades of the nineteenth century some settlers came for both purposes, some to hold slaves, some, as Edward Coles, to free them. It was not only practiced in the southern part along the Mississippi and Ohio but as far north in Illinois as Sangamon County, were found servants known as "yellow boys" and "colored girls."—See the Laws of Illinois.]
CHAPTER II
A TRANSPLANTATION TO THE NORTH
Just after the settlement of the question of holding the western posts by the British and the adjustment of the trouble arising from their capture of slaves during our second war with England, there started a movement of the blacks to this frontier territory. But, as there were few towns or cities in the Northwest during the first decades of the new republic, the flight of the Negro into that territory was like that of a fugitive taking his chances in the wilderness. Having lost their pioneering spirit in passing through the ordeal of slavery, not many of the bondmen took flight in that direction and few free Negroes ventured to seek their fortunes in those wilds during the period of the frontier conditions, especially when the country had not then undergone a thorough reaction against the Negro.
The migration of the Negroes, however, received an impetus early in the nineteenth century. This came from the Quakers, who by the middle of the eighteenth century had taken the position that all members of their sect should free their slaves.[1] The Quakers of North Carolina and Virginia had as early as 1740 taken up the serious question of humanely treating their Negroes. The North Carolina Quakers advised Friends to emancipate their slaves, later prohibited traffic in them, forbade their members from even hiring the blacks out in 1780 and by 1818 had exterminated the institution among their communicants.[2] After healing themselves of the sin, they had before the close of the eighteenth century militantly addressed themselves to the task of abolishing slavery and the slave trade throughout the world. Differing in their scheme from that of most anti-slavery leaders, they were advocating the establishment of the freedmen in society as good citizens and to that end had provided for the religious and mental instruction of their slaves prior to emancipating them.[3]
Despite the fact that the Quakers were not free to extend their operations throughout the colonies, they did much to enable the Negroes to reach free soil. As the Quakers believed in the freedom of the will, human brotherhood, and equality before God, they did not, like the Puritans, find difficulties in solving the problem of elevating the Negroes. Whereas certain Puritans were afraid that conversion might lead to the destruction of caste and the incorporation of undesirable persons into the "Body Politick," the Quakers proceeded on the principle that all men are brethren and, being equal before God, should be considered equal before the law. On account of unduly emphasizing the relation of man to God, the Puritans "atrophied their social humanitarian instinct" and developed into a race of self-conscious saints. Believing in human nature and laying stress upon the relation between man and man, the Quakers became the friends of all humanity.[4]
In 1693 George Keith, a leading Quaker of his day, came forward as a promoter of the religious training of the slaves as a preparation for emancipation. William Penn advocated the emancipation of slaves, that they might have every opportunity for improvement. In 1695 the Quakers while protesting against the slave trade denounced also the policy of neglecting their moral and spiritual welfare.[5] The growing interest of this sect in the Negroes was shown later by the development in 1713 of a definite scheme for freeing and returning them to Africa after having been educated and trained to serve as missionaries on that continent.
When the manumission of the slaves was checked by the reaction against that class and it became more of a problem to establish them in a hostile environment, certain Quakers of North Carolina and Virginia adopted the scheme of settling them in Northern States.[6] At first, they sent such freedmen to Pennsylvania. But for various reasons this did not prove to be the best asylum. In the first place, Pennsylvania bordered on the slave States, Maryland and Virginia, from which agents came to kidnap free Negroes. Furthermore, too many Negroes were already rushing to that commonwealth as the Negroes' heaven and there was the chance that the Negroes might be settled elsewhere in the North, where they might have better economic opportunities.[7] A committee of forty was accordingly appointed by North Carolina Quakers in 1822 to examine the laws of other free States with a view to determining what section would be most suitable for colonizing these blacks. This committee recommended in its report that the blacks be colonized in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.