[Footnote 47:  Farmer, History of Detroit and Michigan, I, chap. 48.]

[Footnote 48:  There was the usual effort to have slavery legalized in Michigan.  At the time of the fire in 1805 there were six colored men and nine colored women in the town of Detroit.  In 1807 there were so many of them that Governor Hull organized a company of colored militia.  Joseph Campan owned ten at one time.  The importation of slaves was discontinued after September 17, 1792, by act of the Canadian Parliament which provided also that all born thereafter should be free at the age of twenty-five.  The Ordinance of 1787 had by its sixth article prohibited it.]

[Footnote 49:  In 1836 a colored man traveling in the West to Cleveland said: 

“I have met with good treatment at every place on my journey, even better than what I expected under present circumstances.  I will relate an incident that took place on board the steamboat, which will give an idea of the kind treatment with which I have met.  When I took the boat at Erie, it being rainy and somewhat disagreeable, I took a cabin passage, to which the captain had not the least objection.  When dinner was announced, I intended not to go to the first table but the mate came and urged me to take a seat.  I accordingly did and was called upon to carve a large saddle of beef which was before me.  This I performed accordingly to the best of my ability.  No one of the company manifested any objection or seemed anyways disturbed by my presence.”—­Extract of a letter from a colored gentleman traveling to the West, Cleveland, Ohio, August 11, 1836.—­See The Philanthropist, Oct. 21, 1836.]

CHAPTER IV

COLONIZATION AS A REMEDY FOR MIGRATION

Because of these untoward circumstances consequent to the immigration of free Negroes and fugitives into the North, their enemies, and in some cases their well-intentioned friends, advocated the diversion of these elements to foreign soil.  Benezet and Brannagan had the idea of settling the Negroes on the public lands in the West largely to relieve the situation in the North.[1] Certain anti-slavery men of Kentucky, as we have observed, recommended the same.  But this was hardly advocated at all by the farseeing white men after the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century.  It was by that time very clear that white men would want to occupy all lands within the present limits of the United States.  Few statesmen dared to encourage migration to Canada because the large number of fugitives who had already escaped there had attached to that region the stigma of being an asylum for fugitives from the slave States.