Three motives impelled these blacks to go South.  Some had found northern communities so hostile as to impede their progress, many wanted to rejoin relatives from whom they had been separated by their flight from the land of slavery, and others were moved by the spirit of adventure to enter a new field ripe with all sorts of opportunities.  This movement, together with that of migration to large urban communities, largely accounts for the depopulation and the consequent decline of certain colored communities in the North after 1865.

Some of the Negroes who returned to the South became men of national prominence.  William J. Simmons, who prior to the Civil War was carried from South Carolina to Pennsylvania, returned to do religious and educational work in Kentucky.  Bishop James W. Hood, of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, went from Connecticut to North Carolina to engage in similar work.  Honorable R.T.  Greener, the first Negro graduate of Harvard, went from Philadelphia to teach in the District of Columbia and later to be a professor in the University of South Carolina.  F.L.  Cardoza, educated at the University of Edinburgh, returned to South Carolina and became State Treasurer.  R.B.  Elliot, born in Boston and educated in England, settled in South Carolina from which he was sent to Congress.

John M. Langston was taken to Ohio and educated but came back to Virginia his native State from which he was elected to Congress.  J.T.  White left Indiana to enter politics in Arkansas, becoming State Senator and later commissioner of public works and internal improvements.  Judge Mifflin Wister Gibbs, a native of Philadelphia, purposely settled in Arkansas where he served as city judge and Register of United States Land Office.  T. Morris Chester, of Pittsburgh, finally made his way to Louisiana where he served with distinction as a lawyer and held the position of Brigadier-General in charge of the Louisiana State Guards under the Kellogg government.  Joseph Carter Corbin, who was taken from Virginia to be educated at Chillicothe, Ohio, went later to Arkansas where he served as chief clerk in the post office at Little Rock and later as State Superintendent of Schools.  Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, who moved north for education and opportunity, returned to enter politics in Louisiana, which honored him with several important positions among which was that of Acting Governor.

[Footnote 1:  This is well treated in John Eaton’s Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen.  See also Coffin’s Boys of ’61.]

[Footnote 2:  Williams, History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, p. 70.]

[Footnote 3:  Greely, American Conflict, I, p. 585.]

[Footnote 4:  Ibid., II, p. 246.]

[Footnote 5:  Official Records of the Rebellion, VIII, p. 628.]

[Footnote 6:  Williams, Negro Troops, p. 66 et seq.]

[Footnote 7:  Official Records of the Rebellion, VIII, p. 370; Williams, Negro Troops, p. 75.]