[Footnote 2:  Simmons, Men of Mark, p. 352.]

[Footnote 3:  Wright, “Negro Rural Communities” (Southern Workman, vol. xxxvii., p. 158).]

[Footnote 4:  Special Report of the U.S.  Com. of Ed., p. 373; and Non-Slaveholder, vol. ii., p. 113.]

During the same period, and especially from 1820 to 1835, a more continuous and effective migration of southern Negroes was being promoted by the Quakers of Virginia and North Carolina.[1] One of their purposes was educational.  Convinced that the “buying, selling, and holding of men in slavery” is a sin, these Quakers with a view to future manumission had been “careful of the moral and intellectual training of such as they held in servitude."[2] To elevate their slaves to the plane of men, southern Quakers early hit upon the scheme of establishing in the Northwest such Negroes as they had by education been able to equip for living as citizens.  When the reaction in the South made it impossible for the Quakers to continue their policy of enlightening the colored people, these philanthropists promoted the migration of the blacks to the Northwest Territory with still greater zeal.  Most of these settlements were made in Hamilton, Howard, Wayne, Randolph, Vigo, Gibson, Grant, Rush, and Tipton Counties, Indiana, and in Darke County, Ohio.[3] Prominent among these promoters was Levi Coffin, the Quaker Abolitionist of North Carolina, and reputed President of the Underground Railroad.  He left his State and settled among Negroes at Newport, Indiana.[4] Associated with these leaders also were Benjamin Lundy of Tennessee and James G. Birney, once a slaveholder of Huntsville, Alabama.  The latter manumitted his slaves and apprenticed and educated some of them in Ohio.[5]

[Footnote 1:  Wright, “Negro Rural Communities” (Southern Workman, vol. xxxvii., p. 158); and Bassett, Slavery in North Carolina, p. 68.]

[Footnote 2:  A Brief Statement of the Rise and Progress of the Testimony, etc.]

[Footnote 3:  Wright, “Rural Negro Communities in Indiana” (Southern Workman, vol. xxxvii., pp. 162-166); and Bassett, Slavery in North Carolina, pp. 67 and 68.]

[Footnote 4:  Coffin, Reminiscences, p. 106.]

[Footnote 5:  Birney, James G. Birney and His Times, p. 139.]

The importance of this movement to the student of education lies in the fact that it effected an unequal distribution of intelligent Negroes.  The most ambitious and enlightened ones were fleeing to free territory.  As late as 1840 there were more intelligent blacks in the South than in the North.[1] The number of southern colored people who could read was then decidedly larger than that of such persons found in the free States.  The continued migration of Negroes to the North, despite the operation of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, made this distribution more unequal.  While the free colored population of the slave States