See Seventh Census of the United States, vol. 1.]

How the problem of educating these people on free soil was solved can be understood only by keeping in mind the factors of the migration.  Some of these Negroes had unusual capabilities.  Many of them had in slavery either acquired the rudiments of education or developed sufficient skill to outwit the most determined pursuers.  Owing so much to mental power, no man was more effective than the successful fugitive in instilling into the minds of his people the value of education.  Not a few of this type readily added to their attainments to equip themselves for the best service.  Some of them, like Reverend Josiah Henson, William Wells Brown, and Frederick Douglass, became leaders, devoting their time not only to the cause of abolition, but also to the enlightenment of the colored people.  Moreover, the free Negroes migrating to the North were even more effective than the fugitive slaves in advancing the cause of education.[1] A larger number of the former had picked up useful knowledge.  In fact, the prohibition of the education of the free people of color in the South was one of the reasons they could so readily leave their native homes.[2] The free blacks then going to the Northwest Territory proved to be decidedly helpful to their benefactors in providing colored churches and schools with educated workers, who otherwise would have been brought from the East at much expense.

[Footnote 1:  Howe, The Refugee from Slavery, p. 77.]

[Footnote 2:  Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia (Johns Hopkins University Studies, series xxxi., No. 3, p. 107).]

On perusing this sketch the educator naturally wonders exactly what intellectual progress was made by these groups on free soil.  This question cannot be fully answered for the reason that extant records give no detailed account of many colored settlements which underwent upheaval or failed to endure.  In some cases we learn simply that a social center flourished and was then destroyed.  On “Black Friday,” January 1, 1830, eighty Negroes were driven out of Portsmouth, Ohio, at the request of one or two hundred white citizens, set forth in an urgent memorial.[1] After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 the colored population of Columbia, Pennsylvania, dropped from nine hundred and forty-three to four hundred and eighty-seven.[2] The Negro community in the northwestern part of that State was broken up entirely.[3] The African Methodist and Baptist churches of Buffalo lost many communicants.  Out of a membership of one hundred and fourteen, the colored Baptist church of Rochester lost one hundred and twelve, including its pastor.  About the same time eighty-four members of the African Baptist church of Detroit crossed into Canada.[4] The break-up of these churches meant the end of the day and Sunday-schools which were maintained in them.  Moreover, the migration of these Negroes aroused such bitter feeling against them that their schoolhouses were frequently burned.  It often seemed that it was just as unpopular to educate the blacks in the North as in the South.  Ohio, Illinois, and Oregon enacted laws to prevent them from coming into those commonwealths.