[Footnote 71:  MSS. in the Virginia State Library.]

[Footnote 72:  American Historical Association Report for 1904, p. 577.]

[Footnote 73:  An instance is given in the Louisiana Courier (New Orleans), Aug. 26, 1830, and another in the New Orleans Commercial Advertiser, Oct. 25, 1831.  The motives are not stated.]

Invitations to American free negroes to try their fortunes in other lands were not lacking.  Facilities for emigration to Liberia were steadily maintained by the Colonization Society from 1819 onward;[74] the Haytian government under President Boyer offered special inducements from that republic in 1824;[75] in 1840 an immigration society in British Guiana proffered free transportation for such as would remove thither;[76] and in 1859 Hayti once more sent overtures, particularly to the French-speaking colored people of Louisiana, promising free lands to all who would come as well as free transportation to such as could not pay their passage.[77] But these opportunities were seldom embraced.  With the great bulk of those to whom they were addressed the dread of an undiscovered country from whose bourne few travellers had returned puzzled their wills, as it had done Hamlet’s, and made them rather bear those ills they had than to fly to others that they knew not of.

[Footnote 74:  J.H.T.  McPherson, History of Liberia (Johns Hopkins University Studies, IX, no. 10).]

[Footnote 75:  Correspondence relative to the Emigration to Hayti of the Free People of Colour in the United States, together with the instructions to the agent sent out by President Boyer (New York, 1824); Plantation and Frontier, II, 155-157.]

[Footnote 76:  Inducements to the Colored People of the United States to Emigrate to British Guiana, compiled from statements and documents furnished by Mr. Edward Carberry, agent of the immigration society of British Guiana and a proprietor in that colony.  By “A friend to the Colored People” (Boston, 1840); The Liberator (Boston), Feb. 28, 1840, advertisement.]

[Footnote 77:  E.P.  Puckett, “The Free Negro in Louisiana” (MS.), citing the New Orleans Picayune, July 16, 1859, and Oct. 21 and 23, 1860.]

Their caste, it is true, was discriminated against with severity.  Generally at the North and wholly at the South their children were debarred from the white schools and poorly provided with schools of their own.[78] Exclusion of the adults from the militia became the general rule after the close of the war of 1812.  Deprivation of the suffrage at the South, which was made complete by the action of the constitutional convention of North Carolina in 1835 and which was imposed by numerous Northern states between 1807 and 1838,[79] was a more palpable grievance against which a convention of colored freemen at Philadelphia in 1831 ineffectually protested.[80] Exclusion from the jury boxes and from giving testimony against whites was likewise not only general in the South but more or less prevalent in the North as well.  Many of the Southern states, furthermore, required license and registration as a condition of residence and imposed restrictions upon movement, education and occupations; and several of them required the procurement of individual white guardians or bondsmen in security for good behavior.