[Footnote 78:  The schooling facilities are elaborately and excellently described and discussed in C.G.  Woodson, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 (New York, 1915).]

[Footnote 79:  Emil Olbrich, The Development of Sentiment for Negro Suffrage to 1860 (University of Wisconsin Bulletin, Historical Series, III, no, I).]

[Footnote 80:  Minutes and Proceedings of the First Annual Convention of the People of Colour, held in Philadelphia from the sixth to the eleventh of June, 1831 (Philadelphia, 1831).]

These discriminations, along with the many private rebuffs and oppressions which they met, greatly complicated the problem of social adjustment which colored freemen everywhere encountered.  It is not to be wondered that some of them developed criminal tendencies in reaction and revolt, particularly when white agitators made it their business to stimulate discontent.  Convictions for crimes, however, were in greatest proportionate excess among the free negroes of the North.  In 1850, for example, the colored inmates in the Southern penitentiaries, including slaves, bore a ratio to the free colored population but half as high as did the corresponding prisoners in the North to the similar population there.  These ratios were about six and eleven times those prevalent among the Southern and Northern whites respectively.[81] This nevertheless does not prove an excess of actual depravity or criminal disposition in any of the premises, for the discriminative character of the laws and the prejudice of constables, magistrates and jurors were strong contributing factors.  Many a free negro was doubtless arrested and convicted in virtually every commonwealth under circumstances in which white men went free.  The more severe industrial discrimination at the North, which drove large numbers to an alternative of destitution or crime, was furthermore contributive to the special excess of negro criminality there.

[Footnote 81:  The number of convicts for every 10,000 of the respective populations was about 2.2 for the whites and 13.0 for the free colored (with slave convicts included) at the South, and 2.5 for the whites and 28.7 for the free colored at the North. Compendium of the Seventh Census, p. 166.  See also Southern Literary Messenger, IX, 340-352; DeBow’s Review, XIV, 593-595; David Christy, Cotton Is King (Cincinnati, 1855), p. 153; E.R.  Turner, The Negro in Pennsylvania, pp. 155-158.]

In some instances the violence of mobs was added to the might of the law.  Such was the case at Washington in 1835 when following on the heels of a man’s arrest for the crime of possessing incendiary publications and his trial within the jail as a precaution to keep him from the mob’s clutches, a new report was spread that Beverly Snow, the free mulatto proprietor of a saloon and restaurant between Brown’s and Gadsby’s hotels, had spoken in slurring terms