The Journal of Negro History, Volume 1, January 1916 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 615 pages of information about The Journal of Negro History, Volume 1, January 1916.

The Journal of Negro History, Volume 1, January 1916 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 615 pages of information about The Journal of Negro History, Volume 1, January 1916.
Lundy, and James G. Birney, but less distinguished workers like John Rankin, of Ripley; James Gilliland, of Red Oak; Jesse Lockhart, of Russellville; Robert Dobbins, of Sardinia; Samuel Crothers, of Greenfield; Hugh L. Fullerton, of Chillicothe, and William Dickey, of Ross or Fayette County, Ohio.  There were other southern abolitionists who settled and established stations of the Underground Railroad In Bond, Putnam, and Bureau Counties, Illinois.[48] The Underground Railroad was thus enabled to extend into the heart of the South by way of the Cumberland Mountains.  Over this Ohio and Kentucky route, culminating chiefly in Cleveland, Sandusky, and Detroit, more fugitives found their way to freedom than through any other avenue.[49] The limestone caves were of much assistance to them.  The operation of the system extended through Tennessee into northern Georgia and Alabama, following the Appalachian highland as it juts like a peninsula into the South.  Dillingham, John Brown, and Harriet Tubman used these routes.

Let us consider, then, the attitude of these mountaineers toward slaves.  All of them were not abolitionists.  Some slavery existed among them.  The attack on the institution, then, in these parts was not altogether opposition to an institution foreign to the mountaineers.  The frontiersmen hated slavery, hated the slave as such, but, as we have observed above, hated the eastern planter worse than they hated the slave.  As there was a scarcity of slaves in that country they generally dwelt at home with their masters.  Slavery among these liberal people, therefore, continued patriarchal and so desirous were they that the institution should remain such that they favored the admission of the State of Missouri as a slave State,[50] not to promote slavery but to expand it that each master, having a smaller number of Negroes, might keep them in close and helpful contact.  Consistently with this policy many of the frontier Baptists, Scotch-Irish and Methodists continued to emphasize the education of the blacks as the correlative of emancipation.  They urged the masters to give their servants all proper advantages for acquiring knowledge of their duty both to man and to God.  In large towns slaves were permitted to acquire the rudiments of education and in some of them free persons of color had well-regulated schools.[51]

Two noteworthy efforts to educate Negroes were put forth in these parts.  A number of persons united in 1825 to found an institution for the education of eight or ten Negro slaves with their families, to be operated under the direction of the “Emancipating Labor Society of the State of Kentucky.”  About the same time Frances Wright was endeavoring to establish an institution on the same order to improve the free blacks and mulattoes in West Tennessee.  It seems that this movement had the support of a goodly number of persons, including George Fowler, and, it was said, Lafayette, who had always been regarded

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The Journal of Negro History, Volume 1, January 1916 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.