evade the law interpreted as prohibiting any one from either sitting or standing to teach a black to read.  They, therefore, gathered the colored children around them while they lay prostrate on the couch to teach them.  For further evasion they kept on hand splinters of wood which they had the children dip into a match preparation and use with a flint for ignition to make it appear that they were showing them how to make matches.  When this scheme seemed impracticable, one of the boys was sent to Washington in the District of Columbia to attend the school maintained by John F. Cook, a successful educator and founder of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church.  This young man was then running the risk of expatriation, for Virginia had in 1838 passed a law, prohibiting the return to that State of those Negroes, who after the prohibition of their education had begun to attend schools in other parts.[2]

It was because of these conditions that in 1851 when her husband died Mrs. Richards sold out her property and set out to find a better home in Detroit, Michigan.  Some of the best white people of Fredericksburg commended her for this step, saying that she was too respectable a woman to suffer such humiliation as the reaction had entailed upon persons of her race.[3] She was followed by practically all of the best free Negroes of Fredericksburg.  Among these were the Lees, the Cooks, the Williamses and the De Baptistes.  A few years later this group attracted the Pelham family from Petersburg.  They too had tired of seeing their rights gradually taken away and, therefore, transplanted themselves to Detroit.

The attitude of the people of Detroit toward immigrating Negroes had been reflected by the position the people of that section had taken from the time of the earliest settlements.  Slavery was prohibited by the Ordinance of 1787.  In 1807 there arose a case in which a woman was required to answer for the possession of two slaves.  Her contention was that they were slaves on British territory at the time of the surrender of the post in 1796 and that Jay’s Treaty assured them to her.  Her contention was sustained.[4] A few days later a resident of Canada attempted under this ruling to secure the arrest and return of some mulatto and Indian slaves who had escaped from Canada.  The court held that slavery did not exist in Michigan except in the case of slaves in the possession of the British settlers within the Northwest Territory July 11, 1796, and that there was no obligation to give up fugitives from a foreign jurisdiction.  An effort was made to take the slaves by force but the agent of the owner was tarred and feathered.[4]