A wave of legislation passed over the South, prohibiting the slaves from learning to read and write, forbidding Negroes to preach, and interfering with Negro religious meetings.  Virginia declared in 1831 that neither slaves nor free Negroes might preach, nor could they attend religious service at night without permission.  In North Carolina slaves and free Negroes were forbidden to preach, exhort, or teach “in any prayer meeting or other association for worship where slaves of different families are collected together” on penalty of not more than thirty-nine lashes.  Maryland and Georgia and other states had similar laws.

The real effective revolt of the Negro against slavery was not, however, by fighting, but by running away, usually to the North, which had been recently freed from slavery.  From the beginning of the nineteenth century slaves began to escape in considerable numbers.  Four geographical paths were chiefly followed:  one, leading southward, was the line of swamps along the coast from Norfolk, Virginia, to the northern border of Florida.  This gave rise to the Negro element among the Indians in Florida and led to the two Seminole wars of 1817 and 1835.  These wars were really slave raids to make the Indians give up the Negro and half-breed slaves domiciled among them.  The wars cost the United States ten million dollars and two thousand lives.

The great Appalachian range, with its abutting mountains, was the safest path northward.  Through Tennessee and Kentucky and the heart of the Cumberland Mountains, using the limestone caverns, was the third route, and the valley of the Mississippi was the western tunnel.

These runaways and the freedmen of the North soon began to form a group of people who sought to consider the problem of slavery and the destiny of the Negro in America.  They passed through many psychological changes of attitude in the years from 1700 to 1850.  At first, in the early part of the eighteenth century, there was but one thought:  revolt and revenge.  The development of the latter half of the century brought an attitude of hope and adjustment and emphasized the differences between the slave and the free Negro.  The first part of the nineteenth century brought two movements:  among the free Negroes an effort at self-development and protection through organization; among slaves and recent fugitives a distinct reversion to the older idea of revolt.

As the new industrial slavery, following the rise of the cotton kingdom, began to press harder, a period of storm and stress ensued in the black world, and in 1829 came the first full-voiced, almost hysterical protest of a Negro against slavery and the color line in David Walker’s Appeal, which aroused Southern legislatures to action.