[Footnote 1: Howe, _Ohio Historical Collections_, p. 356.]
[Footnote 3: Manuscript in the hands of Dr. J.E. Moreland.]
[Footnote 4: _The African Repository_, vol. xxii., pp. 322-323.]
[Footnote 5: Howe, _Ohio Historical Collections_, p. 465.]
[Footnote 7: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p. 723.]
Many free persons of color of Virginia and Kentucky went north about the middle of the nineteenth century. The immediate cause in Virginia was the enactment in 1838 of a law prohibiting the return of such colored students as had been accustomed to go north to attend school after they were denied this privilege in that State.[1] Prominent among these seekers of better opportunities were the parents of Richard De Baptiste. His father was a popular mechanic of Fredericksburg, where he for years maintained a secret school.[2] A public opinion proscribing the teaching of Negroes was then rendering the effort to enlighten them as unpopular in Kentucky as it was in Virginia. Thanks to a benevolent Kentuckian, however, an important colored settlement near Xenia, Greene County, Ohio, was then taking shape. The nucleus of this group was furnished about 1856 by Noah Spears, who secured small farms there for sixteen of his former bondmen.[3] The settlement was not only sought by fugitive slaves and free Negroes, but was selected as the site for Wilberforce University.[4]
[Footnote 1: Russell, _The Free Negro in Virginia_, Johns Hopkins University Studies, Series xxxi., No. 3, p. 492; and _Acts of the General Assembly of Virginia_, 1848, p. 117.]
[Footnote 2: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p. 352.]
[Footnote 3: Wright, "Negro Rural Communities" (_Southern Workman_, vol. xxxvii., p. 158).]
[Footnote 4: _Special Report of the U.S. Com. of Ed._, p. 373; and _Non-Slaveholder_, vol. ii., p. 113.]
During the same period, and especially from 1820 to 1835, a more continuous and effective migration of southern Negroes was being promoted by the Quakers of Virginia and North Carolina.[1] One of their purposes was educational. Convinced that the "buying, selling, and holding of men in slavery" is a sin, these Quakers with a view to future manumission had been "careful of the moral and intellectual training of such as they held in servitude."[2] To elevate their slaves to the plane of men, southern Quakers early hit upon the scheme of establishing in the Northwest such Negroes as they had by education been able to equip for living as citizens. When the reaction in the South made it impossible for the Quakers to continue their policy of enlightening the colored people, these philanthropists promoted the migration of the blacks to the Northwest Territory with still greater zeal. Most of these settlements were made in Hamilton, Howard, Wayne, Randolph, Vigo, Gibson, Grant, Rush, and Tipton Counties, Indiana, and in Darke County, Ohio.[3] Prominent among these promoters was Levi Coffin, the Quaker Abolitionist of North Carolina, and reputed President of the Underground Railroad. He left his State and settled among Negroes at Newport, Indiana.[4] Associated with these leaders also were Benjamin Lundy of Tennessee and James G. Birney, once a slaveholder of Huntsville, Alabama. The latter manumitted his slaves and apprenticed and educated some of them in Ohio.[5]