Despite a fanatical
urge to free the black man from the slavery inherited from the British
colonial system, the abolitionists either did not want the free black in
the North, or treated them with disdain if they lived among them.
Author J.C. Myers wrote in 1849 that the fanatic New England
abolitionists were so perfectly mad on the subject of slavery that their
whole soul was filled with burning gall, and they were ever seeking an
opportunity to “spit . . . venom on the South, for the purpose of
withering down her institutions, even at the very hazard of shivering
into fragments, our glorious Union.”
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Northern Degradation of the Free Negro
“All
the social advantages, all the respectable employments, all the honors,
and even the pleasures of life are denied free Negroes of the North, by
pious Abolitionists full of sympathy for the downtrodden African,”
Parson Brownlow told his Philadelphia audience in 1858.
Daniel
R. Hunley . . . [heard] Henry Ward Beecher describe the condition of
free Negroes more graphically and authoritatively than any Southerner
could have done: “They are refused the common rights of citizenship
which the [Northern] whites enjoy . . . They are snuffed at even in the
House of God, or tolerated with ill-disguised disgust . . . We heap upon
them moral obloquy more atrocious than that which the master heaps upon
the slave.”
In
1828 a Southern visitor to New York was served “by an intelligent young
man of colour” who indicated that he was seriously considering
returning South to his master who had taken him and his wife North to
manumit them. He had rejected the idea of going to Liberia, because the
reports from there were that it was “the most miserable place in the
world. I had rather remain here.”
When
the white man then pointed out that if he returned South he could not
know into whose hands he might fall in the event of his master’s death,
he replied that he would prefer to take that chance than to remain where
he was.
When
a former slave went to Cincinnati to live, his difficulties were
numerous; and when there were no work opportunities, he was accused of
stealing. In his plea of guilty, he made a statement that . . . “Since I
came here,” he said, “I have been kicked about and abused by all
classes of white men; can’t get work from no one; and to borrow money . .
. that is out of the question.”
He concluded by saying that as soon as he served his time on the chain gang he would return South and become a slave.”
(A Southern Odyssey, Travelers in the Antebellum North, John Hope Franklin, LSU Press, 1976, pp. 151-152)
