31
hung up in the streets of New York as dogs; and then, after emancipation, for nigh fifty years they were cruelly treated; excluded from cars, coaches, and steamboats; frequently mobbed; and late as 1863, in an awful riot, their houses were sacked, their women whipped in the streets, and their men hung up at the lamp-posts! Don't all this look as though "northern people knew Negroes when they saw them?"
I turn to the second class of facts:
(a) During the whole period of Northern Negro slavery there was always a class of Northern men, philanthropists, who revolted at Negro bondage.
(b) This class of men—Quakers, Episcopalians, and others—were never afraid of slaveholders, and would never allow themselves to be bullied by them.
(c) At a very early period, even in Colonial times, they asserted themselves, and demanded the abolition of slavery.
(d) Hence arose the "Abolition Societies" of the Middle States, who both established schools for Negro children and demanded the abolition of slavery. It was these men—the Jays, Clarksons, Kings, and Kents, of New York; the Boudinots, Shotwells, the Benezets, of New Jersey; the Rushs and Franklins, of Pennsylvania—who ameliorated the condition of Northern Negroes, and, in some cases, destroyed their slavery. They looked upon these people as men, and secured their citizenship. They regarded them as intelligent beings; and so, at last, through their efforts, schools, and the colleges of the North—Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, and Pennsylvania—have been opened to Negroes. Nay, beyond this, they counted them as brethren in Christ; and so they have been received in their churches; and in many cases they have been cordially welcomed to their pulpits.
