Record Data
Transcription
The following extract, which we take from an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer, contains an idea worth looking after:
“There is a remarkable and very suggestive fact in regard to the negro emigration into this State. It is this: Of the twenty-five thousand free negroes in the State, the vast majority reside in the counties where there are very few Abolitionists, and which have been chiefly settled by emigrants from the Southern States. These negroes appear to have a great dread of the Abolition counties; they give them a wide berth. Thus for example, Ashtabula has a negro population of forty three, [illegible] seven, Trumbull sixty-five. The other counties on the lake have a proportionate number of negroes. These counties are settled almost exclusively by New England emigrants. On the other hand, Ross county, a Virginia settlement, has one thousand one hundred and ninety eight, and Hamilton county has over four thousand.
“In these counties the negro is regarded as inferior, socially and politically, and the Abolitionists have but a slight hold. What is the cause of this striking discrepancy? Is it that the negro feeds and knows his inferiority, and naturally attaches himself to the population which is disposed to regard him as an inferior? Or is it that the whites in the lake shore countries are Abolitionists from an ignorance of the real character of the negro? Certainly there is no better mode of curing a neighborhood of abolitionism than by indicting on them a colony of free negroes. The only way in which Giddings can be defeated will be by a few more such philanthropic efforts as those of Col. Mendenhall, in settling a few hundred South Carolina or Kentucky negroes in Ashtabula. If our Southern friends will send us their surplus negro population, let them provide that they may be located among their kind and generous friends in the Western Reserve. Such earnest philanthropy as they profess ought not to be “wasted on the desert.”