[Footnote 1: This statement is based on the accounts of various western freedmen.]
[Footnote 2: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p. 113.]
[Footnote 3: Simmons, _Men of Mark_, p. 829.]
[Footnote 7: Wright, "Negro Rural Communities in Indiana," _Southern Workman_, vol. xxxvii., p. 169.]
In the colored settlements of Canada the outlook for Negro education was still brighter. This better opportunity was due to the high character of the colonists, to the mutual aid resulting from the proximity of the communities, and to the coöperation of the Canadians. The previous experience of most of these adventurers as sojourners in the free States developed in them such noble traits that they did not have to be induced to ameliorate their condition. They had already come under educative influences which prepared them for a larger task in Canada. Fifteen thousand of sixty thousand Negroes in Canada in 1860 were free born.[1] Many of those, who had always been free, fled to Canada[2] when the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made it possible for even a dark-complexioned Caucasian to be reduced to a state of bondage. Fortunately, too, these people settled in the same section. The colored settlements at Dawn, Colchester, Elgin, Dresden, Windsor, Sandwich, Queens, Bush, Wilberforce, Hamilton, St. Catherines, Chatham, Riley, Anderton, Maiden, Gonfield, were all in Southern Ontario. In the course of time the growth of these groups produced a population sufficiently dense to facilitate coöperation in matters pertaining to social betterment. The uplift of the refugees was made less difficult also by the self-denying white persons who were their first teachers and missionaries. While the hardships incident to this pioneer effort all but baffled the ardent apostle to the lowly, he found among the Canadian whites so much more sympathy than among the northerners that his work was more agreeable and more successful than it would have been in the free States. Ignoring the request that the refugees be turned from Canada as undesirables, the white people of that country protected and assisted them.[3] Canadians later underwent some change in their attitude toward their newcomers, but these British-Americans never exhibited such militant opposition to the Negroes as sometimes developed in the Northern States.[4]