intolerable but necessitated their expatriation. Because of the Virginia
drastic laws and especially that of 1838 prohibiting the return to that
State of such Negro students as had been accustomed to go North to attend
school, after they were denied this privilege at home, the father of
Richard DeBaptiste and Marie Louis More, the mother of Fannie M. Richards,
led a colony of free Negroes from Fredericksburg to Detroit.[24] And for
about similar reasons the father of Robert A. Pelham conducted others from
Petersburg, Virginia, in 1859.[25] One Saunders, a planter of Cabell
County, West Virginia, liberated his slaves some years later and furnished
them homes among the Negroes settled in Cass County, Michigan, about
ninety miles east of Chicago, and ninety-five miles west of Detroit.

This settlement had become attractive to fugitive slaves and freedmen
because the Quakers settled there welcomed them on their way to freedom
and in some cases encouraged them to remain among them. When the increase
of fugitives was rendered impossible during the fifties when the Fugitive
Slave Law was being enforced, there was still a steady growth due to the
manumission of slaves by sympathetic and benevolent masters in the
South.[26] Most of these Negroes settled in Calvin Township, in that
county, so that of the 1,376 residing there in 1860, 795 were established
in this district, there being only 580 whites dispersed among them. The
Negro settlers did not then obtain control of the government but they
early purchased land to the extent of several thousand acres and developed
into successful small farmers. Being a little more prosperous than the
average Negro community in the North, the Cass County settlement not only
attracted Negroes fleeing from hardships in the South but also those who
had for some years unsuccessfully endeavored to establish themselves in
other communities on free soil.[27]

These settlements were duplicated a little farther west in Illinois.