The opportunity thus offered to help the oppressed brought forward a class
of anti-slavery men, who went beyond the limit of merely expressing their
horror of the evil. They believed that something should be done "to
deliver the poor that cry and to direct the wanderer in the right
way."[40] Translating into action what had long been restricted to
academic discussion, these philanthropic workers ushered in a new era in
the uplift of the blacks, making abolition more of a reality. The
abolition element of the North then could no longer be considered an
insignificant minority advocating a hopeless cause but a factor in drawing
from the South a part of its slave population and at the same time
offering asylum to the free Negroes whom the southerners considered
undesirable.[4l] Prominent among those who aided this migration in various
ways were Benjamin Lundy of Tennessee and James G. Birney, a former
slaveholder of Huntsville, Alabama, who manumitted his slaves and
apprenticed and educated some of them in Ohio.

This exodus of the Negroes to the free States promoted the migration of
others of their race to Canada, a more congenial part beyond the borders
of the United States. The movement from the free States into Canada,
moreover, was contemporary with that from the South to the free States as
will be evidenced by the fact that 15,000 of the 60,000 Negroes in Canada
in 1860 were free born. As Detroit was the chief gateway for them to
Canada, most of these refugees settled in towns of Southern Ontario not
far from that city. These were Dawn, Colchester, Elgin, Dresden, Windsor,
Sandwich, Bush, Wilberforce, Hamilton, St. Catherines, Chatham, Riley,
Anderton, London, Malden and Gonfield.[42] And their coming to Canada was
not checked even by request from their enemies that they be turned away
from that country as undesirables, for some of the white people there
welcomed and assisted them. Canadians later experienced a change in their