Free Negroes had voted in all the colonies except Georgia and South
Carolina, if they had the property qualification; but after the sentiment
attendant upon the struggle for the rights of man had passed away there
set in a reaction.[2] Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky
disfranchised all Negroes not long after the Revolution. They voted in
North Carolina until 1835, when the State, feeling that this privilege of
one class of Negroes might affect the enslavement of the other, prohibited
it. The Northern States, following in their wake, set up the same barriers
against the blacks. They were disfranchised in New Jersey in 1807, in
Connecticut in 1814, and in Pennsylvania in 1838. In 1811 New York passed
an act requiring the production of certificates of freedom from blacks or
mulattoes offering to vote. The second constitution, adopted in 1823,
provided that no man of color, unless he had been for three years a
citizen of that State and for one year next preceding any election, should
be seized and possessed of a freehold estate, should be allowed to vote,
although this qualification was not required of the whites. An act of 1824
relating to the government of the Stockbridge Indians provided that no
Negro or mulatto should vote in their councils.[3]

That increasing prejudice was to a great extent the result of the
immigration into the North of Negroes in the rough, was nowhere better
illustrated than in Pennsylvania. Prior to 1800, and especially after
1780, when the State provided for gradual emancipation, there was little
race prejudice in Pennsylvania.[4] When the reactionary legislation of the
South made life intolerable for the Negroes, debasing them to the plane of
beasts, many of the free people of color from Virginia, Maryland and
Delaware moved or escaped into Pennsylvania like a steady stream during
the next sixty years. As these Negroes tended to concentrate in towns and
cities, they caused the supply of labor to exceed the demand, lowering the
wages of some and driving out of employment a number of others who became