efforts to secure to the free blacks opportunities to be trained in the
mechanic arts to equip themselves for participation in the industries then
springing up throughout the North. This movement, however, did not succeed
in the proportion to the efforts put forth because of the increasing power
of the trades unions.

After the middle of the nineteenth century too the Negroes found
conditions a little more favorable to their progress than the generation
before. The aggressive South had by that time so shaped the policy of the
nation as not only to force the free States to cease aiding the escape of
fugitives but to undertake to impress the northerner into the service of
assisting in their recapture as provided in the Fugitive Slave Law. This
repressive measure set a larger number of the people thinking of the Negro
as a national problem rather than a local one. The attitude of the North
was then reflected in the personal liberty laws as an answer to this
measure and in the increasing sympathy for the Negroes. During this
decade, therefore, more was done in the North to secure to the Negroes
better treatment and to give them opportunities for improvement.


[Footnote 1: _Cincinnati Morning Herald_, July 17, 1846.]

[Footnote 2: Woodson, _The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861_, p.
242.]

[Footnote 3: Turner, _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, p. 143;
_Correspondence of Dr. Benjamin Bush_, XXXIX, p. 41.]

[Footnote 4: DuBois, _The Philadelphia Negro_, pp. 26-27.]