it, she went
to Toronto where she studied English, history, drawing and needlework. In
later years she attended the Teachers' Training School in Detroit. She
became a public-school teacher there in 1863 and after fifty years of
creditable service in this work she was retired on a pension in 1913.[39]

The Negroes in the North had not only shown their ability to rise in the
economic world when properly encouraged but had begun to exhibit power of
all kinds. There were Negro inventors, a few lawyers, a number of
physicians and dentists, many teachers, a score of intelligent preachers,
some scholars of note, and even successful blacks in the finer arts. Some
of these, with Frederick Douglass as the most influential, were also doing
creditable work in journalism with about thirty newspapers which had
developed among the Negroes as weapons of defense.[40]

This progress of the Negroes in the North was much more marked after the
middle of the nineteenth century. The migration of Negroes to northern
communities was at first checked by the reaction in those places during
the thirties and forties. Thus relieved of the large influx which once
constituted a menace, those communities gave the Negroes already on hand
better economic opportunities. It was fortunate too that prior to the
check in the infiltration of the blacks they had come into certain
districts in sufficiently large numbers to become a more potential
factor.[41] They were strong enough in some cases to make common cause
against foes and could by cooperation solve many problems with which the
blacks in dispersed condition could not think of grappling.

Their endeavors along these lines proceeded in many cases from
well-organized efforts like those culminating in the numerous national
conventions which began meeting first in Philadelphia in 1830 and after
some years of deliberation in this city extended to others in the
North.[42] These bodies aimed not only to promote education, religion and
morals, but, taking up the work which the Quakers began, they put forth
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