olence in
the actual treatment of the Negro population of the State.[307]
Pennsylvania's interest in slavery, because of her position just to
the north of slaveholding States, was never allowed to lag even after
she had set all her slaves free. Her Negro population was constantly
being replenished from the South and largely by fugitive slaves. This
brought about much friction with Maryland, owing to the unwillingness
of Pennsylvanians to surrender the runaways. In spite of Federal law
the spirit of freedom made it unsafe for owners to hunt for their
escaped slaves in Pennsylvania, as the famous Christiana riot of 1851
shows, and brought the State to the verge of nullification,[308] to
such extremes were a peaceful and yet liberty-loving people ready to
go in their championship of the abstract rights of the oppressed
slave.

But while this was true, there is abundant evidence to show that by
the masses of the people the Negro was thoroughly disliked, persecuted
and relegated to an inferior social status by no means in harmony with
the doctrine of the inalienable and unalterable rights of man. Negroes
were set upon in the streets, beaten, cut and even stoned to death in
sheer wanton cruelty. In 1831 the refusal of New Haven, Connecticut,
to establish a Negro college was enthusiastically endorsed in
resolutions passed at a public meeting in Philadelphia, and in 1834,
1835, 1838, 1842 and 1849 this city was distracted by riots directed
against the Negroes. The houses of the Negroes were sacked, their
inmates beaten and mobs of whites and blacks fought through the
streets with clubs and stones.[309] "A careful study of each of these
riots," says Turner, "makes inevitable the deduction that the deep
underlying cause which made every one of them possible, and which
prepared them long before they burst forth, was a fierce, and at least
among the lower classes, an almost universal, hatred of the negro
himself."

How are we to explain this contradiction in dealing with the Negro?
Why did Pennsylvanians mob him, disfranchise him from 1838 to 1873,
seek to get rid of him by colonization and yet hide him from his
master and resolutely refuse to close to him the door of freedom even
in the face of Federal laws? The answer is one of fundamental
importance for the comprehension of the status of the Negro in the
social consciousness of the nation now as well as then. The people of
Pennsylvania had been educated for generations in the