erated
in virtually all the classes but that of unskilled laborers. New York's
poor showing as regards colored craftsmen, however, was mainly due to the
greater discrimination which its white people applied against all who had a
strain of negro blood.

This antipathy and its consequent industrial repression was palpably more
severe at the North in general than in the South. De Tocqueville remarked
that "the prejudice which repels the negroes seems to increase in
proportion as they are emancipated." Fanny Kemble, in her more vehement
style, wrote of the negroes in the North: "They are not slaves indeed,
but they are pariahs, debarred from every fellowship save with their own
despised race, scorned by the lowest white ruffian in your streets, not
tolerated even by the foreign menials in your kitchen. They are free
certainly, but they are also degraded, rejected, the offscum and the
offscouring of the very dregs of your society.... All hands are extended to
thrust them out, all fingers point at their dusky skin, all tongues, the
most vulgar as well as the self-styled most refined, have learned to turn
the very name of their race into an insult and a reproach."[51] Marshall
Hall expressed himself as "utterly at a loss to imagine the source of that
prejudice which subsists against him [the negro] in the Northern states, a
prejudice unknown in the South, where the domestic relations between the
African and the European are so much more intimate."[52] Olmsted recorded
a conversation which he had with a free colored barber on a Red River
steamboat who had been at school for a year at West Troy, New York: "He
said that colored people could associate with whites much more easily
and comfortably at the South than at the North; this was one reason he
preferred to live at the South. He was kept at a greater distance from
white people, and more insulted on account of his color, at the North than
in Louisiana."[53] And at Richmond Olmsted learned of a negro who after
buying his freedom had gone to Philadelphia to join his brother, but had
promptly returned. When questioned by his former owner this man said: "Oh,
I don't like dat Philadelphy, massa; an't no chance for colored folks dere.
Spec' if I'd been a runaway de wite folks dere take care o' me; but I
couldn't git anythin' to do, so I jis borrow ten dollar of my broder an'
cum back to old Virginny."[54] In Ohio, John Randolph's freedmen were
prevented by the populace from colonizin