[19]
Some Negro slaves unwilling to wait to be carried or invited to the
Northwest Territory escaped to that section even when it was controlled by
the French prior to the American Revolution. Slaves who reached the West
by this route caused trouble between the French and the British colonists.
Advertising in 1746 for James Wenyam, a slave, Richard Colgate, his
master, said that he swore to a Negro whom he endeavored to induce to go
with him, that he had often been in the backwoods with his master and that
he would go to the French and Indians and fight for them.[20] In an
advertisement for a mulatto slave in 1755 Thomas Ringold, his master,
expressed fear that he had escaped by the same route to the French. He,
therefore, said: "It seems to be the interest, at least, of every
gentleman that has slaves, to be active in the beginning of these
attempts, for whilst we have the French such near neighbors, we shall not
have the least security in that kind of property."[21]
The good treatment which these slaves received among the French, and
especially at Pittsburgh the gateway to the Northwest Territory, tended to
make that city an asylum for those slaves who had sufficient spirit of
adventure to brave the wilderness through which they had to go. Negroes
even then had the idea that there was in this country a place of more
privilege than those they enjoyed in the seaboard colonies.
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