He brought them to Edwardsville, where they
constituted a community known as "Coles' Negroes."[28] There was another
community of Negroes in Illinois in what is now called Brooklyn situated
north of East St. Louis. This town was a center of some consequence in the
thirties. It became a station of the Underground Railroad on the route to
Alton and to Canada. As all of the Negroes who emerged from the South did
not go farther into the North, the black population of the town gradually
grew despite the fact that slave hunters captured and reenslaved many of
the Negroes who settled there.[29]
These settlements together with favorable communities of sympathetic
whites promoted the migration of the free Negroes and fugitives from the
South by serving as centers offering assistance to those fleeing to the
free States and to Canada. The fugitives usually found friends in
Philadelphia, Columbia, Pittsburgh, Elmira, Rochester, Buffalo,
Gallipolis, Portsmouth, Akron, Cincinnati, and Detroit. They passed on the
way to freedom through Columbia, Philadelphia, Elizabethtown and by way of
sea to New York and Boston, from which they proceeded to permanent
settlements in the North.[30]
In the West, the migration of the blacks was further facilitated by the
peculiar geographic condition in that the Appalachian highland, extending
like a peninsula into the South, had a natural endowment which produced a
class of white citizens hostile to the institution of slavery.
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