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236    FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR.

company. Their public property, (mostly appropriated to religious uses,) is estimated at the value of more than 200,000 dollars.
12. In addition to the foregoing, it may be proper to remark, that many of the colored people have, by their labor and economy, acquired property, and become freeholders. Their real estate in the city, (belonging to individuals,) is supposed to be worth at least a million of dollars. It is known that more than 600, and it is believed that upward of 1,000 colored persons in the city and  suburbs,follow mechanical employments, many of whom are acknowledged as superior workmen.

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FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR.

FROM THE PHILANTHROPIST.

"THE free people of color," were pronounced by Mr. Clay, some years ago, to be, "of all descriptions of our population, and of either portion of the African racd, as a class, by far the most corrupt, depraved, and abandoned." Let us now attend to some of the facts which are beginning to be ascertained, and to be published for the correction of this error.
2. There were, by the last census, nearly 5,000 free people of color in Kentucky. The senior

FREE POEPLE OF COLOR. 237

editor of this paper has made extensive inquiry as to the state of pauperism among them, as indicated by the records of the country courts. He heard of but one, an old woman in Jassamine county, who was on the pauper list, and was supported from the public funds.
3. In the Southampton insurrection, there was not a single free colored person implicated in the remotest degree, yet were hundreds of them, residing in that county, compelled, by the cruelties and abuse which they suffered from the neighboring whites, to emigrate immediately afterward to Western Africa.
4. Mr.Gayarre, a member of the Louisiana legislature in 1834, uses this language concerning the colored population in that state, in a report which he submitted to that body:-"It has been said, that, in the colored population of Louisiana, a few respectable individuals could be found. Justice, perhaps, would have required the confession, that the many were respectable, and the few depraved; the many are sober and industrious mechanics, quiet and useful citizens, who are susceptible of noble sentiments and virtues. This homage is due to them, and your committee pays it with pleasure," &c.
5. In Philadephia, so far from burdening the whites with the support of their paupers, their city taxes, over and above the support of their own poor, funds for the support of white

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-06-20 23:26:14