George you'll find most of that black code stuff in mid-west states. More so than New England, where there were blacks who were actualy involved in ratifying the Constitution, no blacks did that in the South that I know about. As for going to Canada, that would put them out of reach of the Dred Scott law, put into effect by a slave owning Supreme Court Justice. Also a lot of that keeping blacks out of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois was at the will of people who had moved there from the Upper South, Kentucky for instance. They had seen that it was hard for free labor to advance against slavery and didn't want to compete agains blacks who were slaves or free. There was always the chance those free blacks could be sold as slaves again.

Did most whites want blacks around, except to work? Nope. Quakers would be the exception. My Quaker ancestors believe that the black man should be as free as the white man. The thing is George, they also believed that it was wrong to kill a white man to set a black man free. I know some people on the board will laugh at me, but my ancestor was a nurse in the war. He worked in the same hospital as Louisa May Alcott. He did not kill anyone but helped to save lives both yank and reb. When World War 1 came along my grandfather left the Quaker Church to enlist and the rest is history. Though I don't hold to many of their religious beliefs, I respect Quaker heritage.

Chase