Brittany Von Kamp, a new doctoral student at Loyola University (congratulations Brittany), provides an interesting visual analysis of free African Americans in Cincinnati. Brittany’s work provides an indispensable backdrop for understanding the milieu that Hayes operated as a lawyer in the bustling 19th century Ohio town.
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Gathering a sufficient understanding of Hayes’s surroundings during his tenure as a fugitive slave lawyer in Cincinnati requires an understanding of the African American population in the state of Ohio, Hamilton County, and the city, as well as the number of fugitive slaves throughout the country. This information is easily found in the United States census but can be difficult to comprehend. Repackaging the census data visually provides an easier access point on the world Hayes was living and working in.
In 1850, when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed and enacted, the total population of Ohio was nearly 1.98 million people. Of that population, approximately 1.3 % of Ohioans were free African Americans – totaling just over 25,000 people. Of those free African Americans, 3,600 of them lived in Hamilton County (where Cincinnati resides). This is more than double the total of free African Americans living in any other Ohio county at the time. The following visual demonstrates Hamilton’s large share of the state’s African American population by converting Ohio’s total county-by-county numbers into different sized squares.
However, when comparing the total number of free Africans Americans in each county to the county’s total population, the graph looks much different. The number of free African Americans in Hamilton County was only about 2.3 % of the county’s total population. In fact, Hamilton County’s percentage of free African Americans in the total county population does not even make it in the top 10 highest percentages of Ohio counties, with the highest being Gallia county at 6.8 %. Most of the counties with the highest African American population percentages, including Hamilton County, were located in Southern Ohio, at or near the border with Kentucky. This tells us that many free African Americans in Ohio remained in the southern part of the state. This is interesting, particularly with the enaction of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. It may be that these free African Americans sought to help fugitive slaves crossing that border 
into free territory. Either way, it seems clear that free African Americans tended to stay in large communities together in the same areas.
The following chart shows that that majority of Hamilton County’s free African American population in 1850 lived within Cincinnati’s city limits – only 363 of 3,600 free African Americans lived outside.
But what does all this data mean for Hayes? For one, this tells us about the area he was living and working at the time. With such a high number of free African Americans in Cincinnati, it is likely Hayes would have passed by or even met several of them on a regular basis. From Levi Coffin’s autobiography, we know that many free African Americans in the area aided fugitive slaves and could have assisted Hayes as he performed his legal work. Attending school in Delaware and Norwalk, Ohio, Hayes likely would not have interacted with many free African Americans – by 1850 in Delaware County, there were only 135 and in Huron County (where Norwalk resides) there were only 89. In Knox County, where he attended Kenyon College, there were even fewer free African Americans--only 62 total. It is possible that during his schooling in Middletown, Connecticut or at Harvard Law School he interacted with more free African Americans. Yet, it is probable that Cincinnati’s larger African American population influenced Hayes’s beliefs on slavery.