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496
Appendix
SVarlier’ °r SUbSCqUent data: Migration reports. These data also
suffer from imprecise definitions, for black immigration to Canada was remrlo
°ften m te™S °f arrivaIs £rom 1116 United States and via ocean
port^ These two categories are not genuinely helpful, for numerous AmeriMnn^°eS "ndoubtedly entered through the ports of Halifax, Saint John,
Montreal, and Vancouver, just as West Indians and Africans may have
rossed into Canada from the American border rather than entering by sea.
Other data do refer to West Indians as distinct from Negroes, the latter
word apparently being reserved for Americans; but in 1926 the ethnic
totals were dropped, as was the West Indian designation, temporarily. And
immigration reports could be contradictory: although the 1922 report
showed that no Negroes had entered Canada the previous year, this
was
corrected in the report of 1923.27
A comparison of census returns, birthrate ^
estimates, and immigration
reports for the period 1911 to 1951 shows that one body of data was in
? C°nfisiderable numbcr of Negroes “passed over” each decade
m o white classifications—not primarily through intermarriage, since the
intermarriage rate was low, but presumably through electing to consider
Aemselves white. This conclusion would also help to account for the
r" flT8h0Ut the Peri0d fr0m 0ntario
other provinces
( ept Nova Scotia), and for the movement out of Nova Scotia into
Negro communities^
*
^ * °ntari° and Nova Scotia *e
were
„ more reac% recognizable, and if one had made
the decision to “
step. By 1961
help to explain the sharp increase in the reported Negro population, for
“sen ISS 7
h3Ve Ch0Se“ t0 “paSS” “ay now h™5 oh°sen to
tinn i^ i ba faSe-In the previous decades a modestly advancing immigracrease
7 ^ ^ W£St Indies’ aIso contributed measurably to the inIf neither the estimates of interested observers
nor the reports of disinterested statisticians are to be accepted for this study one may yet conelude that the Negro, although never numerous, has on the whole been
more numerous than Canadians have thought. His influence in Canadian
Even
°f ?g dUration and’ at times> of marked importance.
Even more, one may demonstrate that the Canadian experience has been
fte SfeCCaCnad0r
wTfl“t the faction between the black,
, . fCad,’. and their shared environment has revealed much of
general interest and importance about Canadian ethnic and racial
attitudes.
(oLTm9U27yeZVf te Dertment °f ******** ond Colonization . . .
l sstrssasr’ -d '*
A Note on Sources
This book arises largely from manuscript materials. That is true of____
most
books by most historians, and usually the fact would not be worthy of
special comment. Negro, or Black, history manuscript materials present
unusual problems, however. Manuscripts left by Negroes are fewer in
number, more difficult to find, and less self-consciously revealing, than
manuscripts arising from more traditional sources. The reasons for this
comparative dearth are obvious enough, even though until recently few
historians seem to have remarked upon the ways in which an anti- or at
least non-Negro bias might be reflected in many aspects of North Ameri
can social history. In historiography, as in chess, the white is always the
first to move—or has been until recently.
As slaves, blacks often were illiterate; even when free, they were the
least likely of all newcomers to North America to leave behind a written
record. They had left no one in Africa to whom they would write of their
new experiences; they were not organized in the New World in ways con
ducive to communication on paper; and they often lacked the skills re
quired to prepare the historian’s cherished manuscript, to be produced in
time in some neatly catalogued archive. They also were highly itinerant,
and frequently not in control of their own movements, so that the little
they had by way of a historical record was swept aside, left behind, or
burned to keep a body warm during the winter. Furthermore, they were
not organized institutionally, so that until the mid-nineteenth century there
were very few religious groups, schools, mutual aid societies, fraternal or
ganizations, or other self-venerating institutions to preserve a collective
record. Accordingly, Negro records are few, scattered, and require much
time and effort to find, assess, and relate.
The assessment of those records that have survived poses another prob
lem. One need not recite here the many arguments about the special nature
of Black history, for a flood of monographs has appeared in recent years
to attest to the angry shoals upon which anyone who casts himself adrift
from traditional historiography may run aground. Obviously, much of the
documentation relating to the Negro in North America comes from sources
which are “white”; thus we often must view black activities and responses
—even Negro thought—through sources which, while contemporary, are
at one remove from our subject matter. To note that one must also view
497
�ancient Greek thought through modern eyes is not to vitiate the conclusion
that by its nature much white-authored history will be biased history. It
does not follow, however, that all white observers have got their sums
wrong. In any event, the historian works with what he has, and while
black observers are to be preferred in many instances, this is not invariably
so; and even were it so, surely it is not beyond the empathy of man to
compensate at least somewhat for the bias inherent in any observation
that moves across ethnic, cultural, or religious chasms. Two superb books
—David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1966), and Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1969)—have been criticized by some scholars on the ground that
they are less about what the Negro did than about what the Negro had
visited upon him. If this is so, it does not challenge the validity of telling
the latter story, and I cannot hope, in this more modest effort, to escape
such criticisms.
In any event, this book says something about both subjects. I have
sought out black sources carefully, and feel that I have demonstrated that
vast quantities of material do exist, if not always in the customary places.
Such sources are not used in preference to white sources, as a substitute
or supplement to them, nor in token integration, but as parallel sources
of equal and different validity.
As drafts of this work were revised, the documentation was substantially
reduced. Anyone interested in additional references to a specific point in
the text may consult the author’s original notes or one of the earlier drafts
of the manuscript, now in the Schomburg Collection of the New York
Public Library. The documentation is relatively full as presented here,
however, and the following essay will deal with contemporary or original
source materials only. The footnotes will lead the reader to the more im
portant of the secondary works, as well as printed documents, which are
not discussed here.
Most of the books, pamphlets, and articles cited in the notes were con
sulted at the British Museum, the Library of Congress, the Public Archives
of Canada, or one of the Canadian provincial archives. All major collec
tions of Negro Americana (as the term once had it) known to me were
consulted. These include the five leading collections: the Schomburg, the
James Weldon Johnson in the Yale University Library, and the holdings
of Fisk, Hampton, and Howard universities. Lesser collections in the Bos
ton Athenaeum, the Brookline (Mass.), Chicago, and Providence public
libraries, the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, the Confederate Me
morial Library in Richmond, Tuskegee Institute, Lincoln University, and
the universities of Atlanta, California, and Vermont, were examined, as
were special collections of antislavery pamphlets at Cornell University and
!
Oberlin College. I also consulted over a hundred theses and dissertations.
Those drawn upon are cited in full in the footnotes. For a basic list, one
may consult Earle H. West, comp., A Bibliography of Doctoral Research
on the Negro, 1933-1966 ([Ann Arbor, Mich.], 1969).
The only partial bibliography on The Negro in Canada appeared as this
work neared completion. Subtitled A Select List of Primary and Secondary
Sources for the Study of Negro Community in Canada from the Earliest
Times to the Present Days, and prepared by Sushil Kumar Jain, it is avail
able from the University of Saskatchewan library (Regina, 1967). The
list is highly selective and uncritical. A Bibliography of Antislavery in
America, prepared by Dwight Lowell Dumond (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1961),
is the most important guide to antislavery literature and other printed
sources. It does not entirely replace two earlier, and excellent finding aids:
W. E. Burghardt DuBois, A Select Bibliography of the American Negro
(Atlanta, Ga., 1905), the only one of several such bibliographies con
sistently to include Canadian citations; and the references in Mary S. Locke,
Anti-Slavery in America, from the Introduction of African Slaves to the
Prohibition of the Slave Trade (1619-1808) (Boston, 1901). These and
other bibliographies include a number of highly general histories of slavery
which make passing reference to Canada—histories not cited in the pres
ent volume. (A representative example is Frank Hoyt Wood, Vrsprung
und Entwicklung der Sklaverei [Leipzig, Germ., 1900], which discusses
Canada on pages 7 to 16.) Anyone wishing to compile a definitive bibli
ography on Canadian Negroes must therefore consult the standard finding
aids as well as the raw notes to the present study, for not all relevant
secondary titles are incorporated in the printed footnotes of this book.
Official Papers
Official papers tend to survive, private papers tend not to. Most official
papers, at least until recently, will tell far more of the Negro as a person
acted upon rather than as actor. For these reasons, the papers of official
bodies—and especially of governments—were of relatively less use in this
study than in most books which attempt to examine some facet of the
Canadian-American relationship. Nonetheless, the official,, papers were
indispensable, especially for a record of the Black Pioneers, the migration
to Sierra Leone, the Maroons, and the Refugees.
The Public Archives of Canada, a uniquely well-run and organized
depository, contains many basic collections of importance. Among these
are the Canadian “G” series, consisting of dispatches and ancillary records
relating to the office of the governor-general. Of this record group’s
twenty-three numbered subseries, the most valuable were Gl, Despatches
from the Colonial Office, G12, Letter Books of Despatches to the Colonial
�500
A Note on Sources
Office, and G20, Civil Secretary’s Correspondence. The “C” series, British
Military Records, provided much information, especially on the War of
1812 and the rebellion of 1837. Particularly fruitful were Cl, C35, C801,
and Cl 049. The Minutes of the Executive Council, Upper Canada Land
Petitions, State Papers of Upper Canada, transcripts of Letters Patent,
transcripts of Treasury letters to the Naval and Military Departments for
1815-21, the raw censuses of Canada, the internal correspondence for
Quebec, and several miscellaneous volumes of petitions, also added pieces
to the mosaic. The Public Archives Record Centre, a storage depot for
the archives, contained the important General Headquarters Papers re
lating to World War I.
The Public Archives of Nova Scotia, in Halifax, provide equally im
portant data. Beginning with the voluminous Akins Collection (to which
belong most PANS volumes bearing a number in the footnotes), succes
sive archivists have drawn together an exceptional range of material.
Among the official papers are volumes of unpassed bills, the letter books
of the surveyor-general for 1784 to 1824, letters of the lieutenant governor
to the Colonial Office, accounts on the final settlement of the Jamaican
Maroons in Nova Scotia, a variety of petitions, deeds, and bills of sale, a
loose collection of land papers, a bound series of Crown Land Papers,
raw census returns, Council Minutes, the Minute Books of Proceedings
of the Port Roseway Associates, official documents on Old Township and
Loyalist settlements, French documents relating to Acadia, and a number
of miscellaneous volumes (on occasion with incorrect binder’s titles, as
when a volume labeled 1815-18 is found to contain a letter for 1836).
The line between official and unofficial papers is a thin one, of course,
and often impossible to draw. Several of the collections used in the New
Brunswick Museum in Saint John were of this kind. They include the or
der books of the York County Militia, the records of the Provincial Chas
seurs, extracts from King’s County wills, miscellaneous records of the
York County registry office, the record book of the Pennfield settlement,
and a variety of marriage and death certificates. A wide range of papers
pertaining to Crown lands in Ontario, together with the papers of the Edu
cation Department (often referred to as the Ryerson Papers) of Canada
West, are among the most valuable sources in the Ontario Provincial
Archives in Toronto. Deeds, petitions, location tickets, and the papers of
the Toronto City Council for the 1840s (supplemented by minutes of town
meetings held by the Toronto Public Library), also proved useful. The
History Branch of Ontario’s Department of Lands and Forests holds a
substantial number of survey records that were relevant. In Windsor, the
registry office provided lists of property holders, plans for lots, and lists of
burials which helped plot the patterns of black settlement in Essex County.
To the West, the Archives of Saskatchewan and those of British Co-
A Note on Sources
507
lumbia proved especially useful. At the former’s Saskatoon branch, a wide
range of homestead records have been microfilmed, while the Regina
branch hdds films of the provincial Department of Education’s district
files. The British Columbia archives, in Victoria, also hold many official
land records, as well as the correspondence of the Commissioner of Lands
and Works. The Land Titles Office, in Edmonton, Alberta, and the pro
vincial Department of Lands and Forests, also in Edmonton, provided
maps, tax records, and certificates of title.
official records were of great value, since the majority of
XT American
.
Canada arrived via the United States. The National Archives
in Washington holds such diverse collections as the papers of the Con
tinental Congress, the George Washington papers, the Interior Depart
ment’s records on the slave trade and Negro colonization, the Harper’s
Ferry Select Committee files, the records of the Labor and Transportation
Committee for Congested Production Areas (1943-45), the State De
partment’s Decimal Files for the first four decades of the present century,
and dispatches from twenty-one American consulates in Canada, as well as
from American consuls in Nassau, Bahamas; Kingston, Jamaica; and Aux
Cayes, Haiti.
The most important repositories of official and public papers proved to
be in Britain, however. The Public Record Office is an overburdened
ever-ncher storehouse for the colonial, imperial, or diplomatic historian’
and many of its volumes were central to this study. These include eighteen
CO series: 2, 23, 42, 44, 45, 60, 188, 217, 218, 219, 220, 267, 270,
296, 305, 398, 410, and 537; together with FO series 5, 35, 115, and
414. Each of these series may run to hundreds of volumes, as in C042
which consists of over 600 volumes, 131 of which proved to contain relevant
material. H045, confidential extradition prints, the Confidential Minute
Papers on The Gambia, Admiralty series 1, WO series 1 and 61 (the
latter the Jeffery Amherst Papers), the Chatham Papers, and the Head
quarters Papers of the British Army in America also were of use. The
Public Archives of Canada holds microfilms of the CO series, and PANS
holds copies of C0188 and 217-20, although for maximum effectiveness
one must still consult the originals. To these official documents should be
added Additional Manuscripts 15,485 in the British Museum, on exports
and imports of North America, 1768-69.
Private Papers
In the end, however, private papers proved to be of the greatest utility.
On subjects of race personal statements are likely to be franker, more
frequent, and ultimately more unconsciously revealing than the cautious
records of governments can be. If one includes among private papers those
�502
A Note on Sources
of unofficial corporate bodies, such as the Society for the Propagation of
the. Gospel, of the many antislavery societies in Britain, Canada, and the
United States, and of self-help societies, one inevitably will find a more
open, accurate, and fuller expression of opinion and reflection of events
than any official records might provide. Unfortunately, the number of col
lections consulted makes a full critical discussion here impractical.
In the United States, all paths lead to the Library of Congress. There
I drew upon single volumes of papers relating to Sir Guy Carleton and
Sir William Johnson; two boxes and sixteen volumes of materials (the
Edward Vernon and Charles Wager collection) on the slave trade prior
to 1773; Arthur Hamer’s manuscript bibliography on the trade, compiled
at Magdalen College in 1799; collections of papers relating to James Gillispie Birney, John Brown, Edward Everett, Augustus John Foster, Hugh
Gaine, Joshua Giddings, Marcus Gunn, Mrs. Basil Hall, Julia Ward
Howe, Samuel Gridley Howe, John Mitchell, Wendell Phillips, F. W.
Pickens and M. L. Bondam, James Redpath, Franklin B. Sanborn, Wil
liam H. Seward, John Sherman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, B. F. Stevens,
Mary Church Terrell, Booker T. Washington, Theodore Dwight Weld’
Walter White, Elizur Wright, Frances Wright, the Western Anti-Slavery
Society for 1845-57, and the Edith Rossiter Bevan Autograph Col
lection. Most valuable of all was the Carter G. Woodson Collection of
Negro Papers, the minutes of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and
papers of Benjamin, Lewis, and Arthur Tappan. (Several of the letters
from Thomas Clarkson and John Scoble to the Tappans have been re
printed in Anne Heloise Abel and Frank J. Klingberg, eds., “The Tappan
Papers,” JNH, 7 [1927], 128-329, 389-554 and simultaneously in their
A Side Light on Anglo-American Relations, 1839-1858 [Washington].)
Boston is the chief center for research on abolitionism. In the Massa
chusetts Historical Society one may consult the papers of John A. Andrew,
John Brown, George Ellis, Edward Everett, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Amos A. Lawrence, Edmund Quincy, and Amasa Walker-—all drawn
upon chiefly for unravelling the story of Josiah Henson—as well as the
Francis Parkman Papers. The Boston Public Library holds the papers of
William Lloyd Garrison, the original manuscript of Josiah Henson’s nar
rative as written by Samual A. Eliot, and Lydia Maria Child, Samuel May,
Jr., Amos A. Phelps, and Maria Weston Papers. Across the river in Cam
bridge, at Harvard’s Houghton Library, one may contest wills against the
awkwardly organized Charles Sumner Papers, which include correspon
dence with Clarkson, Eliot, Ellis, Scoble, and Walker, as well as George
Thompson and Hiram Wilson. The Ralph Waldo Emerson and William
H. Siebcrt Collections, the latter consisting of forty-five volumes of clip
pings and notes (three on Canada), and the Houghton theatre collection,
A Note on Sources
503
„W;* Srarv6 On^T P!?ybilIS’ add t0 1116 att^tions of this most ele-
ton.
. Garrison II collections in the Smith College Library in Northamp-
some Thomas: r,n°JeSS riCh' The NeW-York H^al Society provided
some Thomas Clarkson papers and an excellent copy of John Clarkson’s
John’Taylor' Thomas
Sharp’ Gerri‘ Smith! and
n Taylor, Thomas Nyes journal, a single Charles Stuart letter in the
ranaHS!nP !i °f ^eVerend Franc>s Hawks. a miscellaneous collection on
Canada and settlement, correspondence on the slave trade and da
(olhSeFreCd0rdSjc0nthe, S°Ciety f°r Pr°moting Manumission of Slaves’
i?hai w d
oD0UgaSS papers were consulted in the Douglass Me
jssi-sirs.rrr ris s°f™
f
Samuel Ringgold Ward). At Columbia Unive^y one S the oa^s
eorge Plimpton, of Sydney Howard Gay (in fifty badly sorted boxes)
e papers of the Toronto Emigration Office, the John Bartlet BreW ’
antes T. Shotwell and William J. Wilgus coileSo^alfwfth m«
14o tnianCe~a!1i osheu L' S' Alexander Gumby Collection of Negroiana
1910 untTl950 so
“ °ffPpingS on Mack activities collected from
n i
at50, S° orSamzed that one may readily find materials cm
Douglass Marcus Garvey, Jackie Robinson, and riteTsSSfThe
H^ York Geographical Society library has manuscript maps which denote
black settlements m the Maritime Provinces, and playbills and program s
for Tom Shows are in the New York Library for the Perfor2g 1“
sity Ltory whe0reeam0VeS
m°St
t0 the 5y»«w Univera slDgular Private collection was mined. The Gerrit
Brown Jr rIafPherS T"1 volumin°aa correspondence to Smith from John
Brown, Jr Anthony Burns, Thomas Clarkson, James C. Fuller Thomas
Henning, Benjamin Lundy, Samuel J. May, Jr., Joshua R. Giddings Isaac
and^T-p” J°1^.IScoble> JosePh Sturge, George Thompson, Samuel Ward
and Hiram Wilson, as well as subject matter volumes, as for exampie on
J• WrLo!re,HNrbc
1116 SyraCUSe HiSt0riCal Society holds a Me on
gun and the Syracuse Public Library has a useful collection
f genealogical materials. In Rochester, the university preserves the large
�504
A Note on Sources
the Samud D' Porter hoIdin2s on
facts snmf^ ° ^aiIroad- 111 Auburn one may examine a variety of artiCornell n Ca ‘aD’ m the Harriet Tubman Memorial Home- and at
A Note on Sources
505
van
SteinValshdenrCovedCti<?n’
aDd
P3pCrS °£ Ulrich B- P™PS and Gertrude
Society hold's th^e^t£££& w££*££S™
IthrTa\?e C°,le®e ^ aa extensive“rno^
The S^te Hi t S?c J' May antislavery pamphlet file proved of use.
other of AmSl7^ °f Pennsylvania> in Philadelphia, is yet anlectL vi^/
superlative state archives. Here the Simon Grate Coljournal of ffif Spe;eral,mtoest“S items- William Still’s letter book, and the
were
Society Underground Railroad,
John nrr,^F
^he.mmutes
the Pennsylvania Abolition Society
Robert VauxPJames bSi^^A^ S°me Redpath materia1^’ and th®
British Navtdiw®
’ Amencan NeSro History Society, and
-£<£?.£=.izzszxr** N'“by s"nh-
the o™!l6fi0DS ^ m°re WideIy di^ibuted and I researched th
em as
Clements t -u V aros\ usually while on other business. The William L
STof J
UniV£rSity °f Michigan houses the large coUec-'
Sarah orfr ^' ^ The°d°re DwiSht Weld, and Angelina and
ed tfd hv n Abr°ut one-third of the most important manuscripts
were
Birney, 1837-1857 (2 vds^N111
^
°f Iames GilUsPie
Wilson, and Hemy Eftb a e includli p' SC0We’ StUart* StUrge> Walker,
55 “ “
brary has several diaries of Elihu Burri t hft make
7 ^^
materials of Harriet Beecher Stowe—in some sixt^lihrL^ ^ ^ f® h®
GrMe'y Swe^nrighf 1°£ “
the Kansas State Historical Soctefv Thk
f
Eastman PaPers), and
||S£~SHSlsi
.»£^"o=r„ “o£ s*ja,tsron M“- °*™*
ss jS2s t";:*
v^oV^S£mS^aVery-A^iti0n —p“ KreS Z
,"d
m
“st “ ■=* Acrrsss: ssr
-d
and I used a microfilm of the Wickett-WiswaU Collection of EhiahTo633’
joy Papers at Texas Technological College. The Office of the Chief Jr"
Washillgton’ DC> made available within its Historical
Highway
3 V3nety °f manuscriPt ffles <® the building of the Alaskan
treasUrer’s Ietters> and ‘he
r°WS ^ °D the early fugitive slave settle-
Papers in Canada were also dispersed across the continent.
Again, the
most valuable collections were in the Public Archives of Canada
There
one
ss
X^rer::
HeJ holies
ments in Canada West. P ’
At Yale, the James Weldon Johnson
are
Collection, in the Beinecke Li-
orSJSSI,
zz%v ,ue“re ;r "d i”'-1«»=«««*
8
0DSWUt,0n of Vancouver Island’s Confederate League. The Carl
Galt i «”?S“ Afc"n,I“™
officials. The Louis-Hippolyte
Lafontaine Papers were of great use on
the French period, as were the
�si note on sources
extensive transcriptions from the Archives de la Marine (Serie B) and
Archives des colonies (Serie B, C, E, F) in Paris, the general correspon
dence of Intendant Giles Hocquart, Fonds Frangais from the Bibliotheque
Nationale, and a variety of transcripts from the Archives Nationale. The
papers of James Murray, a number of Carleton transcripts, the Ward
Chipman, William King and William Dummer Powell papers, the diary of
Alexander McNeilledge, the Reynolds Family papers, plans of the Elgin
settlement with contemporary maps, and the journal of Mgr. J. O. Plessis
were of substantial use. The PAC also holds microfilms of the annual re
ports, occasional papers, and minute books of the Colonial and Continen
tal Church Society, the originals of which are at McGill University, at the
Methodist Missionary Society chambers in London, and in the British
Museum With the exception of the last, it was the microfilm I used. George
Julien s ‘ Coon” of Laurier is in the National Gallery of Art, also in Ot
tawa.
In Toronto, the Ontario Provincial Archives provided the papers of Wil
liam Canniff, J. George Hodgins, Mrs. Edmund George O’Brien, James R
Roaf, the Robinson and Russell families, John Graves Simcoe, Thomas
Smith, D. E. Stevenson, Bishop John Strachan, and a typescript by John
M. Elson. The University of Toronto added the John Carleton papers;
while the Toronto Public Library, always pleasant and efficient, drew from
its midden the diary of Elizabeth Russell, the papers of Peter Russell,
Robert Baldwin, William Jarvis, and David William Smith, the HubbardAbbott Collection, the manuscript autobiography of Thomas H. Scott,
Mrs. Amelia Harris’s scrapbooks, and a variety of broadsides, playbills'
prospecti, and clippings. All save the Smith papers proved of immense
value. The pamphlet and newspaper holdings of the Victoria University
(Toronto) Archives were of great use. A Bengough sketch satirizing
blacks hangs m the William Lyon Mackenzie House.
Elsewhere in Ontario, the obvious centers of research were Windsor,
London, and Hamilton. The first provides, in its public library, files on the
AME and BME churches, on black activities in the area, and on Amherstburg’s churches and schools. Several private individuals made available to
me family letters, genealogical charts, marginally annotated books, and
maps while the Hiram Walker Historical Museum also possesses maps
miscellaneous Negro papers, and lists of black settlers. Nearby, in the Amerstburg Public Library, the tiny Boyle Collection attested to the presence
of the early missionaries, while the museum of the Fort Malden National
Historical Park offered the account book of David McLaren Kemp, an
undertaker who was racially conscious, the F. C. B. Fall and Farney papers,
assessment rolls, Amherstburg deeds, and miscellaneous fugitive slave
and genealogy files.
507
The second city, London, provides unpublished local histories in both
S6 -!b lCJuar!! and at
University of Western Ontario, while the
Hamfiton Public Library holds a number of Negro-related scrapbooks and
G. C. Porter s manuscript history of the area. McMaster University, in
Hamilton, houses the Canadian Baptist Historical Association collection.
This includes James W. Johanson’s manuscript history of the Amherst
burg Association, 1841-61, the minute book of the Sandwich Baptist
Church, and the minutes of the Western Regular Baptist Association.
Local libraries in Ontario, the province to which the majority of fugitive
slaves fled, cannot be ignored. The Barrie and Orillia public libraries the
Suncoe County Surrogate Court Office (in Barrie), the Norfolk, Lennox
and Addington, and Oxford historical societies, as well as those of Lundy’s
Lane and Thunder Bay (the latter in Port Arthur), and the ChathamKent Museum in Chatham, all hold relevant manuscripts. The last also has
books from William King’s library; and Uncle Tom’s Cabin Museum
near Dresden, displays playbills and artifacts relating to Henson. The of
fice of the Board of Education in Chatham, in the minutes of the Board
of Public School Trustees, and the Grant African Methodist Episcopal
Church in London, through its church records, helped fill in lacunae in
the local story.
The Maritime archives were of slightly less importance. The Public
Archives of Nova Scotia holds individual files on several early settlers
transcripts from the Carleton papers, the diaries of Simeon Perkins (now
available in carefully edited form), a copy of the first volume of John
Clarkson’s diary, an Etter family genealogy, several Ward Chipman papers
and typescript local histories. Unfortunately, the papers of William s’
Fielding remain closed to researchers. Also in Halifax, the public library
m its local history collection, and the provincial library, in its newspaper
holdings, proved of great help. The Cambridge Maritime Military Library
has compiled a file on William Hall, V.C. The libraries of Saint Francis
Xavier University in Antigomsh and Acadia University in Wolfville the
last incorporating the Maritime Baptist Historical Collection, also yielded
scarce pamphlets and journals; and the Colchester Registry Office in
Truro has a relevant registry book. The office of the Halifax ChronicleHerald holds clippings on the singer, Portia White. I am particularly grate
ful to Marjory Whitelaw of Pictou, who loaned me seven reels of taped
reminiscences of, and conversations with, Negroes living in Nova Scotia
in the 1960s.
In New Brunswick, the provincial museum in Saint John provided
papers and files on the Eastman, Hazen, Mayes, Odell, Thompson, and
etsel famihes, and some surviving Chipman papers, together with
numerous scrapbooks. In Fredericton, the University of New Brunswick,
�508
A Note on Sources
the legislative library, and the Rectory office of Christ’s Church, hold local
registers, wills, and minutes. The Saint John Public library has several files
on local Negro activities. The Woodstock Public Library has a small col
lection of petitions. The Charlottetown, P.E.I., Public Library offered
typescript local histories which attest to early Negro arrivals.
In Quebec, Negro-related private materials were less frequent than one
would expect. The Chateau de Ramezay, in Montreal, has a manuscript
record on slavery in New France, while the Archives du Palais de Justice
attest to sales, births, marriages, baptisms, deaths, and burials. The Mc
Cord Museum of McGill University, in the Porteous Manuscripts, and the
McGill University Library in its local history materials, were of some
value. The provincial archives in Quebec hold the manuscript second vol
ume to Marcel Trudel’s study, wills and other actuarial records, and tran
scripts of the Ordres du Roi. The Brome County Historical Society in
Knowlton offers local manuscripts and files. The single most valuable col
lection in the province, however, is one not generally open to the public:
the records of the Canadian Labour Congress’s Joint Advisory Commit
tee on Human Relations, originally kept at the Workman’s Circle Center
in Montreal. Extensive and highly revealing, these records tell of annual
trips into the Maritime Provinces, as well as within Quebec, to note and
combat instances of overt discrimination. These, together with folders on
discrimination in the Toronto office of the Human Rights Commission,
provided the single greatest non-newspaper source of data on the 1950s
and early 1960s. The collection includes mimeographed reports on activities, normally issued eleven times a year, files of local union news
papers, newsletters of municipal employee groups, and carbons of correspondence with representatives in the field. In the end, relatively little
of this material was incorporated into the present study since the decision
was made to limit it largely to the years before 1960.
Across western Canada private collections helped tell the story of Negro
settlement, although interviews proved to be the most valuable source for
the prairie and mountain provinces since most settlement was within
the memory of living men. The Archives of British Columbia hold the
reminiscences of John Sebastian Helmcken, the diaries and account books
of Wellington D. Moses, the diary, correspondence, and record books of
Edward Cridge, the diaries of Reverend Ebenezer Robson and of Augus
tus F. Pemberton, the South Saanich Public School Visitor’s Journal, tran
scripts relating to the Colonial Missionary Society, several questionnaires
directed to early pioneers, and letters written by J. S. Matthews concerning early black settlers. The Vancouver City Archives, in the Vancouver
Public Library, has other Matthews correspondence and local clipping
files, and Victoria’s City Hall gave me documents signed by Mifflin Wistar
A Note on Sources
509
Gibbs, which I will deposit with the Yale University Library. L_.
The
University of British Columbia and Victoria University, in Victoria, hold
scarce pamphlets. The Central Saanich Baptist Church records, in that
church, attest to other Negro settlers, while the Nanaimo Archives has a
smgle document on
Stark family. Interviews on Saltspring Island,
as well as in Vancouver, proved of great importance.
On the prairies, private papers were less useful. The Glenbow Foundation Archives, in Calgary, holds typescripts and taped interviews with
Nettie Ware and seven other black settlers, related papers, and letters on
the settlements. The Edmonton Public Library has a clipping file on the
Ware family, and the Rutherford Library at the University of Alberta, in
Edmonton, has several manuscript local histories. So, too, does the
Saskatchewan Legislative Library, the University of Saskatchewan, and
the North Battleford and Moose Jaw public libraries. Again, interviews
in Amber Valley, Breton, Wildwood, Lloydminster, and Calgary, Alberta
and in Maidstone and Battleford, Saskatchewan, proved of greater value.
In Great Britain records are voluminous, cherished, yet nonetheless not
so well cared for as in North America. Most collections in the British
Museum take on a semiofficial character, as with the Bright, Clarkson,
Chatham, Cobden, Haldimand, Layard, Liverpool, Peel, and Sturge
papers. The BM reading room is unparalleled, of course, for yielding up
rare pamphlets, such as the annual reports of the Sierra Leone Company
or the Elgin Association; odd copies of the Nova Scotia Packet for 1786,
almanacks, and other printed primary sources. The Archives of the Hud
son’s Bay Company, at London’s Beaver House, provided many references
to Negroes in the fur trade. Somerset House on the Strand, through its
wills; the College of Arms, in its modest Joseph Brant file; the West India
Committee Library, in the minutes of that body for the nineteenth century;
the visitor’s register in the Lambeth Palace Library; and the Estlin Papers
in Dr. Williams Library—all in London, also proved helpful. University
College, London, houses the papers of Lord Brougham, which fortunately
include a full, annotated index to that collection’s fifty thousand letters.
Of particular value for this study were the various archives and libraries
of the London-based missionary societies. The Society for the Propagation
of the Gospel was exceptionally important. It holds the account and
minute books of the Associates of Dr. Bray, the Canadian Papers of that
group, abstracts of proceedings, the journals and reports of the SPG, and
special West African and Nova Scotian files, together with the Houseal cor
respondence and many pamphlets. The original SPG letters from Nova
Scotia are contained in a file box labeled “Dr. Bray’s Associates, Canadian
Papers.” While most of this material is now on microfilm at the PAC, the
film is unusually difficult to use, and one is well advised to consult the
�510
A Note on Sources
originals if at all possible. The Muniment Room of the Methodist Mis
sionary Society holds twenty boxes of letters from the Canadian colonies
to London, of which six were pertinent. (All are on microfilm in the United
Church of Canada Archives at Victoria University, Toronto.) The Society
for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge preserves annual reports and
lists of votes for grants of money; the Church Missionary Society held
relevant journals; and Friends’ House contains letters to and from Phila
delphia that proved relevant, as well as the journals of John Candler and
his wife.
The other great classification of records in Britain upon which I drew
were those of antislavery groups. By far the most important is the large
antislavery collection at Rhodes House, Oxford. This consists of most of
the papers of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (and the AntiSlavery and Aborigines Protection Society), which are systematically
transferred from the latter body’s headquarters at Denison House, in Lon
don, to Rhodes House, every ten years. (The Society retains a small re
search library, the Thomas Binns Collection of pamphlets, some reports
of the Sierra Leone Company, and a modern file on Sierra Leone for the
period of independence.) Rhodes House holds the early minute books,
memorials and petitions, correspondence, and files of the printed Annual
Reports and of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, from 1840.
These papers were acquired in 1951. To them have been added manuscripts on the South African Labour Corps of World War I, which grew
from an offshoot of the Society—the Committee for the Welfare of Afri
cans in Europe—and manuscripts relating to Indians in Canada. The antislavery papers have been edited and microfilmed, with an introduction by
Howard R. Temperley, the author of a forthcoming study on the AngloAmerican antislavery connection which I have read in manuscript.
Elsewhere in the United Kingdom one finds a variety of lesser collec
tions. The Earl Fitzwilliam Papers, in the Sheffield Central Library
Archives, and other Fitzwilliam Papers in the Northamptonshire Record
Office at Delapre Abbey, were relevant to the story of Sir John Went
worth. The Southampton Civic Record Office has made available the papers
of George S. Smyth. Wilberforce House, at Kingston upon Hull, the Ips
wich Central Library, and the East Suffolk and Ipswich Record Office in
Ipswich hold papers of the ubiquitous Thomas Clarkson. Other Clarkson
letters are in the hands of Thomas Hodgkin, of Oxford, who was kind
enough to grant me access to them at his home in Umington; and in the
Granville Sharp papers, at Hardwicke Court, Gloucester, which LieutenantColonel A. Lloyd-Baker, their owner, made available. The John Rylands
Library in Manchester has some George Thompson materials and the
Crawford Muniments, containing letters written by Earl Balcarres. The
Royal Archivist at Windsor Castle consulted the appointments book of
A Note on Sources
511
Queen Victoria for me, while the Greenwich Naval Library microfilmed
the log of the Sandown, which touches upon the Asia. The National
Library of Scotland, in Edinburgh, has the Edward Ellice Papers, while
the papers of the Earl of Dalhousie, in the Scottish Record Office, contain
correspondence with Bathurst for the Refugee period. The County Archives
of the East Riding of Yorkshire, in Beverley, holds one such letter. There
are Simcoe Papers in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth and in
the Devon Record Office, Exeter. A petition from Hitchin, Herts., relating
to the fugitive slaves in Canada, listed by Charles O. Paullin and Frederic
L. Paxson in their 1914 Guide to the Manuscripts in London Archives for
the History of the United States since 1783 (Washington), as being in the
House of Lords Papers, could not be traced.
Some records that one would like to consult are apparently gone for
ever. We know that the papers of Reverend Daniel Cock, as well as most
of those of Benjamin Lundy, were destroyed by fire. None of the original
records of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada have been preserved out
side the George Brown papers. The papers of Sam Hughes appear not to
have survived in any quantity. Materials relating to T. B. Macaulay are
said to exist in a garage in suburban Montreal although efforts to gain
access to them failed. While the widows of both Marcus Garvey and Rich
ard Wright sent me various printed materials, they were unable to make
available any manuscript collections. No references to the Fort Erie meet
ing survive in the papers of W. E. B. DuBois, now in the hands of Herbert
Aptheker, who kindly searched them for me. One could also wish
that registers of marriage had been kept in Ontario prior to 1867, but they
were not, and thus only Anglican and Roman Catholic interracial marriages could be documented for Canada West.
Archives in other lands proved of marginal utility. In Bermuda, the
Bahamas, and Jamaica, local archives, public libraries, and churches
yielded records relating to the period when Canadian-West Indian Union
was under desultory discussion. This documentation is cited in my recent
short monograph, subtitled A Forty-Year Minuet (London, 1968). The
Jamaican Institute, the public library of Montego Bay, and the University
of the West Indies hold rare printed materials on the Maroon Wars. The
Sierra Leone Archives, in Freetown, contain John Clarkson’s draft diary,
while the library of the University of Sierra Leone has the diaries of
George Ross. In Freetown I interviewed some members of the Sierra
Leone Settlers’ Descendents League. In Bathurst, The Gambia, I passed
an exciting week in anticipation while working through the archives—then
totally unorganized and strewn about a small shed—to find only two docu
ments relating to the Nova Scotians, duplicated elsewhere. By chance, the
diary of Thomas Haweis, in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, Australia, while
being searched for another purpose, helped to confirm one aspect of the
�J14
A Note on Sources
Nova Scotian migration. In Paris, visits to the Bibliotheque Nationale, the
Archives Nationale, and related archives confirmed that the transcripts
(many handwritten) in the PAC and in Quebec were full and accurate
Finally, one must note other papers which remain in private hands but
which nonetheless were made available to me, in addition to those men
tioned above. Fred Landon’s private collection, to which that devoted
scholar gave all interested historians ready access, proved to be of great
value, especially on the 1840s and 1850s. Consulted in Professor Landon s home in London, Ontario, these materials have been transfered si
nee
his death in 1969 to the University of Western Ontario. Of only slightly
less value were the records kept in the Cornwallis Street Baptist Church
in Halifax. These include the reports of the African Association of Nova
Scotia, and also of the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement
of Colored People together with extensive church records. Other churches
in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, and Nova Scotia also opened up
their records. The documents of the Negro Community Centre in Monfreal, made selectively available by Stanley Cylke, and those of the
Canadian Labour Congress, discussed above, were particularly useful So
too was the private collection of Mr. Alvin McCurdy of Amherstburg who
has drawn together many local records on the Negro community along the
Detroit River. At the Harvard School of Public Health I was given unrestneted access to the original research transcripts of the “Stirling County”
project, which includes raw data on Negro residents in Digby County, Nova
acoua.
1 advertized for individuals to come forward with materials, and a number did so In this way files, letters, and clippings were made available on
Matthew Henson, by Herbert M. Frisby of Baltimore; on John Ware bv
ettie Ware of Kirkaldy, Alberta; on Henry Yandusen, an early black
settler, by Glen Ladd of Dresden; on J. B. Harkin, by Miss Dora Barber
of Ottawa; on Negro Freemasonry in Canada, by Reginald V. Harris of
Halifax; and on the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the British
Columbia Association for the Advancement of Colored People, by Frank
Collms of Burnaby. Mrs. Keith Staebler loaned her notes on New Road
and her letters to her husband, written at the time; the Reverend William P.
G l!f’ f1S,h°P W- L WaUs> and Reverends Charles Este and Winston
• H. Clarke, as well as Messrs. Stanley G. Grizzle and Daniel G Hill all
made personal items available. Cecil Flarmsworth King kindly permitted’the
author to examine his copy of John Clarkson’s diary in his office at the
London Daily Mirror. (This diary has since gone to the University of
Illinois.) Many others wrote letters of reminiscence, provided references
sent clippings from local newsapers, and simply offered encouragement in
response to my appeals printed in a variety of j'ournals.
A Note on Sources
513
Printed Materials
been indiciateddabovpOIAeS vT
^ scarce Published materials have
. f
. . e' A Wlde vanety
printed sources, especially annual
reports of societies and government agencies, is cited in the notel These
18971 fr?i> It6 leSU!‘ Relations and AUied Documents (Cleveland
211; ed:ted^y Reuben Gold Thwaites> through the annual reports of
die Education Department of Nova Scotia. Wherever possible the originals
bv Pauff rnatenals have been consulted, as with the Relation of 1632,
d n ‘1 Je.une; Whl^h ,s ln the John Carter Brown Library in Provi°f parUcular value were the annual reports of the Canadian League
n7th \r v"CeTn
C° °red People’ of the United Baptist Convention
bers 3
T
°£ ““ Elgin Associatio11 (°f which only numbers 3, 4, 6-7, and 10-11 appear to have survived,
although number 2 is
quoted in the Voice of the Fugitive for November 5, 1851, and number 5
m Bcnjamms Drews work), and of the British Columbia Association for
the Advancement of Colored People. Some reports that one expected to
p °f value—those of the Upper Canada Committee of the Society for the
Propaga ion of the Gospel m Foreign Parts, for example—proved of little
use whde others that one ordinarily would pass over (the Proceedings of
the Semi-Annual and Annual Session of the Grand Lodge of A.F and A
A widT °
fT ' - ' } W6re f0Und t0 conta“ Negro-related records.
A wide range of almanacs, maps, novels, artifacts (as with Negro berry bas
kets preserved in the Citadel Museum in Halifax), and “association items”
!nn-'cTCr^ , ,° be!onging to John Scoble> or l°^s of Thomas Clarkson s hair) helped to demonstrate a relationship, an activity, or an attitude.
Other contemporary materials are less difficult to find. The British
Canadian, and provincial Hansard’s, for example, provide most of the
evidence on the legislative record. The published accounts by fugitive
Josiah FT
^ 7w7 WeUS Br°Wn’ Uwis Clarke- Frederick Douglass,
osiah Henson, J. W. Loguen, Austm Steward, or Samuel Ringgold Ward
ell WC°ntem^r7 cW°rks of Beniamin Drew, Levi Coffin, Samuel
Tosenhy<S°We’ 7?“ { E' Lmt0n’ Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Stuart,
Joseph Stage, and others, are all central to this study. The value of most
of these is mdicated at the appropriate places in the
notes.
Newspapers
and
Magazines
While newspapers are a particularly valuable source for the historian
they also present special problems. Full files of any except the major met
ropolitan papers are not likely to have survived and if one wishes to con
sult an entire run of a single newspaper, issues often must be pieced
•
�?
514
A Note on Sources
together from a variety of locations. Viewed as a source of data, a single
issue of a single paper has its values; viewed, as in this study, as a source
of public opinion, and as a molder of that opinion as well, longer and co
herent runs of a paper are essential. Before accepting a news item, the
historian must do what he can to verify its version against other types of
sources or, failing such sources, against another newspaper. The re
searcher must know of the newspaper’s ownership, the politics of its man
agement and of its editors, the extent to which it may be dependent upon
advertising revenue for survival, and the nature of its readership. Ob
viously, news concerning Negro activities that appears in a Negro news
paper differs from news that appears in an anti-Negro paper. Equally
obviously, the estimate given to the size of an abolitionist meeting by the
antislavery Toronto Globe is to be set off against an estimate provided by
the anti-abolitionist Toronto Leader, although not necessarily equally. The
editorial opinions of Toronto’s Christian Guardian will spring from differ
ent sources than the opinions expressed by a secular press. And one must
view distinctions within their time, for most nineteenth-century newspapers
in North America, even if overtly secular, employed biblical and racial
rhetoric on their editorial pages.
Apart from the problem of interpretation there is, when dealing with
the press of the last century and a half, the added problem of quantity.
The nineteenth century was a time of thriving local newspapers, and for
a full understanding of what Canadians read about black men (or about
events which would have given rise to thoughts about black men, as re
porting on the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States did),
one might reasonably be expected to examine many dozens of titles. In
the twentieth century, with the growth of massive Sunday newspapers, of
supplements, and of advertising, the researcher must contend with a bulk
beyond the capacity of any one person. Yet these newspapers demand
examination, for on their editorial pages, in their news items, among the
social notes, through those letters to the editor which they chose to print,
and even in the products they advertized, one may find frequent suggestions
of racial awareness. A full content analysis of the Canadian press on this
subject would be a lengthy study in itself (and very possibly not worth
while).
Accordingly, I narrowed the range of research in two ways. Leaving
myself thirty-two newspapers which I examined personally and—to the
extent that complete files were available—on an issue-by-issue basis, I
chose forty-five other newspapers, largely weeklies, which both I and
bursary assistants examined on the basis of specific known events, or in
the light of a bulking of Negro-related news items in the initial twentythree papers. These thus came to comprise a “control” group. Further,
since it quickly became apparent that no single researcher could keep
A Note on Sources
515
abreast of press opinion and news items in the decade of the 1960s (dur
ing which time this investigation was made) while carrying out other re
search as well, I sought professional help. From 1960 to 1968 the
Canadian Press Clipping Service of Toronto supplied weekly sets of material drawn from the entire spectrum of the Canadian press, including
all items referring to Negroes—whether in the United States or Canada—
and to discrimination, against whatever group. The specific newspapers
drawn upon, 210 titles in all, are indicated seriatim in the footnotes. A
full list would be superfluous here, as well as unduly cumbersome,
especially since masthead titles often changed two or three times. These
clippings have also been given to the Schomburg Collection.
Certain newspapers were of particular help. Fortunately, many are now
available on microfilm from the Canadian Library Association; and the
Public Archives of Canada, which has runs of all those on film, will loan
its microfilm holdings. The Ontario Public Archives provides many others.
In this way one could examine, for example, the Amherstburg Echo for
1888-1949, the Charlottetown Islander for 1853-65, the Chatham
Journal for 1841-44, the Chatham Planet for 1850-58, The Christian
Guardian for 1837-39, the Fredericton New Brunswick Royal Gazette for
1786-1816, the Halifax Acadian Recorder for 1813-1919, the Halifax
Herald for 1897-1938, the Halifax Journal for 1796-1817, the Halifax
Morning Chronicle for 1884-1969, the Halifax Novascotian for 1841-47,
the Halifax Royal Gazette for 1752-1824, the Hamilton Spectator for
1916-47, the London Free Press for 1859-1969, the Montreal Gazette
for 1840-1969, the Montreal Witness for 1846-54, the Quebec Gazette
for 1768-94, the Saint John Globe for 1847-1912, the Saint John New
Brunswick Courier for 1849-52, the Saint John Royal Gazette for 17841800, the Toronto Globe for 1850-1969 (in later years the Globe &
Mail), the Toronto Financial Post for 1942-69, the Toronto Mail and
Empire for 1911-28, the Toronto Star for 1930-65, the Toronto Tele
gram for 1924-69, the Vancouver Province for 1935-69, the Victoria
Colonist for 1859-1969, the Victoria Daily Evening Express for 1863-65,
and the York Upper Canada Gazette for 1793-1838. The Maidstone Mirror
for 1943-53 is on microfilm in the Saskatchewan archives. Joseph Howe’s
personal copies of The Nova Scotia Chronicle and Weekly Advertiser,
together with the Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle, both from
Halifax, are in the PANS. For background on many of these papers at mid
nineteenth century, see Helen Elliot, comp., Fate, Hope and Editorials:
Contemporary Accounts and Opinions in the Newspapers, 1862-1873,
Microfilmed by the CLA/ACB Microfilm Project (Ottawa, 1967).
Another approach was to examine, in so far as possible, all of the press
of a single key community. For this purpose Windsor was chosen, and
extant files of the Windsor Herald, Daily Star, and Daily Record, were
�516
A Note on Sources
consulted. For Halifax, in addition to the papers cited above, the Nova
Scotia Packet, Weekly Chronicle, Mail-Star, Herald, and Evening Mail
were used.
Particularly important, of course, were the abolitionist newspapers. In
Canada these were the Voice of the Fugitive, published in Windsor from
1851 to 1852 (with a file in the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit
Public Library); The Provincial Freeman, from Chatham, 1853-ca. 1857
(the originals of which are in the University of Pennsylvania Library), the
short-lived Voice of the Bondsman, from Stratford (with a single 1856
copy surviving in the library of the University of Western Ontario), and
The True Royalist, of Hamilton (of which two copies may be found in
the Fort Malden Museum). In the United States there were far more such
newspapers, and they have survived longer. Those that were searched (al
though there is much duplicated content among them) were the National
Anti-Slavery Standard from New York, 1840-70 (New York Public Li
brary), The Friend of Man, 1836-38 (on film), Garrison’s Boston-based
Liberator, 1831-65, The Oberlin Evangelist for 1848-53 only, The AntiSlavery Record, New York, 1835-37, Anti-Slavery Examiner, New York,
1836-45, American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, New York,
1840-46, Anti-Slavery Lecturer, from Utica, N.Y., 1839, The Emanci
pator, New York, 1834—49, and the National Anti-Slavery Bazaar, Boston,
1845-50 (all at Yale); The Genius of Universal Emancipation, Benjamin
Lundy’s parapetetic newspaper, 1821—39 (The Johns Hopkins University
Library); and Frederick Douglass’ Paper, for 1853, and the Salem, Ohio,
Anti-Slavery Bugle, 1845-60 (both LC). Also consulted was the New
York Herald for 1854—71, which is not cited in the footnotes since it was
drawn upon heavily in a previous book by the author, and since most of
its news items on Negro activities in Canada were reprinted from other
sources. Of the greatest value was the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery
Reporter to which ‘and Aborigines Friend' was later added, published in
London 1840-1966 (Yale University Library, 1840-57, 1859-67, and
1857—59 on microfilm).
American and Canadian Negro newspapers were a chief source of in
formation and opinion. All Canadian Negro newspapers and magazines,
as discussed in Chapter 13, were researched on an issue-for-issue basis.
Locations of files are discussed in the notes to that chapter. Of some sixtythree American Negro newspapers available on microfilm by 1968,
eighteen were used. Those that proved to be helpful were the St. Paul
Appeal and St. Paul Broad Axe (not to be confused with the Chicago Broad
Ax, which was also consulted), The Elevator, from San Francisco, in which
Mifflin Wistar Gibb’s articles appeared, New York’s Amsterdam News, the
Pittsburg Courier, the Detroit Plaindealer, and the Cleveland Gazette.
A Note on Sources
517
Several newspapers were used at the office of the papers themselves, on
occasion with the aid of an informal index compiled locally for in-house
purposes. That this method of approach was useful may be shown by the
Saint John Telegraph. Two important items relating to the Refugee
Negroes of the 1820s, drawn from reminiscences of early settlers in Nova
Scotia, appeared in issues in 1875 and 1884. The New Freeman, a Roman
Catholic newspaper, also of Saint John, and read in that paper’s library,
first revealed in its issues for 1903 the controversy with Neith magazine’
as related in Chapter 13. The Toronto Star's clipping file proved of great
use as well. Regrettably, two files of newspapers that might well have en
riched the story told here were not found: The Truro News, of which only
a post-1949 run survives in that paper’s office, following upon a fire in
that year; and the Dresden Times, published weekly from 1872 into the
1890s.
Magazines, like newspapers, are organs of opinion. The number of
articles on Negro-related subjects, as well as their content, is one index
to the degree of interest in the “Negro problem.” Articles on race relations
in the United States, appearing in contemporary Canadian periodicals__
Atlantic Advocate, Commentary, Canadian Forum, Canada Week,
Maclean's, Saturday Night—reveal much about the use of the Negro as a
metaphor in the relations between the two countries. Articles in welfareoriented journals, such as Canadian Labour Reports, the Journals of Edu
cation for both Ontario and Nova Scotia, Canadian Welfare, L'Action
nationale, The Labour Gazette, The Journal of the Y.M.C.A., The Angli
can, or The United Church Record and Missionary Review, increasingly
contain Negro-related materials. American journals, especially in the nine
teenth century, had occasion to report on the progress of the fugitives in
Canada and, later, on race relations in the Dominion. Thus, Atlantic
Monthly, The Chautauquan, The Literary Digest, The Living Age, the New
York Times Magazine, The North American Review, Outlook, Scribner's
and The Southern Workman, all contain relevant matter. So, too, do reli
gious periodicals in both countries: Acadia Bulletin, American Missionary,
The [Canadian] Baptist Magazine and Missionary Register, Canadian
Christian, Canadian Evangelist, Freewill Baptist Quarterly, Gospel Tribune
and Christian Communionist, The Maritime Baptist, The United Church
Observer, the Upper Canada Baptist Missionary Magazine, and several
others. The most important British publications were the American Baptist
Free Mission Society (seen in the American Antiquarian Society),
Arminian Magazine, Baptist Annual Register, The Colonial Protestant,
Free Church of Scotland Monthly, and Herald of Peace. British and
Canadian popular periodicals were of substantial help'. These include
�518
A Note on Sources
A Note on Sources
519
Of Riches (1957) or The Innocent Traveller (1949) respectivelv Still
clnadiln erilS,S;
Anglo-American Magazine, Canadian Antiquarian,
prrj
Il‘ustrfed News- Canadian Magazine, The European Magazine
Monthlv’l d yp Cana?en‘ The Imperial Magazine, Knox College
Journal'TheTn
The Maple Lea<- Numismatic
Z ,'T
A Llterary and AntiSl™ery Journal, and The Unirsity agazine. Special interest publications were often of value- Ca
nadian Cigar and Tobacco Journal, Canada-West Indies Magazine, McDuff
!ro, r';
v?" Merchant, West India Commercial Cir-
cuiar, or the New York organ of the Ku Klux Klan, the American
Standard.
fun?seSdatA°nS °f \nd fM Canadiaa and American Negroes were careMly searched. Among these were those magazines discussed in Chapter 13
journal rt AtS A/kan In!erpreter’ African Repository and Colonial
i
, ' _ Afro~Ame/ican Magazine, The AME Church Review Amherstburg Quarterly Mission Journal, The Black Man, The Black Worker
c2Ze/r!nenCanr Challense’ The stored American Magazine, The
Th M Ha,vesl- Crisis, Ebony, The Freedman’s Advocate, The Informer
PalmTh^’v68™ Dl8eSt (D0W BlaCk W°rld)’ Negr0 World> Pine and
Palm, The Spoken Word," and The Street Speaker.
Most of the above were consulted at the Library of Congress the Yale
University Lib™,, ,b, British Mnsenm, or the&hombTJ CoM™
Exceptions are the Canadian religious periodicals, read in the New York
Pubhc Library, at Acadia University, McMaster University, the Union
SoStTtP S”r{/New Y°* City), the American Bapiist Historic^
y ( ochester, New York), or the Southwestern Baptist Theological
v^Tvh F°rlWonh)- Four earlier journals were consulted at the Har
vard library: American Baptist Magazine and Missiona,y Intelligencer
nublSdSe“sBatptlS‘ Maftme, Massachusetts Missionary Magazine (all
published m Boston), and Vermont Baptist Missionary Magazine
(Ruttwe^fl
J’°UrAnaIS gave
t0 othera> of a secular nature, in the
twentieth century. Again, as m the 1920s so in the 1960s, Canadian fiction
m magazines and books reflected continental norms, and the black man was
set to play the same roles in Canadian as in American fiction. Negroes be
gan to appear with regularity in Canadian novels, still as stock figures but
now supporting °*T stereotyPes- Mazo de la Roche wrote her poorest
h k’!fr0miP8 at Jahla (1961). about pro-Southern Canadians during the
r
Civil War; Ernest Buckler, a highly regarded Maritime novelist, was to
prove unexpectedly graceless when he attempted to hint at prejudice in
Nova Scotia’s classrooms in his 1959 short story, “Long, Long after School”
(A fanttc Advocate, 52 [1959], 42-44); and even GabrieUe Roy and Ethel
Wilson, fastidious writers both, could not bring black men to life in Street
D.«, ,„d tvtog L„lm,
r„ -rs-sri«2r- “d ^ i»«"
L™‘
undesirable Negroes, so did lib.,1
men
novels: The Apprenticeship of Daddy KravTtz (1959) r/! .SUCCessi011 °f
(1963), and CociW (1968) It wa left to 1’
Ineom*rdHe
srr “
covertly and frequently overtly-had become part of tte
baggage for the Canadian of the 1960s, a far wfder range ofmaterids S
.h...*h te
Zta p=Jddts^™ d”i «S
o?r“! ,0,bl'Clt-Whl“ "“«=>">■'- Few r«LS ,„ fa,t ,o nS
of the journals mentioned above, have been incorporated into the footnotes
rightly the provmce of the social scientist than of the humanist*1*10118 m°le
I
Still, , not all knowledge arises from the printed word. Interviews with
mo„
many dozens: of Canadian Negroes, from Cape Breton Uland to Vancou
!!L“’ fPSd t0 Provide a background of attitudes, recollections
regrets, and pleasures for the post-1865 years. Seldom
’
was I refused the
�1
I
520
A Note on Sources
gift of time, attention, and of being taken seriously; often this gift was
accompanied by a willingness to bring out faded photographs, wedding
invitations, and family Bibles, the visual evidence of a past that was
thought worth remembering. Such items are not “documents” to add to the
piling of note upon note—no more than the casual conversation with a
black laborer, a sidewalk artist, or a school custodian may be—but they
provide above all the interest and the pleasure to sustain the more traditional search for evidence. There are many thousands of Negroes in
Canada to whom I was not able to talk, and this study is the weaker for
that. It is nonetheless much the stronger for the help of those with whom
I could talk, for the fact that no one appeared to feel that the end result
would lack “relevance” to the continuing black experience.
These contacts often took place at the scenes of events described in
this book, for no archive can provide a substitute for traversing the ground
of history itself. One must see for oneself precisely where William King’s
house stood, or William Peyton Hubbard was buried, or John Clarkson
spoke to the assembled Nova Scotians. To see the Cockpit Country of
Jamaica; to view Freetown from the heights above Fourah Bay; to write
upon a table in Kingston upon Hull where Wilberforce wrote—in short, to
experience the place, the sight, and occasionally the sound of history is to
remind oneself that the historian must always use that slight gift of intuition
which makes the leaps of faith he takes between evidence and conclusion
possible. It is in such places and moments as these, as well as in the con
tinuing chase within the confines of an archive, that the historian must
ever seek his pleasure and his sole reward.
Index
In the index, as well as the text, hyphens appear in French-Canadian names when
their owners generally used them, and otherwise not. Place names in Canada but not
stanhvCHnameS d“Where’ are indexed- °nly ^ose footnotes which contain sub
discussion of a point are included in the index. The maps are omitted, as is
the Note on Sources, except for pages 512 and 519-20.
Abbott, Anderson Ruffin, 328-32 passim Afro-American Press Association, 393
335, 412n41
Afro-Beacon, The, 404
Abbott, Ellen Toyer, 328-29
Agnew, Stair, 44, 108, 109
Abbott, Wilson Ruffin, 211, 212, 226 Alake of Abeokuta, 167
255, 328-29, 357, 367
Alberta: settlement in, 287; Oklahoma
Acadia University, 350, 383
Negroes in, 303, 305-06; civil rights
Activism: in the church, 351-52; growth
legislation in, 428
of, 414-68
Alcan project, 422
Adams, Elias, 258
Alexander, Arthur, 314
Adams, Grantley Herbert, 442
Alexander, Charles, 277
Addington, 133
Alexander, Lincoln, 459-60, 489, 494
Adolphustown, 33
Allan, William, 352
Africa: migrations to Sierra Leone, 44, Allen, Isaac, 44, 108, 109
56, 57, 61-78, 90-94; Bulama settle Allen, Richard, 154-55, 355
ment in, 74, 75; settlement in Liberia, Allen, William, 152
154; Canadian reaction to apartheid Amber Valley, 303, 306, 308, 381
in, 445-48
Amelia Island, 116
African Aid Society, 168
American and Foreign Anti-Slavery So
African Association of Nova Scotia, 512
ciety, 173, 263, 264
African Baptist Association of Nova American Anti-Slavery Society, 149 179
Scotia, 139
220,236,263,490
’
*
African Methodist Episcopal Church American Baptist, The, 342
(AME), 154, 231, 355-60, 394
American Baptist Anti-Slavery Conven
African Methodist Episcopal Zion
tion, 219
Church (AMEZ), 355, 359
American Baptist Free Mission Society
African Orthodox Church, 354, 415
200-03 passim, 206, 230-31, 342
African Students Association of the American Baptist Missionary Union, 342
United States and Canada, 442
American Colonization Society, 154-55
African United Baptist Association of
162, 257
*
Nova Scotia, 139, 345-48 passim, American Missionary Association
386-87
(AMA), 207-08, 224-27, 271, 397
African United Nations Emergency
American Nazi Party, 468n66
Force, 445-46
American Revolution, affect on Negroes
Africa Speaks, 404, 408-09, 412/z40
29-31,46,61
“
3
Africville, 130, 348, 383, 384, 389, 411
American Tract Society, 221, 222
420, 441, 452-56
Amherst, 27, 52
Afro-American Council, 359
Amherst, Jeffrey, 24
521
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Lyman Wilmot House
Description
An account of the resource
This collection consists of records related to the Deerfield Public Library's research into whether or not the Wilmot house could be proved to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad.
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Deerfield Public Library
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Deerfield Public Library
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Deerfield Public Library
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2002
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English
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DPL.0013
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Dublin Core
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Title
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A Note on Sources
The Blacks in Canada: A History
Description
An account of the resource
Photocopy from The Blacks in Canada of a section entitled "A Note on Sources." Some highlighting.
Creator
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Winks, Robin W.
Publisher
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Yale University Press
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1971
Language
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English
Identifier
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DPL.0013.033
A Bibliography of Antislavery in America
A Forty-Year MInuet
A Select Bibliography of the American Negro
A Side Light on Anglo-American Relations
A. Lloyd-Baker
Abby K. Foster
Aberystwyth Wales United Kingdom
Abolitionist Newspapers
Abstracts
Acadia Bulletin
Acadia Documents
Acadia University
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Acadiensis Magazine
Activities
Actuarial Records
Adams Tolman
Addington Historical Society
Addington Ontario Canada
Adolphustown Canada
Advertising Revenue
Africa
Africa Speaks
African Aid Society
African American Fremasonry
African American Newspapers
African Americana
African Association of Nova Scotia
African Canadian Newspapers
African Methodist Episcopal Church
African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church
African Orthodox Church
African Repository and Colonial Journal
African Students Association of the United States and Canada
African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia
African United Nations Emergency Force
Africville
Afro-American Council
Afro-American Press Association
Alake of Abeokuta
Alaskan Highway
Alberta Canada
Alberta Churches
Alberta Civil Rights Legislation
Alberta Department of Lands and Forests
Alcan Project
Alexander Crummell
Alexander McNeilledge
Alexander Tilloch Galt
Almanacs
Alvin McCurdy
Amasa Walker
Amber Valley
Amber Valley Alberta Canada
AME Church
Amelia Harris
Amelia Island
American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter
American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society
American Anti-Slavery Society
American Antiquarian Society
American Antiquarian Society Stephen and Abby K. Foster Papers
American Baptist Anti-Slavery Convention
American Baptist Free Mission Society
American Baptist Free Mission Society Magazine
American Baptist Historical Society
American Baptist Magazine and MIssionary Intelligencer
American Baptist Missionary Union
American Civil War
American Colonization Society
American Consulates
American Missionary Association
American Missionary Magazine
American Nazi Party
American Negro History Society
American Reconstruction Era
American Revolution
American Standard Magazine
American Tract Society
Amherst
Amherstburg Association
Amherstburg Churches
Amherstburg Deeds
Amherstburg Echo
Amherstburg Ontario Canada
Amherstburg Public Library
Amherstburg Public Library Boyle Collection
Amherstburg Quarterly Mission Journal
Amherstburg Schools
Amos A. Lawrence
Amos A. Phelps
Amsterdam News
Anderson Ruffin Abbott
Angelina Grimke
Anglican Church
Anglican Interracial Marriages
Anglo-American Antislavery Connection
Ann Arbor Michigan
Anne Heloise Abel
Annotated Books
Annual Reports
Anthony Burns
Anti-Black Bias
Anti-Black Bias in History
Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society
Anti-Slavery Bugel
Anti-Slavery Examiner
Anti-Slavery in America from the Introduction of African Slaves to the Prohibition of the Slave Trade
Anti-Slavery Lecturer
Anti-Slavery Society of Canada
Antigonish Nova Scotia Canada
Antislavery Groups
Antislavery Pamphlets
Antislavery Societies
Apartheid
Archives
Archives du Palais de Justice
Archives Nationale
Archives of British Columbia
Archives of Saskatchewan
Archives of Saskatchewan Regina Branch
Archives of Saskatchewan Saskatoon Branch
Arminian Magazine
Arthur Alexander
Arthur Hamer
Arthur Tappan
Artifacts
Asia
Assessment Rolls
Atlanta Georgia
Atlanta University
Atlantic Advocate Magazine
Atlantic Monthly Magazine
Auburn New York
Augustus F. Pemberton
Austin Steward
Autobiography
Aux Cayes Haiti
B.F. Stevens
Bahamas
Baltimore Maryland
Baptisms
Baptist Annual Register
Barrie Ontario Canada
Barrie Public Library
Bathurst
Bathurst The Gambia
Battleford Saskatchewan Canada
Beaver House
Bengough
Benjamin Drew
Benjamin Lundy
Benjamin Singleton
Benjamin Tappan
Berea College
Bermuda
Beverley England
Biased Histories
Bibliotheque Nationale
Bibliotheque Nationale Fonds Francais
Births
Black Canadians
Black History
Black Pioneers
Black World
BME Church
Booker T. Washington
Boston Athenaeum Library
Boston Massachusetts
Boston Public Library
Boston Public Library Maria Weston Papers
Breton Alberta Canada
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines Friend
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Committee for the Welfare of Africans in Europe
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Research Library
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Thomas Binns Collection
British Colonial Office
British Columbia Association for the Advancement of Colored People
British Columbia Churches
British Military Records
British Museum
British Museum Additional Manuscripts on Exports and Imports of North America
British Museum Bright Papers
British Museum Chatham Papers
British Museum Clarkson Papers
British Museum Cobden Papers
British Museum Haldimand Papers
British Museum Layard Papers
British Museum Liverpool Papers
British Museum Peel Papers
British Museum Reading Room
British Museum Sturge Papers
British Naval Prisoners' Correspondence
British Periodicals
Broadsides
Brome County Historical Society
Bronze American
Brookline Massachusetts
Brookline Public Library
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
Bulama Settlement Sierra Leone
Burial Lists
Burials
Burnaby Canada
Calgary Alberta Canada
California University
Calvin W. Philleo
Cambridge Maritime Military Library
Cambridge Massachusetts
Canada
Canada Commissioner of Lands and Works
Canada Lieutenant Governor
Canada Week Magazine
Canada West
Canada West Education Department
Canada-West Indies Magazine
Canadian Antiquarian Magazine
Canadian Baptist Historical Association
Canadian Censuses
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Canadian Cigar and Tobacco Journal
Canadian Colonies
Canadian Evangelist Magazine
Canadian Fiction
Canadian Forum Magazine
Canadian Illustrated News
Canadian Labour Congress
Canadian Labour Congress Joint Advisory Committee on Human Relations
Canadian Labour Reports
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Canadian League for the Advancement of Colored People
Canadian Library Association
Canadian Magazine
Canadian National Gallery of Art
Canadian Novels
Canadian Periodicals
Canadian Press
Canadian Press Clipping Service of Toronto
Canadian Prime Ministers
Canadian Provincial Archives
Canadian Rebellions of 1837-1838
Canadian Welfare Magazine
Canadian-West Indian Union
Cape Breton Island Canada
Carl van Vechten
Carter G. Woodson
Case Western Reserve University
Cecil Harmsworth King
Central Saanich Baptist Church
Certificates of TItle
Challenge
Chapel Hill North Carolina
Charles Alexander
Charles Este
Charles O. Paullin
Charles Stuart
Charles Sumner
Charles Wager
Charlottesville Virginia
Charlottetown Canada
Charlottetown Islander
Charlottetown Public Library
Chateau de Ramezay
Chatham Board of Education
Chatham Board of Public School Trustees
Chatham Board of Public School Trustees Meeting Minutes
Chatham Journal
Chatham Ontario Canada
Chatham Planet
Chatham-Kent Museum
Chicago Broad Ax
Chicago Historical Society
Chicago Public Library
Chipman
Christ's Church
Christ's Church Rectory Office
Christian Guardian
Church Activism
Church Missionary Society
Civil Secretary's Correspondence
Cleveland
Cleveland Gazette
Cleveland Ohio
Clifford Sifton
Clippings
Cocksure
Colchester Registry Office
College of Arms
Colonial and Continental Church Society
Colonial and Continental Church Society Annual Reports
Colonial and Continental Church Society Minute Books
Colonial and Continental Church Society Papers
Colonial Missionary Society
Columbia University
Columbia University George Plimpton Papers
Columbia University James T. Shotwell Collection
Columbia University John Bartlet Brebner Collection
Columbia University L.S. Alexander Gumby Collection of Negroiana
Columbia University Sydney Howard Gay Papers
Columbia University William J. Wilgus Collection
Columbus Ohio
Commentary Magazine
Concord Free Public Library
Concord Free Public Library Sanborn Papers
Concord Massachusetts
Connecticut Historical Society
Continental Congress
Cornell University
Cornell University Autograph Collection
Cornell University College Papers
Cornell University Samuel J. May Antislavery Pamphlet File
Cornell University Special Collections
Cornwallis Street Baptist Church
Correspondence
Council Minutes
Crawford Muniments
Crisi
Crown Land Papers
D.E. Stevenson
Daniel Cock
Daniel G. Hill
David Brion Davis
David McLaren Kemp
David William Smith
Death Certificates
Deaths
Delapre Abbey
Denison House
Detroit Historical Society
Detroit Michigan
Detroit Plaindealer
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Detroit Public Library Burton Historical Collection
Detroit River
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Digby County Nova Scotia Canada
Discrimination
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Dissertations
Dora Barber
Douglass Memorial Home
Dr. Bray
Dr. Williams Library
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Dresden Ontario Canada
Dresden Times
Duke University
Dwight L. Dumond
Dwight Lowell Dumond
Earl Balcarres
Earl Fitzwilliam
Earl of Dalhousie
Earle H. West
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Eastman
Ebenezer Robson
Ebony
Edge
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Edith Rossiter Bevan
Edmonton Alberta Canada
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Edmund Quincy
Edward Cridge
Edward Everett
Edward Everett Augustus John Foster
Edward Vernon
Elgin Association
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Elias Adams
Elihu Burritt
Elijah Lovejoy
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Elizabeth Russell
Elizur Wright
Ellen Toyer Abbott
Ernest Buckler
Essex County Ontario Canada
Ethel Wilson
Etter
Evidence
Excelsior
Exchange
Exeter England
F.W. Pickens
Family Bibles
Family Letters
Fate Hope and Editorials: Contemporary Accounts and Opinions in the Newspapers 1862-1873
Fisk University
Fisk University American Missionary Association Archives
Fisk University Library
Flash
Fort Erie
Fort Malden Museum
Fort Malden National Historical Park
Fort Malden National Historical Park Museum
Fort Malden National Historical Park Museum F.C.B. Fall and Farney Papers
Fort Worth Texas
Fourah Bay
Frances Write
Francis Hawks
Francis Parkman
Frank Collins
Frank Hoyt Wood
Frank J. Klingberg
Franklin B. Sanborn
Fraternal Organizations
Fred Landon
Frederic L. Paxson
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass' Paper
Fredericton Canada
Fredericton New Brunswick Royal Gazette
Free Church of Scotland Monthly Magazine
Freetown Sierra Leone
Freewill Baptist Quarterly Magazine
Fremont Ohio
French Archives de la Marine
French Archives des Colonies
French Canadian
Friends' House
Fugitive Slave Files
Fugitive Slave Settlements
Fur Trade
G.C. Porter
Gabrielle Roy
Genealogical Charts
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George Brown
George Ellis
George Julien
George PLimpton
George S. Smyth
George Thompson
George Washington
Gerrit Smith
Gerrit Smith Miller
Gertrude Stein
Gideon Welles
Giles Hocquart
Glen Ladd
Glenbow Foundation Archives
Globe and Mail
Gloucester England
Gospel Tribune and Christian Communionist Magazine
Governmental Papers
Grand African Methodist Episcopal Church Records
Grant African Methodist Episcopal Church
Grantley Herbert Adams
Granville Sharp
Great Britain
Great Britain Public Record Office
Great Britain Public Record Office Admiralty Series 1
Great Britain Public Record Office British Army in America Headquarters Papers
Great Britain Public Record Office Chatham Papers
Great Britain Public Record Office Confidential Minute Papers on The Gambia
Great Britain Public Record Office WO Series 1
Greenwich Naval Library
Guide to the Manuscripts in London Archives for the History of the United States Since 1783
Guy Carleton
Halifax Acadian Recorder
Halifax Chronicle-Herald
Halifax Citadel Museum
Halifax Evening Mail
Halifax Herald
Halifax Journal
Halifax Mail-Star
Halifax Morning Chronicle
Halifax Nova Scotia
Halifax Novascotian
Halifax Public Library
Halifax Public Library Local History Collection
Halifax Royal Gazette
Halifax Weekly Chronicle
Halvor Steenerson
Hamilton Ontario Canada
Hamilton Public Library
Hamilton Spectator
Hampton University
Hansards
Hardwicke Court
Hardwicke Court Granville Sharp Papers
Harlem New York City
Harper's Ferry
Harper's Ferry Select Committee
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Harriet Tubman Memorial Home
Hartford Connecticut
Harvard Library
Harvard School of Public Health
Harvard School of Public Health Stirling County Project
Harvard University Houghton Library
Harvard University Houghton Library Charles Sumner Papers
Harvard University Houghton LIbrary Houghton Theatre Collection
Harvard University Houghton Library Ralph Waldo Emerson Collection
Harvard University Houghton Library William H. Siebert Collection
Hazen
Helen Elliot
Henry Bibb
Henry Clinton
Henry Cowles
Henry Huntington Library
Henry Vandusen
Henry Wilson
Henson
Herald of Peace Magazine
Herbert Aptheker
Herbert M. Frisby
Herts
Hiram Walker Historical Museum
Hiram Wilson
Historiography
Hitchin
Horace Greeley
House of Lords Papers
Houseal
Howard R. Temperley
Howard University
Hudson's Bay Company
Hudson's Bay Company Archives
Hugh Gaine
Human Rights Commission
Human Rights Commission Toronto Office
Human Rights Commission Toronto Office Discrimination Files
Illiterate
Ilmington England
Index
India
Institutional Organization
Interviews
Ipswich Central Library
Ipswich England
Irving Layton
Isaac Allen
Issac J. Rice
Ithaca New York
J. George Hodgins
J.B. Harkin
J.O. Plessis
J.S. Matthews
J.W. Loguen
Jackie Robinson
Jamaica
Jamaica Cockpit Country
Jamaican Institute
James Buchanan
James C. Fuller
James G. Birney
James Gillispie Birney
James Miller McKim
James Murray
James R. Roaf
James Redpath
James T. Shotwell
James W. Johanson
James Weldon Johnson
Jeffrey Amherst
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John A. Andrew
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John Brown
John Brown Jr.
John Candler
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John Graves Simcoe
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John H. Rapier Papers
John Hopkins University
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John J.E. Linton
John M. Elson
John Mitchell
John Rylands Library
John S. Keyes
John Scoble
John Sebastian Helmcken
john Sherman
John Strachan
John Taylor
John Ware
John Wentworth
Joseph Brant
Joseph Howe
Joseph Sturge
Joshua Giddings
Joshua R. Giddings
Josiah Henson
Journals
Julia Ward Howe
Kansas State Historical Society
Karl Shapiro
Kentucky
King's County WIlls
Kingston Jamaica
Kingston Upon Hull
Kirkaldy Alberta Canada
Knowlton Quebec Canada
Knox College Monthly
Ku Klux Klan
L.S. Alexander Gumby
L'Action Nationale Magazine
Lambeth Palace Library
Land Records
Le Foyer Canadien
Leipzig Germany
Lennox Historical Society
Lennox Ontario Canada
Leonard Cohen
Letter Books of Dispatches to the Colonial Office
Letters of James Gillispie Birney
Letters Patent Transcripts
Levi Coffin
Lewis Clarke
Lewis Tappan
Liberator
Liberia
Library of Congress
Limbo
Lincoln Alexander
Lincoln University
Literary Criticism
Lloydminster Alberta Canada
Local Histories
Local Newspapers
London Daily Mirror
London England
London Free Press
London Methodist Missionary Society
London Ontario Canada
London Public Library
London Review
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Long Long After School
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Lot Plans
Louis Dudek
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Lowery's Claim
Loyalist Settlements
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Lundy's Lane Historical Society
Lundy's Lane Ontario Canada
Lydia Maria Child
M.L. Bondam
Maclean's Magazine
Magazines
Magdalen College
Maidstone Mirror
Maidstone Saskatchewan Canada
Maine Historical Society
Maine Historical Society Robert Trelawny Collection
Manchester England
Manuscript
Manuscript Histories
manuscripts
Maps
Marcel Trudel
Marcus Garvey
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Maria Trumbull Church
Maria Weston
Maritime Archives
Maritime Baptist Historical Collection
Maritime Provinces
Marjory Whitelaw
Maroon Wars
Maroons
Marriage Certificates
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Mary Church Terrell
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Massachusetts Baptist Magazine
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Massachusetts Historical Society Francis Parkman Papers
Massachusetts Missionary Magazine
Matthew Henson
Mayes
Mazo de la Roche
McDuff Ottawa Report
McGill University
McGill University Library
McGill University Library Local History Materials
McGill University McCord Museum
McGill University McCord Museum Porteous Manuscripts
McMaster University
McMaster University Canadian Baptist Historical Association Collection
Methodist Missionary Society
Methodist Missionary Society Muniment Room
Mifflin Wistar Gibb
Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
Migration to Sierra Leone
Minnesota Historical Society
Minnesota Historical Society Halvo Steenerson Papers
Minutes
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Missionaries
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Mitchell Library
Montego Bay Jamaica
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Montpelier Vermont
Montreal Gazette
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Moose Jaw Public Library
Mordecai Richler
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Mrs. Keith Staebler
Municipal Employee Group Newsletters
Mutual Aid Societies
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National Anti-Slavery Bazaar
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National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
National Library of Scotland
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National Library of Wales
National Library of Wales Simcoe Papers
Naval and Military Departments Treasury Letter Transcripts
Negro Digest
Negro World
Neith Magazine
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New Britain Public Library
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New Brunswick Museum
New Brunswick Museum Ryerson Papers
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New France
New Road
New York
New York City New York
New York Geographical Society
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New York Herald
New York Historical Society
New York Historical Society Correspondence on the Slave Trade and Slavery
New York Historical Society Frederick Douglass Papers
New York Historical Society Gerrit Smith Papers
New York Historical Society Granville Sharp Papers
New York Historical Society John Taylor Papers
New York Historical Society Miscellaneous Canada Collection
New York Historical Society Society for Promoting Manumission of Slaves Records
New York Historical Society Thomas Clarkson Papers
New York Library for the Performing Arts
New York Public Library
New York Public Library Alexander Crummell Collection
New York Public Library Gideon Welles Papers
New York Public Library Horace Greeley Papers
New York Public Library James Miller McKim Papers
New York Public Library John Edward Bruce Papers
New York Public Library Maria Trumbull Church Papers
New York Public Library Schomburg Collection
New York Public Library Schomburgh Collection
New York Public Library William Lloyd Garrison Papers
New York Times Magazine
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Norfolk Historical Society
Norfolk Ontario Canada
North America
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North Battleford Public Library
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Northamptonshire Record Office
Northamptonshire Record Office Fitzwilliam Papers
Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Colored People
Nova Scotia Chronicle and Weekly Advertiser
Nova Scotia Churches
Nova Scotia Education Department
Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle
Nova Scotia Jamaican Maroons
Nova Scotia Journal of Education
Nova Scotia Packet
Nova Scotia Provincial Library
Novels
Novia Scotia Packet
Numismatic Journal
Oakland Art Gallery
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Oberlin College
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Odell
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Ohio State Historical Society
Ohio State Historical Society Benjamin Lundy Papers
Ohio State Historical Society John Brown Papers
Ohio State Historical Society Joshua Giddings Papers
Ohio State Historical Society Wilbur H. Siebert Papers
Oklahoma
Old Township Settlements
Oliver Johnson
Onatario Department of Lands and Forests
Ontario Canada
Ontario Churches
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Ontario Journal of Education
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Ontario Provincial Archives
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Ordres du Roi
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Orillia Public Library
Ottawa Canada
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Outlook Magazine
Oxford England
Oxford Historical Society
Oxford Ontario Canada
Oxford Rhodes House
Pamphlets
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Paul le Jeune
Pennfield Settlement
Pennsylvania Abolition Society
Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society
Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society Underground Railroad Journal
Pennsylvania State Historical Society
Pennsylvania State Historical Society John Brown Papers
Pennsylvania State Historical Society Simon Gratz Collection
Personal Statements
Peter Russell
Petitions
Philadelphia Pennsylvania
Photographs
Pictou Nova Scotia Canada
Pine and Palm
Pioneer Questionnaires
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8. A Continental Abolitionism?
The Underground Railroad plays a dual role in the story of the continental
movement to abolish slavery. It was unquestionably the highly effective
means by which a number—an exaggerated and indefinite number of
fugitive slaves reached British North America. It was the cause of a legend
that would make it possible for Canadians to reinforce their self-congrat
ulatory attitudes toward their position on the Negro, and to strengthen
those self-congratulatory assumptions into the twentieth century. The latter role was more demonstrable than the former.
To say that the Underground Railroad was enlarged by legend is not
to say that it did not exist. Clearly, there was a loose network of abolition
ists, perhaps predominantly Quaker, who communicated with one another
in order to make known various places of refuge where fugitive slaves
might go during their journey from the slave states to the free border cities
of the north and to the British provinces. Thousands of fugitive slaves were
helped in this manner, being passed on from hand to hand, fed, clothed,
and hidden, and on occasion given transport or money for the purchase of
tickets. In some areas—especially southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio—
the so-called Underground Railroad agents worked clandestinely, living
amidst proslavery or anti-Negro neighbors. But in many other areas
further to the north the Railroad was seldom underground, being well
known to local newspapers and law officers alike—as in Syracuse, Detroit,
and Toledo. That the Railroad did help many fugitive slaves reach Canada
West in particular, yet that its importance was much exaggerated, is now
well demonstrated.1 Both aspects of this legend are central to an under
standing of the position of the Negro in the Canadas during the decade
before, and the several decades after, the Civil War.
Canadian legend today claims that at least sixty thousand fugitive
slaves were resident in Canada West in 1860. Contemporary estimates
ranged from fifteen to seventy-five thousand, with many whites accepting
figures closer to the latter. If this were so, the black population of Canada
West in the 1850s was around 4 percent of the total, since the 1861 census
1. See, in particular, Larry Gara: “Propaganda Uses of the Underground Railway,”
Mid-America, n.s., 23 (1952), 155-71; and idem, “The Underground Railway: Legend
or Reality?”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 105 (1961), 33439.
�234
A Continental Abolitionism?
The Blacks in Canada
for the province showed 1,396,000. That the Negro population did increase
precipitously in the southwestern part of the province also is clear, a condition that helps to explain the rapidly rising anti-Negro sentiment in that
portion of Canada West as well as the tendency to overestimate Negro
numbers. If so many fugitive slaves did find refuge in the single province,
two other conclusions follow: the great majority returned to the United
States at the end of the Civil War, since the Negro population in 1871
was undeniably but a fraction of sixty thousand; and the Canadians could
rightly take credit for harboring—and for at least a decade and a half
giving aid to—a quite substantial body of refugees from the political and
social conflicts of the Republic.
Yet, both the estimates of the Negro population, and the conclusions
relating to fugitive slaves that flow from these estimates, must be tempered
by a number of observations:
1. While contemporary accounts often suggested that sixty thousand or
more fugitive slaves were present in Canada West, in fact at least, both
Canada West and Canada East were meant—as one may see when the
estimates are read in context; and on occasion all of British North America
was indicated. Thus, the sixty thousand should be read against a total
population of over three million. In fact, the black segment of the population probably gained only a percentage point in the 1850s, since there
was massive white immigration during the decade.
2. While the estimates implied that they referred to fugitive slaves only,
again when read in context nearly all show that they applied to the total
black population. The figures often were given out in ignorance of the
presence of many free Negroes from the northern states and of free
Canadian Negroes who traced themselves back to the American Revolution. One may ask, What is said of the British North American attitude
toward Negroes when all were assumed to be fugitives? 2
3. In any event, the estimates utterly ignore the official censuses of the
governments of the Canadas. The census for Canada West in 1851 showed
a total of 4,669 Negroes, while official estimates suggested 8,000; the
census for 1861 showed 11,223; and other official figures raised the total
to 13,566. The 1861 census, in particular, was thought at the time and has
proven since to be quite inaccurate.3
2. Siebert, Underground Railroad, p. 219; Booker T. Washington, The Story of
the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery (New York, 1909), 2, 240. Contemporary authority for the estimate of a total of sixty thousand Negroes in the Canadas
appears in “W. M. G.” “A Sabbath among the Runaway Negroes at Niagara,” Excelsior, 5 (1856), 41. Typical exaggerations include the estimate of Thomas Nye, men
tioned in chapter 6, note 28, above.
3. See M. C. Urquhart and K. A. H. Buckley, cds., Historical Statistics of Canada
(Cambridge, 1965), pp. 1-4, for an analysis of the inaccuracy of the early census
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4. Further, no accurate figures can be given either for the number of
fugitive slaves in the whole of the British North American provinces, or
for the total number of Negroes. Many attempted to pass for white when in
the Canadas, many were not enumerated, and census takers might reasonably have confused fugitive American with free American blacks, since the
former often claimed the status of the latter, especially because of their
misplaced fear of extradition.
5. Samuel Ringgold Ward, a fugitive slave himself, wrote in his autobiography in 1855 that reaching Canada was a most difficult task, and that
"but few comparatively can come.” This would seem a logical conclusion,
for the Canadas were far away and little known to the fugitives, and many
were told that the colonies were uninhabitable for black men. One must assume that the majority of the total number of fugitive slaves did not reach
the Canadian provinces and remained in the free northern states.4
6. This being so, how many might have reached the Canadas? Official
reports suggested that the slave states lost perhaps a thousand runaway
slaves a year. Assuming this to be so for the period 1830 to 1860, even
had every single fugitive reached Canada safely, the total would have been
only 30,000.° As it was, many died en route, disappeared and could not be
accounted for, returned to the South to escape another time and be counted
again (for one man escaping twice is two escapes, although he is still but
one man when on Canadian soil), or remained in the North.
7. Thus, contemporary accounts tended to refer to fugitives as “passing
through” Syracuse, Albany, or Cleveland “on the way to Canada.’ All
of these were assumed to have reached the Canadas. But many—perhaps
the majority—stopped short of the Canadian border; and many were
counted more than once, “passing through” Albany and, at a later date,
“passing through” Syracuse, Rochester, or Buffalo. No doubt, there were
many, like William Wells Brown, who set out for Canada West and, finding
ice on Lake Erie had curtailed steamer traffic, simply stayed in Ohio.6
returns. The census of 1851 is believed to have underenumerated the province’s
total population by a hundred thousand. Both it and that of 1861 undercounted
children.
4. Ward, Autobiography, p. 158; Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the
Underground Railroad (Lexington, Ky.f 1961), pp. 37-40, 67, 111, 145, 149, 161,
185-90. Gara has drawn upon the Siebert Papers in the Ohio State Historical Society
and Harvard's Houghton Library; I have examined both collections and accept his
conclusions.
5. However, in 1855 a Southern judge guessed that the slave states had lost
“upwards of 60,000 slaves” (Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery In
the Ante-Bellum South [New York, 1964], p. 118).
6. See William Edward Farrison, “A Flight Across Ohio: The Escape of William
Wells Brown from Slavery,” The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly,
61 (1952), 272-82, and Brown’s Narrative . . . (Boston, 1847). A typical entry
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77ie Blacks in Canada
A Continental Abolitionism?
237
8. Related to this terminological guesswork was the tendency for
abolitionists, in letters, newspaper accounts, and their autobiographies, to
rejoice at having put a fugitive “on the stage for Canada.” This phrase
could be invoked in Cincinnati—where it meant nothing, since no stage
ran from southern Ohio to Canada—as well as in Buffalo, where it had
genuine meaning. To count a fugitive who boarded a stage in Cincinnati,
or even Oberlin, as being safely in Canada is similar to assuming that a
Hungarian refugee who was seen leaving Budapest in 1957 arrived safely
in Vienna.
9. The abolitionist press quoted each other at length, usually but not
always with credit, and with repetitious figures—all of which served to
create the impression that refugees were reaching Canada West in waves.
The Voice of the Fugitive would report that forty Negroes had arrived in
Amherstburg; six weeks later the same item would be reprinted in another
abolitionist journal in New York or Ohio. The forty fugitives one read of
in June were the same forty that one had read of in April.7
10. The free Negro population in the northern states, and the total
Negro population in British North America —fugitive and free—showed
an excess of females. Most fugitives were males. One might conclude that
the majority in either population therefore consisted of nonfugitives.
11. Many southerners, who had some reason to wish to exaggerate thenlosses, did not think the Canadas harbored large numbers of fugitive slaves.
The New Orleans Commercial Bulletin suggested in 1859 that fifteen
hundred slaves had escaped each year for fifty years. This figure applied
to the entire South and was said to represent an outer limit of the possible;
even so, this would have accounted for but seventy-five thousand fugitives,
the upper figure sometimes given for Canada West alone. When the
Baltimore Sun said, in 1856, that all living fugitives were worth thirty
million dollars, it also suggested that the average value was nearly $9,000,
a patent untruth.8
12. The abolitionists, who might also have wished to exaggerate thensuccesses, were less sanguine. In 1861 the American Anti-Slavery Society
estimated that the total number of slaves who had escaped was well below
seventy-five thousand. Most were thought to be in the North.9
13. The fugitives who did reach the British provinces were by no means
entirely happy. A number returned to the northern states, through which
they had passed while seeking out the North Star, further reducing the
total in the Canadas. At the beginning of the Civil War, more returned.
14. After the Fugitive Slave Bill was passed, abolitionists on the border,
such as Henry Bibb, Isaac Rice, and Hiram Wilson, reported that fugitives
were arriving at the rate of thirty a day. This seems a substantial figure,
and indeed it was when so many descended upon the strained resources of
Rice or Wilson. Yet were this so, the post-1850 fugitive black population
of Canada West alone (setting aside those who returned to the North or
died in the province) would have been 110,000 in 1860, a clear absurdity.
At the height of the fugitive influx, the total Negro population of Amherst
burg—the single most important entry point for refugees—was at most
eight hundred; and during the eighteen months of initial panic after pas
sage of the bill, even the Toronto Globe set the figure at no higher than
three thousand.10
15. On occasion free Negroes from the northern states moved into the
Canadas and pretended to be fugitives in order to attract the sympathy of
Canadian abolitionists or to benefit from the fugitive slave hostels. In
1854, for example, a free black barber from New Hampshire twice raised
money to reach Canada by claiming that his master was pursuing him.
Many of the begging preachers appear to have been free men.11
16. One of the most publicized of the Underground Railroad depots
was that run by the fugitive J. W. Loguen in Syracuse. His activities were
not secret, and once in a free state a fugitive could learn of Loguen and
his work. Yet in nearly nine years in Syracuse, Loguen—whose account
is exaggerated on other matters—saw but fifteen hundred fugitive slaves,
not all of whom moved on to the Canadas.12
17. Studies of Negro songs and folk tales in Canada show relatively
few references to fugitives. More important, recent investigations of
southern slave songs show that Canaan, the Promised Land, and the New
Jerusalem were equated most often with Africa and seldom with Canada.
In the South, those slaves who contemplated other lands did not appear
to have had the British provinces uppermost in their minds.13
would tell how "a female, Patsey Williams, of Kentucky, on her way to Canada,
passed through Rochester Thursday" {Stratford [C. W.] Beacon, May 31, 1861).
7. And the "six covered wagons filled with Negroes" hailed by the Owen Sound
Comet on May 18, 1852, were the same covered wagons earlier praised by the
Detroit press.
8. Gara, Liberty Line, p. 153, quoting Baltimore Sun of March 13. The St.
Catharines Journal esU'mated in 1857 that “1,500 to 2,000 slaves" were brought to
Canada annually, predicted an end to slavery in the South, and that there would be
no blacks in Canada by 1900. See The St Catharines and Lincoln Historical Society,
St. Catharines A to Z by Junius 1856 ([St Catharines, 1967]), p. [70].
9. Ibid., pp. 38-40.
10. Anti-Slavery Reporter, n.s., 4 (1856), 135; Toronto Globe, June 10, 1852;
Montreal Gazette, Oct 4, 1860. See W. H. Withrow, “The Underground Railway,"
RSC, Proceedings and Transactions, sec. 2, 8 (1902), 73; Fred Landon, "Canada’s
Part in Freeing the Slave,” OHS, Papers and Records, 17 (1919), 74-84; and Landon,
"The Negro Migration to Canada after the Passing of the Fugitive Slave Act," JNH,
5 (1920), 22-36.
11. Siebert, Underground Railroad, p. 249.
12. Loguen, The Rev. J>W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A Narrative
of Real Life (Syracuse, N.Y., 1859), p. 444.
13. Helen Creighton, “Folklore of Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia," National
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The Blacks in Canada
18. This is not surprising, for the slaves were kept in ignorance of
British North America, and most of them were probably not, at the
moment of their escape, thinking of taking refuge under the lion’s paw.
Slaveholders emphasized the harshness of the northern climate, denied
their slaves maps or the education that would enable them to read them,
and suggested that all Canadians spoke French, worshipped idols, and
executed black men upon arrival. Lewis Clarke, in memoirs published in
1845, said that he had been told that Canadians would skin his head,
eat his children, poke out their eyes, and wear their hair as coat collars.
Even so astute a Negro as Frederick Douglass thought that Canada was
where “the wild goose and the swan repaired at the end of winter” and
not “the home of man.” 14
19. These estimates, confusions, and exaggerations were added to by
the publications of contemporary observers. In 1860, Reverend William M.
Mitchell published in London an influential book on The Under-Ground
Railroad. A free Negro who had been a slave driver, Mitchell lived in
Toronto after 1855 as an agent for the American Baptist Free Mission
Society. He claimed that the railroad had been operating for a quarter
of a century and that “nearly two thousand” fugitives reached “Canada”
each year. This would have meant a total fugitive population of fifty
thousand; and allowing for deaths his estimate was forty-five thousand.
This figure, then, is well below many of the estimates, and yet it is given
by a man who had every reason to enlarge it, since he used his book as
a medium by which he solicited funds for his church and school in Canada
West; many of the communitarian settlers condemned him as “a pious
fraud.” 10 Later it was suggested that in 1860 alone five hundred Negroes
“from Canada” went into the slave states to rescue others, a figure that
surely confuses border crossings into the North for business, social, and
religious purposes with antislavery journeys. Even so industrious and
courageous a person as Harriet Tubman made not more than nineteen
(and probably fifteen) such trips over eight years.10
Museum of Canada, Bulletin No. 117 (Ottawa, 1950), pp. 86, 127; Creighton, “Songs
from Nova Scotia,” Journal of the International Folk Music Council, 12 (I960),
84-85; W. J. Wintemberg, “Some Items of Ncgro-Canadian Folk-Lore,” The Journal
of American Folk-Lore, 38 (1925), 621; Arthur Huff Fausct, “Folklore from the
Half-Breeds in Nova Scotia," ibid., pp. 300-15; Fausct, cd., Folklore from Nova
Scotia (New York, 1931), pp. vii-xiv.
14. Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke, during a Captivity of More than
Twenty-Five Years, Among the Algerines of Kentucky . . . (Boston, 1845), pp. 3940; Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, Conn., 1884) pp.
198-99.
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15. Mitchell, The Under-Ground Railroad, pp. 3-5, 71, 113.
16. Herbert Aptheker gives this figure in The Negro in the Abolitionist Move
ment (New York, 1941), p. 16, perhaps drawing it from Benjamin Brawlcy, A Short
History of the American Negro, 2nd rev. ed. (New York, 1927), p. 78.
A Continental Abolitionism?
Another of the chief accounts of the Underground Railroad was by
William Still, a free Negro who from 1847 was on the staff of the
Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Philadelphia
was a prime entrepot for fugitive slaves, and many visited Still at his home;
during fourteen years of active work on behalf of escaping slaves, includ
ing a visit to Canada West in 1855, he kept detailed records from which,
in 1872, he published his Record of Facts. Subsequent students of the
Railroad drew heavily upon this massive volume of 780 finely printed
pages, twice revised and extended, of narratives and letters.17 Yet a close
reading of Still’s work, together with an examination of his manuscripts,
does not support the notion that great streams of fugitives reached British
North America through the medium of “the Road.’’ Still gives evidence on
892 fugitives in his volume—although there appear to be more, some are
repetitions—and he provides names for most. Of these, he gives evidence
clearly showing that 112 reached the Canadas, and he asserts on nine
other occasions, without evidence, that fugitives did so; the rest are left
departing from Philadelphia with “their faces set Canada-wards.” From
the names provided by Still, one may identify five more who reached
Canada West, unknown to him. No doubt there were others, for many
fugitives changed their names—if not always radically, as when John
Atkinson became John Atkins—and a number, not alone on Still’s evi
dence, could have passed for white after arriving in the provinces. None
theless, the figures that one may project as safely having reached British
North America via Philadelphia are not, despite Still’s frequent usage of
Canada as a presumptive goal, very large.18
20. Subsequent scholarship added to the figures. Many volumes re
peated the estimates. Some, such as Homer Uri Johnson’s From Dixie
to Canada: Romances and Realities of the Underground Railroad, pub
lished in 1894,10 are presented as factual, when they were in truth a
pastiche of tales. Other works, such as the highly influential treatment by
Wilbur H. Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom—
the first genuinely scholarly study of the fugitive slaves’ escape routes,
published in 1898—further fed the legend. Siebert (whose position at his
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Letters, &c . . . (Philadelphia); Siebert, Underground Railroad, p. 234, n. 1; Drew,
North-Side View of Slavery, p. 43. I have examined the Letter Book of William
Still, and the Journal of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society Underground Rail
road in the PSHS, and they add little to Still’s published account
18. A number of Still’s letters have been reprinted in Carter G. Woodson, ed.,
“Letters Largely Personal and Private," JNH, 11 (1926), 104-75. See also Larry
Gara, "William Still and the Underground Railroad,” Pennsylvania History, 28
(1961), 33-44; and C. Lightfoot Roman, The Underground Railroad (Valleyfield,
P.Q., [1933]), passim.
19. (Orwell, Ohio), vol. 1 (no further volumes published); 2nd cd., 1896.
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university was in European rather than American history) worked from
published materials, a lengthy questionnaire he sent to aging antislavery
advocates, and from conversations with former fugitives. He did not verify
the published accounts—many of them repetitive, taken from each other—
against manuscript sources, and he accepted the answers to his question
naire at face value. His descriptions and references—to “taking an agency”
for the Railroad, or “employees of the U.G.R.R.”—tended to suggest a
greater degree of organization than existed.20 Even so careful a scholar as
western Ontario’s Fred Landon, the foremost student of the Negro settle
ments in Canada West, was content to accept from Siebert and elsewhere
the estimates of sixty thousand fugitives, did not distinguish carefully
between fugitive and free Negroes, and reported that after 1850 “the early
trickle which had become a stream turned for a time into a torrent.”
Siebert’s work, Landon concluded, was “authoritative.” 21
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today are descendants of fugitive slaves, the slave condition, poverty, and
America—inheritors of the disgrace of both caste and mark. In 1956 when
a journalist, J. C. Furnas, asked acquaintances to guess at the total number
of fugitive slaves, the average reply set the figure at 270,000; some
answered a million.22 Is it little wonder, then, that one heritage of the
fugitive slave period, for Canadians, is an easy assumption of Negro
uniformity? The legend of the Underground Railroad and its aftermath
has united all Canadian Negroes into a single group in the eyes of white
Canadians, reinforcing those prejudices which grow from the notion that
an ethnic group must be viewed as a single social unit. To Canadians,
Negroes were a monolith, both because of their color and because of their
presumed origins as fugitive slaves—origins probably shared by no more
than half the Negro population of Canada today.
British North Americans who read the literature of the Underground
Railroad, the fugitive slaves, and the abolitionists in general also were
reinforced in their consciousness of moral purity. Some few accounts—by
Drew, Henson, Ward, Israel Campbell, and Austin Steward in particular 23
—remarked upon the incidence of prejudice in the Canadas and compared
Canada West to the northern states; but the great mass of fugitive nar
ratives were unstinting in their praise of the Canadian haven and found
no occasion to mention the quasi-segregated pattern of life developing
there, the numerous demeaning incidents that the fugitives encountered,
or the morass of conflicting claims made upon the confused fugitive by
missionary groups, communal settlements, and school societies. In the
thirty most widely known fugitive slave accounts published between 1836
and 1859, British North America is mentioned in all but four; of these
twenty-six accounts, few can be said to provide anything like a realistic
picture of conditions in Canada West.24
The structure of these fugitive slave narratives tended to be similar.
Often the fugitive was said to have “much white blood” flowing in his
veins, was forced to watch drunken masters down great quantities of
whiskey (for the books also preached temperance), and had to listen to
s, and b----- h”) from which religion was a
foul language (“d—n, b
solace taken despite the master’s disapproval. During the flight one was
usually helped by Quakers, met a band of Indians, and kissed the earth
of Canada. Much was written off as “substantially, if not literally, true,” as
Loguen remarked. For the white reader, interest focused upon the exciting
That Siebert’s Underground Railroad existed is quite true. Many brave
and selfless men labored for it in behalf of the fugitive slaves. Thousands
of fugitives did find refuge in Canada West And one should not denigrate
the estimates contemporary to 1860 without putting something in their
place. This is difficult, for the censuses were inaccurate, the fugitives often
stayed in the Canadas only a few weeks, and no figures are available with
consistency from school, tax, or voting records, since some but not all
provide an indication of color. On the basis of my own research, the best
I can offer—in addition to the statement in the Appendix—is that by
1860 the black population of Canada West alone may have reached forty
thousand, three-quarters of whom had been or were fugitive slaves or their
children, and therefore beneficiaries of the Underground Railroad.
But the legend outgrew the reality in Canada, as legends invariably do
without the correctives of time, logic, or scholarship. And the legend fed
the twentieth-century assumption that nearly all black men in Canada
20. Siebert wrote many articles on the underground railroad, as well as his mas
sive book, cited previously, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (see
pp. 29, 70-72, 76, 151). He confuses the date of his interviews, however (compare
p. 194 n. 1, and p. 249 n. 4). The uncritical acceptance of his book is shown in the
Siebert Papers in the Houghton Library, vol. 45 of which contains letters and reviews
(including Canadian ones) on its publication. See, for example, the Montreal Star,
Jan. 28,1899.
21. Landon, “Canada and the Underground Railroad," Kingston Historical Society,
Reports and Proceedings (1923), p. 17, and “The Underground Railway along the
Detroit River," Michigan History, 39 (1955), 63-68. The chief volumes that build
upon Siebert are: Hildegarde Hoyt Swift, The Railroad to Freedom (New York,
1932); Henrietta Buckmaster [Henkle], Let My People Go: The Story of the Under
ground Railroad (New York, 1941); and William Breyfogle, Make Free: The Story
of the Underground Railroad (Philadelphia, 1958).
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22. Furnas, Goodbye to Uncle Tom (New York, [1956]), p. 239.
23. Henson, Ward, Steward, and Drew have been cited previously. Campbell’s
account, an unusually able one, was Bond and Free: or, Yearnings for Freedom . . .
(Philadelphia, 1861); see especially pp. 199, 203-39, 251-64, 291-97.
24. See those titles discussed in Nelson, “Negro in Literature," pp. 60-67.
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The Blacks in Canada
moment of escape from the master and the long journey northward to
freedom; a secondary interest lay in accounts of life on the plantation,
culminating in a series of brutalities which precipitated the decision to
flee. Little space was given to the post-escape life of the fugitive, in part
because the narratives often were written soon after the fugitive had
arrived in the North or in Canada, and in larger part because the later
aspects of the story held less intrinsic interest. Even Benjamin Drew, in his
A North-Side View of Slavery—published in Boston in 1856 by John P.
Jewett, the enterprising publisher of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—gave most of
his space to accounts of how the fugitives escaped, despite his announced
intention to provide a record of “the history and condition of the colored
population of Upper Canada.”
Representative accounts were those by J. W. Loguen, Moses Roper, and
Laura Haviland, and those on Harriet Tubman. Loguen was born in
Tennessee, the natural son of a white man and a slave mother. His flight to
freedom, in 1834-35, was a daring undertaking; during his five years in
Canada West he learned to read, took a two-hundred-acre farm (which he
lost because of a partner’s bad judgment), and spoke of acquiring British
citizenship. He turned to teaching school in Utica, New York; became an
elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (and in 1868, a
bishop); and was for some years a teacher and minister in Syracuse,
where he was one of the prime movers in the “Jerry rescue,” leading to his
taking temporary refuge with Hiram Wilson in Canada. He died in 1872.
Loguen’s autobiography, which is contradictory and unclear on dates and
sequences, became an important primary source for historians. Although
Loguen stated that there was no Underground Railroad at the time of his
flight, the Dictionary of American Biography later would note how his
escape revealed that “preliminary surveys” had been made for the under
ground system and that “a few lines already ran . . . as unerringly as
railroads run through the large towns and cities.” 25 On the other hand
Roper, whose narrative sold widely in England, went on to London. Later
he became famous in British North America through a lecture tour.20
It was in Sarah Bradford’s biography of Harriet Tubman in 1869 that
several of the songs allegedly sung as the fugitives crossed the Suspension
25. See Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman, which despite its date (1859) con
tains letters for 1860; Wfilliam] H. A[Uison], “Jermain W. Loguen," DAB 11 (1943),
368-69; James Egert Allen, The Negro in New York (New York, 1964)*, pp. 74-75J
and Rhodes House, Oxford, Anti-Slavery Papers: Wilson to Scoble, Feb. 24, 1852!
The Syracuse Public Library’s copy of Loguen’s book contains a note indicating
that he was sixty-three when he died, which suggests that he was bom in 1810 (the
DAB says 1813); the New York Tribune for Oct. 1, 1872, contains an obituary.
26. Roper’s account was A Narrative of the Adventures and Escapes of Moses
Roper, from American Slavary, 3rd ed. (London, 1839).
/I Continental Abolitionism?
243
Bridge at the Niagara frontier were first recorded. The most famous words
betrayed abolitionist and non-Negro origins, however, even as printed
in the Bradford account:
I’m now embarked for yonder shore,
Where a man’s a man by law.
De iron horse will bear me o’er,
To ‘shake de lion’s paw’;
Oh, righteous Father, wilt thou not pity me,
And help me on to Canada, where all de slaves are free.
Oh I heard Queen Victoria say,
That if we would forsake,
Our native land of slavery,
And come across de lake,
Dat she was standing on de shore,
Wid arms extended wide,
To give us all a peaceful home,
Beyond de rolling tide.
To this Bradford added, “No doubt the simple creatures . . . expected
to cross a wide lake instead of a rapid river, and to see Queen Victoria
with her crown upon her head, waiting with arras extended wide, to fold
them all in her embrace.” 27
Laura Haviland, a white Canadian-born Quaker “Superintendent of
the Underground,” also was the subject of much postemancipation writing
in Canada. Her narrative, A Woman’s Life Work, although rambling, un
clear, and filled with fictitious dialogue, unquestionably shows that she
aided several fugitives to escape, knew Hiram Wilson and Isaac Rice, and
was to the Detroit frontier what Harriet Tubman was to the Niagara. In
addition to her active part in the Anderson extradition case, Laura Havi
land taught school and, hoping to avoid denominational strife, opened a
Christian Union Church in the Puce River area in 1852-53 with the
support of Henry Bibb and two Detroit philanthropists. She suffered all
the publicized rigors of the Canadian climate, frequently awakening “with
snow sifting on her face, and not infrequently [finding] the snow half an
inch or more deep on her bed upon rising in the morning.” 28 The point at
27. Sarah Bradford, Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People, 2nd ed. (New
York, 1886); Smith College, Sophia Smith Collection: Martha Coffin Wright to
Lucretia Coffin Mott, n.d. [18601; Earl Conrad, Harriet Tubman (Washington, 1943),
passim. Conrad suggests there were fifteen trips, Bradford mentions nineteen. The
author visited the Harriet Tubman Memorial Home, near Auburn, New York, but
found no useful memorabilia.
28. See Mildred E. Danforth, A Quaker Pioneer: Laura Haviland, Superintendent
of the Underground (New York, 1961), passim (the quotation is from p. 122);
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The Blacks in Canada
A Continental Abolitionism?
others who left moving mcmoirs-S ClariTe, »m»Brown!
Wilham Harrison—were honest, for on the whole they were, but that their
Sfern aV^ r;r0t *\ayS USed honeStIy by those wh0 generalized from
them, adapted them to their own purposes, reprinted out-of-context extracts
British North!America u^n^the^asis^of them
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refugees upon whom Drew commented, twelve were born free and kidnappcd into slavery or fled from fear of being kidnapped. Five were
passing as white. Ages ranged widely, with many being middle-aged (or
as Isaac Rice defined the term, over thirly-iree) and many much
fwithfall !e?!i aU Werf destitute» cominS as one said “like terrapins,
L,
Ve ^adi 0n 0Ur backs-” A number arrived heavily armed.20 Their
attemnLTf01!!^17/38 gtnU'mQ’ and on several occasions Negroes
southerners wh0 were f00lish
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New York ,h *
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245
usually for Kingston, Cobourg, or Toronto. They made their way over the
lakes on steamers, in smaller craft, and in one instance by floating across
on a wooden gate—to land at Point Pelee, the ports of Burwell, Rowan,
Talbot, and Stanley, at Long Point and Fort Erie, and elsewhere. The
steamer Arrow, moving between Sandusky and Detroit under its noted
Captain J. W. Keith, transported a large number of fugitives; and small
vessels under Robert Wilson put in with “grain” which had been sent out
from an Ashtabula warehouse for human cargo. Toronto, Brantford, Oak
ville, Collingwood, London, and the village of Shrewsbury, saw sharp
rises in their black populations as a result of such traffic. Others went
among the French near Windsor but, finding them “distant,” moved away
from the Detroit frontier, several establishing a short-lived all-Negro
town, New Kentucky, in 1860. In 1851 the Voice of the Fugitive said that
twenty-five hundred Negroes were at work on the railroad, and Ingersoll
attracted a number once the line was open to Windsor because wood for
the railway engines was cut and stored there. Some few went to the oil
field near Petrolia, at Oil Springs.31
Just how sharp the rise was in specific communities cannot be said. In
1852 Isaac Rice thought there were between one and two thousand Ne
groes in Hamilton, while there were “not far from one hundred” in
Brantford and between two and three hundred in London. He set the
black population of Chatham at fifteen hundred, and on the Detroit fron
tier at four thousand. Two years later Drew found a thousand Negroes in
Toronto, mostly in the northwest section of the city, which then had a
population of forty-seven thousand. He thought there were forty Negroes
in Galt, two hundred in Windsor, five hundred in Amherstburg (of a total
population of two thousand), nearly the same in Colchester (of fifteen
hundred population), and two thousand in or near Chatham of a total
population of six thousand. Dr. Howe found seven hundred Negroes in
St. Catharines, although the census had reported 472, and in Hamilton he
found five hundred where the census had enumerated only 62—unlikely,
given the large numbers reported for nearly a decade earlier. The census
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£ I0* 18591 The Ho™rab>e Elijah Leonard: A
0a}-> n-d->, PP- 47—48; Toronto Globe, Oct. 8, 1858 Sept. 9 1859Orlo Miller, Gargoyles & Gentlemen: A History of St. Paul's Cathedral London
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31. Montreal Gazette, Aug. 10, 1853; Drew, p. 300; London (Ont) Free Press,
June 21, 1926, June 30, 1956; Oakville (Ont.) Weekly Sun, Sept 7, 1960; Siebcrt,
Underground Railroad, pp. 83, 148-49; O. K. Watson, “Along the Talbot Road,”
Kentiana (n.p., 1939), p. 67; O. K. Watson, “Early History of Shrewsbury," Kent
Historical Society, Papers and Addresses, 6 (1924), 83-84; Lauriston, “Negro Col
onies,” p. 96; John Nettleton, “Reminiscences, 1857-1870," Huron Institute, Papers
and Records, 2 (1914), 13-15; Fred London, “Over Lake Erie to Freedom," North
west Ohio Historical Quarterly, 17 (1945), 132-38; Landon, “Fugitive Slaves in Lon
don Ontario before 1860," London and Middlesex Historical Society, Transactions, 10
(1919), 37; Landon, “The Fugitive Slave Law and the Detroit River Frontier, 185061," Detroit Historical Society Bulletin, 7 (1950), 5-9.
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The Blacks in Canada
reported 510 Negroes in Toronto, while Dr. Howe found 934. The proper
numbers were not known and cannot now be recovered, but it is clear
that while the Negroes were not so numerous as subsequent myth-making
and contemporary abolitionist propaganda would lead one to believe,
they nonetheless were substantial, and on occasion—in Chatham, for
example—comprised as much as a third of the population.32
Conditions for the fugitives were, as before 1800, mixed. Some adjusted
readily and soon enjoyed relative prosperity. John W. Lindsey, who could
pass for white, was worth $10,000 or more, as were Aaron Siddles and
Henry Blue of Chatham. John Little and his wife—who moved into
Queen’s Bush—came to have over one hundred acres under good cultiva
tion, could lend a friend $2,000, and owned a horse and carriage. In
London, A. B. Jones, who had arrived penniless, soon owned several
properties, one worth $4,000; and his brother, Alfred T., ran a prosperous
pharmacy. Some fugitives became brakemen on the Great Western Rail
road, which paid well, while others helped clear new lands around Col
chester. Apprentices earned $2.50 a week, and waiters, especially around
Niagara and in Toronto, received wages of $12.00 a month.
Still, lodgings might cost $15.00 a month and earnings were seldom
sufficient to replace clothing left behind, to pay for the journey to Canada
of wives and children who had remained in the South, or to pay doctor’s
bills. Most fugitives, badly dressed for the Canadian winters, arriving
“like frogs in Egypt,” were consumptive: one Toronto woman lost ten
children from tuberculosis.33 Thomas F. Page, a young man from the
upper South, reported “I do not like Canada, or the Provinces. I have been
to St. John, N.B., Lower Province, or Lower Canada, also St Catharines,
C.W., and all around the Canada side, and I do not like it at all. The
people seem to be so queer.” The more frequent sentiment probably lay
closer to that expressed by John H. Hill, a skilled carpenter and an officer
in a company of Negro rifle guards, who wrote to William Still, “I wants
you to let the whole United States know we are satisfied here because I
have seen more Pleasure since I came here than I saw in the U.S. the 24
years that I served my master.” “It is true,” he added the following year,
“that I have to work very hard for comfort but I would not exchange
32. Amherstburg Quarterly Mission Journal, 1, Sept 25, 28, Oct 12, 1852; Drew,
pp. 94-95, 118-19, 136, 147-48, 234-35, 321, 348-49; Siebcrt, pp. 220-21; Howe,
Refugees from Slavery, pp. 15-16. In 1843 Hiram Wilson had put the Negro popula
tion of Canada West at sixteen thousand (BPL, Samuel J. May, Jr. Papers, 1:
circular, Sept 30).
33. London Free Press, June 12, 1954; M. Murray, “Stories of the Underground
Railroad," The Methodist Magazine and Review, 48 (1898), 221-22; Mitchell, UnderGround Railroad, pp. 158-67; Siebert, pp. 205, 223; Drew, pp. 149-53, 198-233,
250, 270-73; Still, Underground Rail Road, pp. 2, 51, 77, 152, 319, 324, 490, 598.
A Continental Abolitionism?
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with ten thousand slave that are equel [jtc] with their masters. I am
Happy, Happy.” “Those that will work,” remarked another, “do well—
those that will not—not; it is the same here as everywhere. It is the best
poor man’s country that I know of.”34
Until the economic panic of 1857, this judgment was a fair one. Jerry
of the famous rescue became a barrel-maker in Kingston, and the equally
famous Shadrach opened a restaurant in Montreal. In Toronto one Lemon
John prospered by peddling his special ice creams about the streets, and in
Saint John the city’s ice trade was the monopoly of a Negro, Robert
Whetsel. Joseph Mink became wealthy by managing a line of stages
running from Toronto. In Colchester, Nathan S. Powell survived by
manufacturing and selling Powell’s Indian Tonic. In Bronte a refugee
opened the first blacksmith shop; in Otterville a fugitive ran the only
saloon. Still others made rope, worked as fishermen, in the brickyards
and slaughterhouses, in livery stables, and as carpenters. Many women
were servants, as they had been in the South, or opened dress-making or
wig shops. In Hamilton, Negroes were in charge of the dead cart during
the 1850s—a fact that cuts two ways—and New Brunswick had a black
hangman who was regarded as standing apart from humanity, as had
been the executioner of Quebec, Mathew Leveille of Martinique, in the
previous century. Many Negroes, it was said, were “well dressed, quite
clean and interesting,” and owned houses that were “patterns of neat
ness.” 35
Indeed, the desire of most fugitives, once they had looked about and
had overcome the initial period of adjustment, was to acquire a house and
land. Most of the whites shared this goal, representative as it was of the
middle-class values to which the fugitives often attached themselves. One,
John Long, had owned land in the area that became Toronto in the 1830s,
34. Still, p. 333, Oct. 6, on Page; pp. 194, 197, Hill to Still, n.d. Pate 1853], and
Sept. 14, 1854; Robert Jones to Still, Aug. 9, 1856, p. 272; and pp. 250-54; Drew,
P. 172.
35. Fort Malden “Fugitive Slave File"; New York Tribune, Oct. 24, 1857; London
Free Press, July 5, 1924, April 30, 1932; Toronto Star, Aug. 11, 1943; NBM, "Whetscl Family" file; The Life of Rev. James Thompson, The World’s Wonder (Rich
mond, Va., 1885), pp. 13-23; Eber M. Pettit, Sketches in the History of the Under
ground Railroad . . . (Fredonia, N.Y., 1879), p. 53; Nina Moore Tiffany, “Stories
of the Fugitive Slaves, II: Shadrach," The New England Magazine, n.s., 2 (1890),
283; Blodwen Davies, Storied York: Toronto Old and New (Toronto, 1931), p. 68;
Marjorie Freeman Campbell, A Mountain and a City: The Story of Hamilton
(Toronto, 1966), p. 113; Lloyd A. Macham, A History of Moncton Town and City,
1855-1965 (Moncton, N.B., 1965), p. 67; A. Carle Smith, The Mosaic Province of
New Brunswick (Saint John, 1965), p. 93; Andrd Lachance, Le Bourreau au Canada
sous le regime frangais (Quebec, 1966), pp. 79-81; Colonial Church and School
Society Report for 1856-7 (PAC microfilm): A-325, p. 55, Nov. 1, 1856.
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A Continental Abolitionism?
The Blacks in Canada
and a number had acquired property in the Niagara district before 1850
and without benefit of communitarian practices. By 1853, one investigator
estimated, 276 Negroes in London owned real estate valued at $13,504—
an average higher than for whites in the city.
In 1862 Dr. Howe found that one in eleven of Malden’s Negroes paid
taxes on property, while one in thirteen in Chatham were so taxed. (In
both cases, one in every three or four whites owned ratable property.)
But in Windsor one in five blacks, and only one in seven whites, were ratepayers. In this case, however, the average assessment on white-owned
property was $18.76, while on black it was $4.18; in Chatham the figures
had been $10.63 and $4.98 respectively.36 And prejudice operated to keep
even those Negroes who could afford better properties from moving else
where.
Few fugitives attempted to deny that they encountered substantial
prejudice. In the 1850s city directories began to designate those residences
and businesses owned by Negroes. Blacks were expelled from camp meet
ings, and those churchmen who—like Cronyra in London—wished to
help educate the fugitive, now argued that separate schools were needed
because of white opposition. Dresden was called “Nigger Hole” by those
who had opposed the Dawn settlement; racial jokes increased in the press;
Negroes who, a decade or two earlier, had been able to employ whites
to work for them no longer could do so. Throughout British North America
blacks were thought, by some, to be responsible for “all the outrageous
crimes, and two thirds of the minor ones”; chicken coops and laundry lines
were said to require special protection where black men were about; and
their women were blamed for an alleged rise in prostitution. Hotels in
Hamilton, Windsor, Chatham, and London refused blacks admission, and
they could not purchase cabin-class tickets on the Chatham steamer. The
Montreal Gazette, turning back to the Nova Scotian experience, suggested
that the fugitives should be sent to Sierra Leone. Beginning in 1855,
auctioneers at the sale of building lots in the Windsor area refused to take
bids from any Negroes, the city’s Herald remarking that an owner had the
right to “preserve his property from deterioration.” Negroes should wish to
stay with their own people, and if they did not they were welcome to
leave. To oppose intermarriage and social mixing was not to be pro
slavery. So long as blacks remained in Canada West, the Herald warned,
they would “ever have to contend with their superiors,” and thus one
36. Edwin C. Giullet, Toronto from Trading Post to Great City (Toronto, 1934),
p. 310; [Archibald Bremner], City of London Ontario. Canada: The Pioneer Period
and the London of To-day (London, 1897), pp. 60-61; Howe, pp. 61-62; Siebert,
p. 232.
249
helped them by refusing to sell them land. Canada West had become,
according to Samuel Ringgold Ward, writing in what John Scoble called
his “belligerent spirit,” “beneath and behind Yankee feeling” in its colorphobia.37
The widely held Canadian view that there was a disproportionate
number of Negroes in prison, jails, or the insane asylum was current well
before 1850—and it cannot be supported. In 1851 the provincial institu
tion for the insane in Canada West had only one Negro among 220
patients. The Reports of Penitentiary Inspectors tended to emphasize the
“high percentage” of Negroes behind bars, while noting that fugitives
educated only to slavery naturally were more prone to petty crime. Nor are
the percentages particularly high: in fact, of the 3,223 persons who
enjoyed Toronto’s jail in 1859, 117 were black. Of 1,057 women committed in 1856, only eight were black; and of the Kingston penitentiary’s
125 prisoners, eight also were Negroes. But each Negro offense received
major publicity: when blacks burned down the barns of three of their
opponents; when a Negro stabbed a colleague in a raffle, another murdered an Indian, and two beat a white to death—all in 1852; when one
Negro killed another over noise in a Negro church in 1853; and when
two black men murdered a mail carrier in 1859 and were hanged. Through
out these years the begging preachers and agents continued to be much
in the news over their suits, assaults, and petty thefts.38 Public opinion
considered that fugitives were too often not punished for minor crimes out
of sympathy for their condition: “it was found,” according to the Montreal
Gazette as early as 1842, “to be a sufficient reason to be an Indian or
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37. Windsor Herald, Oct. 20, Nov. 3, 1855; Montreal Gazette, April 18, Sept. 16,
1851; Sarnia Observer, Nov. 25, 1859; Hamilton Canadian Illustrated News, 1
(1862), 8, 44, (1863), 131; Chambers, Things as They are in America, pp. 2728; Dclany, Niger Valley Exploring Party, p. 71; Ward, Autobiography, pp. 14446, 202; Lauriston, Romantic Kent, p. 383; Edith C. Firth, ed., The Town of York,
1815-1834: A Further Collection of Documents of Early Toronto (Toronto, 1966),
pp. 333-34.
38. See, for example, Windsor Herald, Jan. 4, 1856; London (C.W.) Times,
May 4, 1849; Toronto News of the Week, Aug, 28, Nov. 6, Dec. 24, 1852, March 12,
1853; The Friend of Man, Aug. 30, 1837; Brantford Expositor, July 31, Aug. 6,
1852; the Inspector’s Reports in the Appendixes to the Journal of the House of
Assembly of Upper Canada, 1837-38, and the Journals of the Legislative Assembly
of the Province of Canada, 1841-43, 1860; Linton, Liquor Law, p. 24; and James
Silk Buckingham, Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the Other British
Provinces in North America, with a Plan of National Colonization (London, n.d.),
P- 67. Of 5,346 people committed to Toronto jail in 1857, only 78 were Negroes
(W. G. Brownlow and Abram Pryne, Ought American Slavery to be Perpetuated?
. . [Philadelphia, 1858], pp. 237-38).
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The Blacks in Canada
A Continental Abolitionism?
251
Negro to escape the gallows, no matter what crime they may have com
mitted.” 38 In short, the record was broken even before it was played.
This rising tide of prejudice, remarked upon by nearly all of the white
members of Canadian antislavery organizations and many of the refugees
themselves, was ascribed by most to four groups of people. All singled
out the American-born settlers—or those who had acquired “Yankee
ways”—who moved into the Niagara peninsula and, in greater numbers,
into the extreme southwest corner of the province. Most had occasion to
include Irish settlers as a source of anti-Negro sentiment. Others suggested
that former planters from the West Indies and their children—having lost
their patrimony and now displaced from what they considered to have been
a leading position in Imperial society—were enemies of the black man.
Finally, nearly everyone had an amorphous body of villains to blame,
those “lower orders” of whatever ethnic or national origin (including but
not limited to the Irish settlers) with whom the Negroes competed for
work and with whose women black men allegedly were able to make
their way. To prove any of these contentions would be impossible; of
the fugitive at the time no proof was asked. They were, many perceived,
what James G. Birney—twice the Liberty Party’s presidential candidate—
had predicted they would be: “an inferior class" in the “bleak and hyper
borean regions. » 40
Why this should have been so may not be answered clearly. Certainly
imported prejudices played a role. Certainly the pressures created by a
growing awareness of mass Negro arrivals, to compete for labor and
allegedly to add to the crime rate, contributed. The persistence of selfconscious Negro associations, of separate communities, of improvement
societies such as the Sons of Uriah or the Negro Order of Odd Fellows,
and of all-Negro churches, were both a symptom of prejudice and a con
tributor to it Unquestionably the flow of fugitives changed in character
after 1850 as a result of the Fugitive Slave Act, that desperate compromise
by which nationalist American statesmen attempted yet again to hold the
union together. The new fugitives were not only more numerous but
poorer, more ready to take fright, armed and suspicious. Among British
North Americans there was a growing awareness of the many moral
ambiguities thrust upon them by the fugitives and their problems. This
awareness helped to induce that confusion which has always been present
when Canadians have had to deal with issues not of their own making but
arising mostly from the unfortunate circumstance of sharing a continent
with a giant neighbor where confusion and moral ambiguity were magni
fied, more passionate, and seemingly endemic.
In short, and as we have seen, British North Americans shared the
patterns of prejudice found in the North, although these patterns appeared
in colors muted by distance from the central scene of action. So, too, were
these patterns varied even within Canada West, and economic realities
again provided the conditions that led to those differences. Systematic
prejudice—in the schools, in the churches, in the sale of property—was
mild in the eastern part of the southwestern peninsula, in Hamilton, and
north into Toronto, while it was relatively stringent in the western part.
One explanation for this observable difference—noted at the time and
clear from the evidence now—is that Hamilton and Toronto were pros
perous, especially after 1854 and even after 1857 despite the slump, and
that the building trades were in need of much semiskilled labor, so that
Irish and Negro alike could find jobs; while at the frontier on the west,
opposite Detroit, the economy was not able to absorb the new arrivals,
Prejudice, always individual, was also a matter of the moment, the place,
and the market, however, for discrimination was widely practiced in St.
Catharines, despite this geographical generalization.
But if many of the cherished beliefs of Canadians—then and since
about the haven they provided fugitives from federal marshals are myths,
or at least exaggerated, a countervailing fact also remains indisputably
true: in British North America, the Negro remained equal in the eyes of
the law—after the abolition of slavery, and setting aside the growing
tendency toward segregated education, a most damaging exception to be
dealt with in a later chapter. Although challenged in 1851, Negro jurors
and jury foremen served in Toronto and elsewhere, and Negroes gave
evidence with full legal protection. They generally were taxed as the white
man was, were punished in no harsher a manner than any other criminals,
and cast their votes openly and with impunity. British consuls looked after
the black Canadian’s interests when he was abroad with the same care
that any British subject might expect, and even American consuls in the
British provinces treated Negro Canadians with the respect that was their
due.41 If social and economic realities did not conform to legislative and
39. [D. N. Haskell], The Boston Committee in Canada: A Series of Eight Letters
reprinted from the Boston Atlas (Boston, 1851), p. 19; Anti-Slavery Reporter, n.s.,
4 (1856), 134, 166, 229-30; The Provincial Freeman, July 4, 1857.
40. Quoted in William H. and Jane H. Pease, eds., The Antislavery Argument
(Indianapolis, Ind., 1965), p. 46.
41. Anti-Slavery Reporter, June 21, 1843, and n.s., 4 (1856), 230, Voice of the
Fugitive, July 2, 1851; Toronto Globe, Oct 8, 1859; Ottawa Citizen, May 3, 1867«
PRO, BTI/479: Francis Waring, consul, Norfolk, Va., to J. T. Briggs, Oct 25, and
ends., in re New Brunswick Negro Antonio Nicholas; NA, Foreign Semce Post
Records, C.D., Halifax: cases of destitute Negro seamen (e.g., no. 6, R. W. Fraser
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A Continental Abolitionism?
The Blacks in Canada
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to William L. Marcy, Nov. 8, 1853, and no. 7, Dec. 14, 1854); Murray, “AngloAmerican Anti-Slavery Movement," pp. 324-27.
42. A-325, Report for 1856-7, p. 60: Nov. 1.
43. A longer version of the material that follows appears in Robin W. Winks,
“‘A Sacred Animosity’: Abolitionism in Canada," in Martin Duberman, ed., The
Anti-Slavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton, NJ., 1965), PP301-42.
*
253
events in and after 1850 in particular—the Larwill election campaign, a
public petition relating to segregated schools, and the passage of the Fugitive
Slave Bill—made such a society imperative in the minds of those who had
followed the color question in the United States with growing apprehension.
There was a ready-made group of Negro sympathizers in the white
Canadians who had contributed to the support of Wilberforce, Dawn, and
Elgin.44
Foremost among Canada’s abolitionists was George Brown, the powerful
editor of the province’s most important newspaper, the Toronto Globe.
Brown had shown an interest in the condition of the Negro in Canada
from the journal’s inception in 1844. He, his brother Gordon, his father
Peter, and his sister Isabella formed the nucleus of an antislavery society
in Toronto; and Isabella’s husband, Thomas Henning, was the first secre
tary of the Canadian Anti-Slavery Society as well as a member of the
Globe's editorial staff until 1854.45 Far more restrained than Garrison’s
Liberator and far more forthright than the lesser abolition sheets, the
Globe provided the antislavery group with a forum for the “sacred ani
mosity” its owners held toward slavery.40 In his paper Brown attacked
Henry Clay, the Fugitive Slave Law, Larwill, Prince, and separate schools
with equal force, for—as he wrote—Canadians had the “duty of preserv
ing the honour of the continent” against slavery.47
The Toronto-based group were able to ground their work on previously
established channels of communication. In 1827 Samuel Cornish and a
Quebec-educated Jamaican, John Browne Russwurm, editors of Freedom’s
Journal, which they published in New York for two years, had sent agents
into Canada to solicit support. Negroes in Windsor had established a short
lived antislavery society there, and Upper Canadians, led by John Roaf,
a Congregational minister, had attended a temperance convention in Sara
toga Springs, New York, in 1837, making contact with many American
abolitionists.48 As a result, Reverend Ephraim Evans, a Wesleyan Meth-
legal forms, those forms at least limited the ways in which prejudice
might make itself felt.
Still, the hierarchy of the unequal will have its way. In British North
America, as in the United States, the Kingdom of Individuals would be
long in coming. Even those who felt most committed in that cause, mem
bers of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada and others who worked with
the abolitionists to cleanse North America of that which George Brown
accepted as a continental rather than merely American stain, were limited
in their effectiveness by that sense of paternalism which may so easily shade
into a racism no less hurtful for its presumptive benevolence; for such
paternalism reveals the quiet arrogance of those who feel that they have
all to give to an underprivileged group and nothing to learn from it
Can one condone wholly—or condemn entirely—the blind, well-meaning
certitude of that missionary-teacher who, reporting to the Colonial Church
and School Society in 1856 of her Negro charges, concluded that “The
worse they are, the more need there is for British Christians to instruct,
enlighten and reform them”? 42
The major thrust in the Canadian contribution to worldwide abolition
ism came not from the British mission boards, the self-segregated, selfhelp communities, the begging ministers, or the isolated Negroes of the
Maritime Provinces. These groups were interested in helping those blacks
who were citizens in British North America and in easing the adjustment of
the fugitives. Certainly individual members of some of the communities
helped to flay slavery through the press or hoped to weaken it by journeys
south of the border to guide fugitives toward freedom. Certainly, too,
many reasoned that any aid given to fugitives in British North America
made the provinces additionally attractive, and that by creating a magnet
for runaway slaves, they were helping to sap the strength of the institution.
But as collective bodies they did not attack slavery directly. Abolitionism
in British North America was expressed through attempts to subdue
prejudice within the provinces and efforts to lend vocal and moral support,
and limited financial aid, to the more exposed but also far more effective
abolitionist groups in the United States.43
The first major Canadian antislavery society was created to combat the
growing evidence of organized, group prejudice in Canada West. Three
ilk_____
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44. On the Negro issue in politics, see Winks, “Abolitionism in Canada," pp. 31718, n. 28.
45. J. M. S. Careless, Brown of the Globe, 1: The Voice of Upper Canada, 18181859 (Toronto, 1959), pp. 102-03; Syracuse Univ., Gerrit Smith Miller Papers:
Henning to Smith, Feb. 2, 13, 1861, Oct. 12, 1863; Columbia Univ., Gay Papers:
Henning to Gay, May 27, 1852, Feb. 18, 1854, April 11, 1855.
46. A phrase drawn from the Toronto Globe's notice, on June 8, 1860, of
Charles Sumner’s speech before the Senate, “The Barbarism of Slavery." See The
Works of Charles Sumner (Boston, 1874), J, 124.
47. See, for example, editorials of Feb. 7, March 19, May 28, Aug. 10, Sept 19,
Oct. 5, Nov. 9, 1850; Feb. 22, March 6, 27, April 3, 12, 18, May 10, 13, June 20,
Sept. 18, 25, Nov. 27, Dec. 18, 1851; and March 24, 1852.
48. Aptheker, Abolitionist Movement, p. 33; Washington, Story of the Negro, 2,
292-93; M. A. Garland, “Some Frontier and American Influences in Upper Canada
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Lyman Wilmot House
Description
An account of the resource
This collection consists of records related to the Deerfield Public Library's research into whether or not the Wilmot house could be proved to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad.
Creator
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Deerfield Public Library
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Deerfield Public Library
Publisher
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Deerfield Public Library
Date
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2002
Language
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English
Identifier
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DPL.0013
Text
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Dublin Core
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Title
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A Continental Abolitionism?
The Blacks in Canada: A History
Description
An account of the resource
Photocopy of a chapter from The Blacks in Canada entitled "A Continental Abolitionism?" with some highlighting.
Creator
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Winks, Robin W.
Publisher
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Yale University Press
Date
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1971
Language
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English
Identifier
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DPL.0013.032
1851 Canadian Census
1861 Canadian Census
A Flight Across Ohio: The Escape of William Wells Brown from Slavery
A Narrative of the Adventures and Escapes of Moses Roper from American Slavery
A Quaker Pioneer: Laura Haviland Superintendent of the Underground
A Sabbath Among the Runaway Negroes at Niagara
A Sacred Animosity: Abolitionism in Canada
A Short History of the American Negro
A Woman's Life Work
Abolitionism
Abolitionist Movement
Abolitionist Press
Abolitionists
Abram Pryne
Africa
African American Churches
African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church
Albany New York
Along the Talbot Road
Alvin McCudy
Amelia Harris
American Anti-Slavery Society
American Baptist Free Mission Society
American Civil War
American Philosophical Society
American Revolution
Americanborn Canadians
Amherstburg Ontario Canada
Anderson Extradition Case
Anglo American Anti-Slavery Movement
Anti-Slavery Reporter
Anti-Slavery Society of Canada
Antonio Nicholas
Aptheker
Archibald Bremner
Arrow
Arthur Huff Fauset
Ashtabula Ohio
Auburn New York
Augustus Diamond
Austin Steward
Authentic Narratives
Autobiography
Baltimore Sun
Baptist Church
Benjamin Brawley
Benjamin Drew
Bond and Free: or
Booker T. Washington
Boston Atlas
Boston Massachusetts
Brantford Expositor
Brantford Ontario Canada
British Mission Boards
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British Provinces
Brown of the Globe
Buffalo New York
Burwell Ontario Canada
C. Lightfoot Roman
Cambridge Massachusetts
Canada
Canada East
Canada Nova Scotia New Brunswick and the Other British Provinces in North America with a Plan of National Colonization
Canada West
Canada's Part in Freeing the Slave
Canadian Antislavery Organizations
Canadian Antislavery Societies
Canadian Censuses
Canadian Liberty Political Party
Canadian Racial Prejudice
Canadian Racism
Canadian Segregation
Cape Vincent New York
Carter G. Woodson
Charles Sumner
Chatham Ontario Canada
Chatham Steamer
Christian Union Church
Cincinnati Ohio
City of London Ontario Canada: The Pioneer Period and the London of Today
Cleveland Ohio
Cobourg Ontario Canada
Collingwood Ontario Canada
Colonial Church and School Society
Columbia University
Columbia University Gay Papers
Communal Settlements
Congregational Church
Creighton
Cronym
D.N. Haskell
Dawn
Detroit Historical Society
Detroit Historical Society Bulletin
Detroit Michigan
Dictionary of American Biography
Dr. Howe
Dresden Ontario Canada
Drew
Earl Conrad
Early History of Shrewsbury
Edith C. Firth
Edwin C. Giullet
Edwin Larwill
Elgin
Elijah Leonard
Ephraim Evans
ETc.
Excelsior
Folklord of Lunenburg County Nova Scotia
Folklore from Nova Scotia
Folklore from the Half-Breeds in Nova Scotia
Foreign Service Post Records
Fort Erie
Fort Malden Ontario Canada
Foul Language
Francis Waring
Fred Landon
Frederick Douglass
Free African Americans
Freedom's Journal
French
From Dixie to Canada: Romance and Reality of the Underground Railroad
Fugitive African Americans
Fugitive Slave Act
Fugitive Slave Narratives
Fugitive Slaves
Fugitive Slaves in London Ontario Before 1860
Galt Ontario Canada
Gara
Gargoyles and Gentlemen: A History of St. Paul's Cathedral London Ontario
Garrison Liberator
George Brown
Goodbye to Uncle Tom
Gordon Brown
Gordon Sellar
Grand Rapids Michigan
Halifax Nova Scotia
Hamilton Canadian Illustrated News
Hamilton Ontario Canada
Harriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman Memorial Home
Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People
Harvard University
Harvard University Houghton Library
Harvard University Houghton Library Siebert Papers
Haviland
Helen Creighton
Henry Bibb
Henry Clay
Henson
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Historical Statistics of Canada
Homer Uri Johnson
Hungary
Huron Institute
Huron Institute Papers and Records
Illinois
Immigration
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Irish Settlers
Isaac Rice
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Israel Campbell
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J.M.S. Careless
J.T. Briggs
J.W. Keith
J.W. Loguen
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James Egert Allen
James G. Birney
James Silk Buckingham
Jane H. Pease
Jermain W. Loguen
Jerry Rescue
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John Atkinson
John Browne Russwurm
John Nettleton
John P. Jewett
John Roaf
John Scoble
Journal of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada
Journal of the House of Assembly of Upper Canada Inspector's Reports Appendixes
Journal of the International Folk Music Council
Journal of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society
Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada
Junius
K.A.H. Buckley
Kenneth M. Stampp
Kentiana
Kentucky
Kingston Ontario Canada
Kingston Penitentiary
Lake Erie
Lake Ontario
Larry Gara
Larwill Election Campaign
Laura Haviland
Letters
Letters Largely Personal and Private
Levi Coffin: The Friend of the Slave
Lewis Clarke
Lewiston New York
Lexington Kentucky
Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
Liquor Law
Loguen
London and Middlesex Historical Society
London England
London Free Press
London Ontario Canada
London Times
Long Point
Lucretia Coffin Mott
Lunenburg County Nova Scotia
M.A. Garland
M.C. Urquhart
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Martha Coffin Wright
Martin Duberman
Methodist Church
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Mildred E. Danforth
Missionary Groups
Mitchell
Montreal Gazette
Montreal Star
Moses Roper
Narrative
Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke
National Anti-Slavery Standard
National Museum of Canada
National Museum of Canada Bulletin No. 117
Native Americans
Negro in Literature
Negro Order of Odd Fellows
New Hampshire
New Kentucky Ontario Canada
New Orleans Commerical Bulletin
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New York Tribune
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Niagara Suspension Bridge
Niger Valley Exploring Party
Norfolk Virginia
North-Side View of Slavery
Northern Border Cities
Northern Prejudices
Northern Racism
Northwest Ohio Historical Quarterly
Nova Scotia Canada
O.K. Watson
Oakville Ontario Canada
Oakville Weekly Sun
Oberlin Ohio
Ogdensburg New York
Ohio
Ohio State Historical Society
Ohio State Historical Society Siebert Papers
Oil Springs Ontario Canada
Ontario Historical Society
Ontario Historical Society Papers and Records
Orlo Miller
Orwell Ohio
Oswego New York
Ottawa Canada
Ottawa Citizen
Ought American Slavery to be Perpetuated?
Over Lake Erie to Freedom
Owen Sound Comet
Oxford Rhodes House Anti-Slavery Papers
Paternalism
Patsey Williams
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Pennsylvania History
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Pennsylvania State Historical Society
Peter Brown
Petrolia Ontario Canada
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Prince
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Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
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Public Opinion
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Reports of Penitentiary Inpectors
Robert Sellar
Robert Wilson
Robin W. Winks
Rochester New York
Romantic Kent
Roper
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Royal Society of Canada Proceedings and Transactions
Samuel Cornish
Samuel Ringgold Ward
Sandusky Ohio
Sarah Bradford
Saratoga Springs New York
Sarnia Observer
School Records
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Shrewsbury Ontario Canada
Sierra Leone
Slave States
Smith College
Smith College Sophia Smith Collection
Some Frontier and American Influences in Upper Canada
Some Items of Negro-Canadian Folk-Lore
Songs from Nova Scotia
Sons of Uriah
Sophia Smith
Southern Slave Songs
St. Catharines A to Z
St. Catharines and Lincoln Historical Society
St. Catharines Journal
St. Catharines Ontario Canada
St. Lawrence River
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Story of the Negro
Stratford Beacon
Syracuse New York
Syracuse Public Library
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Syracuse University Gerrit Smith Miller Papers
Systematic Prejudice
Talbot Ontario Canada
Tax Records
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Text. of Rev. Wm. Harrison's Sermon at Baptist Church Amherstburg
The Anti-Slavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists
The Antislavery Argument
The Barbarism of Slavery
The Blacks in Canada: A History
The Boston Committee in Canada
The Friend of Man
The Fugitive Slave Law and the Detroit River Frontier
The Honorable Elijah Leonard: A Memoir
The Journal of American Folk-Lore
The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad
The Negro in New York
The Negro in the Abolitionist Movement
The Negro Migration to Canada after the Passing of the Fugitive Slave Act
The Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly
The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South
The Provincial Freeman
The Rev. J.W. Loguen as a Slave and as a Freeman
The Story of the Negro: The Rise of the Race from Slavery
The Town of York 1815-1834: A Further Collection of Documents of Early Toronto
The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts
The Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom
The Underground Railroad: Legend or Reality?
The Voice of the Fugitive
The Works of Charles Sumner
Things As They Are in America
Thomas Henning
Thomas Nye
Toledo Ohio
Toronto from Trading Post to Great City
Toronto Globe
Toronto Jail
Toronto News of the Week
Toronto Ontario Canada
True Makers of Canada: The Narrative of Gordon Sellar who Emigrated to Canada in 1825
Tubman
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Underground Railroad
Underground Railroad Superintendent
Utica New York
Vienna Austria
Voice of the Fugitive
Voting Records
W.G. Grownlow
W.H. Withrow
W.J. Wintemberg
W.M.G.
Ward
Washington
Wesleyan Methodist Church
West Indies
Whiskey
White Immigration
Wilbur H. Siebert
William Edward Farrison
William H. Allison
WIlliam H. Pease
William Harrison
William L. Marcy
William M. Mitchell
William Still
William Still and the Underground Railroad
William Wells Brown
William Wilberforce
Windsor Anti-Slavery Society
Windsor Herad
Windsor Herald
Windsor Ontario Canada
Yearnings for Freedom