1
10
1
-
https://archives.deerfieldlibrary.org/files/original/3653880b49314914c00713dce13798d6.pdf
a4973ac3908e71691cb00bc84e719f0a
PDF Text
Text
y in Canada
°es, for one
3 the United
1 a Canaan.
n> to escape
many never
>n had seen,
claim upon
>crypha, not
id, the AntiBrown were
:hared North
Jse facets of
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
*
'
j
I
!
)
i
f
!
7
i
235
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
�lllltfw
l1
It
?■ ■>
niw/i
■t ’ K
Wil||l;ISsji||pl|iii«| i;: ‘1
.I
.
i
■
U
Hi
t
.
• ■« 4 i-s’ : * /.*• <
■
■
\
.. ...... .
M.
v. '4
i
rm
>?]
•.
I b? i": ■
U -
it
hi
\ Br
;
:!!
256
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
i,.
>1 ii
i Hi
JiJ.
i '
mimi
ifc1*11
! .~-infill
r
i
:
H
I
Ill
i i:
!
ill
I®
'• r
!'
::
I- !
!I
■
i
T:
■
Ji
8
:
E>
i-
m
I:
i
8'
-
I";3
V
'V\
K
!
i'.'i'
■
Ii
i
I!rE
1!i
* !!
•
g;
:
1.1
i
i
l,
:
;
'!
i
l:
ill
1
i
�m snnstsui
238
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.
^
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
•.i
II
I'!;'
.
||
|:
l!
;1
[I
i$
11
!
i
i;
17. Still, The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives,
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.
:
S-
ii
i
.
.
i!
lii:
::
i1 h
!
5
■
�I Hit \\ tji!:-' HU-M-;:-- ) . .V®
■
:
>•,.•:
-*l ll •
.* • 3
*• V J “
§ r f'i
•r V‘
•’«
y £
>
A •'
l/«'
l--..
wk:>\
si
mi
240
: ;|-•:. iiMME
u>
1
''
■'«j|tss|tj; , I
•- . 'rV5'
The Blacks in Canada
A Continental Abolitionism?
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
■
. c
; • 3
; if
HI
■
i-e :
.;-i.;: •,
a'--
'
.;.. .• < (..i /i ■: \ i ■
will®
■
:••:>!
'•*
;
__ '
241
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).
I..
: f
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.
:
•
'{
!
!.
i;!
ill
W
o
i
-ii,
'■I:
I"
'■'ii
I®
f*i
IF£
i ..
!$
1
I
i
i
-
u
i?
■I1
'•i
m
nHi
.
i;
'
i
: !
if
,;S
I£
J!
i
•J
i:
1
j!
l
«
t
tt
;
•i
:
■
;
i
if
iiiii
i
ifl i
ii
'
�■11
I ;:• .V kU
:•
S- •
■'■
Sjfi
jd ...a.
'»:
A j
!»vV- - | Uy---'-‘
1?^ *
'•i-A
} pirn
i;V
!
i..i ■ j j h i ■ '• i\
i^iPiLWi®!!
uv*** flu-.
b'; ::,.: tif*
: : •]
i|
242
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);
, '! ;
i:
i
2
tut II:
i
!
■ill
Mi
I
; i
p
t
•1
IIS
a
■
i
-j
u
!i
kus
■i ti
1
III
3;ir
iia
i
PI
i■Hi
■
t
1
-
ii
lli
ill!
IS
I
I
!!■
p
ill
I
ii!
S
i
■
�—
■
s ij
.
*-*■4 '
Uy
v '
\ i
a
.
V-
. v!
.
■
.
■■
.
■
A '
. - Hi >;
it
. -
ra::%
IteigsBlsesystlaSlipl
I
I
•
-
•■:■■■
■
-
.■
lilt
E
-4
(i
I i!
I
244
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
°f » ^ *
2. zxsztzs z
ai'ISrfJ"''"’ MetI,0diStS.0r BaPasts' *
i™,
P^sed any religion
•
y few were from ciUes. A number were free men Of 114
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
*
»
route6
£u1gitivest,entered Canada West by a greater variety of
routes than the earher refugees, and outside the Utopian colonies they
New York ,h *
Fr°m 0gdensburS
Cape Vincent, in
SttrataL'ym-ss-ifsa:
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
!■
''.I
I!
I
:
i
pri
i'iji
m
i
I
;
;
Mi
f1
1
til
:
Si*
\i\
I
'
■
m
\ ir
;! ''J
eI
m
i
,
i
"
■ii
•I
4
‘
di^'o?M^CmA^rab«Cti-0n,cSee 35 eXampIcs* TPL’ scraPb00k of ^tracts from
hT
£ 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
Makers M^Canada^The
R°bert
True
. . |j 1 ; ,
' W-
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.
i
n
Is
;
!
i !.
!f] I; !
1
i
:
|!'i
ill
i
ft ii
;i
.V
. 'yl: ■'
i]
J
�M.
;
■
J?
J,
• ilj
■ • a >
246
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?
-yrnii
Jr :
•;
Hi
247
’
1
i
i
i
l
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.
;
::
1
j'jj
i i
!
1! in
ii
■
ai\
1
;
■;
!'
i3
;!
if'! j;
$
ft
T
P
froi
.
4
i
t;
D
;
\i
III Iit: 1
mi?ii £ $
<
: ii
ii
ill
t
ai
iff
a
w
i
. ■1
i
ii
jf|
i
I1
•I
I
tm ii i ?
'lit>il
Jii
1
1!
m ::
\J&
i
�248
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
t ■
;\
'
ill
' Vl
i t.
•: ;
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).
4•
1!
■H'
�mm
dnlHp.
'• !
250
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
: ••
n
ft
�M
;
t i
i
Hill
mm
7> •
....................................
iUiill
252
A Continental Abolitionism?
The Blacks in Canada
X
■.(«
r :•
■i
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_____
■ ' il ■
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
V
I
!•
.
•t
A
'
i;
a
a
■
1
■
iI
if
i$
I
K
Hi
1Hi
!
s
11i
I1if:
I
'•Vi
■
-p,
;* : V
'■$:
:
I
II
�
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
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Deerfield Public Library
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
Deerfield Public Library
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Deerfield Public Library
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2002
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
DPL.0013
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
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
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
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Winks, Robin W.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Yale University Press
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1971
Language
A language of the resource
English
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
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
British North America
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
Herbert Aptheker
Hiram Wilson
Historical Statistics of Canada
Homer Uri Johnson
Hungary
Huron Institute
Huron Institute Papers and Records
Illinois
Immigration
Indiana
Indianapolis Indiana
Irish Settlers
Isaac Rice
Isabella Brown Henning
Israel Campbell
J.C. Furnas
J.M.S. Careless
J.T. Briggs
J.W. Keith
J.W. Loguen
Jamaica
James Egert Allen
James G. Birney
James Silk Buckingham
Jane H. Pease
Jermain W. Loguen
Jerry Rescue
John Atkins
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
Maritime Provinces
Martha Coffin Wright
Martin Duberman
Methodist Church
Mid-America
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
New York
New York City New York
New York Tribune
New York Weekly Tribune
Niagara District Canada
Niagara Falls Ontario Canada
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
Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society
Pennsylvania History
Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery
Pennsylvania State Historical Society
Peter Brown
Petrolia Ontario Canada
Philadelphia Pennsylvania
Point Pelee Canada
Port Ontario New York
Prince
Princeton New Jersey
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
Propaganda Use of the Underground Railway
Public Opinion
Puce River
Quakers
Queen Victoria
R.W. Fraser
Record of Facts
Reports of Penitentiary Inpectors
Robert Sellar
Robert Wilson
Robin W. Winks
Rochester New York
Romantic Kent
Roper
Rowan Ontario Canada
Royal Society of Canada
Royal Society of Canada Proceedings and Transactions
Samuel Cornish
Samuel Ringgold Ward
Sandusky Ohio
Sarah Bradford
Saratoga Springs New York
Sarnia Observer
School Records
School Societies
Separate Schools
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
St. Paul's Cathedral
Stanley Ontario Canada
Steamers
Story of the Negro
Stratford Beacon
Syracuse New York
Syracuse Public Library
Syracuse University
Syracuse University Gerrit Smith Miller Papers
Systematic Prejudice
Talbot Ontario Canada
Tax Records
Temperance Convention
Tennessee
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