Blood and Daring (5 page)

Many national leaders spoke out against the law. Powerful New York Republican senator William Seward spoke against it and Massachusetts Democratic senator Charles Sumner forced a doomed vote on the law’s repeal. The nationally known, splendidly articulate, and politically efficacious ex-slave Frederick Douglass was more incendiary in his reaction, stating: “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter [is] to make a dozen or more dead kidnappers.”
¹⁰

Many heeded Douglass’s call. In Detroit, a federal agent taking a runaway slave to jail was pelted with paving stones by white citizens enraged by what they perceived as injustice. The prisoner was freed and sent across the Detroit River to Windsor. An abolitionist mob descended upon a Boston courthouse in which the ownership of a fugitive slave was being decided, and a man was killed in the riot that ensued. The president threatened to send federal troops to northern cities to protect the slave catchers.

All at once, the slow but steady migration across the Canadian border became a flood. Within weeks of the law’s passage the city of Baltimore reported a problem in staffing hotels: all the Black waiters and porters had gone to Canada. Black churches in Buffalo and Rochester complained that their congregations had nearly all fled.
¹¹
In the first three months
after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, about three thousand African-Americans crossed into Canada.
¹²

As more and more slaves and freemen traded their shackles and low-paying insecure jobs for Canadian freedom, even more elaborate campaigns were waged to capture and dissuade them. Additional state and local laws were passed, bounties were raised, more slave catchers were hired, and the punishments for escape attempts and abetting became increasingly violent and draconian. Many people who risked all to help runaway slaves were heavily fined or imprisoned for up to year. Kentucky’s Reverend Calvin Fairbank, for instance, was convicted of helping slaves to escape and handed a sentence of fifteen years’ hard labour. Those caught helping escaping slaves or freemen were often beaten and banished, and many had “SS” branded onto their left palm—slave stealer.

Propaganda was also spread—that Canada is always frigidly cold; slavery existed in Canada with conditions worse than in the south; all runaways were imprisoned upon crossing the border.
¹³
But nothing worked. The lure of freedom remained stronger than frantic lies and desperate power. Canadian governor general Lord Elgin wrote to the British colonial secretary that Canada West was “flooded with blackies who are rushing across the frontier to escape from the bloodhounds whom the Fugitive Slave Bill has let loose on their track.”
¹⁴

Many American slaves and freemen who fled to Canada had by that time come to play prominent roles in the country’s development. Wilson Abbott, for example, had been born a freeman in Richmond, Virginia, and run a successful grocery business in Mobile, Alabama. In 1834, he was warned that his store was about to be attacked and just in time escaped with his family first to New Orleans and then, in 1836, to Toronto. He operated a number of successful businesses and ploughed profits into real estate speculation, and soon found himself a leader among the city’s small but powerful Black elite. His son Anderson was the first Black graduate of Toronto’s King’s College and the first African-Canadian doctor. He later served as a surgeon in the Civil War.

Thornton Blackburn and his wife had escaped from slavery in Kentucky and eventually found their way to Detroit but, in 1833, were tracked down by slave catchers. A daring jail break led to a riot when abolitionists turned on the police and slave catchers. Blackburn and his wife, Lucie, made their escape and soon settled in Toronto. He tried his hand at a number of jobs before forming the city’s first taxi company.
^*
Blackburn retired a wealthy man.

Abbott and Blackburn were two success stories among many. Thousands of other Black farmers, teachers, priests and business owners were enriching the growing Canadian nation while pursuing their dreams. And all the while, the personal was political. Every intelligent, successful, law-abiding African-American in Canada was one more arrow flung into the heart of the Southern idea that Blacks were unworthy, unable and unwilling to lead such lives.

William Lyon Mackenzie understood the danger that the success of former slaves in Canada posed for the future of the South. Mackenzie was Toronto’s first mayor and leader of the ill-fated 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion. On a visit to the United States, the former newspaperman wrote an article that was widely published south of the border. He spoke glowingly of Blacks and whites living and working together in Toronto and of some ex-slaves doing so well in business that they kept domestic servants in their impressive homes. Mackenzie wrote, “This is turning the table on the Sothrons [sic], and fairly balancing accounts with the ebony-hearted slave-holders.”
¹⁵

Among those who echoed the point was George Brown. The tall, handsome, and always fastidiously tailored Brown had emigrated to America from Scotland and worked in the New York City newspaper business with his father. An intelligent, ambitious and articulate man, he moved to Toronto and founded the
Globe
. By 1850 it had become Canada’s most widely read and influential newspaper. Brown was also an important
politician who became the Reform Party leader and later played an essential role as one of Canada’s Fathers of Confederation.

In the early spring of 1851, Brown helped form the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada. His brother-in-law Thomas Henning, who also served on the
Globe
‘s editorial staff, was its secretary. The Anti-Slavery Society made connections with other like-minded associations in Canada; in addition, on a rather regular basis, Henning exchanged letters with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.

The Canadian abolitionist movement ultimately weakened itself through schisms born of politics, religion and ego, but the Anti-Slavery Society remained an important voice for the cause. Its drawing power and the popularity of its beliefs and goals were seen when a convention was held in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Hall in March 1851. Twelve hundred people applauded speaker after speaker, including Brown, who attacked the Fugitive Slave Law, the institution of slavery, and the Southern interests that defended both. Brown promised to urge the Canadian government to do all that could be done to end slavery in the United States.
¹⁶

The Anti-Slavery Society’s connections led to visits to Canada by influential abolitionists. In April 1851, Frederick Douglass was the keynote speaker before a crowd of two thousand at St. Lawrence Hall. British abolitionist George Thompson and American abolitionist Samuel May also spoke. May brought the crowd to its feet when he exclaimed, “I ask you, members of another nation, to assist in our over throwing one of the institutions of my country.”
¹⁷

Many important Americans were already in Canada doing what May advocated. Harriet Tubman, for instance, had been born a Maryland slave, but in 1849 had fled to freedom in Canada. In 1850, she had begun a courageous campaign of risking her life to travel back over the border again and again, eventually rescuing about seventy people.
^*
In 1851, Tubman took up residence in St. Catharines, where she continued her efforts until moving
back to the United States to serve in the Civil War. In 1850, Henry Bibb founded a paper called the
Voice of the Fugiti
ve and became an important member of the Canadian abolitionist movement. Mary Ann Shadd was born a freewoman and was running a successful school for freed Blacks in Wilmington, Delaware, when the fallout from the Fugitive Slave Law led her and her brother Isaac to move to Canada. She also took a home in Windsor. With her founding of the
Provincial Freeman
in March 1853, she became North America’s first female newspaper publisher. While neither Bibb’s nor Shadd’s paper was as influential as the
Globe
, they, along with others who came and went, added voice to the abolitionist cause and, in so doing, added to the friction dividing the American North and South.

The growing links between the American and Canadian abolitionist movements were demonstrated in September 1851, when fifty-three delegates from the United States and Canada gathered at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Hall for the inauguration of the North American Convention of Colored Freemen. While Boston had been considered as a site for the first meeting, members determined that Toronto was safer. The three goals established were that American Blacks should continue to be encouraged to escape to Canada, that Canada must continue to be a comfortable asylum for those fleeing slavery or threats of kidnapping, and that assistance in resettlement must be offered to all who came. It was also determined that Toronto would be headquarters for the cross-border abolitionist efforts, with branch offices in major American cities. This effort and others resulted in even more correspondence between Canadian and American abolitionists, and more influential Americans such as William Lloyd Garrison, Gerrit Smith, and Arthur and Lewis Tappan began Canadian speaking and fundraising tours.

In October 1859, passionate and perhaps unstable American white abolitionist John Brown shook the movement on both sides of the border and sent tremors through the American body politic with a raid on the federal armoury and arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, fifty miles northwest
of Washington. His goal was to capture weapons and ammunition as the first step in instigating a widespread slave insurrection, which he believed would lead to the creation of an African-American state for freed slaves in western Virginia. The year before the raid, John Brown had come to Canada.

In the spring of 1858, Brown spoke at a number of towns in Canada West. In April he took a room in Chatham at the home of Isaac Shadd, Mary Ann’s brother. He organized a convention that was held in Chatham on May 8 and 10, designed to further publicize his bold plan while raising money and recruits. Twelve white and thirty-three Black men attended. The convention wrote a constitution and appointed people to positions that created the trappings of a provisional government, with Brown as commander-in-chief. In the end, only one former slave, Osborne Anderson, accompanied Brown back across the border.

The Harper’s Ferry Raid turned to fiasco, as Brown and many of his compatriots were captured by marines led by a young colonel named Robert E. Lee. Three of Brown’s men escaped to Canada. One of them, physician Samuel Gridley Howe, summarized the role he believed Canada would play in the fight against slavery in a letter to a fellow American abolitionist: “I look with the more interest upon Canada, because it seems to me she is to be the great and reliable ally of the Northern States, in the coming struggle with slavery.”
¹⁸

Meanwhile, Brown’s case intrigued both Canadians and Americans. The documents created in Chatham the year before played a significant role in his trial and his conviction for treason, conspiracy with slaves to rebel, and murder in the first degree.
¹⁹
When Brown was hanged on December 2, 1859, a martyr was created. While vilified in the American south, Brown was celebrated in many Canadian quarters. The
Globe
called Brown “the hero of Harper’s Ferry.”
²⁰
In another article it posited that Brown would be fondly remembered “as a brave man who periled property, family, life itself for an alien race.”
²¹
On the day of his funeral, bells tolled in many Windsor, Chatham, Hamilton, Montreal and Toronto churches, and many held memorial services and collected money for his widow.

Southern leaders knew of the raid’s Canadian connection and that association further poisoned thoughts about Canada, its abolitionist movement, and its opposition to Southern beliefs and goals. Virginia’s governor Henry Wise, for instance, addressed his legislature shortly after Brown’s hanging and spoke stingingly of Canada’s role in the raid. Wise reported: “It was an extraordinary and actual invasion, by a sectional organization specially upon slaveholders and upon their property in negro slaves … a provisional government was attempted in a British province, by our own countrymen, united to us in the faith of confederacy, combined with Canadians to invade the slave holding states.”
²²

The
New York Herald
, always ready to stir up trouble between the United States, Britain and its North American colonies, was among many newspapers that spoke of the Canadian connection to the raid, and noted the widespread popular ire directed toward Canadians who were now apparently not only hurting and insulting the South by providing refuge to runaway slaves, but also serving as a base for invasion and insurrection. A
Herald
editorial that was reprinted in the December 28, 1859, edition of the
Globe
demanded that the president take action to end Canada’s ability to serve as a sanctuary for fugitive slaves and headquarters for those plotting treason. It quoted Governor Wise as suggesting that Canada’s role in condoning the Harper’s Ferry raid was sufficient to provoke war with Britain and promising, “The war will be carried into Canada.”
²³

Perhaps most vehement in its opinion of Canada was the
Southern Review
. It condemned Canada for its years of providing a terminus for the Underground Railroad, and now for its complicity in the Brown Raid, and spoke of “the vile, sensuous, animal, brutal, infidel, superstitious, Democracy of Canada.”
²⁴

This was the charged environment—and the Canada—in which John Anderson found himself. Canada was the mystical Canaan of inspirational Negro spirituals, a place where slavery was but a memory. Yet it seethed with many of the same moral, political, economic and social debates concerning racial equality that for generations had divided America.