As a man of property, however modest, Henson now felt sufficiently self-confident to measure himself against other refugees from the South, several hundred of whom lived scattered in the vicinity of his home. What he saw troubled him deeply. Most of them were working as casual farm laborers, and making little effort to improve their situation. “The mere delight the slave took in his freedom, rendered him, at first, contented with a lot far inferior to that which he might have attained,” Henson gloomily observed. Ignorance of contracts, leases, and the most elementary rules of commerce led the refugees repeatedly to make “unprofitable bargains” that prevented them from saving money or acquiring property of their own. “They were content to have the proceeds of their labor at their own command, and had not the ambition for, or the perception of what was within their easy reach, if they did but know it.” Henson was entrepreneurial by nature, and intensely ambitious. They were the qualities that had made him valuable to his former masters. They now combined with his compulsion to teach and lead as he began to discover a far wider field of action in the American gospel of self-improvement, self-discovery, and economic achievement.
Henson began meeting with some of the more successful black farmers and tenants. Ten or twelve of them eventually agreed to pool their savings, and to purchase land together for a settlement where they would, he wrote, “be, in short, our own masters.” In the autumn of 1834, he set off on foot, eventually trekking almost three hundred miles in search of a suitable site. Vast tracts of densely forested government land were constantly being opened up for settlement all across the broad, flat peninsula that extends across the southern part of present-day Ontario from Lake Erie to the Detroit River. The colonial authorities, still smarting from American invasion during the War of 1812, were eager, even desperately so, to see the region settled with any men loyal to the Crown, white or black. Land was cheap: fifty-acre lots could be purchased for two dollars per acre, with ten years to pay. Henson found what he wanted at Colchester, a short distance inland from the reassuring earthen ramparts of Fort Malden, overlooking the Detroit River where it debouched into Lake Ontario. For seventy-five miles along the shore of Lake Ontario, the only crop he had seen was the one he knew best, tobacco, which had been brought north by refugees like himself. A few of them had even made small fortunes. Everywhere around Colchester, he saw black faces, and heard the familiar drawl of Kentucky. Also at Colchester he met a white man named McCormick, who had already cleared a tract of land that he was happy to lease to Henson and his friends. They could begin sowing crops immediately. It was a more fortuitous decision than Henson expected. It turned out that McCormick had failed to meet the terms of his grant, and lost his claim to it, enabling Henson’s group to live there rent-free for the next seven years, raising crops and accumulating savings with which they could later purchase land of their own.
Henson thrived at Colchester. However, he noticed how ignorance of the elementary principles of practical economics undermined the efforts of even the most hard-working refugees. They would often lease a tract of wilderness land, and contract to clear a fixed number of acres. By the time the land was clear—a backbreaking job, involving felling trees, and dragging out stumps, root systems, and rocks—the lease had run out, and the owner of the land would reoccupy it, and begin raising crops to which the refugee had no claim. The same refugee would then take up another, identical lease, with the same results, so that after years of labor he still had neither land nor savings. Henson similarly noticed how refugee farmers were ruining the profitable monopoly on the cultivation of tobacco that they had once enjoyed. They were flooding the market with needless overproduction, thus depressing the price, and putting themselves out of business. Henson’s experience as a farm manager for the Rileys gave him a grasp of the larger dimensions of the problem that almost all his neighbors lacked. He began lecturing them about wages and profits, urging independent farmers to diversify, and renters to raise their own crops and to save their wages. It was all basic economics, but revolutionary to men and women who had never before had to plan for the future. There was so much that they had to learn.
As he plowed, and sowed, and harvested, a grander dream was taking shape in Henson’s mind. He began to envision a community far more ambitious than the simple group of friends gathered at Colchester, a place where refugees from slavery would not only support themselves economically, but would also remake themselves as independent men and women, learning to read and write, to acquire mechanical skills, to become responsible for their own decisions, to develop the magical spirit of enterprise: in short, to think like white men. “It was precisely the Yankee spirit that I wished to instill into my fellow-slaves, if possible.” What he had in mind was destined to become one of the Canadian terminals of the Underground Railroad.
The Underground Railroad was not the end of the journey from slavery to freedom, but the beginning. Paradoxically, it was in Canada that blacks became real Americans. Only there were they completely free to pursue the American dream of personal liberty, the acquisition of property, self-improvement, and the unfettered pursuit of happiness. By and large, what former slaves wanted was legal protection, physical security for themselves and their families, honest wages, recognition of the marriage bond, freedom to worship when and how they pleased, protection for their homes and property, education for themselves and their children, the power of the vote, and personal respect. Many shared feelings similar to those of Alexander Hemsley, once a slave in Maryland who had escaped to New Jersey, where he had lived for years before being captured by slave hunters. Except for the intervention of Quakers, he would have been sent back to bondage by a local proslavery judge. Even so, the court had stripped him of everything he owned, and, terrified of further harassment, he fled to Canada. “I had been in comfortable circumstances, but all my little property was lawed away,” he told a visiting journalist, with deep bitterness. “When I reached English territory, I had a comfort in the law,—that my shackles were struck off, and that a man was a man by law.”
Nowhere in the Northern “free states” was freedom for African Americans fully guaranteed or protected. In 1840, more than ninety percent of Northern free blacks lived in states that either partially or completely disenfranchised them. Only in Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire did blacks vote freely. Only Massachusetts allowed blacks to serve as jurors. In Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa, testimony by blacks was forbidden in cases involving whites. Several Northern states limited or barred black immigration. Ohio, in particular, required a certificate of freedom from each black resident, barred blacks without such certificates from employment, fined anyone caught harboring a fugitive slave, and required every black entering the state to post a five-hundred-dollar bond, signed by two white men, as security. In some states, blacks were not allowed to be clerks or typesetters, to buy or sell alcohol, to trade farm products without a license, or to inherit property. Even in the New England states, personal discrimination was widespread in education, transportation, public facilities, and eating places. In Canada, freedom was protected by laws that were enforced by a government that supported abolition in both principle and fact. When a group of potential settlers from Ohio met with Upper Canada’s Lieutenant General, Sir John Colborne, in 1829, he pointedly declared: “Tell the Republicans on your side of the line that we Royalists do not know men by their color. Should you come to us, you will be entitled to all the privileges of the rest of His Majesty’s subjects.” It is impossible to imagine a public official of equal stature in the United States holding such a meeting with blacks for any reason at all.
Refugees in Canada were crossing a cultural watershed that in some ways was more challenging even than the physical ordeal of flight through hundreds of miles of hostile or indifferent territory. In the world of slavery, no matter how hard men and women worked, it made no difference to their condition. Rarely was there any reward for intelligence, initiative, or ambition. Enterprise was as likely to lead to punis
hment as it was to profit. For all but a small handful of privileged slaves, the concept of choice barely existed, while a master’s caprice, insolvency, or death might without warning lead at any time to traumatic separations, or worse. For the slave, poverty was foreordained.
In Canada, for the first time, former slaves could anticipate prosperity. Life became predictable in the best sense of the term. A man or woman who worked hard could expect to be paid. Families could expect to spend their lives together. A woman could expect to live her life without being raped. Children could expect to receive an education. Although racism certainly existed, a man could nonetheless expect to be treated in public with politeness. If he managed to save money, he could invest it and expect to enlarge his fortune. And if he made a bad business deal, he had as much hope as any white immigrant did of recovering and starting over. Wilson Ruffin Abbott, a free immigrant and businessman from Alabama, became one of the most prominent real estate developers in Toronto. And he was not alone.
The black press promoted Canada as a safe and welcoming destination for blacks, both fugitive and free, who wished to escape from the bigotry of “mock republicans,” contrasting it with the “barbarous and pestilential” shores of Africa. “Is not Upper Canada as salubrious and fertile as any other country under the sun?” the Colored American posed in 1839. “Instead of sharks, alligators and tiger, there are wild turkey, and deer, and buffalo. Instead of savages and traders in human flesh, there is civilization, refinement, and religion. A colored man of good character and information and some means, may live in Canada without the least social or civil proscription.” Although in Canada there was in fact color prejudice, the law was color-blind. Blacks had property rights. They could sue. They served on juries. They testified in trials. And they could vote. In 1849, when Colchester blacks (who by then made up one-third of the population) insisted upon their right to vote for the election of local officials, which was opposed by the white office holders, the town chairman was prosecuted and severely fined. A bigoted British immigrant wrote home with astonishment to relatives in England, “Here by the way, I may mention as illustration of the state of society, that everyone is called, it matters not in what position or occupation they stand, as Mr. or Mrs., or this Gentleman, or that Lady, even the Niggers.” A black man even carried the Union Jack at the head of an “Orange Tory procession” in London in the summer of 1836. And in 1843, black residents of Toronto successfully petitioned the mayor and the city council to bar a traveling circus from performing blackface acts that ridiculed Afro Canadians.
In the 1820s, Canada had for all practical purposes ceased to sanction the return of fugitive slaves to the United States. In 1826, after months of fruitless negotiations, Albert Gallatin, the American minister to the Court of St. James, wrote resignedly to Secretary of State Henry Clay that Britain refused to depart from “the principle recognized by the British courts that every man is free who reaches British ground.” A series of fugitive slave cases in the mid-1830s hardened the Crown’s resolve. In the first of these, in 1833, Canadian officials refused to extradite Thornton and Ruth Blackburn, who were the center of an uproar in Detroit when a crowd of angry blacks had torn them out of the hands of the authorities and spirited them off to Canada. Four years later, the governor of Kentucky demanded the return of a fugitive named Jesse Happy, claiming that since he had escaped on his master’s horse he should be treated as a simple thief. In response, Lieutenant Governor Francis Head wrote that “it may be argued that a slave escaping from bondage on his master’s horse is a vicious struggle between two parties of which the slave owner is not only the aggressor, but the blackest criminal of the two—it is the case of the dealer in human flesh versus the stealer of horse flesh.” Happy was allowed to remain in Canada undisturbed.
Blacks returned the Canadians’ welcome with extravagant loyalty. They were staunch supporters of the most conservative Tories, believing with some reason that continuing rule by royalists best ensured that Canada would remain under the British flag. Blacks took a particular pride in bearing arms and wearing the uniform of colonial militia. For men who had been chattels only a few years or even months before, who would have been executed in the South for daring to carry guns, and flogged just for daring to protect their wives and daughters, or for that matter their own lives, the ability to defend themselves may have been the single most liberating experience of all. Strikingly, black militia companies had the lowest rate of desertion in the colonial forces.
Their mettle was tested in the winter of 1837, when the colonial authorities faced rebellion by reformers who demanded a republic, and an end to rule by local oligarchies. The rebels recruited volunteers—“fillibusters,” as they were then called—in New York state, and moved to invade Canada with small forces across the Niagara and Detroit River frontiers. The Crown recruited heavily in the black townships of Canada West. Nearly a thousand blacks volunteered for service in a single month, including almost every black man in the town of Hamilton. Lieutenant Governor Head wrote that “they hastened as volunteers in wagon loads to the Niagara frontier to beg from me permission” to fight. Among them was Josiah Henson, who joined a company that helped defend Fort Malden. When the rebel schooner Anne sailed down the Detroit River firing its guns into the town of Sandwich, a memorable incident in the brief war, Henson was among the men who waded into the river and helped to take the ship’s crew prisoner after it ran aground on a sandbar. The rebels were easily defeated, with little loss of life. For years afterward, Canadians remembered how the refugees had rallied to the Union Jack, and black military companies enjoyed something of a patriotic vogue. The Chatham militia, in particular, was a local tourist attraction, impressive in its scarlet uniforms. A British visitor wrote, “They are all runaway slaves (barring the officers); they look fierce and pompous enough; I daresay they would fight like devils with the Yankees.” Blacks remembered the war as a glorious victory, not just over rebels who they feared would carry the spirit of repression north into Canada along with their American-style politics, but also over the scorn of whites who maintained as an article of racist faith that black men lacked the courage to fight. Freedom created its own rituals, in which pride, self-confidence, and defiance increasingly replaced the servile habits of slavery. In 1842 Chatham’s black community celebrated the ninth anniversary of emancipation throughout the British Empire with an appropriately martial flourish, as black, red-coated militiamen fired twenty-one rounds from a cannon stationed on the parade ground, a sight that must have chilled the heart of any Southerner there, had one been present.
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While living as a farmer, first at Fort Erie and then at Colchester, Henson was also living a kind of double life as a conductor for the Underground Railroad. He claimed in his autobiography to have led a total of 118 fugitives out of Kentucky, in the course of several rescue missions. Unfortunately, his account of these exploits is sketchy, possibly because money was involved and the exchange of cash for assistance did not fit the template of the selfless abolitionist motivated only by idealism and self-sacrifice. His involvement with the underground began with a sermon. One Sunday, he preached on the duty of former slaves who were safe in Canada to bring about the freedom of those still in servitude. Afterward, he was approached by a refugee named James Lightfoot, who had escaped from Kentucky several years earlier. Lightfoot explained that he had left behind his parents, three sisters, and four brothers on a plantation near Maysville, on the Ohio River. The sermon had left him feeling guilty for having done nothing to help them get to Canada. He was willing to pay someone to go to Kentucky to bring them north. The two men met together several times after that. Henson, in his own words, was moved by “seeing the agony of his heart in behalf of his kindred.” He was also struggling to survive in a land where every man was on his own, and he needed money. There is no reason to doubt Henson’s sympathy, but it is likely that the meetings included negotiations over the price that Henson would charge for undertaking such a danger
ous venture.
They evidently came to an agreement, for Henson says that he traveled southward on foot through New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Whether he was in contact with the underground during the trip he does not say, but it seems clear from later events that he knew where to find it when he wanted it. Once in Kentucky, he succeeded in making contact with Lightfoot’s family. But the result was disappointing. Lightfoot’s parents were too frail to travel, and his sisters were unwilling to risk the lives of their small children. The four brothers and a nephew were willing, but they were reluctant to abandon their parents and sisters at such short notice. The brothers promised Henson that if he returned for them in a year, they would be ready to go. Meanwhile, Henson had heard of a party of slaves fifty miles deeper into Kentucky, in Bourbon County, who wanted to escape, but needed a guide. After a week spent working out a plan of escape, he led the group across the Ohio River, and arrived in Cincinnati the third night after their departure, where they “procured assistance,” an allusion, certainly, to the Underground Railroad. The following year, Henson says, he returned to Kentucky and brought away the Lightfoot brothers, as he had promised.
How much Henson was paid for this and for similar jobs that he undertook is unknown. But his profits from such clandestine work may well have helped him to save enough money to lease his share of the land at Colchester, and later to purchase two hundred acres near Dresden. That a man like Henson—secure with his family in Canada, and nothing if not acute at assessing risks and rewards—would undertake such dangerous work was less unusual than it might seem. It was not uncommon for fugitives to hire agents, white or black, to go south on their behalf, to rescue enslaved members of their family. As Levi Coffin bluntly expressed it, the underground operated on different terms in the South: “It was done for money.” A certain free black man living in Buffalo, who “was well paid for his work,” made a business out of going to the South after the wives of slaves who had found a home in Canada or the northern states. M. C. Buswell, whose family was part of the underground in northern Illinois, remembered a black man known to them only as “Charlie,” a former slave from Missouri, “a bright and determined fellow,” who for several years led fugitives on foot from Missouri across northern Illinois, and ultimately to Canada where, according to Buswell, who encountered him many times, “he succeeded in planting quite a large colony of his people.” How another Canadian, this one a white man, carried out one of the most memorable rescues in the Ohio River valley gives some idea of how Henson may have gone about his clandestine work.
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