Shadd too was damaged by their quarrel. Protests against both her abrasive style and the fact that a woman dared even to engage in such public polemics compelled her to relinquish personal control of the Provincial Freeman in 1855. Her brother Isaac took over as publisher, and William Newman, a black Baptist minister with long experience in refugee affairs, as editor. A defiant, and well-justified, editorial in the Freeman blamed her surrender on a “wrongly developed public sentiment that would crush a woman whenever she attempts to do what has hitherto been assigned to men, even though God designed her to do it.” However, she continued to write much, if not most, of the paper’s copy, and there was no slackening in her diatribes. She attacked long-suffering Hiram Wilson for allegedly enjoying “fine furnishings and valuable real estate,” and for distributing clothing and food only to blacks who supported him. She even mocked Frederick Douglass, who believed that blacks should remain in the United States to fight slavery, rather than immigrate to Canada. “Having been permitted so long to remain in our tub,” she wrote in 1856, “we would rather the great Frederick Douglass, for whose public career we have the most profound pity, would stay out of our sunlight.”
The only planned black settlement that Shadd did not attack was, on its surface, the most paternalistic of all. But it was also the most successful. The origins of the Elgin Settlement, also known as the Buxton Mission, were unique, even romantic. It was the single-handed creation of Reverend William King, a University of Glasgow–trained scholar, with a leonine shock of black hair, a craggy Presbyterian demeanor, and a commitment to abolition hardened by years of ethically troubled residence in the South. After immigrating to the United States from their native Ireland, King’s family settled in Ohio, where their farm eventually became a station on the Underground Railroad. King himself, aspiring to a career as an educator, accepted a position as headmaster of a private academy in Louisiana, where he fell in love with and married the daughter of a wealthy slaveholding family. He feared the corrupting atmosphere of slavery on his family for “both the life that is now and that which is to come,” and resolved to have nothing to do with “the domestic institutions of the country.” However, when his wife, Mary, died suddenly in 1848, he was mortified to find himself, as her heir, the owner of fourteen slaves. By then King had lived long enough in the South to realize that simple manumission, difficult enough in itself in Louisiana, would consign the slaves to lives of poverty and hopeless insecurity. After considerable prayer, he determined to build for them, and with them, their own “City of God,” a “haven against social ostracism and legal discrimination,” where they could live as fully free men and women, in Canada.
King, in contrast to Henson, Wilson, and Bibb, had a real gift for administration, and never allowed pious hopes to cloud sound judgment. He traveled to Canada, where he enlisted support from the Presbyterian Synod, and acquired an eighteen-square-mile tract of land forested with oak, hickory, beech, and elm, near Chatham. He recruited twenty-four respected businessmen, including Wilson Abbott, Toronto’s most successful black entrepreneur, to oversee the settlement’s finances, through an incorporated company empowered to raise investment capital, to be called the Elgin Association, in honor of Lord Elgin, the governor general of Canada. Settlers would be required to pay a total of one hundred and twenty-five dollars for fifty acres of land, the standard allotment, either in a lump sum or in yearly installments. Land could neither be rented nor sharecropped until the purchaser had fully paid for it, and if resold within ten years, it had to be transferred only to other blacks. King left nothing to chance. Before a single settler appeared on the land, he wanted to ensure that the community would be a success, and that it would not only match in respectability and aesthetics, but demonstrably surpass, neighboring white towns. Each settler was required to clear at least six acres immediately, and to build a house that had to be a minimum of eighteen feet by twenty-four feet in area, be set back precisely thirty-three feet from the road, and be surrounded by a picket fence and a flower garden.
King personally led his band of settlers by steamer to Cincinnati, where he formally handed them their papers of manumission, and then by canal to Lake Erie, and across it by steamer to Chatham. Waiting for them when they arrived in December 1849, they found the first of many fugitives who would make their home at Elgin, Isaac Riley and his family, who had escaped from slavery in Missouri only a few months before. Another early settler was the notorious William Parker, who was wanted for treason and murder in the United States for his leading role in the Christiana, Pennsylvania, resistance. He was introduced to King by Henry Bibb. “[King] received me very politely,” Parker wrote in his 1866 memoir, “and said that, after I should feel rested, I could go out and select a lot. He also offered to kindly give me meals and pork for my family, until I could get work.” Many more affluent blacks settled in the surrounding area, including Mary Ann Shadd’s father, Abraham, who bought two hundred acres of land nearby, and no doubt helped to soften her view of Reverend King.
From the start, King fostered an atmosphere of shared responsibility. The settlers, with King working alongside them, saw in hand, joined together in logging bees, chopping bees, and house-raising bees. “When we grew tired of the cold and hard work,” one settler recalled, “Mr. King would jump upon a stump and swing his axe around, calling out ‘Hurrah boys’ and set us laughing over some nonsense.” King led rather than governed, with a deft touch for the sensitivities of men and women who had only recently slipped from the control of omnipotent white masters. He established a five-member court of arbitration, for which he disqualified himself. The court took over management of industrialization, emergencies, festivals, and general welfare, and handled complaints and disputes. Other committees elected annually saw to it that laws were enforced, and the settlement’s strict regulations obeyed. Fugitives were always welcome, and at six o’clock every morning and nine every evening, a five-hundred-pound bell sent as a gift by the black Presbyterians of Pittsburgh rang out its clarion call across the forest, in King’s words, “proclaiming liberty to the captive.”
Initially, the settlers faced harsh prejudice. Opposition coalesced around the demagogic editor of the Chatham Journal and regional power, Edwin Larwill, a deceptively elfin-looking tinsmith with a fringe of curly beard, whose followers collectively called themselves the “Free and Easy Club.” Declaring blacks to be “indolent, vicious and ungovernable,” Larwill told anyone who would listen that any further influx would destroy property values, lead to racial “amalgamation,” and provoke war with the United States. He demanded that a poll tax be imposed on blacks, and that they be barred from voting, and ultimately deported to the United States. To blacks, Larwill was an all-too-familiar type. In the United States, men with views like his filled Congress and state legislatures, mobbed black neighborhoods, and hunted fugitive slaves across the countryside. King maintained a low profile, at least initially, keeping a strict watch over the settlement, and counseling the settlers to give no offense to their white neighbors. At times, armed blacks patrolled the woods around the settlement, making it clear that if they were attacked they would fight back.
But King had a subtler strategy to overcome whites’ fears. His trump card was education. He set out to provide Elgin with the best school in the vicinity. He rejected the idea of an industrial school, like Dawn’s, reasoning that it would channel blacks into low-skilled trades. Instead, he emphasized academics, beginning with English, arithmetic, and geography, and soon adding Latin and Greek. Within months after the school’s opening, white children appeared, asking if they could attend, and then white adults. King welcomed everyone free of charge. Soon there were more white children in the Elgin school than in the district one. “The hard feeling against myself and the coloured people considerably abated,” King would recall. “The whites and the blacks mingled freely on the playground, and sat together in the classroom, and stood up in the same class, and they found that the young coloured children were equa
l to the whites in learning, and some of the coloured children often stood at the head of the class.” Indeed, the fugitive Isaac Riley’s oldest son, Jerome, who had been among those waiting for King when he arrived in 1849, was often produced for visitors to demonstrate his faultless Latin recitation of Virgil’s Aeneid. He would go on to become a medical doctor, and establish the first Freedmen’s hospital in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. (Another graduate, William Rapier, would become a Reconstruction era congressman from Alabama.) By the end of the decade, black graduates from Elgin were teaching in district schools throughout the area.
White fears also ebbed as the settlement prospered. Elgin’s farmers profitably cultivated wheat, tobacco, corn, and hemp for the burgeoning markets of Canada West, enabling many settlers to pay off their farms in just five or six years. The settlement could soon boast a steam-powered sawmill, a brickyard, and a grist mill, as well as its own post office, temperance hotel, savings bank, and several churches. As early as 1854, Elgin’s taxpayers were contributing more to the public coffers than any comparable town in the region, causing land values to actually rise. By 1855 the settlement’s population had grown to more than eight hundred. (It would reach one thousand by the 1860s.) A visiting reporter from the New York Tribune found industrious inhabitants, tidy whitewashed cabins, and gardens blooming with phlox, poppies, and cornflowers. He wrote warmly of the people he met: “Those of them who have been accustomed to farming and have had some capital to commence with, have done remarkably well, having cleared more land and made greater improvements, than the greater majority of white settlers in the same time and under similar circumstances.”
In a sense, Elgin’s crowning moment came in 1857, when the racist Edwin Larwill ran for reelection to Parliament. In preparation, King had organized the registration of hundreds of new black voters. On election day, 320 of them joined King in front of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, in the heart of the Elgin Settlement, and walked proudly into Chatham, seven miles away, where they cast the first votes of their lives against Larwill, and for an abolitionist candidate for Parliament. When all the votes were counted, Larwill had been defeated by nearly eight hundred votes, many of them from whites, and the biggest margin ever recorded in the district. King wrote laconically, “From that time forward all opposition both to me and the coloured people ceased; they were now clothed with political power.”
The Underground Railroad continued to funnel fugitive slaves into Canada up to the eve of the Civil War, and beyond. For a few years more, there would still be gaggles of newcomers at the docks of Windsor and St. Catharines, dressed lumpily in donated clothes, and bewildered by freedom. But by the end of the decade, the homeowners of the Elgin Settlement, the townspeople of Chatham and Toronto, even the disgruntled farmers at the Dawn colony and on the Refugee Home Society’s tract, would cease to think of themselves as “fugitives.” They were Canadians. The underground had done its work well, and delivered them to safety. Now their lives angled away from the United States, and away from the dragging spiritual inertia of slavery, toward the free future, where their successes and failures were their own. Josiah Henson, Henry Bibb, Mary Ann Shadd, William King, even the bedraggled Hiram Wilson, had all in their own ways taught refugees who bore every physical, emotional, and mental injury known to the world of slavery how to begin thinking and acting like free men and women. Problems remained, of course, but they were the problems of ordinary citizens, not of slaves. There was still prejudice to be overcome, and it did not disappear quickly. But there was no second act to Edwin Larwill. There were no mobs, no lynchings. The racists accepted their defeat at the polls. For years to come, in the Chatham area, blacks would hold the balance of power in local elections. In 1859, another watershed was crossed when Abraham Shadd, the old underground veteran, was elected the regional councilor for his district, the first black to be elected to public office in Canada.
3
In the Grecian mansion where he lived in Peterboro, New York, Gerrit Smith was also dreaming of a black utopia. He was morally outraged by the state law which required that each African American prove that he owned at least two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of property before he would be permitted to vote. The law effectively disqualified almost every black voter in the state. (No such property qualification had been imposed on whites.) “[T]his mean and wicked exclusion,” Smith wrote, was but another intolerable outrage perpetrated by heartless politicians against “the most deeply wronged class of our citizens.” Smith felt spiritually compelled to respond in some way. But how? The plan that God revealed to him—for Smith’s understanding of the world allowed for nothing that was not provided by God—was one that only he of all living men could make a reality. The source of Smith’s immense wealth was land speculation. He owned at least 750,000 acres (some said a million acres—even Smith may not have known for sure), mostly in New York state. He proposed to donate 40 acres apiece to three thousand black New Yorkers, a total of 120,000 acres, completely free of charge. The scheme had some things in common with the other pioneer black communities in Canada. With the erection of farmsteads and the planting of crops, the assessed value for the property would lift each settler across the infamous two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar threshold. Not only would this plan enable them to become a significant voting bloc, it would also, he hoped, draw them together in a community rooted in the ennobling, spiritually transformative tillage of the soil.
Smith had an almost religious feeling about land: Paradoxically, although he was one of the largest landowners in the United States, he felt an abiding uneasiness with the principle of private property. He believed that the possession of land was “a natural, universal, and inalienable right,” and that each man had a right to as much of it as he needed. “Alas that good men should be so slow to see that the acknowledged right of every generation, to the use of the earth, as well as the use of the sea, the light, and the air, is necessarily preliminary to that state of universal comfort, and happiness, for which good men labor and pray!” He enlisted prominent African Americans, including Frederick Douglass, to hold meetings around the state to sign up volunteers. “The sharp axe of the sable-armed pioneer should be at once uplifted over the soil of Franklin and Essex counties, and the noise of falling trees proclaim the glorious dawn of civilization throughout their borders,” Douglass proclaimed in the North Star. “Let the work commence at once. Companies of tens and twenties should be formed, and the woods at once invaded.” By the autumn of 1847, Smith had made out 2,000 deeds: 861 in New York City, 215 in Queens County, 197 in King’s County, and so on throughout the state. Although the grants were not specifically allotted to fugitives from slavery, many of the recipients were certainly former slaves.
Apart from his generosity with his land, Smith’s philanthropy was legendary. “The tide of benefaction was continuously flowing,” as his biographer, Octavius Frothingham, put it. “The small cheques flew about in all directions, carrying in the aggregate thousands of dollars.” Frothingham estimated that it “carried away” forty or fifty thousand dollars a year. On his desk, Smith kept a stack of blank checks in varying amounts, waiting only for his signature. Sometimes he gave away tens of thousands of dollars in a single day. He sent donations to destitute Irish, Poles, and Greeks; orphans; indigent old maids; bankrupt farmers; paupers who needed money to send their children to school; as well as untold numbers of beggars and swindlers. Free blacks were frequent recipients of his generosity. One of them, William G. Allen, a talented flautist whom he had sponsored at the Oneida Institute, had gone on to teach at the Dawn colony.
Nothing was dearer to Smith’s heart than abolitionism. He was close to the Tappan brothers, Lewis and Arthur, of New York City, and played host to their ideological nemesis William Lloyd Garrison. He corresponded with, among others, the Ohio firebrand John Rankin, former president Martin Van Buren, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Senator William H. Seward of New York, Lincoln’s future secretary of state. He was also a major fin
ancial supporter of Oberlin College, in Ohio, the most important racially integrated institution of higher learning in the United States. He counted as personal friends Henry Bibb, Frederick Douglass, Jermain Loguen, and Lewis Hayden of Boston, who had organized the Shadrach rescue, and he willingly donated money to anyone with an even half-plausible plan to help free slaves. In one instance, when he learned that a slaveholder was willing to emancipate his fifty slaves if they would be taken to a Northern state and provided for, Smith contacted the man and directed that they be sent to him. On another occasion, he had commissioned a friend to travel to Kentucky to purchase on his behalf an entire family of slaves who had once belonged to Smith’s wife’s family, and to personally escort them back to Peterboro.
The mansion at Peterboro was a welcoming watering hole for every abolitionist lecturer who traveled through Central New York, as well as for fugitives fresh from the South, who found themselves in what must have seemed a bizarre, if friendly environment. On any given day, Elizabeth Cady Stanton recalled, a guest might encounter a party of refined sophisticates from the cities, “a shouting Methodist, a Whig pro-slavery member of Congress, a southern ex-slave holder,” three or four local Oneida Indians, a speculator trying to interest Smith in some investment scheme, “a crazy Millerite or two, who, disgusted with the world, thought it destined to be burned up at an early day,” and a “sprinkling of Negroes from the sunny South on their way to Canada.” In his diary, Smith meticulously recorded the unending parade:
“Mrs. Crampton, a beggar woman, spent last night with us. Charles Johnson, a fugitive slave from Hagerstown, took tea at our house last evening and breakfasted with us this morning.
“Mr. William Corning, a wandering pilgrim, as he styles himself, dines with us. He is peddling his own printed productions.
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