ON THE ROAD NORTH - Black Canada and Journey to Freedom

John Graves Simcoe, the only son of a widowed mother, wasn’t rich. He wasn’t an aristocrat either, but he had fought well for the British army during the American Revolution, and in 1791 he was rewarded with an important job – as governor of the new colony of Upper Canada (today’s Ontario). As Simcoe and his wife made the slow journey by boat across Lake Ontario to the wilderness capital of Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake), he was full of ambitious plans – one of which was to outlaw slavery in the new province. That turned out to be harder than he expected.

Most of the early inhabitants of Upper Canada were Loyalist refugees from the former American colonies. Many had brought slaves with them into Canada. With free workers in short supply in the wilderness colony, they were prepared to fight tooth and nail to keep their valuable slave labour. Fortunately, Simcoe was a deal-maker. The settlers also wanted to keep the form of local self-government they had been used to in the south. Simcoe worked out a compromise. The assembly passed a new law that – while it did not outlaw slavery – made the import of new slaves illegal and freed the children of all slaves at age 25. In return, Simcoe allowed the settlers a modified form of local government. Thanks largely to Simcoe’s forward-looking legislation – the first ever to limit slavery in the British Empire – slavery dwindled quickly in Upper Canada. By 1810, it had virtually disappeared. Just as importantly, Simcoe’s law helped turn Canada into a haven both for escaped slaves and for abolitionists at work.

Detroit was in an uproar in 1833, and the free Black community took to the streets. A young couple who had lived among them for two years had been arrested as fugitive slaves. Thornton Blackburn’s destiny was likely to return to slavery in Kentucky, to be whipped, branded and sent south to be worked to death on a cotton plantation. His wife would be sold as a prostitute.

That’s not what happened. Two heavily veiled women asked to visit Mrs. Blackburn in her cell. There, one of them changed clothes with the prisoner, and the other whisked the girl out past the guards. Next day, as Lucie’s husband was led in chains from the jail, the crowd surged forward and grabbed the boy. Within the hour, Thornton and Lucie Blackthorn were together again – in Canada.

The story doesn’t end there. The United States applied for the Blackburns’ return as criminals, and the Canadian court made a famous decision – that no accused person may be returned to a country where the punishment for a crime is more severe than it would be in Canada. That’s still the law in Canada. The Blackburns were saved. They moved to Toronto, where Thornton founded the first cab company in Upper Canada. He returned to Kentucky just once after that – risking his freedom and life in doing so – to bring his mother out of slavery.

In 1858, a secret meeting took place in Chatham, Ontario. John Brown, a violent American abolitionist, had come north to seek support from Canadian abolitionists for an armed rebellion. He planned by force of arms to establish a slave-free state in the mountains of West Virginia.

That meeting was just one of many that took place in Canada as the years passed. Canada’s nearness to the United States and its forward-looking laws had encouraged many leaders in the fight for freedom to settle here. Abolitionists used Canada as a staging ground for the campaign. Here, they organized meetings, speaking tours, fund-raising appeals and rescue missions to the south. They founded newspapers, schools and church communities. The people who gathered at Chatham had tried everything. Now, they were ready to experiment with war. They gave John Brown their blessing.

On Sunday, September 17, 1859, John Brown and 18 men – including one Canadian – attacked a federal armoury at Harpers Ferry in West Virginia. The few who survived the battle – including Brown – were executed. His last words were: “I…am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood.” He was right. His execution helped spark the American Civil War in 1861. More than 600,000 Americans died in the fight that ended slavery.

A meeting was called in Montreal on January 17, 1861. Hundreds of people turned out that night in freezing weather to demonstrate support for a man – an escaped slave – who was facing return to the United States to stand trial for murder. John Anderson, during his escape, had killed a man. After eight years, the American government was demanding his return, and a panel of Toronto judges had decided to obey the request. Montreal was outraged.

John Anderson in the 1860s was one of an estimated 20,000 slaves who had made their way to Canada over the years. The movement swelled from a trickle to a flood after 1850, when the Americans passed a new and tougher Fugitive Slave Law. Escaped slaves who, until then, had felt safe in the "free" states decided to flee further, to Canada. More slaves were also leaving the plantations, and the loss of money and manpower was beginning to hurt the South. An exceptionally healthy and skilled slave was worth anywhere up to $2,000 ($40,000 in today’s money). With some estimates suggesting that 1,500 slaves fled every year in the 1850s, the South was literally hemorrhaging wealth. Sympathy for the slaves rose to new heights in Canada, where abolitionists were well organized and ready to protest decisions like that in the John Anderson case.

Anderson’s story had a happy ending. With public opinion insisting that he had acted in self-defence, the case passed to a higher court, and Anderson was released on a technicality. The Montreal Gazette was jubilant. “Anderson, the now celebrated fugitive slave, was in town yesterday, and called upon us…to return thanks for the manner in which Montrealers stood by him.”