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To Master—A Long Goodnight:

The Story of Uncle Tom, A Historical Narrative

To Master—A Long Goodnight (1946) was Gysin’s first book, published by Eileen Garrett’s Creative Age Press in an edition of one thousand copies. After his transfer from the American paratroopers to the Canadian army during the war, he met Tex Henson, great-grandson of Josiah Henson, the real-life model for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom, who had settled in Ontario, Canada, and founded agricultural communities among the former slaves. Subtitled The Story of Uncle Tom, a Historical Narrative, the book draws on Henson’s own account of his life (written before the decline of his Canadian ventures, while he was still a touring phenomenon), as well as extensive additional research, in an effort to understand the measure of Henson’s complicity in what came to be seen as the negative representation of Uncle Tom. Covering Henson’s entire life till his death at a ripe old age, the narrative goes on to show how that image from the popular novel ultimately affected Henson’s own reception in the world, how the real life and the fiction intertwined as a lesson and warning for later generations.

The book also stands as an early marker of Gysin’s lifelong interest in history, and his ability to make connections between different cultural and historical currents. His insight and sensitivity to the subject of race relations were rare for a white man at the time, perhaps a benefit of his non-American origins. As a result, the work gained him entry into black intellectual circles for years after. An appendix not excerpted here, “A History of Slavery in Canada,” made up the final third of the book.

Don’t Chase after Me

I’m on my way to CanadaWhere everyone is free.So Goodnight, Old Master,Don’t chase after me.—Slave Song

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When this story was told by its hero, he called it Truth Stranger Than Fiction, for Harriet Beecher Stowe had modeled the principal character in her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin upon an earlier account of his life. Under her hand a metamorphosis took place, in which the fictional character of Uncle Tom grew to such strength in the popular imagination of the troubled time that it shouldered aside, and seemed to condemn to obscurity, the human counterpart from which it had sprung. The man was robbed of his personality and almost of his name by a character in a novel, which came to be such a symbol of the inevitable struggle about to take place that those who lived too close to the event to be able to see it in perspective might well mistake the symbol for the cause.

This book is about Uncle Tom, the man and the symbol, and inevitably, therefore, it is an attempt to analyze the society which created him. It is not a book against any individual; nor is it a book against the original Uncle Tom, Josiah Henson; but it is a book against the attitude to which the term, Uncle Tomism, has come to be applied. It was written in the army, in barracks before “lights out,” in hotels, in trains, and in those libraries which could be reached on weekend passes. For that reason there are undoubtedly faults of scholarship and lacunae in research, but there is no apology for the intention of the book, except inasmuch as it might be misconstrued by living members of the Henson family, some of whom were the author’s comrades in arms in the Canadian army. The writer wishes to assure them that no personal disrespect is intended and feels sure that a certain objectivity—a great deal of good along with some bad—will be found throughout the story.

The life of Josiah Henson is illuminating because it shows how a man was formed in slavery and in freedom. Lewis Clark, himself an escaped slave and the author of a narrative from which Mrs. Stowe borrowed some of her material, said, “Slavery was a curious blend of force and concession; of arbitrary disposal by the master and self-direction by the slave; of tyranny and benevolence; of antipathy and affections.” The escape from slavery often involved a moral decision on the part of the slave, curious though that may seem, which has a relevance today. So, in our own time, a moral decision, complicated by social and economic factors, faces every individual of the Negro group who comes in contact, as indeed he must, with the dominant white majority. Whether or not a Negro will be called an Uncle Tom by his own people depends on the manner in which he conducts himself in his dealings with whites.

The term, Uncle Tom, has become a cant phrase among American Negroes, along with half a hundred other synonyms in current slang, but the type of person to whom it refers is known in other minority groups as well. The Japanese-Americans or the Jews might well adopt the term for those of their leaders who counsel compromise rather than struggle. There are, of course, both Negroes and whites who will defend the manner in which an Uncle Tom conducts his relations with the rest of the world. They assure themselves that there is no other way in which the things that are vitally necessary at the moment can be obtained, and are inclined to find justification for their point of view by claiming that they are “practical” and by pointing to the achievements of a man like Booker T. Washington. What may have been true at one time—and perhaps even then to a much more limited extent than they are willing to admit—is no longer true today. To continue to conform consciously to a pattern of segregation is to assure the fact that segregation with all its attendant evils will continue to exist. If, therefore, an attempt is made in this book to represent Henson as a three-dimensional character, it does not imply in any way that today it is possible to condone actions similar to his.

One can no longer believe that either Uncle Tom’s Cabin or the John Brown raid at Harper’s Ferry caused the Civil War in the United States. Rather, both Uncle Tom and John Brown were created and shaped by the same deep forces in society which brought about the irrepressible conflict. At the time, of course, both John Brown and Uncle Tom were identified with the war in the popular imagination, which always seeks an easy, obvious, and often humanized symbol in order to create a hero through whose actions a world event can be interpreted according to the customs which rule each private life.

The popular attitude was conveniently shaped into capsule form by Oliver Wendell Holmes:

All through the conflict up and down

Marched Uncle Tom and Old John Brown;

One ghost, one form ideal:

And which was false and which was true

And which was mightier of the two

The wisest Sibyl never knew

For both alike were real.

In the image of the poet, Brown was the form ideal, though his body lay a-mouldering in the grave, while from that grave had sprung a song to claim that his soul went marching on. The old hymn tune to which they had set the words rolled and thundered through the ranks of the Union, or began, muffled and indistinct as the boots of tired men, to rise, gather, and swell into a mighty monotonous chorus of voices which carried the soldiers another mile and another mile.

The face of the nation was about to change.

The South hanged Brown at Charlestown in Virginia; Lee, not yet a general, had led the last charge against the engine house at Harper’s Ferry on October 16, 1859; Stonewall Jackson was among those who saw Brown die one bright morning in December of the same year.

Death had delivered him: “This is a beautiful country; I never had the pleasure of seeing it before,” he said to those who led him out to the gallows, and it was true that he had seen no country before except the country of his vision. Now he was done with camp and countermarch. The Kansas War, the secret journeys, the convention in Canada, the shepherding of slaves to safety, and the expedition undertaken had led him here inevitably. In the letters which he was allowed to write from prison—they proved stronger weapons against the “peculiar institution” than the pikes with which he had proposed to arm the slaves—we hear the voice of a happy man sure of his destiny. Old John Brown, Osawatomie Brown, the angry prophet and antique hero, knew that the principal condition of his new-found happiness was the limit of time in which he could enjoy it; he was already free. “I am worth now infinitely more to die than to live.”

To those who have written of the last days before the attack on Harper’s Ferry it has seemed probable that he planned it to be a glorious failure. If that was indeed so, what faith he had in himself and in his followers that he should tell them nothing of his plans! He was always a secret man, and he knew where he went. With no insurrection of slaves behind him and the knowledge that even some of the abolitionists would forswear him, he stormed to “an almost certain immortality, dragging with him certain unwilling gentlemen who will be embarrassed to find themselves there as his murderers.” The manner of his failure was to be the very measure of his success. A strong man and his sons were gone to their death achieving a great goal—in fact, and in agreement with the poet’s syntax, Brown was the “form ideal.” But what of Uncle Tom? What was he?

Uncle Tom, then, was a “ghost” because he was a character from fiction and because Harriet Beecher Stowe had killed him off in such impressive literary fashion that no one could doubt that he was really in heaven with Little Eva. Yet was he only a character from the book? The poet would seem to imply, and the Sibyl must surely have known, that both he and John Brown were real.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly poured out from the presses like an avalanche and swept away the greater part of its readers in a torrent of tears, though here and there it was answered by a countertorrent of abuse. In a few years people were to say that it was “the book that had started the war.” Everyone read it; almost everyone saw it acted as well. Uncle Tom, Little Eva, Topsy, Simon Legree, Eliza, all became giant-size as they played out their drama in theaters and in tents behind the kerosene flares and the pine-pitch torches. Even Mrs. Stowe, for the one time in an otherwise virtuous life, was known to have stolen into a theater—heavily veiled, of course—to see her creatures on the stage.

It was Harriet Beecher Stowe who without a doubt was the best-hated woman south of Mason and Dixon’s line, and the ranks of the Northern army were filled with young men who had, when the war broke out, scarcely left her book behind them in the nursery. Yet it was not the shade of a poke bonnet and bustle that Mr. Holmes saw in the smoke of battle. No, it was that “old darky” with his aureole of cotton-wool hair and beard that the poet thought he saw there: Uncle Tom, bobbing and bowing, loving as he suffered. Yes, Massa; no, Massa. It was this picture of a subservient Negro, his master’s friend, the conciliator and turn-the-other-cheek brother, which Mrs. Stowe presented for the admiration of the nineteenth century.

“Uncle Tom” meant one thing to the nineteenth century, but today the term means something quite different. For while John Brown has passed into history and legend, it is Uncle Tom who goes marching on. He is the ghost of a certain relationship between the races in America, and as he marches toward the second half of the twentieth century his is a ghost which must be laid.

It is in the hope of laying his ghost that this book is written. To the problem with which we are presented in this country and elsewhere by the color bar—segregation, the job ceiling, and every other evidence of prejudice—there is no solution which does not involve struggle. The use of force is not an abstract or academic question, for force is used every day in one form or another by those who wish to ensure that the lines continue to be drawn according to race or religion.

The enforcement of discrimination by legal means, or by extralegal means which are condoned by public opinion, is an application of force against a minority group which is bewildering to anyone who has read the American Constitution. If such acts are acceptable to the majority of Americans, it can be only because of a lack of understanding of the age-old technique of divide and conquer. New evidences of the common interest of the majority of the people are continually coming to light, yet the old methods of subjugation will continue to work if they are not understood.

In order to divide people it is necessary to do so in a manner that seems logical, or at least obvious, and which plays upon their own sense of insecurity. This division may be accomplished according to the skin pigmentation, though the line of demarcation might just as well, in the absence of a pigmented group, be pushed to its absurd conclusion and, after a suitable period of inculcation of prejudice, the mass might well be split according to the color of the eye. Then we might have a war of the Blue Eyes against the Brown Eyes. Hitler almost succeeded.

Yet, while one group is elevated at the expense of the other, the mass pressure generated in the subject group must be occasionally relieved. In order best to accomplish this—to provide a safety valve, as it were—an influential individual in the minority can be allowed special privilege on the understanding that he will, in exchange, work to soften the ugly moods and to pacify the anger of his fellows. Such a man can be had in many ways, and he need not be a villain—as indeed Josiah Henson was not. The Uncle Tom of any group can be persuaded to accept a position of minor importance, where his every gesture will, in fact, be padded with compromise, if he can be made to feel that his elevation is not only an individual triumph but is an achievement which, by reflection, will be of benefit to the minority from which he comes. Unless the person concerned be of high moral character and integrity of purpose, it is easy to succumb to comfort and advantage, to become a mere tool.

It may seem almost cynical to say that to a large extent this is happily not possible for members of the Negro minority. The maneuver cannot be managed well enough because of the rigidity of the system of prejudice which surrounds all men and women of color. An affluent Negro, or one who has achieved distinction, will find it as arduous and even impossible as will his poorest and most illiterate brother to achieve and enjoy the equality which is his legal right. True enough, he can turn his back and attempt to segregate himself in a Black Society or Black Economy as certain groups have done in the past, or, driven by despair and the mirage of material success, attempt to gain it or a semblance of such success by whatever means are closest to hand. If in the attempt he must be servile or a clown, he is most likely to be called an Uncle Tom by those who know their folk history, for Uncle Tomism has a long tradition to which, unwittingly, Mrs. Stowe gave a permanent name.

In the days of the Big House, when the plantation flourished, the house servants were in a position far superior to that of the field servants; they, and above all perhaps the women, made cultural and economic advances which are still reflected in the lives and life patterns of the Negro population of today. The house servants were usually those who were brought up from childhood in close contact with the lives of the masters, and it is little wonder if they came to identify their own interests with those of the owners. This identification produced a conflict not only between the two groups of slaves but also in the personal lives of those slaves who benefited from the advantages of increased freedom of movement and intimate contact with their masters. The house servants came to patronize the field hands, regarding themselves as superior, since they had learned that which never could be learned in the cotton fields—the manners and customs of the country to which they were to belong—and in consequence they exercised their native ingenuity in improving the domestic accomplishments of American life. Field work and the system, on the other hand, drove from the minds of the field slaves all that they had ever been in the past—whatever it had been.

The house servants were the first among their fellows to learn the art of reading and writing, at a time when it was punishable by law to teach a slave to read. They thus became the spokesmen of the field hands, their brothers in oppression, who had grievances which they found it difficult to express, for they were neither as articulate as the house servant nor could they get the ear of the master as easily. At the same time the field workers admired, envied, and hated the house servant who had become their arbitrator—the go-between on whose interest and ingenuity they often depended for comfort and safety.

The house servant, while he might sometimes be inclined to forget it in the warmth of the Big House or in the just pride that he had in his accomplishments, was nevertheless a slave himself, in constant fear of being sent back to the cotton fields and the rice swamp. Though he might consider the welfare of his fellows enough to intercede for them, or to aid them secretly in his function as butler by giving them handouts from the back porch, yet, even with the best of intentions, he soon came to know the rather narrow limits beyond which he could not go. The system made him a compromiser, and thus it was not he but the system which was at fault. In all truth, his intentions were often good, and even when they were not, or did not seem to be, little personal fault could be attributed to him, for like all men he was the sum of his personal qualities shaped in the greater mold of his environment. Yet what Mrs. Stowe saw in the type as heroic and admirable were the same qualities which brought a sneer to the lips of those who knew him most intimately; no wonder the Negroes recognized Uncle Tom when they found him in the pages of her book.

It is doubtful, however, whether anyone would have recognized the human counterpart of Mrs. Stowe’s character quite as easily, for he was a much more complex character than it was within her comprehension, or perhaps her ability, to depict. If he had not left an account of his own life from which to draw the details of his story and in which can be seen the reflection of his character, it would be impossible to see him truly today. Mrs. Stowe could not kill Josiah Henson, and she had to excuse herself more than once for the “artistic necessity” which had obliged her to kill him in her book, under the guise of Uncle Tom, with such gusto that he often found it difficult to persuade people of his identity.

We will let the man speak for himself in an extract from a speech that he made when he was already known half the world over as Uncle Tom, and found no cause to be ashamed of the name. We will let him prove that he was not dead in 1877, and then turn to the story of his life to find what made him the sort of man he was.

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According to the Dumfries and Galloway Standard of Scotland for Wednesday, April 25, 1877, Josiah Henson was “loudly cheered” when he began his speech:

There has been so much written and said about me, and so many things thought about me that I did not know I could do better than come and let you see me. (Laughter and applause.) It has been spread about that “Uncle Tom” is coming and that is what has brought you here. Now allow me to say that my name is not Tom and never was Tom and that I do not want any other name inserted in the newspapers for me but my own. My name is Josiah Henson, always was and always will be. I never change my colours. (Loud laughter.) I could not if I would and would not if I could. (Renewed laughter.) Well, inquiry in the minds of some has led to inquiry in the minds of others. You have read and heard some persons say that Uncle Tom was dead. And could he be here? It is an imposition that is being practised on us. Very well, I do not blame you for saying that. I do not think you are to blame. A great many people in this country have come to me and asked me if I was not dead. (Laughter.) Well now to remove this difficulty if it exists in your minds. As a matter of course, it is not pleasant for me to hear that I am traversing this country and practising an imposition on people. No it is not pleasant; and the only way I have to meet it is to say that it shows me that people ain’t well read, or have forgotten what they read, if they have ever read it at all. They have forgotten that Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a novel; and that it must have seemed a glorious finish to that novel that she should kill her hero … a glorious finish. Now you can get the Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin … you can buy it for about sixpence, about fifteen or sixteen cents … and you commence and read it. I see that gentleman along there setting it down. (Referring to our reporter.) That is all right. (Laughter.) I see you. (Laughter.) Well, you commence at the 34th chapter and you read up to the 57th and I think you will there see me. (Applause.)

You remember that when the novel of Mrs. Stowe came out, it shook the foundations of this world. It shook the Americans out of their shoes and of their shirts. It left some of them on the sandbar barefooted and scratching their heads, so they came to the conclusion that the whole thing was a fabrication, a falsehood and a lie; and they accused her of writing it and they demanded of her a clue or a key to the novel she had written, the exposure she had made and the libel she had fixed on the United States.

And so as she was in duty bound to give something, she, I think in 1853, brought out the Key, between you and she, and in that she spoke of me, and in that way set the Negro free. (Laughter and applause.)

I am not Robert Burns … (Laughter.) but that is a fact. (Applause.)

You will find in that Key of me the position which I held in relation to her work.

They said there were never any such things perpetrated on the Negroes; never any Negroes so afflicted, and that the book was a libel on the people of the United States; and when she took to this Key she told them where they would find a man called Josiah Henson. She gave me a great name and said I was a venerable fellow, in which she was not much mistaken, for I was an old man, to be found in Canada West, laboring there as a minister of the Gospel, preaching to the fugitive slaves, encouraging the cause of education and building up the poor afflicted race of Negroes. (Applause.)

Josiah Henson, then, is my name.

Josiah Henson, then, was his name. The black baby was born June 15, 1789, and was the first to be born on the estate of a Mr. Francis Newman, who owned the father, and to whom the mother had been hired out. He was called Josiah for a Dr. Josiah MacPherson of Charles County, Maryland, who owned his mother, and Henson for an uncle of the doctor who had been an officer in the Revolutionary War.

On the Newman estate, which was about a mile from Port Tobacco, in the state of Maryland, the child grew to the age of memory, carried on his mother’s back in the fields or playing on the beaten-earth floor of the slave quarters. His memory, which was excellent, was to serve him well in later years and to be of use to Mrs. Stowe, for his story was first taken down from him in 1849 by a Mr. S. A. Eliot and published in Boston the same year. There Mrs. Stowe was to come across it in the reading rooms of the Abolitionist Society and was to be immediately struck by the vivid picture of slave life which it gave. It was written without the showman’s patter of the speech which we have quoted, but all the elements of her melodrama were there in their terrible reality.

Josiah’s memory of his father was a tragic one, for he saw him brought back to the slave quarters, half-dead, after having been beaten for striking an overseer who had attacked his mother. He had wounded the overseer and then hidden out in the woods, but hunger had driven him back to find food. He was soon captured and whipped in front of the poor whites and slaves of the neighborhood who gathered to witness the ceremony—one hundred lashes and mutilation being the penalty for his offense. After having assured themselves that he could stand the whole punishment, his owners had him flogged by the blacksmith.

Then, while he was semiconscious, his right ear was tacked to the whipping post; a slash with a knife and the ear was left on the post as he fell to the ground.

After this brutality, the slave became so surly and intractable that Newman decided that he could no longer safely keep him on the plantation and sold him to someone in Alabama. Josiah’s mother and five brothers and sisters never saw him again nor heard what became of him. Dr. MacPherson, who owned the mother and therefore the children, demanded their return of Newman, for he did not hold with such cruelty. They lived for two or three years more on his estate until, kindly man that he was, he tipped up one too many, as kindly men will, and fell flat on his face in a stream and drowned there.

The death of a kind master was a great calamity for the slaves, for it meant change, and change was rarely for the better in their experience. Upon the death of MacPherson the remnants of the Henson family were to be put on the auction block—the most dreaded experience in the life of a slave, no matter how often repeated. The cruel humiliation of being put on exhibit for sale, and the overwhelming fear that one might be sold “down south,” were factors quite as terrible as the certainty that families would be torn apart and that a common past of love and shared experience would be lost forever. Every slave’s life was a small circle beaten out around the tethering post; communication was impossible over the shortest distance; history was a black pit and oral tradition a fabric shredded into rags, torn and scattered to the winds by constant partings. Nothing remained of yesterday and nothing could be expected of tomorrow. Human beings mated and bred in cages; the rumor of a sale was enough to stampede them.

The auction block was a little dais with three or four steps leading up to it which each slave had to mount while the auctioneer read off his name, age, and accomplishments. Josiah’s brothers and sisters exhibited their teeth and muscles, jumped and danced to show their agility and were bid off first. Then his mother was sold to Isaac Riley of Montgomery County, Maryland, and she begged him to buy her Josiah, too, in order that she might not be separated from the last of the children. Since he had no need of the child and refused to buy him, the boy was bought by a man who owned a tavern near Montgomery courthouse some miles away. This man, a tavern owner named Robb, had a line of stagecoaches and owned about forty slaves, among whom he threw the child of six.

Josiah sickened and lay all day on the dirt floor, uncared for by any of the other slaves who were too brutalized by their own treatment to think of bothering with him. He was left all day alone while they were driven out into the fields or about their other work, and, when they returned at night, they threw him a piece of corn bread or a dried herring so long as he could still eat. Soon, however, he was unable to move and lay there near death. By chance, Robb, his new owner, met Riley, who had bought the mother, and offered him the child in return for a payment which was to be made in horseshoeing. Riley agreed, and Josiah was returned to his mother who nursed him back to health.

He grew in Riley’s service and learned all the lessons that a cruel master could teach: “The character and the habits of the slave and the slaveholder were created and perpetuated by their relative position,” says the autobiography, but it was to be more than sixty years before Henson could express himself in that concise and elegant way, if indeed the words were not put into his mouth by a ghost writer. At any rate, he was clever and observant, quick to learn and critical of his environment even as a boy. The slaves on Riley’s place were beasts of the field who huddled ten or a dozen to a pen and slept on the ground. In their log huts were no wooden floors, no furniture but beds made of a heap of rags thrown on the trodden mud and boxed in with a board or two. Henson said of this way of life: “Our favorite way of sleeping, however, was on a plank, our heads raised on an old jacket and our feet toasting before the smoldering fire. The wind whistled and the rain and snow blew in through the cracks while the damp earth soaked up the moisture until the floor was miry as a pigsty.”

The principal food on Riley’s farm was cornmeal and salt herring, to which, in summer, there was added a little buttermilk from the churnings and a few vegetables which were grown in truck patches and tended after dark when the field work was done. There were two regular meals a day: breakfast at twelve, after work since dawn, and a supper when the day was over. In harvest season there were three meals, for then the work was harder and a little dried meat was added to their diet. Clothing was of tow cloth, with only a shirt for children. As they grew up, they were also given a pair of pantaloons or a gown, and in winter a round coat, and a wool hat once in two or three years, and one pair of shoes a year.

Under even these conditions Josiah grew to be strong and agile as a young buck, he says; he could run faster, wrestle better, dance better, jump higher than any of the others on the farm. At fifteen he could outhoe, outreap, outhusk all the other slaves; and he worked all day in the field and ran through the orchard at night with the wild young ones following him, to steal and broil a chicken and plot first-rate tricks to dodge work. Yet he loved to work because it brought him to the notice of the overseer, and praise was dear to him. “One word of commendation from the petty despot who ruled over us would set me up for a month.” Josiah had not the makings of Uncle Tom for nothing, and there was just one way for a slave to better his lot and that was to move toward the Big House.

If there was another way, the way of escape, Josiah had not yet heard of it, and in all fairness to him it must be said that the means hardly existed at this time. From the earliest years of the nineteenth century, individual slaves had begun to escape from the plantations and make their way north to the free states. Many of those who ran away from the slave masters of the deep South marked a trail with their corpses or were caught and returned for punishment, mutilation, or death as an example to their fellows. Means of communication were closely guarded by armed patrols who demanded a pass of any Negro who might, in extraordinary circumstances, be traveling alone. The nature of the country, with its dismal swamps, broad marshes, and savannahs, made any travel, except by the few well-known roads, almost impossible. Nonetheless, some did from the earliest years manage to get to the northern states, as can be proven by the record of several attempts made in the late eighteenth century on the part of slave owners who wished to have their property returned to them. Even during Henson’s boyhood several ex-slaves had managed to make their way to Canada and a more secure freedom beyond the reach of American law, but the legend of the North Star, which led and guided those pushed by a relentless hunger for freedom, had not yet become part of the folklore whispered in the slave quarters of every plantation. One cannot blame young Henson for not knowing that there were sweeter joys than the rare and careless word of praise from the man who cracked the whip; that is, one cannot blame him yet. The fault in his nature, the fissure line along which it can be split, does not become evident until he is an older man. In his boyhood, typical as it was of the slave boy of superior talent and physical endowment, we can trace the causes. Let those who can, read an analogy in the circumstances and social pressures that surround, form, and shape a boy born today into the same racial group, however the legal freedom of that group may have changed in a century or so.

Young Henson would naturally reject the movement to revolt, for his first memory was that of the tragedy to which a movement of revolt had led his father, and one cannot doubt that his mother constantly reminded him of its terrible consequences. She had stood there, calling on her husband to cease beating the overseer, and had persuaded him not to kill the man who had attacked her. She was a religious woman who taught her child that violence was in all cases evil and that one must submit and trust to prayer, and she must have worried over his high-spirited escapades and boyish devilry, thinking that it might lead him to a tragic end.

[[ After undergoing a religious conversion around 1807, Henson became a more submissive and willing worker, rising in influence on the Riley estate until he became overseer. Recognized for his industry and his knowledge of farming and managing property, he supervised his fellow slaves with kindness, always seeking to ease their hardships. Gradually he took over management of the accounts and did all the buying and selling. During this time, having defended his master in a brawl, he was brutally attacked by the overseer of Riley’s brother, Amos; Henson, his arms broken and his shoulder blades smashed, was maimed for life. In 1825 Isaac Riley needed to dodge his creditors, so he asked a favor of his loyal slave: to lead all of his slaves down to Kentucky to his brother’s plantation. Henson succeeded in the perilous journey, proudly keeping his promise and maintaining his sense of moral virtue, even as he rejected opportunities from freed slaves on the Ohio side of the river for them all to seek their freedom. A few years later, Riley decided to sell the slaves he had sent to Kentucky, except Henson, whom he wanted returned. Henson grew determined to buy his freedom and raised most of the money during his trek back to Maryland by preaching on a detour through Ohio. But Riley cheated him out of the deal. Left with nothing but ineffective manumission papers, Henson returned to his family on the Kentucky plantation. Yet even then, in that period of unrest prior to Nat Turner’s rebellion of 1831, as a secret plan of revolt gained momentum, he persuaded the slaves to desist from rebellion as an act that was too dangerous and above all not Christian, once again becoming a sort of accomplice in the perpetuation of their misery. ]]

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One day Riley suddenly announced that his young son, who was also called Amos, was going down the river to New Orleans in a flat-bottomed boat full of farm produce. Henson was to go with him, and they were to start the next day and dispose of the cargo to the best advantage. Josiah knew at once what this meant. He was to be sold too. No one said so, but he was sure of it. Rumors of an exchange of letters between the brothers had come from the Big House, and this was the result. Either those two intended turning him into riches without wings and to share the money, or Mr. Amos was stealing a march on his brother. Henson never knew.

He told his wife to sew the precious paper in a cloth, and then to sew the cloth around his waist. It might yet be useful; at any rate, he would have it with him wherever he was to go.

The boat was loaded with beef cattle, pigs, poultry, corn whisky, and other merchandise. Three white men were hired to handle the boat. Henson said goodbye, perhaps forever, to his family and stepped aboard. He was the only Negro, and was, therefore, forced to stand more watches than all the rest, but this turned to his advantage, for he quickly learned all that there was to know about handling the boat. Very soon, he could shoot by a “sawyer,” land on a bank, avoid a snag or a steamboat in the rapid current of the Mississippi as well as the captain himself. The latter seemed to have developed some disease of the eyes and actually became blind. Henson took over. He was, in fact, the master of the boat, although he did not have any more idea of what lay around the next bend than did the others, for none of them had ever been down the river before. They had to halt at night and travel by day.

At night someone had to keep watch. They were in danger of river pirates and bands of escaped Negroes who, until they were captured or killed, lived as marauders in the wilds along the river’s banks. These Negroes lived in a sort of primitive freedom, frequently attacking such boats as were tied up for the night, killing and robbing.

At one stop, a curious incident took place. This was at Vicksburg, where Henson got permission to visit a plantation a few miles inland. It might have been gossip from the Big House, the grapevine, or a chance remark made by young Amos Riley which told him that it was to this place that his former fellow-slaves and charges had been sold. It was the saddest visit he ever made. He found his friends old and broken after only four years in this malarial climate. They worked long hours, half-naked, in the marshes under the burning sun, ill-treated and ill-fed; they were tortured by mosquitoes, horseflies, and black gnats, and thought only of death as a deliverance. At first sight of Josiah they cried, and when he told of his own predicament they felt sorry that he was to be subjected to the same fate to which they were condemned. They seem to have felt no resentment toward him for the part which he had played in their betrayal. The very fact that he went to visit them would seem to show that he expected none. Yet the memory of that wretched group was to haunt him until his death. He had sold them, and now he could cry over them, and pray and roll his eyes to heaven.

The boat drifted on down the great river. To his eye everything in man and in nature looked evil. He saw nothing but the wretched slavepens beside sullen, smelly, stagnant waters which harbored the bloated carcasses of drowned horses and oxen. These were covered with swarms of green flies that blew in clouds through the sticky atmosphere. From time to time huge turkey buzzards wheeled in the burning sky or fed on the half-putrid carcasses. The water extended for miles on either side, in broad steely sheets, bordered by half-dead, gaunt trees hung with funereal moss. Nothing was noble, nothing grandiose; he saw only the fate that awaited him. The world was ruled by whites and every white hand was against him. As he paced the deck during the nights of his long watches, he thought of the treacherous brothers, his masters. Here the son of one of them lay asleep in the cabin. In his power. He would kill him. It was only just.

“If this is to be my lot, I cannot survive it long. I could not live through what I saw on the plantation at Vicksburg. I am not so young as they are. Two years would kill me. Yes, death would free me. Sweet death. But why wait. They don’t even suspect me. I am all smiles and ‘yes, Massa; no, Massa.’ They cannot see the tiger in my heart. Why should I not prevent this wrong? For it is wrong. Wrong that I should be sold and go there, after all that I have done for them. They would repay me with wickedness. One should prevent a wrong that is not yet done. They don’t suspect; they don’t know that I know. I could prevent it. Yes, but prevent it with an axe. That axe there. Then I would escape to freedom. I would be justified. I should be free. My Christian friends said I should be free. I could prevent them all from committing this wickedness. Tonight is dark, no one could hear me in this rain. I can wait no longer. We will be in New Orleans in a day or two and it will be too late to prevent this wickedness. This axe ….”

But he could not do it. His hand had slid along the smooth handle of the axe as he moved silently into the cabin where, by the dim light of a swinging lamp, he could see the sleeping form of young Amos. His hand had been raised to strike the blow, when the thought came to him, “What! Commit murder? And you a Christian?”

A thousand elements of irresolution weakened the arm that held the axe. Young Master Amos had done him no harm. He was only obeying the orders of his father. Josiah turned as silently as he had come and went out into the rain. He washed his hands and let them trail a long time in the night-cold current, for they were covered with imaginary blood which he alone could see. He shrank back into his old shape after his moment of murderous exaltation and now he was desperately afraid that the rage and hatred, the expression of his heart, might show in his face. He roused no one to take over the watch, but remained on the rain-swept deck the night through, alone. No one ever knew; no one ever guessed the tiger that had risen in the night and died away in his heart at its first encounter with his Christian feelings. The next day the four white men saw only old ’Siah, old Uncle Tom. “Yes, Massa. Right away, Massa.” They never guessed.

A few days after this crisis, the boat reached New Orleans with what remained of the cargo aboard. They had sold the greater part of the load at the stops along the way, and now the three men who had been hired to handle the boat were discharged, as they had contracted for a one-way trip. Now that everything was sold, with the sole exception of the most domestic animal, the young master threw off all disguise and spoke openly of auctioning off Josiah as the only thing left to do before he broke up the boat for lumber, sold that, and took passage on a steamboat back to the Riley plantation.

Several planters and dealers came aboard to look Josiah over. He was sent on some hasty errand to fetch and carry that they might see how fast he could run…. Lift that box; bring me that whip. Quick now, let the gentlemen see your points…. Josiah was talked up as a bright fellow, but, perhaps because his arms were crippled, no one would meet the price that young Riley had been told to ask for him.

He had promised Josiah that he would try to sell him into a good position as a coachman or house servant, but as time went on he made no effort to fulfill his promise. He was getting impatient to be off and any sale would do. Josiah begged for his life. Young Riley sought to avoid him, for while he had been brought up in the ethic of slavery to think of a slave not as a man, but as chattel, mere property which had no rights and was thought of as possessing no feelings, yet his conscience troubled him. Josiah reminded him of things in their common past and sought to touch him by telling him of the plight of those other slaves in Vicksburg. At times he seemed so moved by the plea Josiah made that he was close to tears, yet again, when he felt too closely pressed in his inner conflict, he would curse and strike out at Josiah.

It was the month of June, when the terrible summer climate of New Orleans hung over the bayou and the last hot night seemed interminable to Josiah. He could not sleep, for he had been told that young Riley had booked a passage on the up-river paddle steamer and intended to leave the following evening at six, after having sold Josiah for whatever price he would bring. This then was the end; there was little hope now that he would ever be free or ever see his family again. He was a man of forty and could not long survive work in the fields or in the rice swamps.

The next morning Master Amos said that his stomach was disordered, and by eight o’clock, as the full heat of the day began to strike into the cramped cabin, he was utterly prostrate with a raging fever. Now it was another song: “I’m dying, ’Siah. It’s the river fever. People in the city are dying of it. You are my only friend. Stick to me, ’Sie. Don’t leave me. I’m sorry I was going to sell you. I didn’t mean it. It was just a joke. You must stick by me now. Get on the steamer and get me home. I must go home.”

It was quite a change; Josiah was no longer property, a beast to be bought and sold, but his master’s only friend amidst strangers. Riley was now the suppliant, in fear of death, as he lay writhing in the shade of a sailcloth.

“Take me on the steamer, ’Siah. Take me home. You must sell the boat and get me and the trunk aboard the steamer tonight. All the money is in the trunk. You must stick to me, ’Siah.”

Josiah said it was the answer from God.

They took twelve days to reach the Riley landing, for the water was low, particularly in the Ohio River, and navigation difficult. Before they were many hours away from New Orleans, the fever had subsided, but young Riley had been near death and lay weakly on his bunk, depending on Josiah for every attention. He could neither speak nor move, and his eyes followed the slave in entreaty for a teaspoonful of gruel or something to moisten his throat. Josiah nursed and tended him, saving his life, and when they at last reached the landing, Riley was carried to the Big House by a relay of slaves who took him on a litter over the five miles which separated it from the river’s edge.

There was great surprise among the members of the family when they first saw Josiah, until they learned what his burden was, and then all attention was for the young man. A few first words of gratitude were all he ever received from them. “If I had sold him I would have died,” said young Amos. Only the market value of their slave was of any consideration to them. The act which he had performed served to raise his value in their esteem, and Josiah thought that his master now looked at him with a glance that seemed even more greedy than before. He felt sure that another attempt would be made to sell him before long.

/ 7 /

The ruling force of Josiah Henson’s life was the religion which he had learned, and he was convinced, according to the tenets which he professed, that a slave owed a duty to his master. In a moment of crisis such as had occurred during his trip down the river it was this acceptance of religious belief which had held his hand. He was gifted enough with introspection to be driven to the most intense self-examination in every circumstance of his life, and very often the conflict which was thereby exposed would allow of no solution. From his earliest years he had felt that he must justify himself in his own eyes, as in the case of a chicken which he “stole” from Isaac Riley. Now he needed justification to “steal” himself and his family. He must argue that the Riley brothers had conspired against his rights, as indeed they and the whole system had done, but further than the offense against his natural rights, they had sought to cheat him in the bargain which he had made with them for his liberty. This last infamy was what had decided him to take his wife and children and escape forever.

“If Isaac had only been honest enough to adhere to his bargain, I would adhere to mine and pay him all I had promised,” Henson later wrote. “But his attempt to kidnap me again after having pocketed three-fourths of my market value, in my opinion absolved me from all obligations to pay him any more or to continue in a position which exposed me to his machinations.”

On his trip through Ohio Josiah had heard of the Underground Railway. News of the Underground was whispered about everywhere by this time, but where was it? Where did it run? Could you hear it coming, see it? What was a train? The untutored slaves, and many whites too, were puzzled by the legend and the name. Around many a plantation fire it was pictured by hushed voices as an immense carriage traveling at great speed at night through a dark tunnel, on out of sight, and into freedom.

Lord, lead us out of Egypt’s land. But where is thy train? If only one knew where to catch it, where to find it and go on to blessed freedom. One thought he had seen it rushing through the darkest forest in the night, while another thought that he had heard its lonely wail as it passed in the distance with its cargo of happy but frightened passengers. Yet no one really knew.

The Underground was running few “trains,” and those mostly from the northern slave states at this time. The highly organized “excursions,” the crowded schedules, did not get under way until the late 1840s, and above all after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. By that time “passage” cost a great deal of money, and quite extravagant ruses and extraordinary disguises were adopted to spirit slaves away to freedom. Yet, in 1830 there were, if one only knew where to knock and what to say, a few “stations” and “station masters,” even in the South. An “agent,” at the risk of his life, could send a fugitive slave on his way with a bold “conductor” who would take him all the way to the Canadian border.

Josiah had heard of the Underground in Ohio, but he did not know where it ran nor how. He knew only that it went to Canada, sure refuge from pursuit, and now he, too, determined to go there. It was a fearsome journey to undertake, and few men born to slavery would have dared to undertake it even had they suffered the same provocation as Josiah. He knew no “agent,” had met no “shepherd” such as Harriet Tubman, who, in later years, would arrive mysteriously on a plantation and entice slaves away to freedom. His escape was to be entirely of his own doing. He was not even alone; he had his wife and four children to consider.

When he told Charlotte of his plan, she was overwhelmed with terror. She knew little or nothing beyond the warmth of her own hearthstone, and her imagination peopled the world outside the plantation with fantastic horrors.

“We shall die in the wilderness, ’Siah. They’ll hunt us with the hounds and bring us back and whip us to death. You can’t, ’Siah. I won’t go.”

He tried to persuade her that the chance for freedom was worth the risk, but she clung to her home and her children.

“I’ll go alone. I’ll leave you now and go alone. If we stay, Master Riley will sell me soon and you’ll be alone anyway. I told you what I saw at Vicksburg. Before that, I’ll go alone. No, I’ll take the children too, all but the youngest.”

The next day, when he left for the fields, she suddenly called him back and said that she would go, for she feared that he might go even then and not come back.

The greatest difficulty was presented by the two youngest children, who were two and three years old. They would have to be carried, and so, night after night, Josiah went into training. He had his wife make a sort of knapsack of tow cloth, with straps to go round his shoulders. The children could be slung in this. Every night he walked the cabin floor until dawn, while the children laughed and crowed at the fun until they fell asleep. Finally he found that he could manage them for long stretches without tiring. Now it was time to decide on a night to depart.

They chose a Saturday night because Sunday was a holiday, and on the following two days Josiah was supposed to oversee a job that was to be done on a farm some miles from the Big House. In this way, they would not be missed for some time, and it would give them a start on their pursuers.

Little Tom, his eldest child, was away from the cabin, for the family kept him in the Big House to work in the kitchen, and permission would have to be obtained for him to come and visit his mother. Toward sundown Josiah went up to report on the week’s work, and after talking with the master for some time, started to turn away. “Oh, Massa Amos, I ’most forgot. Tom’s mother wants to know if you won’t let him come down a few days; she wants to mend his clothes, and fix him up a little.”

“Yes, boy, yes. He can go.”

“Thank ’ee, Mass’ Amos. Good night, good night.”

He could not prevent himself from throwing a good deal of emphasis into that last “good night.” What a long good night to Massa that would be.

It was about the middle of September, and by nine o’clock it was dark enough to start. No moon lighted their way down to the landing where another slave was waiting to row them across the river in a little skiff. They sat still as death, crouched together, and rowed into midstream, where the oarsman stopped.

“It’ll be the end of me if this is ever found out; but you won’t be brought back alive, ’Sie, will you?”

“Not if I can help it,” Josiah replied, thinking of the pistols and knife which he had bought some time back from a poor white on one of the outlying farms. “Not if I am shot through like a sieve.”

“That’s all,” said the other slave, starting to row again. “And God help you.”

They landed on the Indiana shore and began to beat through the wilderness, for they dared not approach the main highways. They walked on for two weeks by night, hiding by day, while Josiah carried the two children slung on his back. He did not know where to find any sympathizers, nor did he dare to look for any. There might be a few people in the neighborhood who were merely indifferent, but Josiah felt that most likely any white was an enemy who would send them all back to be beaten to death in order to claim the reward and protect the system.

Actually, many houses in Ohio and Indiana were already marked with the secret signs which only those of the Underground could recognize. Three white bricks set in the wall beneath the eaves were a sign that a fugitive could safely knock on that door and expect to be taken in or sent along to the next “station” under the seat of a wagon. Henson was merely heading for Cincinnati as best he could, the North Star his only guide. Two days away from that city, where he depended on finding friends, he was forced to risk capture by daylight because his family was starving. His wife reproached him for having brought them into such danger. The children kept whimpering from hunger, and while he could speak sternly to his trembling wife, he could quiet them no longer. His back was now raw from the rubbing of the homemade knapsack; the only thing to do was to adopt a bold course of action.

He walked quickly out onto the highroad and turned south, with the idea that it might lull suspicion should he meet anyone. At the first house to which he came, he was attacked by a dog whose owner curtly refused to accept his offer to buy bread and meat. At the next house a man answered in the same surly fashion, but his wife came quickly after him and said, “How can you treat a human so? If the dog was hungry you’d feed him. We have children of our own who may some day need a friend.”

The man replied, laughing, “If you have need of such friends, then feed him,” and turned away.

The woman put out a plate of venison and bread, refusing money when he offered her a quarter for it, and added more food, sending him on his way with a “God bless you.”

He hurried back to where his family lay hidden and fed them. But almost at once they cried out for water because the meat was so salty. Josiah stole away to search out a stream, but having no container in which to carry water, he first tried his hat, which leaked, and then rinsing out his shoes, filled them and brought them back to drink from.

The Henson family at last arrived at the outskirts of Cincinnati, and Josiah hid them in the woods while he entered the town at dusk to find the friends that he had made there among the Methodists. He was warmly greeted by them and sent to fetch his wife and children, but they could stay only long enough to rest and gather a little strength. The fugitive slave laws were federal statutes, and the town of Cincinnati was no longer safe. The power of these laws was such that they could reach into the free states to pluck back a fugitive. Methodist friends sent them on about thirty miles in a wagon, and then they again had to follow the same course as before: traveling by night and resting by day.

They were told that when they arrived at a place called Scioto they would strike a military road which had been cut through the forest by order of General Hull during the War of 1812. The beginning of this road was marked by a large sycamore and elm grove, and they had been told they might travel along it by day. The road was safe because it had been cut through the wilderness and no one lived along it, nor was it much traveled. The road was considerably overgrown, and difficult, and when by nightfall they had passed no houses, they began to be alarmed, for they had brought few provisions with them. Furthermore, Josiah could now barely carry the two small children; the knapsack had rubbed all the skin from his back. They had further cause for alarm in the howling of the wolves, which they could hear in the darkness of the forest. However, they were not molested by these animals, and lay down to sleep.

The next day they started off again with only enough salt-jerked beef to make them intolerably thirsty. The underbrush caught at them and tore their clothes, while the road was often blocked by wind-fallen trees over whose trunks the children and Charlotte could climb only with difficulty. Henson himself struggled on a short distance ahead. His wife fainted once, and continually moaned that she could go no further, that they were foolish ever to have left home.

After struggling along for some hours, they saw a number of persons with heavy loads on their backs approaching around a bend, and, as they could expect to meet no friends, they were at once on the alert. Charlotte screamed that they were Indians and that they would all be scalped and killed if they did not run. The Indians continued to advance, while Josiah argued with his wife that it was useless to try to escape. Suddenly, the Indians, who were so heavily burdened that they had not raised their eyes from the ground until now, looked up and caught sight of the little group of Negroes. They stood stock-still for a frozen moment and then, hastily throwing off their packs, ran howling back, disappearing into the woods in all directions.

His wife insisted that they had gone back to get help and would soon return in greater numbers, and begged Josiah to flee with her. He resolved, on the contrary, to follow them, for he was certain that it was terror that had caused their retreat, and assured her that it was a ridiculous thing for both parties to run away, stricken by mutual fear.

The little band of Negroes advanced—the children clutching their parents and whimpering all the while because Indians peeped at them from behind trees and flitted through the deepness of the woods that bordered what was little more than a trail. It is a strange picture that one gets here of the fearsome Indians of legend, who were themselves to be a source of terror and fireside tales for at least another half-century. They apparently thought that the Hensons were suffering from some terrible disease which had blackened their faces, for this particular band had never encountered Negroes before. During the years that were to follow, the Indians gave aid to many a fugitive slave in his bitter journey through the wilderness that bordered Canada, where even today none but an experienced woodsman can find his way. In the narratives of escape one continually comes upon the statement made by a runaway to the effect that he owed his safe passage over that part of his journey—in which he had more to fear from nature than from man—to the nomad Indians whom he encountered by chance.

Josiah and his family soon came on the Indian camp. There they were met by an older man who appeared to be the chief, and as soon as he had assured himself that they were human beings, he spoke a word or two in scorn to those around him and ordered them to bring food. Josiah’s children, after the weeks in the woods during which they had seen none but their parents, were shy as wood creatures themselves. Each time they were approached by the curious Indians, they would shrink back with a little cry of alarm, while the Indian who wished to touch them would jump back too with an echo of the same little shriek. They arrived at some degree of understanding through sign language, and after the Hensons were fed, they were given a wigwam in which to spend the night. The next day they were accompanied a short distance on their way by some of the young men who told them that they were now only about twenty-five miles from the lake.

They had to ford a stream or two and pass one more night in the woods before they came out on a wide, treeless plain, southwest of Sandusky. Here they must be bold once more, so Josiah hid the family and pushed forward alone toward a house that he saw on the shore. A number of men were busily engaged in loading a small vessel. As he approached, the captain of the vessel shouted out to him, “Holoo, old man, you want to work?”

“Yes, sir,” Josiah shouted back.

“Come along, come along. I’ll give you a shilling an hour. Must get off with this wind.” And then he added as Josiah approached, “Oh, you can’t work, you’re crippled.”

“Can’t I?” said Josiah scornfully, and in a moment he had hold of a bag and was following the gang in emptying it into the hold.

He took his place in the line of laborers next to a colored man, and soon got into conversation with him.

“How far is it to Canada?” he asked.

And when the other fellow gave him a knowing look, he realized that he was at once understood.

“Want to go to Canada? Come along with us then. Our captain’s a fine fellow who will take you. We are going to Buffalo.”

“Buffalo? How far is that from Canada?”

“Don’t you know, man? Just across the river.”

At this Josiah decided to tell him that he was not alone, but that his wife and children were hidden not far off.

“I’ll speak to the captain,” said the other. In a few minutes the captain beckoned Josiah aside.

“The doctor says you want to go to Buffalo with your family. Well, why not go with me, then? Doc says you got a family. Bring them too.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Where do you stop?”

“About a mile back.”

“How long you been there?”

“No time at all,” replied Josiah after a moment’s hesitation.

“Come, my good fellow, tell us all about it. You’re running away, ain’t you? How long will it take you to get ready?”

“Be back in half an hour, sir.”

“Well, get you along then, and fetch them.”

But before Josiah had gone fifty yards, he called him back. “You go on getting the grain in. When we get off, I’ll lay to, over opposite that island, and send a boat back. There’s a lot of regular nigger-catchers in the town below, and they might suspect if you brought your party out of the bush by daylight.”

Josiah worked while his heart sang, and soon the two or three hundred bushels of wheat were aboard, the hatches fastened down, the anchor raised and sail hoisted.

He watched the vessel leave its mooring and run before the breeze. Already she seemed to have passed the spot at which the captain had said he would lay to. He was sure they were leaving without him; a moment before, his hope had been so great that now he was utterly crushed. What cruel sport they had made of him! But no, she swung around in the wind, the sails flapping as the ship lay motionless. The sun set, leaving the world in a dusk which would make it safe for him to lead his wife and children down to the water’s edge. Aboard ship he could see that they were lowering a boat, and the oars flashed as they rowed toward the shore.

The black man to whom Josiah had spoken had come along with two other sailors. They jumped ashore and the four of them started off together to the place where the other Hensons lay hidden. They searched the whole area, for at first Josiah was not sure just where his family had been. He could not believe his senses, but, yes, they were gone. He was frozen with horror, as he supposed that they had been found and carried off. The three sailors told him that as there was no time to lose, he must come along back to the ship with them. Filled with despair, he turned to follow, when he stumbled across one of the children, lying in the grass. In a moment he came upon the others, and finally found Charlotte, who lay speechless in a thicket. She had given him up for lost as he had been gone so long, and had supposed he had been captured. When she heard his voice along with the voices of several other men, she believed that he had been forced to come back for the rest of them. In her terror, she had tried to hide, and when he came upon her, she was gripped with silent paroxysms of hysteria in which she could understand nothing of what he said. They had to drag and carry her to the boat before she recovered herself sufficiently to understand that at last they were near freedom.

As they neared the ship at anchor in midstream, the captain, who was a Scot, leaned over the taffrail and shouted, “Come up on deck and clop your wings and craw like a rooster; you’re a free nigger as sure as you’re a live man.” And with that welcome they came aboard.

Round went the vessel, the wind plunged into her sails and the water seethed and hissed past her sides. The tension of the past weeks had been too abruptly released, and even Josiah cried that night.

The following evening they reached Buffalo, but it was too late to cross the river that night. The next morning the captain called Josiah on deck, and pointing to the distance, said, “You see those trees; they grow on free soil, and as soon as your feet touch that, you’re a man. I want to see you go and be a free man. I’m poor myself and have nothing to give you. I only sail this boat for wages, but I’ll see you across.” And then he called to the ferryman, “What will you take this man and his family over for—he’s got no money.”

“Three shillings will do it.”

The captain reached into his pocket and, pulling out a dollar, gave it to Josiah and said, “Be a good fellow, won’t you?”

“Yes, I’ll use my freedom well. God bless you.”

It was the morning of October 28, 1830, and when Josiah jumped from the ferry, he threw himself on the sand, kissed it, and jumped around shouting like a madman.

“He’s some crazy fellow,” said a Colonel Warren, who happened to be there.

“Oh, no, Master, don’t you know? I am free.”

The colonel burst into a shout of laughter and said, “Well, I never knew freedom made a man roll on the sand in such a fashion.”

Dawn in Canada

/ 1 /

Up until the time that Josiah Henson landed from the Buffalo ferry and stepped onto Canadian soil, we have no firsthand account of his life but his own. We know only what he chose to tell of his first forty-one years, but what he had to tell was in itself extraordinarily revealing both of the material conditions and the human relations developed by the slave system. There may be a great number of things left unsaid, or forgotten for a purpose, in the story of his early years as it appears in his autobiography; yet there is, on the other hand, much told by himself which is not entirely to his credit. He had great powers of observation and often a frank and ingenuous fashion of revealing the complexities of his own character.

Many of his faults he laid to the account of the system in which he had been brought up, but he did not change much in later years. We may infer that important events have been left out of his own story of the first period of his life because the second part of the book, which deals with Henson’s life in freedom, neglects to mention important happenings which we can learn from other sources. Almost from the moment that he landed in Canada there is a broader field than his own account from which to draw information about his activities. From a little after 1830 until his death in 1883 others were to record and to remember things which he might have chosen to forget. Old diaries, letters and papers can be found in Canada, and in some cases memories of him have been gathered from people still alive or others who have died fairly recently.

Once in Canada he was, indeed, as the captain who had carried him there said, a man, and considered so by all around him. No longer a chattel slave, no longer a fugitive in fear of his life, he must prove to himself and to the world that he was capable of making full use of his freedom.

At the time that Henson landed, slavery had not yet been abolished in the British colonies and was to remain on the statute books until the Act of 1833. He had nothing to fear, however, from the Canadians, as the institution of slavery was everywhere in that country looked upon with disfavor. Henson was not the first fugitive to arrive in Canada, but the presence of Negro refugees does not seem to have attracted marked public attention until late in the 1840s, according to Fred Landon of the University of Western Ontario, who has done considerable research on the subject.

It is difficult to imagine today the psychological, material and moral situation of a slave who had newly gained his freedom, as Josiah Henson had. These were persons who had in many cases reached maturity without ever having earned their living in the manner in which a free man was, at least theoretically, supposed to do. On the other hand, they had been in most cases forced into or bred to a brutalizing and degrading system which demanded of them the limit of their physical strength. They consequently knew how to work, in the sense that they were capable of performing a certain limited number of operations without tiring physically. On the other hand, the system had neither obliged nor even allowed them to develop the initiative necessary to carry a project through to completion. Lacking liberty, there were no compensations for them in labor other than the avoidance of punishment. Now, in freedom, all the ties with the system were broken, yet these people had grown in and been formed by the life of the plantation.

Those who were already settled in Canada before 1840 were of a different temperament than those who were to arrive after that approximate date. In later years there were many who were to come only because they had been talked into it by an agent of the Underground who had a moral stake in the matter of the number of slaves that he might bring through. Then there were some who were actually driven out by such “shepherds” as John Brown, who cut them out of the herd and guided them north almost against their own will. In the earlier days the Underground was not yet running regularly, and anyone who could evade the pursuit through his own boldness and by the exercise of his ingenuity—indeed anyone who had been able to formulate and carry through the plan for escape by himself—was no ordinary slave. To win freedom it was necessary to be a man gifted with more than the usual amount of resourcefulness, courage, and perhaps luck. Josiah Henson was, indeed, such a man.

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It was to be some years before Henson was to become acquainted with the conditions of the other Negroes in Canada. He had first to apply himself to the business of finding the necessities of life, for he was entirely without money. He was among strangers, knowing nothing of the country or the people.

After making several inquiries Henson heard of a Mr. Hibbard who was willing to hire him. Hibbard gave him a sort of two-story shanty in which to live. It was not much but it was the first house that Josiah had ever owned, and he set about putting it in some sort of order because it had been vacant for several years. When he had worked through the day, cleaning and repairing it, he moved into this new home, as he has said himself, the only “furniture” that he possessed—the rest of the Hensons. Even Charlotte admitted that it was better than what they had known in Kentucky, and they set about making beds of straw, boxed in with logs, as they had done in the South. The great difference was that they now had wooden floors in place of beaten earth, and to his wife this seemed the most important gain that they had made by changing their state.

They were to remain with Mr. Hibbard for three years, sometimes working on shares and sometimes for wages. Josiah was able in that way to procure some livestock of his own. But there also developed a valuable friendship between the Hibbard family and the Hensons. Through the aid of Mrs. Hibbard they were able to procure genuine furniture and some of the other comforts of life. Mr. Hibbard was an educated man and began to teach Josiah’s older son Tom to read and write.

The boy used to read from the Bible to his father, and one day, when he asked where he should begin, he was surprised to be told, “Oh, just anywhere.” When he asked for an explanation of what he read, the child was astonished to find that his father could not tell him what the printed words meant.

“Why, Father, can’t you read?” he said.

Josiah was loath to answer him, for it was a blow to his pride to admit that he had never learned. But it was a direct question and must have a direct answer.

“I never had an opportunity to learn nor anybody to teach me,” he replied, perhaps thinking back to the incident in his childhood when he had been severely beaten for his attempt to learn.

“Well, you can learn now, Father.”

“No, my son, I am too old and have not time enough. I must work all day or then you would not have enough to eat.”

“Then you might do it at night.”

“But still there is nobody to teach me. I can’t afford to pay anybody for it, and of course no one can do it for nothing.”

“Quiet, Father, I’ll teach you. I can do it, I know.”

Josiah’s heart was filled with conflicting emotions because for so many years he had thought of himself as the superior of others and he could not admit the idea of being helped to read by his own child. The boy insisted that he could teach him, but Josiah was so overwhelmed that his ignorance was now known even to his own family that he left the house and passed the day in the woods in solitary reflection.

When he returned that night he set about improvising some sort of illumination by which they could study. Tallow candles were too expensive for him, and indeed for the neighboring white farmers, unless perhaps their wives dipped their own. A string wick floating in oil or fat gave not enough light by which to read, so Josiah gathered pine knots and some hickory bark and used their bright dry flame for a lamp.

Few people in those days stayed up long after sundown, for they rose early and worked long hours in the fields, so the father and son made slow progress at their reading. Josiah’s eyes were little used to deciphering what he complained were hen scratches. But they persevered throughout the winter, and by spring they had advanced so far in their studies that in his reading Josiah came to have an idea of the immense world of knowledge from which he had been debarred in his enforced ignorance.

About that time an old friend arrived from Maryland, where he had escaped from an intolerable master, and this friend made it known in the neighborhood that Henson was something of a preacher. Josiah was encouraged to hold Sunday meetings which, as ever in Negro congregations, did not have a wholly religious character, though they were ostensibly church services. Henson has said he found that to preach it was necessary to have only a minimum of theological knowledge.

Religion, as it had been taught to Henson and other slaves in the South, when it was taught at all, consisted of admonitions to obey the master. The more optimistic white Christians who held out any reward for slaves in the hereafter confined it to the promise that God had “a nice clean kitchen for good niggers.”

What then would be the character of Henson’s sermons? We have seen how, in early life, the system had formed him. We know what he had done in the past, and how he had preached to his fellow-slaves in Kentucky at the time when they plotted an insurrection. “No, let us suffer in God’s name and await His time for Ethiopia to stretch forth her hands and be free.” That was the moral he had adopted under slavery, yet now he would seem to have denied it by his own action in securing freedom for himself and his family. The character of Uncle Tom must always be contradictory. Would that sort of moralizing be necessary or even welcome in a community of people who had escaped from bondage by their own efforts?

For there were by now several hundred colored people settled in the neighborhood, and their problems were very different from those of the plantation slaves to whom Henson had counseled forbearance and suffering in the Lord. Now they were free. It was not, however, impossible to be unhappy even though one was free, for the demands of freedom were severe.

Under a master a slave worked as hard as he was forced to work. In some the habit became ingrained so long as they lived under the conditions of the system, but the best rebelled. They learned to avoid both work and punishment until the time came when they could escape. In the first days of freedom, therefore, they were content with little.

It seems that to a large extent they had the same opportunities as the other settlers; they were considered equal under law, and they could take up land on the same terms as a white colonist. Many of them, however, did not know this; and, while all Canadian authorities have always been anxious to point to the unbroken tradition of legal freedom prevailing in that country, there may well have been a conspiracy of silence in regard to opportunity on the part of the white settlers. A supply of cheap and expert labor was a windfall in frontier days when every man was intent on carving out a homestead for himself in the wilderness. Real evidence of race prejudice was, however, absent until some years later.

Henson as a preacher, therefore, had other themes than purely religious ones to develop for his flock. The religious form in which they were cast served only to add more weight to the practical aspects of his proposals. He saw that they must either better themselves, as their neighbors were trying to do, or slip down into an inferior position in the community. In the first joy of their deliverance they had been content to feel themselves free to move about from place to place and to work or rest as they pleased. Generally, they worked for hire upon the lands of others and had no thought of working for themselves.

Mr. Risley, for whom Josiah worked after leaving the Hibbards, agreed to loan his house for meetings where the most intelligent and successful members of the growing colored community were called together to discuss plans for bettering their lot. Labor was scarce and they had been reasonably well paid; so it was that they found they had among themselves a sum in cash sufficient to allow them to settle on land of their own, if the project were undertaken on a cooperative basis.

“The joy we had at first taken in mere freedom has rendered us content with a lot far inferior to what might be obtained. We must benefit from the example which this country has set for us and strike out with energy and enterprise,” said Josiah. He was determined to prove that all which it was possible for the white colonist to gain was possible for them also. “I was not deterred from this task of persuasion by the perception of the immense contrast in all their habits and character generated by long ages of freedom for the one and servitude for the other; activity and sloth, independence and subjection.”

He reiterated that what others had done they too could do, and he brought his associates around to believing it. In a short time he had the enthusiastic support of all those who had come to his meetings and who had some influence in the group. They agreed to take charge of his family and deputized him to make a journey of exploration in search of a place where they might settle.

Josiah started out in the autumn of 1834 and traveled over the region that lies between Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Huron. The country is quite flat and was, at that time, very heavily wooded. He says in his autobiography that he traveled on foot, yet almost the first outside account of him dates either from this or perhaps the second journey which he was to make a few months later, when the Reverend Benjamin Cronyn recorded in his diary that he first saw Josiah Henson trying to get into a coach at Brantford.

Mr. Cronyn was on his way home from Ireland. He had with him “several thousand hunting dogs” which he expected to sell. The number would seem to be a printer’s error or the nightmare of someone who had been to a dog show. Mr. Cronyn was making the trip from Hamilton to Lake Ontario by covered wagon, and perhaps because he was a fellow-clergyman, he gave Josiah a lift and a good deal of advice on the nature of the surrounding country.

Henson, during his tour of the semipeninsula bounded by the three Great Lakes, came to a territory east of Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River which attracted him by its evident fertility. As it seemed in all ways suited to the purpose of the colony, he decided to go no further but to return and make a report. His companions were impressed with his enthusiasm, but as they had already experienced the violently alternating seasons of Canada, so different from the more gradual changes to which they had been accustomed in the southern states, they advised him to return again at another time of year. The climate of even that eastern portion of Canada whose temperatures are influenced by the proximity of the great inland seas like Ontario, Erie, and Huron, was a greater trial to these newcomers than it was to the white colonists, of whom the greater majority had come from Scotland. The cold winters were to play an important part in the future of the Negro settlers, and their adaptability to the climate was to be a subject of debate.

At the request of his associates Josiah waited until the following summer and then made a second trip to the region which he had surveyed. This time he pushed on a little further toward the head of Lake Erie. There he came on an extensive tract of government-owned Crown Lands which had been granted to a Mr. McCormick upon certain conditions, the chief of which was that within a given number of years he must prove to the satisfaction of a land commission that a percentage of the land had been cleared and was under cultivation. At such a time he would be given the absolute title to the property.

In this case, McCormick had very cannily rented the virgin land to such settlers as came along, and when they could not meet his terms, summarily evicted them, thus benefiting from the improvements which they had made. It was the customary skin game of the time and compares rather favorably, from a moral point of view, with the manner in which the railroads and the clergy were reserving immense tracts of the country for themselves.

At the time when Henson and his companions presented themselves as future tenant farmers, a good portion of the land in question had been cleared. This was a decided advantage in the matter of the immediate raising of crops with which to sustain themselves, for they had limited resources and no equipment and could not afford the time and labor necessary for the job of cutting trees and blasting roots. They settled on the land the following spring, and set about raising crops of wheat and tobacco. Their plan was to save all the money they could in order to purchase the land on which Josiah had set his heart when first he viewed it.

After the Negro group had worked these farms for about a year, Henson found out that to acquire the freehold deed to the property, according to the conditions of the grant, all necessary improvements must be made by the one to whom the grant was given. McCormick did not own the land as yet and was in no way entitled to the rent which he was exacting from them. They determined to pay him no more. Josiah applied to Sir John Cockburn, who held an official position in the province, and was told to address himself to the provincial legislature. There he found that the friends of his landlord were too powerful for him, and he failed in his first application for terms of his own. The following year, however, these friends of McCormick were out of office, and Henson’s group was able to take over the land subject to the improvement clause on which the former titleholder had held it.

They were thus free of the obligation to pay rent, but the land was not their own and, as they had no political influence, it did not seem likely that it ever would be. Henson was certain that some time short of the expiration of their term some man in office might well advise a wealthy purchaser to buy it outright. In this way they would lose all the profit of their work and be driven off. With this hanging over their heads there was little incentive to clear more land than was necessary to raise sufficient crops for their own needs. They remained six or seven years in this position.

During this time immigration from the United States went on at a greater rate than ever before, and members of the colony were joined by relatives and friends who had heard of their success, moderate though it still was at that time. They came singly or in little groups, having in many cases been forced to part with even their wives and children. In most cases they were destitute, but in the early years, at least, they were quickly absorbed as laborers, although some became barbers, bootblacks, or carpenters, for they came from the more privileged class of slaves who knew a trade.

The country as a whole was extremely unsettled in the 1830s, though one might have expected that the colonists, situated as they were on the frontier, would have remained unaware of political developments. Communication was nowhere very swift, and Upper Canada, where transportation was to a large extent overland, was at a disadvantage compared with Lower Canada, where not only were the settled areas much older but also strategically placed along the St. Lawrence River.

Great tensions were, however, developing in the political life of Canada, and there were those prominent in the affairs of both the French- and the English-speaking provinces who felt that the term “colony” could best be exchanged for another.

It was almost certainly Henson who first saw the advantage to be gained from an interest in politics. It was he who petitioned the legislature and who organized the Negro colonists in his area during the Rebellion of 1837. Nor was this the first Negro participation in Canadian affairs.

During the War of 1812 it was that portion of Canada in which the Negro colonists had settled which had been taken by the army of General Harrison who penetrated far into the province of Upper Canada. It is certain that at that time there were Negro troops in the Canadian militia on the British side, but it seems uncertain whether they were freemen or slaves. Since that date, however, slavery had been abolished in the British Empire by the Act of 1833. When it seemed certain that the rebels would attack from their headquarters in Detroit, the provincial legislature undertook to re-form the militia, and Henson was active in insuring that the Negro colonists would form a part of it.

He claims that he was appointed a captain in the Second Essex Company of Colored Volunteers. There is no other authority for this than his own statement. Another colored preacher, the Reverend J. W. Loguen, has also claimed that he commanded a black company.

Henson says that, owing to his crippled arms, he could not shoulder a musket and therefore carried a sword in its place. “My company held Fort Malden from Christmas till the following May, and also took the schooner Ann and captured all it contained, which were three hundred arms, two cannons, musketry, and provisions for the rebel troops. This was a fierce and gallant action and did much toward breaking up the rebel party, for they could not obtain provisions while we held the Fort, which we continued to do till we were relieved by the colonel of the Forty-fourth Regiment from England. The colored men were willing to help defend the government that had given them a home when they fled from slavery.”

The affair of the schooner Ann was a curious incident, for it is perhaps the only occasion in the history of warfare when a company of foot soldiers has captured a vessel. It seems that the schooner was caught, during a quick drop in temperature, in the ice floes which bound her solid, enabling the soldiers to make their way across the ice and board her.

The part which the ex-slaves played in the rebellion has been commented upon in an interesting letter written by the rebel leader himself. This letter was sent in answer to an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society who visited Canada immediately before the rebellion and canvassed a number of public men in the province as to their opinion on the state of the ex-slaves.

January 30, 1837

Sir,

In reply to your enquiries I beg to offer as my opinion with much diffidence, 1st, That nearly all of them are opposed to every species of reform in the civil institutions of the colony—they are so extravagantly loyal to the Executive that to the utmost of their power they uphold all the abuses of government and support those who profit by them. 2nd, As a people they are as well behaved as a majority of the whites, and perhaps more temperate. 3rd, To your third question (regarding crime), I would say, not more numerous. 4th, Cases in which colored people ask public charity are rare as far as I can recollect. I am opposed to slavery whether of whites or blacks, in every form. I wish to live long enough to see the people of this continent, of the humblest classes, educated and free, and held in respect, according to their conduct and attainments, without reference to country, color or worldly substance. But I regret that an unfounded fear of union with the United States on the part of the colored population should have induced them to oppose reform and free institutions in this colony, whenever they have the power to do so. The apology I make for them in this matter is that they have not been educated as freemen.

I am your respectful humble servant,

W. L. MacKenzie

The legal position of the refugees had been admittedly precarious, and the first fruit of this political intervention would seem to have been the law of 1837 permitting ex-slaves to vote. This apparently signified that the fugitive slaves were to be admitted to British citizenship, for it could hardly have been intended to apply to the insignificant number of Canadian-held slaves who had been freed by the Act of 1833. Naturalization was made easy, and the growing Negro colonies were about to become a political force whose direction would lie in the hands of the first man to show himself capable of manipulating their combined vote.

The political question was to lie dormant, however, for some years, until the tide of colored immigration had almost reached its peak about the year 1850. By that time, Josiah Henson was to be in a strong position as the chief member and director of an organized Negro colony. He spent the intervening years raising funds, traveling about the country attending meetings, and speaking everywhere, both to consolidate his own position and to advise the immigrants as to the necessity of owning land of their own. His activity on the platform and in the pulpit was to lead eventually to the foundation of the Dawn Institute, but first his activity was to precipitate him into a series of adventurous missions in the slave states.

[[ Ten years after his own escape, Henson made his way to Kentucky to rescue the Lightfoot family from slavery, but as they were reluctant to leave just then, he journeyed to the interior of the state to shepherd another group out; the next year he returned to the Lightfoots and, amid various difficulties, helped four brothers to escape. Overall, he brought back some 118 people from such trips into slave territory. In 1842, with $1,500 raised by abolitionists in England, he bought three hundred acres of the land he had seen several years earlier, plus an adjoining one hundred acres on his own account, and there he founded the Dawn Institute. At the colony, he proposed establishing a school that taught grammar and manual training—as suited frontier life—to enable independence from the white population. Periodically, he traveled to the northern states to seek assistance for newly arrived fugitives. To ensure the prosperity of the Dawn Institute, he also raised money to build a sawmill in order to profit by the felled trees on their land, but the project was not well planned and ran out of funds. Discontent with his stewardship began to set in at this point, but with support from friends in Boston he succeeded in getting the mill in working order. Around this time, about 1849, his life story was published by the Anti-Slavery Society of Boston and read by Harriet Beecher Stowe, whom he met while passing through Andover, Massachusetts, where she had just moved from Cincinnati. After a debt of $7,500 was discovered, to pay for which they had to appeal to abolitionists abroad, the trustees of the Dawn Institute decided that the school and the sawmill should be separately managed. Henson took over the mill; he took black walnut boards produced at the mill to the great exhibition in the Crystal Palace in London, where he was generally well received and even visited by Queen Victoria. ]]

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Henson was, in consequence of the temper of the society in which he found himself, introduced everywhere by his new friends, and he very often rose to a point of correction at the public meetings which were held at that time by the rare apologists for slavery who managed to appear before the English public. As a visiting celebrity, he was taken to see such charitable institutions as the Ragged Schools, to which he was accompanied by Lord Grey.

This gentleman made Henson a most interesting offer. The English government had been seeking for some time to procure for its manufacturers sources of cotton other than the slave states of America. The production of cotton had been introduced into Egypt and India, where the peasants were being encouraged to raise that crop. Various difficulties had been encountered in its culture, and it was particularly difficult to find efficient supervisors who were acquainted with methods of cultivation. Therefore, Grey asked Henson to go to India as a supervisor.

It is interesting to note that Henson spoke of this effort on the part of the government as “the intention to introduce the culture of cotton into India on the American plan.”

It would seem that he recognized that forced labor was to be the keystone of the imperialist project. He refused to go to India on the grounds that he was more interested in the fate of the Canadian colony. There is no evidence that he had any particular interest in the fate of the Indian peasantry nor that his refusal was due to the nominal support which he must have given to the freedom-for-India plank in the platform of the English abolitionists.

It is extraordinary to realize today that while the American abolitionists under Garrison had two main theses—the abolition of slavery and equal suffrage for women—the English abolitionists, at least in the most advanced group, had a third which demanded freedom for India. At various times Henson and the other Negro abolitionists in England spoke at public meetings whose main intention was to promote this third principle.

Samuel Gurney gave Josiah a card of introduction to the archbishop of Canterbury whom he visited at Lambeth Palace. This dignitary of the English Church received Henson most kindly and granted him an interview which lasted well beyond the allotted time.

“At what university, sir, did you graduate?”

“I graduated, Your Grace, at the University of Adversity.”

“The University of Adversity? Where’s that?”

“It was my lot, Your Grace, to be born a slave and to pass my boyhood and all the former part of my life as a slave. I never entered a school, never read the Bible in my youth, and received all of my training under the most adverse circumstances. That is what I mean by graduating in the University of Adversity.”

“I understand you, sir, but is it possible that you are not a scholar?”

“I am not,” said Josiah.

“But I should never have suspected that you were not a liberally educated man. I have heard many Negroes talk but I’ve never seen one that could use such language as you. Will you tell me, sir, how you learned our language?”

Henson then related to Archbishop Sumner the story of his early slave days and the manner in which he had sought to imitate his customers, particularly those who spoke good English and for whom he reserved the best of the farm produce which he sold in the Washington market. On leaving the archbishop, the latter pressed a bank note for fifty pounds into his hand.

Upon another occasion, Josiah was invited along with a large company of Sabbath-school teachers to spend a day on the estate of Lord John Russell, who was, at that time, prime minister of England. “His magnificent park, filled with deer, of varied colors, from all climes, and sleek hares, which the poet Cowper would have envied, with numberless birds, whose plumage rivaled the rainbow in gorgeous colors, together with the choicest specimens of the finny tribe, sporting in their native element, drew from me the involuntary exclamation: ‘Oh, how different the condition of these happy, sportive, joyful creatures, from what is now the lot of millions of my colored brethren in America.’” And he went on with his effort to do something for these brethren.

Henson collected money with comparative ease, for he found it as great a pleasure to meet wealthy people in England as he had found it in Washington, where he had known them in vastly different circumstances. He liked to flatter people and agree with them and to be continually busy with the details of his “enterprise,” its administration, and the thousand petty intrigues which it entailed. He liked to imagine himself a master diplomat, the colorful impresario of the entire Negro population of Upper Canada. As he had responded long ago to the jocular, patronizing invitation of the drovers who had thought it sport to befuddle him with drink in the taverns along the way as he had conducted his fellow-slaves from one master to another, so, now, he was not apt to question any overture which was made to him by persons who appeared to be friendly. He could not ignore the fact that the periphery of the abolition movement in England and America contained many doubtful elements. In America it was a constant source of discussion. It was well known among devoted members of the association that their ranks were likely to be penetrated by spies, traitors, and saboteurs in the pay of the slavers. Cases, rare enough in all truth, had been found where even Negroes sold their brothers for a price. There is no proof of any such accusation brought against Henson, however loose he may have been about money matters, and despite the fact that the later history of his life in relation to the colony at Dawn is one long record of protracted lawsuits.

Neither Josiah Henson nor most of those Uncle Toms who followed him have a price to be reckoned in money. Their price is the achievement of a certain celebrity, or even renown, as good men with whom to make mutually satisfactory terms when the case in dispute would give the right so unequivocally to the weaker party that no compromise would be possible if it were not for that very disparity in strength. With a desire for notoriety, which is often innocent enough, Uncle Tom is easily persuaded that his own prominence can work to the advantage of those to whom his aid is formally pledged. And with this desire go a certain blind eagerness and credulity which can lead him into the company of his worst enemies.

Henson was very sure that he was apt and alert, capable of judging men and their motives with a discernment derived from the lesson of his forty-three years of slavery. If he could flatter himself that he was the representative of the entire Negro population of Canada, though he knew it to be untrue, he could listen with greater readiness and a show of mock solemnity to those who approached him with a certain deference, presumably due to one who occupied the position which he allowed it to be believed that he held. He never denied that he was an important man, and he was seen in the company of men who were important in English affairs. Unfortunately they were not all abolitionists nor even antislavery men.

Some of these associates of Henson were men who had lost their property in the West Indies not twenty years earlier; the slaves held by the British plantation owners had been liberated in 1833. Many of these proprietors claimed that they had suffered severe financial loss in the subsequent exploitation of their holdings, although they had been richly indemnified by the government at the time of emancipation.

The landlords of Jamaica and Trinidad now looked to the Negroes who were settled in Canada as a source from which enough labor could be drawn to revive the plantations. The defenders of slavery remarked with solicitude that there would be fewer difficulties of a purely practical nature to contend with under a system which would closely resemble that which the ex-fugitives had known in the States. They added kindly that the world had seen what freemen of color could accomplish even in the face of the greatest adversity, and speculated on how much one could expect when Canadian adversity would be exchanged for patriarchal ease. Those men in England who felt that emigration would serve their interests were certain that the climate of the islands, pleasantly reminiscent of the South, would be a great factor in persuading the Canadian colonists to listen to their blandishments. They sought out all the men of color who visited England and endeavored to interest them in the project.

William Wells Brown was one of those who was approached, and he wrote of it in the following manner to Frederick Douglass, who was in America:

Knowing that there were many proprietors and agents dissatisfied with the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, and that a species of slavery had been carried on under the name of emigration, I frankly told these men upon what conditions I thought our people would go to the West Indies.

But as to going there to be bound or fettered in any way, I assured him, that no fugitive slave would consent to. And although I was assured that the utmost freedom would be enjoyed by all who might consent to go, I understand that a secret move is on foot in London to induce our unsuspecting people in Canada to go to the West Indies, and that agents are already in Canada for that purpose.

The Reverend Josiah Henson is said to be one of these. [The italics are mine—B.G.] As my letter in the Times first brought this subject before the people, and fearing that some might be entrapped by this new movement, I take the earliest opportunity of warning all colored men to be on their guard how they enter into agreement, no matter with whom, white or colored, to go to the West India Islands, lest they find themselves again wearing the chains of slavery.

A movement that is concocted in secret, and that, too, by men, many of whom would place the chains upon the limbs of the emancipated people of the West Indies tomorrow if they could, and which is kept from the knowledge of the Abolitionists of this country should find no countenance with our oppressed people. He who has made his escape from the cotton, sugar and rice fields of the Southern States is ready to finish his life among the cold hills of Canada and if needs be to subsist upon the coarsest of food; but he is not willing to enter into a second bondage. Then I would say again beware lest you are entrapped by the enemy.

Yours for our people,

W. W. Brown

In his autobiography Henson makes no mention of any connection with those who wished to move the slaves from Canada to the Caribbean, and it may be assumed that, once he had returned to Canada, he made no real effort to persuade his people to go there. The agents and proprietors may very well have used his name in 1854, when they spoke to Brown, merely because they were sure that Henson was not in the country to refute them. But more probably he had been flattered by their company and had been seen with them in England. In any case, he did not in reality enjoy the necessary influence among the Canadian colored population to be able to sway them in any way. He does not seem ever to have been on friendly terms with the other men of his race who were prominent internationally or even nationally, for this letter from Brown contains the only reference to him in the mass of correspondence with the Anti-Slavery Society which has been published.

In the month of September, 1852, while he was still in Britain, there came two unwelcome reminders of his former life which obliged Josiah to cut short the pleasant days spent “in the company of the noblest men in England.” The first of these was the memory of his brother, who still remained in slavery. Josiah was dining at the house of a friend who kept a luxurious table, when suddenly a vision of his brother in chains seemed to appear before his eyes. The impression was so strong that he found himself obliged to push back his chair and rise from the table.

“What is the matter, Josiah? Has anything occurred to disturb your peace of mind?” asked his host.

“Come, come, Josiah. Do help yourself and make yourself at home,” said the other guests.

Josiah begged to be excused from eating his dinner on that day, for he had lost all appetite for the food which lay before him. He determined to make every effort to rescue his brother, of whom he had rarely thought until that moment, at the first opportunity which presented itself upon his return to America.

Very shortly after this incident he received a letter from his family, saying that his wife was extremely ill, and he immediately set sail for Canada.

[[ Soon after his arrival, Henson’s wife died, and he became entangled in the financial affairs at the Dawn Institute. Meanwhile, he arranged for American abolitionists to rescue his aged brother, which proved costly and difficult; he rewrote his life story to include his Canadian experiences and from the proceeds of the sale of the book, purchased his brother’s freedom. The flight to Canada of ex-slaves and freemen of color greatly increased after the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, but the Dawn Institute was nearly bankrupt and compelled to accept a high-handed English agent as its administrator, who led them to ruin over the next decade. Unfortunately Henson made himself an ally of the Englishman, arousing ill-will around him, though he found new prestige as the model for Stowe’s hero in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was published in 1852 and became an instant bestseller. In 1858 he married a young free-born widow from Baltimore, with whom he had three more children. After years of mismanagement by the English agent, Henson succeeded in ousting him, entailing a protracted and costly lawsuit, which was at last dropped in 1871. By then the Dawn Institute no longer existed: many people had left the area and, with reconstruction after the Civil War, many more returned to the United States, cutting the black population of Canada by half. The land owned by the Dawn Institute was sold by a new board of trustees, who paid the colony’s debt and used the rest of the money to build a school, the Wilberforce Institute, in nearby Chatham. Henson remained on his farm near Dresden with his second family and grandchildren, though he was less popular in the community. Restless for the attention still to be had abroad by playing his role as the real-life Uncle Tom, he sailed for England again with his wife in 1876, where he toured the country appearing at churches, chapels, and public halls, and prepared a new edition of his autobiography; a copy was forwarded to Queen Victoria who received the Hensons in March 1877. The following winter, they traveled to Baltimore and Washington, where they visited President Hayes at the White House; in Maryland he saw how much had changed along the roads leading to the old Riley plantation (just twelve miles from the capital), which he found in complete disrepair, like old Mrs. Riley herself, now a “poor, fretful invalid.” ]]

/ 15 /

Henson died in his house near Dresden, Ontario, in May, 1883. The Dawn Institute no longer existed, and many of the families who had once lived there were scattered. His own family was gathered in the house, for everyone had been expecting for some time that the old man might die. Many of the children and grandchildren had come back to the farm from the United States where they had gone to live. Today they and their descendants live in Detroit, Buffalo, and Cincinnati.

After his death there were the unfortunate but only too common family disputes over the property and the division of the old man’s effects. His prized mementos, the signed portrait of Victoria, the gold watch, the music box which had been presented to Mrs. Henson, and the illuminated scrolls were carried off by the lucky or the insistent.

Today there are a dozen signs along the road to Dresden which point out the only place of interest in the surrounding countryside: UNCLE TOM’S GRAVE. The grave lies on a little knoll within sight of the winding river, bordered by the few tall trees which have not been cut down.

The monument stands in a small plot where not more than a dozen or two graves have been marked. Across the road is an older burying ground, full of broken headstones with illegible inscriptions, where cows break in to pasture. The Henson plot is more securely protected and there, beneath an imposing stone pillar, Josiah lies beside his second wife. The Masonic symbol is carved on the pillar’s base along with the following verse:

There is a land of pure Delight

Where Saints immortal reign;

Infinite day excludes the night

And pleasures banish pain.

/ 16 /

Today Beecher Henson is the oldest living member of the family who still resides in Dresden. He says, with some bitterness, that he does not know where any of the things which belonged to his grandfather are to be found. He farms a small piece of land, none of which was inherited from Josiah, and lives as a bachelor in a little cottage on the edge of town. People occasionally come to question him about the family history and leave with the impression that he knows more than he cares to tell. Beecher himself fosters the idea that there is some secret worth keeping, but very probably it is only a family matter, the peccadillo of a son or a dispute over the inheritance; something which is of greater importance to him than it would be to another.

The people of Dresden have a curiously ambivalent attitude toward the memory of Josiah Henson. It is reflected by the manner in which they speak of him: “Oh, he just said he was Uncle Tom.” “Beecher, now, he’s a deep one. Knows more than he talks ’bout.” “Beecher Henson is as white as I am. He can’t be Uncle Tom’s grandson.” “There never was an Uncle Tom, really.”

It is curiously irrational, of course, because there can be no doubt of the truth of the story. But there is something more than mere cynicism in the attitude of the Dresdenites. After all, they are the children and the grandchildren of those people who experienced the paternalism of the Dawn Institute. A residue of resentment against the old man is evident in everything they say. Some of the people have read Mrs. Stowe’s book, but not many of them are aware of the meaning which the phrase “Uncle Tom” has taken on today in the United States.

Uncle Tom in fiction was the perfect type of the Negro whom the white folks were willing to free as long as he retained all the characteristics of his former servitude. He was compliant and submissive, satisfied with whatever a master chose to give him. He was pious and ready to accept the doctrine that even in heaven “black cherubs rise at seven to do celestial chores.”

In real life the same people like “their colored folk” when they are menial. They like to be flattered by the Negro’s deference and amused by his antics; fawning is considered a mark of respect. They are not quite sure whether or not they like the Negro to cower, for that sometimes arouses a twinge of conscience, but they amuse each other with tales of his physical cowardice and suppose it to be a racial characteristic. The joke disappears, however, when they need to frighten themselves with stories of the Negro who is a monster of strength and wanton cruelty. Into such a paranoiac picture of his people must the modern Uncle Tom fit himself. No easy task.

Uncle Tom scolds his nephew, whose escapades may range from wild pranks, maliciously exaggerated, to deeply justified outbursts of violent resentment against being treated as something less than human. He preaches to his people to wash their faces, straighten their hair, and “honor the white folks.” At one time he assures everybody that this is a white man’s world and the only way to live is to get everything one can by being subservient and taking a little good along with much bad. Another day he is out preaching that anyone with the least trace of pigmentation in his skin should go back to Africa or, at the very least, found a Black Economy, with black trains to run alongside the white ones, and a black government seated in a black Washington.

Behind the Uncle Tom disguise is a dangerous man who leads his people nowhere. Forced into patterns of their own which make it increasingly difficult for contact to exist between the races, Uncle Tom walks a tightrope over this chasm.

The stock figures left over from plantation days, the minstrel show, and Mrs. Stowe’s book, are a little worn-out today. It is obvious that they will no longer do. While the Negro has a job in a factory, not everyone is going to expect to see him shining shoes or picking up pennies for doing a cakewalk on the street corner. Yet this economic security is new, incomplete and precarious. As long as it remains, so there will always be Uncle Toms. Alas, Uncle Tom is not just a stock character, nor is he Josiah Henson. He is alive today under many disguises. He is the so-called leader subventioned by a section of society eager to use him as their tool. No action led by him, no cultural relations, no concession gained, no school built, no hospital staffed, nothing attained through his intercession will ever be a step toward the solution. There is no Negro problem in America; there is a common problem.

It will be a great day when we can shout together, “Uncle Tom is dead.”