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This book will provide some new interpretations and information on the most notable African-American/African-Canadian conductor on the legendary Underground Railroad: Harriet Tubman. Based upon interviews with Tubman descendants, archival materials, and extant literature, this book will acquaint the reader with the experience and contribution of just one of the many notable, identified leaders on the Underground Railroad, placing her in a local, regional, international, and global context.

The Underground Railroad was the first freedom movement of the Americas and is credited with infusing Canada with a number of black people. How did it work? Where did people come into Canada? How were they treated upon their arrival? How is it that we spoke of these things in certain places and why was this missing from the education that I was receiving at school?

The nature of slavery did not lend itself for many to keep detailed records. For slave owners, the date and place of the birth of the offspring of enslaved women was not always recorded and was left to memory. Many now feel that ancestral memory has power; that “indigenous knowledge” has value not always accepted or recognized. However, the selling of slaves had an impact on plantation memory. No one may have remained in your circle who could verify your date of birth, or even your parentage. No one may have realized the need to do so. When an enslaved African was sold, and once that memory was gone, it was as if a library had been lost. The stories about your birth, issues on your plantation, would be lost unless there had been an opportunity for this information to be passed down through African oral tradition or recorded by slave owners.

To this end, there are several dates for Harriet Tubman’s birth in the literature. A descendant fervently believed Tubman to have been born in 1820, “if not earlier.” Harriet Tubman herself indicated that she was “about seventy-five years old” in 1898 as she was trying to ensure that she receive her back pay for her military service and status as a widow. Was she being modest about her age, or is it that she did not know her exact age and took her best guess? Another famous black abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, took February 14th to be his birth date as he had never been provided with documentation to indicate otherwise.

There were essentially two types of support for the Underground Railroad (UGRR) escapes: the formal and somewhat documented and those activities that happened on the spur of the moment and that were almost acts of kindness or veiled acts of resistance. Even after the UGRR had ended, the fear and real possibility for legal action kept many stories of assistance and involvement secret, and many of the stories literally went to the grave with the involved persons. In modern times the Underground Railroad is often romanticized to the point where it might almost seem to have been a pleasant, albeit lengthy stroll from a place of hard work and restriction to a place of easy opportunity and acceptance. The truth is that the Underground Railroad was a significantly danger-fraught means of escaping from the real threat of severe punishment or death towards the possibility of freedom in various communities in the northern United States, or further on into Canada. In Canada, Ontario was the largest recipient of those “fugitive slaves,” those freedom seekers. Who would lead such a perilous journey? Why risk one’s life for others? How could she have managed to evade capture? Who was this heroine of legend? How could an “uneducated,” “unsophisticated” enslaved African become the person of historic and contemporary notoriety and fame? How can the legacy of one black woman be so compelling that her story resonates across international boundaries? This book will attempt to provide some new insights into the saga of slavery, the mechanisms of the Underground Railroad, what happened to freedom seekers upon their arrival to places usually called “North,” and the nature of the character of the person who would become known as a famous freedom seeker, a freedom leader, the Moses of her people, Harriet Tubman.

The economies of many countries, including the United States and especially in the agricultural south, were built upon the labour of captured Africans. Slavery, as experienced by the survivors of the “Middle Passage” between Africa and the New World and their descendants, was all encompassing. They had no rights whatsoever under the law. Enslaved blacks had to work constantly under the watchful eye of overseers who whipped slow workers. They could not legally marry and raise a family, they could not attend school or learn to read and write, they could not live where they wished, follow their interests, or move about in society as they pleased.

Unlike the slavery imposed by other societies at other times, this servitude was lifelong and perpetual. If children came about through acts of breeding, acts of love, or acts of violence they were automatically enslaved. And, because Africans had distinctive dark complexions in a society where free people usually were white, their skin colour immediately identified them as being a slave no matter where they were. Their African names, religions, histories, languages, customs, and families were taken from them by the time they were auctioned off. They were required to use the name given to them by their owner and work a hard job for which they received no salary and little recognition. Over time certain slaves started to be freed, perhaps because of guilty consciences, because a slave’s value had decreased due to old age or poor health, changing attitudes about slave owning, or because the dark complexion and distinctive features of the captured Africans started to approximate the colour and appearance of their owners due to forced intimate relations. The northern states, with their large Quaker settlements and anti-slavery proponents, tended to free slaves earlier than other areas. This pressured neighbouring states and Canada to struggle with the debate about abolishing slavery or continuing it.

In 1793 the cotton gin was invented and was widely used. It permitted the plantation owner, through the work of his slaves, to more quickly and efficiently remove the tiny seeds from cotton. This resulted in much more profit for the owners. Because the free labour of the slaves was so valuable to their owners and to the agricultural economy of the south, those who relied the most on exploiting them tended to be the white southerners who had large land tracts that they could not profitably manage to cultivate without slavery — free labour.

In the same year the first fugitive slave law in the U.S. came into force and it allowed slave owners or their agents — bounty hunters or slave catchers — to bring any black person before a magistrate and accuse them of being a runaway. With the vague descriptions of freedom-seeking slaves that existed, any black persons who were so accused and not able to provide immediate proof of their free status were forced to be returned to their “master.”

The first enslaved African, Olivier Le Jeune, was a young boy who was brought into Canada in 1628. Slaves were held in Canada only by the wealthy to do household work, livery work, barbering, and laundry, but this was mostly due to the fact that large-scale plantations did not exist in Canada, so fewer slaves were needed there. However, no matter how many slaves there may have been, slavery was still a dehumanizing process that reduced Africans who had contributed to the process of civilization to mere beasts of burden. Slavery had negative repercussions for that period of history, which have continued through to the present day as evidenced in negative treatment or perspectives about people of African descent and the erroneous idea that only Europeans contributed to civilization. Slavery was abolished in Canada on August 1, 1834, which is known as Emancipation Day.

Black people did not want to be slaves, and fought against it as well as they could. Some resisted passively, by intentionally working extra slowly, pretending not to understand commands, or discreetly contaminating or poisoning food. Many slave revolts are documented, but trying to run away was extremely difficult. Slaves would be tracked down like animals by groups of men with guns and dogs, and they were further disadvantaged by not necessarily knowing where they could go, or who could help them. If caught alive, slaves would be returned to their master where some sort of punishment — a foot or an ear hacked off, an eye removed, or a severe whipping — would be administered to leave the freedom seeker able to work, but unable to attempt another escape. It also signalled to other would-be runaways the punishment they could expect for trying to escape. When it was easy to obtain slaves, the runaway might have been hung, but as the importation of captured Africans slowed down in the nineteenth century, torture, branding, disfigurement, and maiming were preferred to destroying “property.” Stolen labour was so valued by owners of large plantations that in Virginia in the 1850s officials started to consider enslaving “poor whites.”

Human dignity and free choice were unimportant, especially when wealth could be amassed by dehumanizing and exploiting others. Slaves lived in separate shacks away from the big house or mansion where the owner lived. Their homes had dirt floors and possibly one thin blanket for a bed. Meals were plain, served from a pot, and eaten with hands. For example, slaves ate cornmeal porridge, fish, or “pot liquor,” the liquid left after vegetables are cooked. The stolen “discards” from slaughtered pigs and cows would supplement their rations. The discards consisted of heads, intestines, organs, feet, and tails, as would squirrels or other small animals that industrious, hungry black people would catch. If they became ill they had to nurse themselves back to health as no doctor would be summoned for them. Knowledge of herbal remedies from the African tradition or learned from Native People was indeed valuable.

Mothers might be able to have their children with them in the evenings, but even children were taken into the master’s house to assist or were hired out to work for others at the whim of their owner. Parents and children, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives could at any time be permanently separated from each other by being sold, and they often were. In fact, some owners felt that people of African descent had no feelings and did not care if their children were taken from them. Pro-slavery forces felt that enslaved Africans accepted and actually preferred to live their lives in bondage. There was little comfort for slaves except each other.

Work might slow down on Sundays as Christian owners and overseers would not work on their Sabbath day. Religion was given to the slaves only to reinforce their inferior position and justify their abuse. If a slave died, he or she could only be buried at night because the master’s needs for the labour of his slaves always came first, well above the emotional trauma felt by the slave community over losing a loved one. The images of freedom and movement in many of the hymns did help to provide images of a life that might be had possibly in the North or after death. Those hymns became codes for people who were willing to follow the call for freedom.

The Underground Railroad was born of the desperation and resolve of black people to be free, and the commitment and resources of free blacks and whites to end slavery. The Underground Railroad was the name of a means of escaping slavery through using various trails, safe houses, and vehicles. It was a system of people helping people to be free, but being connected to the Underground Railroad was dangerous. The Underground Railroad “carried” its human cargo from the late 1700s until slavery was abolished in the United States beginning in 1863. It was the busiest from 1850 on because of the passing of the second Fugitive Slave Act, which put all blacks, whether free-born, manumitted (granted their freedom in the Will of their owner), or runaway, at risk of recapture no matter where they were in the United States. By this time, many of these black peoples had been free for several generations and had acquired considerable property. If they resisted being re-enslaved they were beaten or killed. Some black families were even kidnapped in the middle of the night.

A “ride” on the Underground Railroad would not be comfortable. Your conductor would lead you north on foot by night through swamps, paths, river shores, and forests. If you were lucky, you would have part of your passage on a real train or a boat paid for or provided by abolitionists — but you might have to wear a disguise since you could end up sitting beside someone who could identify you. You might travel from one station to another in a secret compartment of a wagon or on a makeshift boat. Your food would consist of whatever you had been able to carry and whatever you could find during the six to nine weeks your trip could take. Your sleeping quarters might be a hollow tree, a culvert under a bridge, a cemetery, a root cellar, a barn, a cave, or the open terrain. Until you reached your final destination, you would be in constant fear of being recaptured.

Many died along the way or soon after reaching the land of freedom because of starvation, chronic fatigue, or exposure. Before 1850, you only needed to travel to places like Philadelphia in the northern United States, but after 1850 your trip would have to be longer, likely all the way to Canada, therefore the risk of recapture would be greater. You would “buy” your ticket with your commitment to be free at any cost, including leaving your family behind, and you would “claim” your luggage of liberty with your first steps into Canada.

There are two concepts that describe the large-scale capture and sale of millions of African people: the slave trade and Maafa. Maafa comes from the Swahili word for “disaster” and refers to the African Holocaust. For five hundred years Africans were captured, enslaved, and brought to areas controlled by Europeans and Arabs. This ongoing enslavement of Africans had an impact on African settlements and systems, African ways of knowing, African religions, African languages, and the whole gamut of further potential developments within Africa and within the African diaspora. Maafa had an impact on how Africans were perceived, where Africans were felt to be in relation to whites, and on the ways in which Africans were categorized according to the depths of their melanin, their skin colours, rather than on other factors. The slave trade is about how profit was made; Maafa is about the impact on African peoples.

Africans had made their way to North America independently prior to enslavement. Their remains have been found in the Olmec areas of Middle America and on some of the islands in the Caribbean dating back as early as 800 A.D. Africans travelled into the areas now known as Canada and the United States with the coureurs de bois, fur traders, in the 1400s. Black people helped to found Chicago and built Ontario’s first parliament building in the 1700s. Their presence in North America “before Columbus” is documented, but their routine inclusion in North American history does not usually begin until the transatlantic slave trade.

Africans were often hired as interpreters to work with Europeans doing business in Africa. It was not uncommon for an African to be able to speak French, Dutch, or Portuguese in addition to their native tongue. Canada’s first named African was Mathieu Da Costa, who arrived on Canada’s east coast by the early 1600s. A free black man, Da Costa was a translator and contract negotiator for Samuel de Champlain, a French trader and explorer who was on a voyage of discovery with Pierre Du Gua de Monts. Through Da Costa’s linguistic skills and possible previous visits to Canada, he was able to interact between the First Nations (the Mi’kmaq and Montagnais) and the Europeans, creating a relationship. Mathieu Da Costa has been commemorated in Canada by the Federal Government since 1996 for his efforts to establish a link between and among the various early arrivals to Canada.

The first known enslaved African to arrive in Canada was an eight-year-old boy captured from Madagascar and brought to Quebec by David Kirke, a British Commander, by 1628. Sold to a French clerk, Olivier Le Baillif, the child remained enslaved. In 1632, the French regained control of the area, and Le Baillif left, giving his enslaved child to Guilliame Couillard. Being sent to a religious school, the child was later baptized and given a formal name, Olivier Le Jeune.

While slavery was not officially legalized in New France/Quebec until 1709, the practice had been going on for years prior and was an almost international standard. If one was an African, a negro, then one was presumed to be a slave. The Underground Railroad was a clandestine, loosely organized anti-slavery system. Called the first freedom movement of the Americas, it supported the bravery of enslaved people to escape their bondage through the immediate departure from the plantation and supported them as they required hiding places, food, and clothing along the way. Some aspects of the UGRR have been well documented, and those figures, consequently, are well known. However, at the other end of the spectrum, there was much ad hoc assistance provided by any number of persons to fleeing fugitive slaves, so the real numbers will never be known. More than random acts of kindness, the providers of this help, whether it be a bit of food, correct directions, looking the other way, or actively escorting enslaved Africans, were all knowingly directly contravening the law. Assuming terms from the rail system, station masters were in charge of safe houses, conductors led people through parts of their journey, passengers were the escaping people, and stockholders were those who contributed or handled fundraising for the purchase of necessary supplies for runaways.