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Slavery was an indelible part of everyday life in Colonial Canada under both the French and British regimes, and the presence of Black people in the country was manifested in literary terms almost from its inception. Long gone is the time in which Canadian studies grounded the beginning of Black Canadian writing with Austin Clarke’s first novel published in 1964. As far back as in 1991, in his now classic two-volume study of Black Canadian literature titled Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotia Writing, George Elliott Clarke set out to map the origins of Black writing in Canada and stated the seventeenth century as the starting point to consider the beginning of the African experience in the country. In the same vein, Winfried Siemerling’s recent and groundbreaking book The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History and the Presence of the Past (2015) has insisted on the endeavor of tracing back the origins of African Canadian literature1 and explains that “Black writing in what is now Canada is over two centuries old and that black recorded speech is even older” (3). Much earlier than the publication of these two works, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the revision of the critical history of North American slavery and its unambiguous practices in Canada. Ashraf Rushdie studied this phenomenon and concluded that “the 1960s saw the formation of a contemporary discourse of slavery”, one that “developed new methodologies and generated new visions” (5). Following this trend, two foundational books opened the way to study Canada’s history of slavery: Marcel Trudel’s L’Esclavage au Canada français (1960), later on translated into English by George Tombs in 2013 with the title of Canada’s Forgotten Slaves, and James Walker’s The Black Loyalists (1976). These studies represented new directions in the analysis of slavery and did away with the image of Canada’s acknowledged reproval of American chattel slavery. They also underlined the historical fact that “Canadian history is also black history (and that black Atlantic history is also Canadian)” (Siemerling 8). Truthfully, African slavery in the territory nowadays known as Canada began in New France where slavery was suffered by Black and Indigenous people. The first known evidence of a Black enslaved subject can be found in 1628, nine years after a Dutch ship brought the first cargo of Africans to Jamestown. It was then recorded how David Kirke, otherwise known as the British Conqueror of Québec, took with a slave boy to the French territory, thus installing African people in New France and in British North America thereafter. The petite nègre was brought to New France from Madagascar which proves that slavery not only existed but was well established in Canada.
Indeed, slavery soon became a common and extended practice in New France, and, out of its wealth and influence, the Church became the largest slave owner. When the first farmers and land gentry arrived in New France and were faced with the task of clearing the wilderness and building their farms in these hostile territories, they resorted to the easiest and most controllable labor at hand and thus demanded slaves, despite the fact that this practice was only legalized around 1689 by an edict of Louis XIV, and later on validated in New France in 1709. In sum, as Marcel Trudel reported, there were more than 4.000 slaves between 1628 and 1834, of which approximately 1.400 were Blacks who, in truth, were the favorites of English settlers and were owned by a significant amount of 1.400 masters. Yet, Canadians with, the aid of British policies, have historically considered slavery through the lens of the Underground Railroad, the clandestine network of surrogate homes by which Quakers, black freedmen and abolitionists smuggled runaway slaves towards the North in search of freedom. This episode of North American history has clouded other sides of the reality simply to turn a blind eye to the fact that there also existed slaves owned, exploited, bought, and sold by Canadians themselves. Trudel’s aforesaid work demonstrated that “men and women at every level of French and English Canadian society owned slaves, from farmers, bakers, printers, merchants, seigneurs, baronesses, judges and government officials to priests, nuns, and bishops” (7). This means that slavery in Canada was widely practiced and got eventually spread, to the extent that slaves “were not only an accepted feature of society but were also acknowledged both in law and by notarized contract” (Trudel 8).
Accordingly, and though infused with an inevitable sense of belatedness, the critical revision of the history of slavery in Canada has brought to light the retrieval of slave narratives in the country as found in the “Book of Negroes” as well as in Black Nova Scotian accounts of slavery. Even if the “Book of Negroes” was an administrative documental account, it was equally a personal record that collected the individual transformation of Black people who signed up as Black Loyalists to fight against the United States in search of their freedom during the American Revolutionary War. The testimony of these individuals remains meaningful to this day in order to learn about the transit of Blacks up and down the US and British Canada frontier. Also, this removal of Black Loyalists from New York to Nova Scotia linked Upper Canada with slavery and, therefore, with the written and oral testimonies attached to it. As Siemerling states, “Nova Scotia is connected to several eighteenth-century slave and captivity narratives, written by black community leaders who described the province in their memoirs or took up residence there” (52).
Slavery was legally abolished in the British empire in 1834 but the Black population in what we know nowadays as Canada grew in numbers during the subsequent two decades as a result of a considerable influx of fugitive slaves from the United States. As the number of free Black people made their way into these Northern territories, the abolitionist movement focused its interest on their testimonies about their enslavement aiming to condemn slavery and to launch an ideological attack against such capital sin. By the time slavery was abolished in British North America, abolitionism was very well established at both sides of the frontier. This abetted ex-slaves, fugitive slaves and refugees to rely on the help of abolitionists and their compassionate humanitarianism to give account of their personal stories. Central to this ideological crusade against slavery, and to the eventual publication of their stories, was the mythical Underground Railroad, otherwise known as United States’ first civil rights movement. This secret network of safe houses and routes was used by fugitive slaves to escape and get their way into free states of Canada. The network was assisted by abolitionists as well as other active participants who were sympathetic to the cause of the escapees and committed to fight against slavery. They were “compelled by the philosophies of Abby Kelley Foster, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Coffin Mott, and John Woolman, volunteers captain Daniel Drayton and Captain Alfred Fountain,” and were engaged in “bold acts of civil disobedience to federal laws that required citizens to support slaveholders and federal agents” (Snodgrass xxxi). Yet, taking into account the nature of the secrecy on the Underground Railroad there are a few historical sources available that provide information about the refugee slaves themselves. The greatest amount of information about the secret network comes directly from the abolitionists who published their stories and writings in books and newspapers. A notable exception to this practice is a collection of interviews published by American abolitionist Benjamin Drew in 1856 and titled A North-Side View of Slavery; the Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. The book still bears importance and relevance since it is useful to answer questions regarding the actual travel of escapees between slavery and freedom, the kind of infamous conditions slaves endured while enslaved, and what St. Catharines and other Canadian cities were like when these fugitives set foot in the new country. Although the volume was created specifically as a response to Nehemiah Adam’s pro-slavery A South-Side View of Slavery (1855), it can be added to the catalogue of slave narratives that appeared from the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century in North America.
In Henry Louis Gates’s words, the slave narratives are “a unique creation on the long history of human bondage” because they represent the Africans’ testament of “their own stories about life in slavery and about the meaning of freedom” (xi). However, and acknowledging that the slave narratives support “the very foundation” of “the African American literary tradition, especially its canonical texts” (Gates xii), it should be highlighted that they also inform “the origins of other New World African literatures, even that of Canada” (“This is No Hearsay” 11), as George Elliott Clarke has claimed for so long. In fact, despite the Canadian publications of narratives of African American fugitives, many Canadian literary critics blithely prefer to classify the slave narrative as American and therefore alien to Canada. Interestingly, irrespective of the fact that slave narratives seem to remain absent from most anthologies of and guides to Canadian literature, Clarke’s aim of claiming the preeminence of Canadian slave narratives concurs with a recent theoretical trend that reads slavery as a transnational act and avows the fluidity of the North American frontiers acknowledging the cross-borderness of fugitive slaves’ texts. This move builds upon Clarke’s defense of “some estimated "6000 published narratives” by ex-slaves in Canada, most of them African American and many of them brief transcriptions from interviews, that despite having been published in “hundreds British journals”, are still marginalized in mainstream Canadian literary scholarship (“This is No Hearsay” 13). The Black Canadian scholar and poet laureate sentences that “no matter the snowy camouflages and inky smokescreens that our critics and historians throw over Canada’s own heritage of slavery” because “History abhors lacunae, and so Literature rises to answer back, to shout out what had formerly only been whispered and sighed” (“This is No Hearsay” 14). There is no doubt that the sentence is being accomplished.
Clarke’s timely publication coincided with the “transnational turn” in Black Canadian studies. It is thus fit to admit that the work by Clarke, Siemerling or Nancy Kang have contributed to revitalize and shape the field of Black Studies in Canada by placing it in transnational and cross-border frameworks. Prompted by the poet laureate’s article, there was a revisiting of the nineteenth century in Canada to consider the different ways in which Blacks were seen, understood, and acknowledged. Accordingly, a revision of slave narratives, as a literary genre, became imperative since through the lens of this trasnational turn their reading had been rather restrictive.
To this new paradigm in Black Canadian studies, it is important to add Nele Sawallisch’s Fugitive Borders: Black Canadian Cross-Border Literature at Mid-Nineteenth Century, published in 2019. In her work, Sawallisch studies nineteenth-century autobiographical writing by enslaved men that emerged in or around the region of Canada: Richard Warren’s Narrative of the life and sufferings of Rev. Richard Warren (A Fugitive Slave) (1856), Thomas Smallwood’s A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood (Colored Man) (1851), Samuel Ringgold Ward’s Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro (1855), and Austin Steward’s Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Fourty Years a Freeman (1857). The book thus “relies on recent developments in Black Canadian studies that have turned to a transnational and explicitly cross-border understanding of Black Canadian history” (14). By rereading and re-contextualizing Black autobiographical writing of the nineteenth century, Sawallisch enlarges our understanding of slave narratives and defends that “these texts are a part of a transnational archive because they represent accounts of transnational, cross-border individuals who negotiate borders, personhood, and community” (14).
In keeping with Clarke’s and Sawallisch’s endeavor to revisit slavery from a transnational stance and to contribute to “liberate the Canadian slave narrative” (Odysseys Home 17), it is interesting to delve into Benjamin Drew’s A North-Side View of Slavery; the Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada as an important source and testimony for its stories are anchored in the cross-border Canadian reality whilst they still reveal a lot about what kind of life refugee slaves could look forward to in this country. The collection is fully inscribed in the aforementioned and current transnational turn in Black Canadian studies since the stories by fugitive slaves included in it establish a sort of genealogy through a multiplicity of Black lineages and create a narrative testimony “of pride and strength of black communities that resisted undoing by slavery or racial prejudice” (Sawallisch 17).
In this vein, this edition of Drew’s book sets out to situate the importance of these stories within the historical, cultural and social background in which they were recorded and projected. In the end, the compilation resolves into an exhibition of the intellectual and idiosyncratic practices at work in the mid-nineteenth century North America. The collection of testimonies is ultimately revealed as a transnational and cross-border exercise of abolitionist propaganda that pictures a somewhat new branch within the slave narrative literary genre that might as well be read as slave narratives. However, A North-Side View of Slavery. The Refugee: Or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada goes beyond this and also unravels the heterogeneous formation of the origins and establishment of Black Canada and African Canadian identity while, at the same time, shows the way in which these new Black Canadians participated in the creation and birth of the country we nowadays known as Canada.
The Eighteenth Century and Black Canada: Widening the Routes of the Black Atlantic and Transnational Slavery
As mentioned earlier, the first recorded Black slave arrived in Canada in 1628, transported by a British convoy to New France. The boy was from Madagascar, and he was named by his captors as Olivier le Jeune. This was a rare case of a slave coming to the colony at the time ahead of the Black Code, also known as Code Noir or the Royal Edict of 1685, which restricted the activities of free people of color and prescribed the conversion of all enslaved people throughout the empire. The reason for King Louis XIV’s granting the petition from New France to import Black slaves from West Africa lies in the fact that there were 11. 562 people living in the colony, and most were fur traders, missionaries and farmers. With a lack of servants and labourers, the population wanted to import individuals to undertake such tasks. At the time, slavery was prohibited in France but permitted in the colonies out of the desire to have a large labour force to clear and exploit land. In 1721, the king issued an edict in which he prevented minors emancipated from wardship to sell the Black slaves they owned. Already set up as commodities, Blacks could only be considered if they were enslaved. In 1727, the king issued another edict to regulate foreign commerce with the British American colonies, where it was stated that Blacks who were found on vessels trading abroad would be forfeited to the state of New France. Moreover, although the French legislation posed no question of denying the right of asylum, “even when asylum was granted, a Black person remained a slave” (56), as Marcel Trudel informs.
Taking into consideration that the slaves were forbidden to be taught how to read and write, in order to get acquainted with the stories of some of those Black Slaves in New France, “we have to rely on newspapers, letters, trial records, census reports, and other documents rather than on fully articulated narratives” (Siemerling 34). This exercise gives access to their untold stories and validates the literary importance of testimonies and interviews as part of, or a model of, slave narratives, just as we shall see when dealing with Benjamin Drew’s collection. Indeed, one of the most remarkable events that revealed the suffocating and desperate lives of slaves came from recorded data, more specifically from eighteenth-century trial documents. In 1734, when, according to Trudel, “around forty or fifty” (86) Black slaves lived in Québec, Montréal-based slave Marie Joseph Angélique became nationally known when she was hanged for allegedly burning down almost half of the city out of revenge.
Angélique’s story is as astonishing as fascinating and it accounts for the reality that Black slaves had to endure under New France slavery2. Marie-Joseph Angélique was born around 1705 in Madeira, Portugal. It is possible that she was the first enslaved person in Portugal and a primeval subject under the lucrative transactions of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Angélique was later sold to a Flemish merchant named Nichus Block when she was in her early teens. Block brought Angélique to the New World. There, she lived in New England for one year before being sold in 1725, at the age of 20 to a French businessman from Montréal named Francois Poulin de Francheville. Francheville brought Angélique back to his home town in Montréal to work as a domestic slave. When Francheville died in November of 1733, ownership of Angélique passed down to a Francheville widow. On February 22, 1734, while her mistress was away handling business on her late husband estate, Angélique and her lover Thibault attempted to escape enslavement, but due to bad weather and the frozen river they never made it far, and were finally captured by six militias nearby Chambly.
Angélique was returned to her mistress and started talking back to her and making threats to burn down her home. After learning she was to be sold and separated from the man she devotionally loved, Angélique finally set fire to her owner’s house and escaped. Unfortunately, the fire got out of control and destroyed forty-six buildings, wrecking havoc and propagating horror throughout the streets of Montréal. Only two days after the fire she was interrogated and in the transcription we get to know a short account of her life. Angélique’s confession was not only transcribed but also presented as a type of slave narrative since in these recorded documents she unfolds the events that rank from her birth to her eventual confession. Once convicted and found guilty, she was paraded through the city and finally tortured. On the day of her execution, she was taken through the streets of Montréal and then made to climb a scaffold facing the ruins of the buildings destroyed by the fire she had set. She was then hanged, and her body flung into the fire, so her ashes were scattered in the wind. Marie Joseph Angélique became (and still is) a myth for Black Canadians, and her confession inaugurated, much to her dismay, the Canadian slaves narrative genre.
Even though she never got to write her story due to her illiteracy (Trudel 124), she responded to the questions of the prosecutors and jury and publicly voiced the horrors and tragedies of Black slaves in Canada. The first interrogation sets the tone of her confession and inscribes her testimony within the accounts of slavery: “Stated to be named Marie Joseph, aged twenty-nine years, born in Portugal / And to have been sold to a Flemish man who sold Her to the deceased Sieur de francheville, about nine years ago, where she has remained ever since” (qtd in Siemerling 34). After having consulted all the documents and jurisdiction, Siemerling rightly contends that “[t]hese court documents record the words of the accused slave in the third person, revealing her responses under interrogation” and thus, despite this context, “ the transcriptions of the accused slave’s testimony offer elements of a slave narrative, the most detailed account based on a slave’s statements in eighteenth-century New France that we have” (34). That is, Angélique’s testimony and story have come to represent Canada’s first undisputed slave narrative and, definitely, a direct precursor to Benjamin Dew’s A North-Side View of Slavery because, recorded in 1734 by the authorities of New France, “the narrative anticipated in some of its elements the better known narratives of later fugitive slaves, although these were often elicited under more conductive circumstances by more sympathetic listeners, usually in the service of the cause of abolitionism” (Siemerling 35).3
The peace treaty between France and England in 1760 authenticated the perpetuation of slavery in Québec under the English regime (Trudel 124-142). Yet, by 1800, slavery was rendered unrealizable in Lower Canada. However, prior to that achievement, slave numbers increased when Loyalists arrived with their slaves around 1783. The escape of Loyalists, mainly to Nova Scotia, produced a historical document that “offers us the richest collection of recorded statements by black subjects at the time, at a moment when they were about to become Nova Scotians” (Siemerling 36). Tellingly, the “Book of Negroes”, that represents a milestone in the history of Black Canadians, is an account book created in two versions by British and United States officials in 1783 which includes the names of three thousand Black subjects evacuated from New York in 1783 on an array of ships that were bound for Québec, England, Germany and, primordially, for Nova Scotia. Above all, the “Book of Negroes” represents the testimony of Black individuals that eventually became Canadian citizens. In other words, it is a Black Canadian text that can be seen as a collection of Black testimonies or “an anthology of embryonic slave narratives” (Siemerling 37). What is more, due to the cross-border nature of these Black people’s flight, the ledger constitutes the seed of transnational Black Canadian writing.4 Another specific and important aspect with regard to the “Book of Negroes” is that it contains relevant information about masters and their slaves moving up north. In fact, many entries in the book openly reveal stories of persistent slavery in Canada.
In his article “Black Loyalists and Black Slaves in Maritime Canada” (2007), Harvey Armani Whitfield delves into the history of Black Loyalists and explains how the Blacks who arrived in Nova Scotia “were among the twelve hundred to two thousand slaves brought by Loyalists to Canada” (1981).5 For the historian, “the typical experience of black migrants to the Maritimes after the Revolutionary War was not freedom, but slavery, re-enslavement, and other brutal forms of indentured servitude” (1891).6 Yet, by the late eighteenth century and spurred by different defeats, the British interest in Black people changed and after the American Revolutionary War was “related to contexts and developments that also helped prepare the ground for English abolitionism in the 1780s” (Siemerling 64). Nova Scotia became a relevant site for those new and longer forms of Black testimony that included most notably the slave narrative as a literary testimony. Nova Scotia emerges, in this way, connected to several eighteenth-century slave and captivity narratives, written by Black community leaders who described the province in their memoirs or eventually took up residence there.
One of these well-received Black Nova Scotian narratives was A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black by Methodist minister John Marrant, which was published in 1785. Among the circumstances that fostered the drive of British abolitionism, Siemerling includes “Mansfield’s 1772 decision against slavery on English soil, the 1775 Dunmore Proclamation promising freedom for black support in the American war, and the need, after the humbling British defeat against slaveholding colonies, to consolidate a battered national self-image through moral superiority” (64-65). Certainly, the weight on morality and religious conscience played an important part in rethinking the political image and attitude of England and the British Empire. Cassandra Pybus argues that “material benefit might be sacrificed for moral satisfaction” and this, beyond a doubt, signals a “significant shift in British thinking” (105). A fact of utmost importance was that British intellectuals had come “to an intensified selfscrutiny about the imperial enterprise, in which complicity in slavery was seen to have sullied the moral character of the nation” (Pybus 105).
Under these new perspectives, Granville Sharp took part in the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, which was founded in 1786 in response to the noticeable poverty and suffering of those Black former partners in the war who found themselves rising in numbers in London. It is precisely in this very context that a plan to find a settlement in Sierra Leone to alleviate their situation originated (Pybus 2006, 105–19). Indeed, “important chapters like the evacuation of blacks to Nova Scotia, as well as their subsequent part in the story of the ‘Province of Freedom’ of Sierra Leone, can be understood in the light of genuine British support for black subjects and humanitarian philanthropy” (Siemerling 66). These movements were also a reaction to a pressing need for moral capital after the lost war and the humiliating 1783 Treaty of Paris. All these developments helped to prepare the ground for the ensuing Underground Railroad, and they also informed the course of Canada during the nineteenth century, making the country an important site of Black experience and cultural expression. Despite the frequent racist realities that Black people had to endure in eighteenth-century Nova Scotia and nineteenth-century Upper Canada alike, this new context of a more nuanced humanitarian stance paved the way for the emergence of Canada’s boastful selfimage as a compassionate Black Canaan.
The Arrival of Fugitive Slaves (1820-1860): Loyalty, Suspicion and Writing in Victorian Canada
Prior to the establishment of the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), which prompted a massive escape of slaves to Canada, Black escapees had already decided to flee the United Sates and to move away from slavery. By the end of 1820 and well into 1830, fugitive slaves started to cross the border toward British North America on their own and were rather well received. However, by 1850, both Canada West and Nova Scotia, the two major centers of Black settlement, had established separate educational systems in order to preserve the alleged assumption of equality of opportunity while, at the same time, slowing cultural assimilation. The difference harbored in these thirty years must be understood taking into account the uneven development of Black-white relationships in Canada. A look at the difficulties and obstacles that fugitives encountered alongside Canadian territory exposes the multifarious ways in which Black people fought, metaphorically and literally, to make a living out of Canadian soil.
When the first fugitive slaves arrived in Upper Canada, they generally stopped near the border following a strategic move. Since they had no funds, they could not move freely and deeply into the interior of the country and so, as exiles, they wished to remain close to the frontier hoping for an early return. In Blacks in Canada: A History, Robin Winks explains that
Small knots of Negroes settled at Welland and St. Catherines, back from the Niagara River; at Colchester, Windsor, and Amherstburg, opposite Detroit; near London, Chatham, and Dresden, in the center of the long peninsula of fertile lands that dipped south against Lake Erie almost to the latitude of New York City; and more slowly in Toronto, Oro, and in the Queen’s Bush (144).
On the eastern end of the peninsula Blacks found employment and acceptance to the extent that during the 1830s and well into 1840s many of the waiters in the hotels near the area of Niagara Falls were Black people. Even “travellers to the area agreed that Negroes could have steady employment and access to land as fertile as any settlers occupied” (Winks, Blacks in Canada 146). Their acceptance went so well that they also made it much further afield and began to settle in their own segregated communities to the degree that small communities of Blacks were spread throughout Canada West. They slowly got established throughout British North America, from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Victoria, Vancouver Island, around Halifax and southwards, and near Guysborough and Amherst, in Nova Scotia, around Lake Otnabog in New Brunswick, and in Montreal. Yet, the largest body of Blacks lived in Canada West.
As time went by, this new reality began to be met with apprehension. In 1835 magistrates of the Western District of Upper Canada began to protest because they were certain that Blacks were violating the law of property and “casual segregation patterns began to emerge” (Winks, Blacks in Canada 146). These reactions to fugitives have to be understood due to suspicions around an ambivalent anti-Americanism. Firstly, Canadians thought that to accept runaway slaves was one way to boast about the superiority of British North America over the United States. Also, Canadians were sure that Americans would be less interested in annexing more land because northern abolitionists were really focused on having refugees under British rule. Yet, since abolitionists were really longing to favor annexation of territories and Blacks were Americans, most Canadians feared that they could eventually turned into disloyal subjects to their adopted country in a possible time of conflict with the United States. Nevertheless, the fugitive slaves remained consistently loyal to the British government and supported it in local and provincial matters. An example of this fidelity can be demonstrated when
In Nova Scotia the three hundred members of the Charitable African Society of Halifax resisted the introduction of responsible government in 1846, and when a group of Montreal businessmen issued an Annexation Manifesto in October 1849, calling for union with the United States, Negroes throughout the Canadas were quick to denounce it, fearing that the Washington government would extend slavery to the provinces. (Winks, Blacks in Canada 150)
Blacks in Canada also served in other provinces and insisted on proving their utter loyalty to British North America.7 As expatriates longing to be accepted, they made a greater effort to show their commitment to Canada and their provincial laws and regulations. Thus, the idea that refugees should be given the chance to enjoy freedom started to gain currency. Visits of Quaker abolitionists allowed for a considerable publicity for resettlement in Upper Canada. Perhaps one of the most memorable of those visitors was Benjamin Lundy, responsible of enlisting William Lloyd Garrison to the cause of abolitionism. In his journey across Upper Canada to examine the life led by fugitive slaves Lundy witnessed the way in which the escapees were making a living and eventually confirmed that Blacks were truly free and equal (Winks, Blacks in Canada 158). Despite their proved loyalty and the supporting words of abolitionists, the presence of Black refugees in Canada kept on arising suspicion. There were ongoing rumours that Blacks were being transported back into northern states which, in the short run, would result in damaging the selfassurance in their settlements.8 More often than not these rumours turned out to be a reality, thus evincing that the real situation of Black people was far from being idyllic and that they were neither accepted nor respected.
Indeed, by the 1840s, the Canadas witnessed a clear rise in anti-Black sentiment. Even if hundreds and eventually thousands of Blacks poured north seeking freedom, they only encountered prejudice in many forms. In a passage that is worth quoting in full, Robin Winks insightfully explains how
The Negroes congregated in settlements to themselves, however, and where they did move they seemed to move in abundance, attracting attention and generating prejudice. This prejudice was manifested in the usual ways: in occasional acts of group violence directed against Negroes who attempted to rise too far or too fast, in public resentment of the Negro settlements, in bills to inhibit or prohibit Negro use of the franchise, in segregated schools, and in the subtle currency of daily speech. Terms like “nigger” were in general use, and “darkies,” “sooties,” and other epithets occur in private and public papers. In French Canada two imports, “odor” and “parfum d’Afrique,” were employed by mid-century. Around York (ultimately Toronto) burning fallen trees into parts by placing small pieces of wood across them and then setting these on fire was known as “niggering.” (“A Sacred Animosity” 305)
What is more, after several episodes in which some fugitive slaves were almost kidnapped with an eye to be extradited towards the United States, it became obvious that the British and the American governments needed to agree on a treaty to cover, if not to resolve, the conflicting issue of extradition. Indeed, this was not by any means a minor concern. The condition of African American slaves was exploited by the United States, and therefore the country made a greater effort to solve the situation of Blacks in the North. In this context, the conflict between Americans and Canadians got even more serious when, profiting from the chaos and lack of legislation, white criminals started to use the frontier as a shelter. The American government wished to benefit from this gap in the law and took this propitious chance to negotiate on the legality or illegality of the frontier hoping to include fugitive slaves, though “the British hoped it would not” (Winks 171). Canadian abolitionists were particularly sensitive to this factual peril since most cases were thought to arise upon their own soil. Again, this was nothing but a proof of the vulnerability of Black people in Canada and also another instance of how they tried with all their might to show their loyalty and to hope for respect. The political argument got heated and even known Black personalities took part in it, thus showing their involvement in institutional affairs between the two countries. In fact, three noted Blacks, including the well-known Peter Gallego,9 asked Thomas Rolph10 to send a petition to Queen Victoria through Lord Durham – who became famous as a Governor that inquired into the causes of rebellion to ask that fugitive slaves receive special protection under a possible forthcoming treaty. Needless to say, the petition was ignored. Rolph deplored Durham’s criminal negligence and argued that extradition should be placed beyond the control of caprice or expedience. The three petitioners then suggested that no Black person purposely claimed as a fugitive should ever be surrendered or delivered and that they might as well be tried for any alleged crime in Upper Canada. However, abolitionists in the United States as well as the Colonial Office in Canada still pressed to agree upon a clear and limited treaty of extradition that could equally deal with outstanding issues of law-breaking and with penalties such as desertion, mutiny or revolt. Definitely, the way in which the Colonial Office in Canada and the abolitionists were taking good care of the escapees despite the distrustful atmosphere of the settlers spurred fugitive slaves to flee from the United States and travel to Canada and to the West.
The Fugitive Slave Act, passed in 1850, was a definite turning point in the history of Blacks in North America since it efficiently threatened former slaves and free Blacks alike. It also imposed firm penalties to those who aided fugitives and facilitated the means to turn in Blacks to slavery. It is no wonder that it fostered “the greatest impetus to African American migration to Canada during the antebellum period, effectively doubling the black population of what is now Ontario within a decade” (Frost 281). Certainly, from 1850 to 1860 the number of Blacks in Canada tripled to the extent that by 1852 there were 30.000 Black people in the country (Simerling 94). Despite the aforementioned suspicions and the way in which these new Blacks had to fight to be respected, they made their way through Canada and managed to establish there in search of the freedom they were denied in the United States.
This forced migration led to an enhancement of abolitionist and Black activities and encounters that also flourished and materialized in publications. Winfried Siemerling calls this precise moment the “Black Canadian Renaissance”, that is a “nineteenth-century effervescence of black writing and testimony that was transnational but written and rooted in Canada” (98). Definitely, the textual and cultural production cultivated by these freedom-seekers despite their vulnerable position as Black people was by all means driven by a desire for liberty and human rights that had been withheld by slavery and racial discrimination. This is the context in which Benjamin Drew composed and published his book of interviews and testimonies of fugitive slaves who has escaped to Canada. Moreover, the body of Victorian Canada cultural production comprises a vast array of texts and oral accounts of former slaves and free Blacks. Other than Drew’s A North-Side View of Slavery, there were published slave narratives like those of “Thomas Smallwood, the ministers Samuel Ringgold Ward and Jermaine Wesley Loguen, Austin Steward, Mahommah Bardo Maquaqua […] the two newspapers, Voice of the Fugitive, edited by the Bibbs, and the Provincial Freeman, co-founded and edited by Mary Ann Shadd; Shadd’s A Plea for Immigration and Other Writings” (Siemerling 98), among others.
All these writings and publications came to fruition because, although by the 1850s Black people in Canada had represented a long-standing presence in the land, all through the 1855s and 1860s there would be evidence of the extent of Black involvement in abolitionism and anti-slavery work in Canada West. Marking the province as a pivotal spot in the anti-slavery struggle, authors and abolitionists attached to Western Canada started to intervene in the anti-slavery arena by means of autobiographical, fictional, or testimonial writing, as Benjamin Drew’s work demonstrates. As Sawallisch asserts
The 1850s saw yet an increase in the popularity – and the necessity – of literature that catered to abolitionism’s goal to appeal to the moral opposition to slavery and the requests of their audience. Black authors like Smallwood, Stewsrd, Ward and Warren demonstrated, however, that they did not depend entirely on the phenomenon of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 to further fuel the distribution of their narratives. (20)
Hence, this so-called Black Canadian Renaissance in Victorian Canada needs to be considered as a crucial moment in Black Canadian literature and culture since it represents the springboard of an entire abolitionist literature across diverse genres that will be intent on denouncing slavery and discriminatory practices. At the same time, as Drew’s text proves, this set of writings will pit the Canadian and American reality against each other and, in so doing, it will shun the racist practices and unequal treatment that some Black people were suffering in Canada. Besides, by expanding the centrality of Black Canada through the different geographies, the Renaissance broadens the limited understanding of Canadian abolitionism, antislavery activism, and black community building, and also sheds light to multiple literary and biographical cross-border trajectories and stories between Canada West and the United States, like Drew’s collection corroborates.
Re-Visiting “Canaan” (1845-1860): Interventions and Cross-Border Black Communities
The mid-nineteenth century was marked by the opening of more space for new Black settlement. Canada’s reality was rife with diversity, and it witnessed more and more diasporic and imperial circulation that started to configure Black transnational geographies and the ongoing blossom of Canada’s own national and cultural emergence. In this context, the cross-border exchange, and the transnational unity in search of freedom and a more democratic North America became a commonplace that should be supported. Many voices were part of this attempt and all of them worked toward the same direction. The consolidation of Black communities in Canada, and especially in the West, found the aid and interest of transnational abolitionism. It was a way to display the positive ways in which the (already) Black Canadians had absorbed the professed values of freedom and equality in British North America. These Black communities were, then, the living proof that the way out of slavery was not only possible but also favourable for the country. Among the outstanding personalities that are an example of this transnational effort to foster freedom and anti-slavery defense for the benefit of the established Black communities in Canada is Mary Ann Shadd.
Shadd is a remarkable figure in North American history and culture. As a daughter of notable free Black abolitionists, she became “key to reconfiguring the North American mid-nineteenth century from a perspective that includes the Black Canadian Renaissance” and linked “a number of developments and other writers who were crucial to this cross-border transnational context” (Siemerling 99). Her intellectual drive, her social commitment and her abolitionist militancy turned her into a prominent figure in the Black Canadian 1850s context. She soon proved her convinced ideology when she stepped into the world of abolitionism by publishing two documents, a letter to Frederick Douglass printed in the North Star and a pamphlet called Hints to the Colored People of the North. Yet, it is acknowledged that one of the most, if not the most, relevant contributions of Shadd’s was her devoted defense of emigrationism. In fact, her resolution to move to Canada in 1851 indicated her willingness to take decisive action against The Fugitive Slave Act since this law “gave new urgency to the debate about emigrationism” (Siemerling 102). Even though the Garrisonian abolitionist wing was adamant to consider emigration as a feasible way to not only escape slavery but also to reclaim Black personhood – especially after the failure of having considered Sierra Leone or Liberia as possible destinies that could embrace the freedom of fugitive slaves –, emigration to Canada presented different perspectives. More often than not, it became not only an option but, many a time, a necessity after the Fugitive Slave Act. Shadd was a full supporter of this view and considered Canada a site of human rights and inherent Black empowerment that projected a similar potential across the border. In this light, this Black abolitionist “reiterated in 1855 a number of themes that recurred again and again in the debate of the 1850s, including the theme of the dual role of free blacks in Canada as living proof of the possible self-sufficiency and even prosperity of emancipated slaves and as a menacing Sword of Damocles over the United States” (Simerling 104).
Shadd’s thought is, thus, representative of a transnational and cross-border approach to abolitionism and it also represents the seed of Black Canadian experience and identity in (still) British North America. Her ideological agenda is best explained in her preeminent work, the emigrationist manifesto A Plea for Emigration or Notes of Canada West, in its Moral, Social and Political Aspect: With Suggestions Respecting Mexico, West Indies and Vancouver Island, for the Information of Colored Emigrants, which appeared in 1852. Although originally addressed to a Black U.S. audience, the text gained importance because it was published in the same year that the now classic and foundational Roughing It in the Bush, or, Life in Canada by British Colonial pioneer Susanna Moodie. This text has become a milestone to understanding the beginning of Canadian literature and the Canadian experience no longer under the auspices of the British lore.
As Moodie’s initial distaste for the hardships of “roughing it” gradually changed to an eventual earnest commitment to Canada’s future so did Shadd’s guide as it was welcomed by abolitionists and Black Canadian settlements. In fact, Shadd’s text can be considered foundational to (Black) Canadian literature as it bears testimony “of the earlier black narratives bearing on Canada challenge the elision of black experiences and writing in many previous accounts of midnineteenth-century Canadian life and letters” (Siemerling 105). In fact, Shadd’s manifesto “came at the height of the American Renaissance, with its simultaneous celebration and questioning of the United States” (Siemerling 105) which, together with her reflections on Black emancipation and her transnational approach makes it an outstanding contribution to African American culture and identity.
Moreover, A Plea for Emigration or Notes of Canada West represents Shadd’s tour de force in her defense of emigration against the Garrisonian abolitionists. This new approach to abolitionism became well received in Canada since fugitive slaves found it easier to get her voice heard and taken into account. This is why her work elicited a positive response and served as an inspiration for other abolitionists, like Benjamin Drew himself, who equally thought that migrating to Canada represented a valuable escape in search of freedom. Besides, Shadd’s antislavery plea became crucial to spread “another” type of Canadian nineteenthcentury enclosed in the aforesaid Black Canadian Renaissance. It also acted as a way to breathe flesh and visualize the accepted repression of the other that was so well represented the American Renaissance. In this sense, Shadd’s contribution is worth praising because it confronted noted Garrisonian abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass or Martin Delany, who were utterly suspicious over her emigrationist stance. Her decisive defense of transnational approach to abolitionism, which would soon enlighten other abolitionists like Drew to follow suit, explains why her name is a celebrated among the Black personalities that planted the seeds of Black Canadian identity. Moreover, as Siemerling accurately summarises, Shadd figures prominently in U.S./Canadian studies as one of the notable Black authors who “wrote and worked in a Canadian context for such an extension of democracy and citizenship in all of North America, since their labors are equally part of Canadian history, however, the trans-border and black Atlantic lives of many of these leading nineteenth-century black intellectuals also underline my claim that the bases of Canadian literary history are in need of revision” (107). In a typical cross-border abolitionist writing, Shadd’s optimism overlooks the often racist reality she had surely experienced after a few months in Canada and rather opts to focus on the Canaan myth of benevolence as a feasible and pragmatic way to impress an ideal on potential Black immigrants that is theoretically possible under Canadian legislation. This is the same optimism as well as omissions, grounded in religious terms that will be found in Drew’s collection.
Another relevant publication that Shadd undertook was the foundation, in 1853, of an anti-slavery paper, called The Provincial Freeman. The paper’s slogan was “Devoted to antislavery, temperance and general literature” and it encapsulates the ideological messages it conveyed and spread. Shadd’s editorship of the periodical alone became a milestone as it cued change, marking an important moment in publishing and Black representation in the mid-nineteenth century. In all certainty, “Shadd’s irrepressible drive for freedom and active black self-transformation finally also produced a kind of ideologiekritik that reflected on the mental barriers to freedom among free blacks in Canada” (Siemerling 113). The Provincial Freeman needs to be praised also because it stood for the reality and adversities of Blacks whilst it offered an influential stage for reflection on Black specificity and transformation under the conditions of freedom in Canada. The periodical touched upon the issues that were relevant for the daily lives of Black people in Canada (West) and for the cross-border abolitionist movement. Among them, temperance was a leading one. In fact, from the beginnings of abolitionism, temperance was a required practice and disposition and that is why Shadd explicitly advocated: “The planned black settlements in the province either required or recommended temperance. In communities throughout Canada West, local blacks formed societies, like the African Temperance Society of St. Catharines, to promote abstinence from intoxicating beverages” (qtd. in Stewart 46). These Black communities draw this influence from the importance that African American leaders gained in the fight for temperance which, in due course, “helped the emergence of an independent black nationalist movement, and also that Black leaders joined this cause in support of principles such as industry and economy designed to uplift the race” (Bridgen 66). In other words, the temperance movement in the Black Canadian (West) communities adopted and fervently upheld the reformist drive of the temperance movement attached to abolitionism as a way to legitimize their members as proper citizens. As will be exposed later, Benjamin Drew’s collection, following Shadd’s writing and as an example of transnational abolitionist literature, also taps into this important issue as one of the most remarkable goals of the reformist movements that were active in nineteenth-century Black Canada.
Mary Anne Shadd’s influence is noticeable in a highly relevant book that was published in 1855, just a year before the appearance of Drew’s A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada and written almost at the same time, by Samuel Ringgold Ward and titled Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro. In it, Ward continues Shadd’s ideological enterprise and his narrative delves into the Black condition and racism in Canada in comparison with the United States. By means of narrating the daily routines and incidents he encounters, Ward walks through Shadd’s paved way and “insists on the continuation of anti-slavery work in Canada in the face of continued support for slavery by a number of groups there” (Siemerling 118). His narrative presents importance elements that anticipate Drew’s own book. In a sort of prequel for the voices of Black Canadians appearing in Drew’s collection, Ward’s narrative is fecund in describing
black meetings, organizations, and the progress of black individuals, and portrays the black communities in Hamilton, St Catharines, London, Chatham, and Buxton. He rejoices over the economic progress in all of the communities visited, finds less-than-expected racism in St Catharines and London, and lauds the economic and educational achievements, absence of begging, and absolute temperance in the Elgin settlement. (Siemerling 119)
Hence, the Black settlements in the Canadian (West) Canaan represent a fertile ground to investigate the crucial role of Canada’s Black communities in a wider and transnational context. For the Black fugitive slave, now turned into a Black Canadian, they are nothing less than the living proof of the rich potential of free Black communities, denied by the pro-slavery forces that kept the United States in their oppressive thrall. As he vehemently asserts: “The coloured people of Canada, as a whole, are the most moral and upright of our race in America” (222). Despite his triumphalist (over)statement, Ward signals the direction that abolitionist thinking was pointing to with regard the Black North American population. In this valuable window of Canada West, taken in the years before 1855 and some time before Drew’s account of fugitive slaves, Ward suggests that the importance of Canada’s Black population as a model ought to make it a central concern for abolitionists because it strengthens their claims and gives rise to a global and more humanitarian defense against the ills of slavery.
Consequently, the cross-border Black communities of Canada West reveal themselves as the locale where the crystallizing debates about abolitionism were taking place. They also showcase the importance of getting their voices heard and their attempt to include themselves in the slave narratives literary trend, a genre that was galvanizing the attention of both abolitionists and North American citizens alike. This is the historical, cultural and intellectual context in which Benjamin Drew tried to include his oral interviews into the abolitionist agenda and, in so doing, participated in reshaping the testimonies of fugitive slaves within the literary imprint of transnational slave narratives.
In defense of Continental Abolitionism through Canadian Narratives of Fugitive Slaves: Benjamin Drew’s The Refugee: Or The Narratives of Fugitives Slaves in Canada
In the mid-1850s and sponsored by the Canadian Anti-Slavery Society, Boston abolitionist Benjamin Drew embarked on a tour throughout Canada West aiming to counter and contest the pro-slavery viewpoint that had been put forth in Nehemiah Adam’s 1854 A South-Side View of Slavery. Adams’s work was propelled by his disgust at the national and international impact of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and in it he intended to respond to Stowe’s novel by offering his own observations of the “true” state of southern slavery. Adams was a pastor of the Essex Street Congregational Church in Boston, who had previously – and publicly – denounced slavery and its consequences. Yet, shortly after its publication and circulation the book earned the reputation of being a proslavery text, or, to a certain extent, a succinct defense of slavery. Indeed, A South-Side View was duly criticized because it avoided advocating for Black emancipation on U.S. soil and for refusing to call for an end to slavery. Rather, it only went as far as to promote reforms and to call for the cessation of what the author partially perceived to be northern meddling in southern matters.
Prior to writing A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, Drew had been in contact with the literary world by means of his participation with a group of writers at The Shade and also because he became the editor of a humor magazine, The Carpet Bag, which had contributors as well-known as Miles O’Really, Artemus Ward or Mark Twain. However, his abolitionist drive took over his journalist exercise and prompted him to take action and travel to the north in order to counteract Adam’s infamous portrayal of slaves. Although some of Adam’s assertions had been heard before, his position as a Boston minister caused a commotion in antebellum antislavery circles. Drew revolved against Adam’s defense of support reconciliation and his belief in the masters’ generous paternalism over their slaves.
Drew was not the only one who aimed at responding to Adam’s racist collection. William Lloyd Garrison took the chance to reprint in The Liberator a sheer critique that had already appeared in the Christian Examiner, one of the most well-known magazines that supported the antislavery movement, though fully opposed to Garrison’s fanatic abolitionism. Besides, the very same year in which A South-Side View was published, George Fitzhugh’s Sociology for the South; or the Failure of Free Society came to light with the same racist views that also sparked the anger of abolitionists. To make matters worse, in that same year, a runaway slave named Anthony Burns was captured and finally convicted under the premises of the Fugitive Slave Law. The atmosphere was getting more and more disturbing, and it definitely seemed convincing that “if the observations of Adams and Fitzhugh gained increase acceptance, then slavery, supported by congressional compromise and armed force, might indeed become further entrenched” (Edelstein xv). Drew needed no other impulse and proceeded to depart for Canada willing to reveal the true side of fugitive slaves.
Benjamin Drew appraised that there could be around thirty thousand fugitive slaves in Canada when he got there in 1855. Most of them had settled in Upper Canada (West) and on the east by New York. Although the vast majority of slaves fled to Canada to escape from the hardships of southern slavery, they also admitted that they had left the north because legal or extra-legal discrimination against free of fugitive Blacks was very much practiced. Drew left for Canada with the idea of finding fugitive slaves enjoying freedom and who had become proper citizens of British North America, and who had left behind the suffocating reality of oppression and heightening discrimination. Since the largest wave of African American slaves that slipped away toward Canada followed the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, it meant that the difference between the reality lived in the United States and that in its northern neighbor should be shown.
To prepare his trip and gather information for his book, Drew bore with him letters of introduction by the well-known abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker, and some other Massachusetts abolitionist leaders. But, as Edelstein affirms, “perhaps his most valuable Canadian contact was a white man, the reverend Hiram Wilson, formerly one of the group of students and teachers at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati who had withdrawn from school when antislavery preaching was forbidden” (xviii). Wilson himself, the reverend Theodore Weld and other colleagues had become an important group of early religious leaders of the antislavery movement. In fact, the religious nature of this group of abolitionists, among which Benjamin Drew can also be counted, was considerably influential. In his attempt, Drew also found encouragement in the Reverend William King, who, in 1849, founded the most successful Black community in Canada called Buxton, in Elgin settlement. All these sources of inspiration illuminated Drew and served as an example to nurture a steadfast determination bathed in Christian values to denounce slavery and to expose the fugitive slaves’ free life in Canada as a direct message to the U.S.
