Blood and Daring Read online

  Owned by Moses Burton, Anderson was raised by the white mistress of the house. He had been renamed Jack Burton according to convention at the time whereby slaves were given the surnames of their owners in order to assist with identification. He played with the Burtons’ children, ate reasonably well, and was healthy and relatively well-clothed. At fifteen, he was sent to the tobacco fields to work the sun-up to sun-down hours of the adults. His intelligence and work ethic soon earned him the position of overseer, supervising the work of other slaves. Mrs. Burton was so taken with young Anderson that she arranged for him to be given an acre and a half of land to raise his own crops and earn a meagre living when the tobacco work was done.

  One Sunday Anderson attended one of the many religious revival meetings that owners allowed slaves to organize, where drink and fellowship were offered along with the spirituals and evangelical preaching. He was smitten by a young slave named Marie Tomlin, and the two were married in December of 1850. As was typical of slave weddings, the two vowed to be together until split by death or involuntary separation.

  The couple were not allowed to live together; they were owned by different people and had work to do. Anderson walked two miles to visit Marie every Saturday afternoon and returned each Sunday night. Marie had two children from a previous marriage and the couple soon welcomed a third. Anderson began creeping out nearly every evening to be with his family. Early one morning, Moses Burton caught him sneaking back, and threatened to tie and flog him. Only the intervention of one of the Burton daughters, with whom Anderson had played as child, saved him.

  The incident, and the death of Burton’s wife, led to Anderson’s sale to Saline County’s Colonel Reuben McDaniel for one thousand dollars. McDaniel told Anderson that he had been purchased as breeding stock and that he should pick himself some slave girls and forget his wife and baby. An old slave named Jacob told his young friend about slaves who had fled and never returned, and of a place called Canada where slaves could live in freedom. Anderson became excited and was soon making escape plans.

  On a cool morning on September 25, 1853, Anderson took a large knife, steeled himself, and then slowly walked away, leaving the indignity of the McDaniel farm behind. He crept into Marie’s small shack and whispered goodbye to her and their child. He promised to find Canada and then return or send for her. Moments later, he vanished into the night. In fleeing, Anderson had become a thief. According to American custom and laws, Anderson was not a man but rather a piece of property, and so in running, he was robbing Colonel McDaniel by stealing himself.

  Anderson had inadvertently fled when Missouri was aflame with a season of violence, crime and intrigue. F.H. Moss, a Canadian abolitionist, had travelled to Missouri and had been sneaking onto a number of farms to talk to slaves about joining him on an adventure back north. His work led to a number of escapes. Meanwhile, communities were shaken by two reports of escaping slaves raping white women. In both cases, suspects were caught and hanged without trial. The state had become so concerned about slaves escaping and running wild that a bounty was offered to anyone who caught a slave.

  On the third day of his flight, Anderson accidently stumbled upon a farmer named Seneca Digges and four of his slaves. Anderson explained that he was travelling with the permission of Colonel McDaniel to see if he could have himself sold to a farm closer to his wife. Digges did not believe the tale, but he played for time by inviting Anderson to stay for dinner with his slaves. Anderson initially agreed, but then bolted for the woods. Digges shouted to his slaves that he would pay for Anderson’s capture and with that, the chase was on. For thirty minutes they ran through woods and fields until Digges’s slaves finally had Anderson surrounded. He pulled the long knife from his waistband and escaped, but almost immediately ran into Digges. Digges raised a tree branch, but before he could swing it the two men fell together. Anderson’s knife plunged into Digges’s chest. Two more thrusts to the back dropped Digges, and Anderson fled. Eight-year-old Ben Digges, who had been there throughout the violent encounter, was left staring at his wounded and bleeding father while the slaves gave chase.

  With Digges dying of his wounds, local newspapers reported this latest attack on a law-abiding white man by a rampaging slave. At a hastily called meeting, Howard County residents expressed shock and anger. A vigilante committee was formed and a number of men eager to collect a reward headed out. Twice Anderson was nearly caught, but he managed to slip away before he was seen.

  Dirty, exhausted, starving, and wearing shredded clothing, Anderson slowly struggled northward. He happened upon a white man whose reaction to seeing him was such that Anderson decided to risk trusting him. The gentleman offered a meal and bed for the night. He told Anderson of the quickest way to Chicago and of certain individuals he should find there who would help get him to Canada. With suspicion in his heart, but anguished desperation in his mind, he left the next morning, his pockets bulging with apples and bread. After weeks on his own, Anderson had boarded the Underground Railroad.

  The Underground Railroad was at the time and would forever be shrouded in mystery and myth. Most slaves were on their own when running, but many were helped by sympathetic white people who offered them food, homes, wagons and courage.4 Helping a slave to escape was akin to abetting theft and punishable with fines and imprisonment that became increasingly severe. Brave whites nonetheless persisted and their numbers increased. The Underground Railroad’s name came from code words; safe houses were called stations and those offering help were dubbed conductors. In the harsh cruelty of all that slavery entailed, the Underground Railroad offered a spark of decency. Influential abolitionist Levi Coffin, a North Carolina Quaker, said with a sentiment that reflected the beliefs of all conductors, “The dictates of humanity came in opposition to the law and we ignored the law.”5

  After a few more days of hardship and terror, Anderson arrived in Chicago and he quickly found the people who had been recommended to him. They bought him clothes, found him lodging and gave him food. For three weeks, he lay hidden in a small room above a barbershop. Finally, train tickets were provided for him to travel to Detroit. Within days he was over the Detroit River and in Windsor. It was late November 1853, and John Anderson had made it to Canada. He was free.

  CANADA

  Following directions given to him by his Detroit contacts, Anderson found a safe house in Windsor owned by Henry Bibb, an escaped slave who dedicated himself to helping other fugitive slaves and the Canadian abolitionist movement. His efforts included the creation of an institute designed to help recent arrivals learn to read and master the vocational skills needed to begin their new lives. Bibb enrolled Anderson, who worked hard and did well. Soon, Anderson had a job working as a labourer with the Great Western Railway. He saved his money, and devoted his days off to doing maintenance work and his free time to learning to read, write and do sums.

  The Canada in which Anderson found himself was idyllic compared to Missouri, but it still struggled with racism and segregation. Canada was not a stranger to slavery. Early French settlers had enslaved Aboriginal people, and then, in the late seventeenth century, African slaves arrived in Quebec. The capitulation agreement that ceded Quebec to Britain after the 1759 conquest guaranteed the continuation of slavery. In 1763, Quebec governor James Murray had sent an urgent request to New York for a shipment of slaves to meet a labour shortage.6 Slavery was also common in the British colony of Nova Scotia. About five hundred slaves were brought to the Maritimes by loyalists fleeing the American Revolution.

  Slaves were also a common sight in Upper Canada. Again, most had been brought north by American loyalists. As in Lower Canada and the Maritime colonies, slaves worked predominantly on docks and as domestic servants. But Upper Canada found its great emancipator when British army officer John Graves Simcoe was appointed the first governor of the colony of Upper Canada. He was a visionary under whose leadership the colony grew quickly. Simcoe was also an abolitionist. While he wanted complete emancipation, in 1
793 he settled for the passage of an act that rendered illegal the further introduction of slaves into Upper Canada and the freedom of all children born to slaves.

  Simcoe’s gradual emancipation law reflected the growth of abolitionist sentiment in both Canada and Britain. In 1807, Britain had abolished the Atlantic slave trade, and in August 1834, it abolished slavery throughout its empire. British-Canadian abolitionist laws had thus created a haven for slaves and freemen. With numbers that started slowly but grew each year, American slaves began moving to what many called Canaan, a land where they could be human.

  Partnerships between American and Canadian abolitionists were developed to assist the growing number of racial refugees. An important element in their co-operative efforts was the construction of dispersed and diverse Black communities.7 Some small Black communities developed in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, but most—about forty—were established in Canada West.

  Canadian and War of 1812 veteran Richard Pierpoint founded Garafrax in the 1820s. The community struggled but eventually did well and grew to become the town of Fergus. In 1831, Wilberforce was formed by American freemen James Charles Brown and Benjamin Lundy, who had been inspired by their attendance at a Philadelphia abolitionist conference the year before. While well-intentioned, that community failed because of inadequate capitalization and faulty management.8 Escaped slave Josiah Henson established the Dawn Settlement in 1842. It began as a school to teach basic vocational skills and grew to become a small village. It helped a good number of people, but like Wilberforce, quickly fell into trouble. Henson had literally and heroically carried his children on his back to escape slavery and was later both the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom and an influential leader in the Canadian abolitionist movement. Nevertheless, he was a poor administrator. The most successful of the many communities began with a fundraising effort that saw the purchase of 9,000 acres of farmland in Elgin County’s Raleigh Township. The Buxton Mission, named after British abolitionist Thomas Fowell Buxton, became a thriving town.

  THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW

  While all southern American states and most municipalities had laws that segregated the races and rendered life miserable for slaves and freemen alike, in 1850 things got worse. In September, the American Congress passed, and weak president Millard Fillmore signed, an omnibus bill that included a new and strengthened version of the Fugitive Slave Law. The law went further than previous laws by making it obligatory for all whites to help apprehend fugitive slaves. More severe penalties than ever before were imposed on runaways, and their right to a trial was removed. The law changed everything. Issues that had been distant and subject to somewhat philosophical discussion for northern Americans suddenly became real, practical, urgent and local because it was now their legal responsibility to involve themselves in capturing escaped slaves. Wilful blindness was no longer possible. All were suddenly involved.

  The Fugitive Slave Law and the new generation of slave catchers it spawned sent a wave of fear through northern cities, where many African-Americans had been living peaceful lives in their first or second generation of freedom.9 The law enraged and inspired northern abolitionists. In rapidly increasing numbers, they reacted by bringing the Underground Railroad above ground. Public meetings and support, along with overt defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law, became commonplace. The federal government’s inability to effectively enforce the law pleased and encouraged abolitionists.

  Many national leaders spoke out against the law. Powerful New York Republican senator William Seward spoke against it and Massachusetts Democratic senator Charles Sumner forced a doomed vote on the law’s repeal. The nationally known, splendidly articulate, and politically efficacious ex-slave Frederick Douglass was more incendiary in his reaction, stating: “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter [is] to make a dozen or more dead kidnappers.”10

  Many heeded Douglass’s call. In Detroit, a federal agent taking a runaway slave to jail was pelted with paving stones by white citizens enraged by what they perceived as injustice. The prisoner was freed and sent across the Detroit River to Windsor. An abolitionist mob descended upon a Boston courthouse in which the ownership of a fugitive slave was being decided, and a man was killed in the riot that ensued. The president threatened to send federal troops to northern cities to protect the slave catchers.

  All at once, the slow but steady migration across the Canadian border became a flood. Within weeks of the law’s passage the city of Baltimore reported a problem in staffing hotels: all the Black waiters and porters had gone to Canada. Black churches in Buffalo and Rochester complained that their congregations had nearly all fled.11 In the first three months after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, about three thousand African-Americans crossed into Canada.12

  As more and more slaves and freemen traded their shackles and low-paying insecure jobs for Canadian freedom, even more elaborate campaigns were waged to capture and dissuade them. Additional state and local laws were passed, bounties were raised, more slave catchers were hired, and the punishments for escape attempts and abetting became increasingly violent and draconian. Many people who risked all to help runaway slaves were heavily fined or imprisoned for up to year. Kentucky’s Reverend Calvin Fairbank, for instance, was convicted of helping slaves to escape and handed a sentence of fifteen years’ hard labour. Those caught helping escaping slaves or freemen were often beaten and banished, and many had “SS” branded onto their left palm—slave stealer.

  Propaganda was also spread—that Canada is always frigidly cold; slavery existed in Canada with conditions worse than in the south; all runaways were imprisoned upon crossing the border.13 But nothing worked. The lure of freedom remained stronger than frantic lies and desperate power. Canadian governor general Lord Elgin wrote to the British colonial secretary that Canada West was “flooded with blackies who are rushing across the frontier to escape from the bloodhounds whom the Fugitive Slave Bill has let loose on their track.”14

  Many American slaves and freemen who fled to Canada had by that time come to play prominent roles in the country’s development. Wilson Abbott, for example, had been born a freeman in Richmond, Virginia, and run a successful grocery business in Mobile, Alabama. In 1834, he was warned that his store was about to be attacked and just in time escaped with his family first to New Orleans and then, in 1836, to Toronto. He operated a number of successful businesses and ploughed profits into real estate speculation, and soon found himself a leader among the city’s small but powerful Black elite. His son Anderson was the first Black graduate of Toronto’s King’s College and the first African-Canadian doctor. He later served as a surgeon in the Civil War.

  Thornton Blackburn and his wife had escaped from slavery in Kentucky and eventually found their way to Detroit but, in 1833, were tracked down by slave catchers. A daring jail break led to a riot when abolitionists turned on the police and slave catchers. Blackburn and his wife, Lucie, made their escape and soon settled in Toronto. He tried his hand at a number of jobs before forming the city’s first taxi company.* Blackburn retired a wealthy man.

  Abbott and Blackburn were two success stories among many. Thousands of other Black farmers, teachers, priests and business owners were enriching the growing Canadian nation while pursuing their dreams. And all the while, the personal was political. Every intelligent, successful, law-abiding African-American in Canada was one more arrow flung into the heart of the Southern idea that Blacks were unworthy, unable and unwilling to lead such lives.

  William Lyon Mackenzie understood the danger that the success of former slaves in Canada posed for the future of the South. Mackenzie was Toronto’s first mayor and leader of the ill-fated 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion. On a visit to the United States, the former newspaperman wrote an article that was widely published south of the border. He spoke glowingly of Blacks and whites living and working together in Toronto and of some ex-slaves doing so well in business that they kept domestic servants in their impressive hom
es. Mackenzie wrote, “This is turning the table on the Sothrons [sic], and fairly balancing accounts with the ebony-hearted slave-holders.”15

  Among those who echoed the point was George Brown. The tall, handsome, and always fastidiously tailored Brown had emigrated to America from Scotland and worked in the New York City newspaper business with his father. An intelligent, ambitious and articulate man, he moved to Toronto and founded the Globe. By 1850 it had become Canada’s most widely read and influential newspaper. Brown was also an important politician who became the Reform Party leader and later played an essential role as one of Canada’s Fathers of Confederation.

  In the early spring of 1851, Brown helped form the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada. His brother-in-law Thomas Henning, who also served on the Globe‘s editorial staff, was its secretary. The Anti-Slavery Society made connections with other like-minded associations in Canada; in addition, on a rather regular basis, Henning exchanged letters with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.

  The Canadian abolitionist movement ultimately weakened itself through schisms born of politics, religion and ego, but the Anti-Slavery Society remained an important voice for the cause. Its drawing power and the popularity of its beliefs and goals were seen when a convention was held in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Hall in March 1851. Twelve hundred people applauded speaker after speaker, including Brown, who attacked the Fugitive Slave Law, the institution of slavery, and the Southern interests that defended both. Brown promised to urge the Canadian government to do all that could be done to end slavery in the United States.16