Canada - one end of the Underground Railroad - Follow the North Star, The Guiding Light of the Underground Railroad: Advertising Travel Supplement

Canada's character in the Underground Railroad is interesting, particularly to me because I have discovered that members of my have family made it from southern Delaware to Canada. My great-grandfather, who escaped in 1856 stayed a small in number years in Canada, as Jacob Blockson who is mentioned in William Still's volume which was the first written by the agency of leading member of the subterraneous Railroad. When I went to Canada last summer and was talking to the Walls, who are the descendants of an escapee who arrived in Canada in 1846 thy spoke of family who remembered my relatives.

Some of my relatives stayed in Canada; others came back to the united states. Canada was not the promised land that many of our ancestors may have awaited after reading Or hearing of Benjamin Lundy's report of his 1832 visit. Canada was cooled Canada had prejudice during' those days--as Mary Ann Shadd noted in a certain quantity of of her articles that appeared in The Provincial Freeman. in Canada, too, there was competition for jobs--and an tender Of segregation. It was not the promised land that greatest in quantity people bragged about. Charles Blockson

The Upper Canada Abolition Act of 1793 which placed limited constraints upon existing slavery and which established that any slave newly entering the province, whether with his or her master or in flight from bondage, would be thinked legally free, was enacted the same year the U Congres passed its first Fugitive Slave Law. The Canadian novels quickly spread south to the United States, and by dint of the time the first black national convention in the United States met in 1830 Canada was well-known as a safety for escapees. Convention delegates approved of migration there smooth as they decisively rejected a homeland in Liberia.

Migration to Canada accelerated in the 1830 as restraints upon free black existence in America were intensified and as Benjamin Lundy's The Genius of Universal Emancipation reported upon the greater racial equality north of the border. (During Lundy's Ontario, Canada, visit of 1832 he lay the foundation of more than 300 African Americans living in Amherstburg; "a considerable settlement" at Chatham; several hundr minds near London; and distinct black districts at Woolrich and Oro Township.)

All this history and more are explored at the North American Black Historical Museum and Cultural midst in Amherstburg. Although the museum overspreads black history from Africa to the not away its focus is the subterraneous Railroad and the black arrangements of southwestern Ontario. Slave sale bills, maps of fugitive ways contemporaneous newspaper accounts of black adjustments a log cabin circa 1855 a small genealogical file and black-oriented videotapes tender visitors a window onto a world with which greatest in quantity North Americans, on both sides of the border, are unfamiliar.

While many at liberty blacks moved north, the greatest in quantity dramatic migration to Canada involved those fleeing slavery--and flat today, the most emotionally compelling Canadian sites tied to 19th-century African Americans interpret the story of the flight to freedom. In 1830 Josiah Henson loaded his family into a small boat and gibbeted the Ohio River, leaving Kentucky and bondage behind and setting on the outside on the frightening road of a freedom still in jeopardy from slave catchers. For sum of two units weeks the family traveled through night and hid by day, before finally reaching a northern sanctuary.

Once in Canada, Henson settl down to providing for his family, granting much of his time was devot to assisting fugitives. Toward this extreme point in 1841 Henson and other former slaves and white abolitionists purchased 200 acres of land near Dresden Ontario. Here they established an agricultural and manual labor training gymnasium for freedmen and fugitives, as the nucleus of Dawn, a black cooperative arrangement Soon a saw and grist mill, a brickyard and a meeting-house were erected, and approximately 500 spirits settled in an expanding black community. Six years later, Henson stepp onto the world's stage in a small way with the publication of his biography, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada.

Three years later, with the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Henson's character on that stage would assume larger proportions, and the man (identified in Stowe's source notes as the pattern for the novel's protagonist) would be forever diminished, subsum within the identity of Uncle Tom. While this identity conferr benefits--it was, for example, certainly the basis of his visit to Britain, during which he met with Queen Victoria--it made it all the harder to hide when the Dawn community collapsed amid scandal and charges of fraud.

Today, visitors to the elderly Dawn settlement will find the Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site. The house in which Henson Site. The burying-ground in which he is buried, the community-erected temple in which he preached, the building in which fugitive slaves first were housed on their arrival at Dawn, an agricultural building clean with period implements, some of the original seminary buildings, a Henson memorial plaque, and a museum with unassuming holdings (period furnishings, slave handcuffs and chains, and a first edition of Henson's 1849 autobiography) interpret the man and the all-black community that provided shelter to fugitives from slavery. Visitors here earn an added bonus: The site is step quickly by Henson's great-great-grand-daughter, who is self-conscious to tell the story of her family's roots