Harriet Tubman Seminar
York University
March 15, 2004
“They Shall Not Be Free Among Us”: Canada as Destination for Fugitive Slaves and the Meaning of the Underground Railroad[1]
Keith P. Griffler
University of Cincinnati
The title of a recent piece of legislation enacted by the Congress of the United States in 1998—the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Act—might with some justice be taken to be one of the highest compliments that body has paid to Canadians for upholding liberties that the US denied its own citizens. To be sure, the praise is entirely implicit, since Canada is never mentioned by name as the locus of that freedom.[2] Still, there is at least a hint of irony that a nation consistently proclaiming itself, no less now than formerly, the world’s great beacon of liberty should pay such seemingly unconscious homage to its neighbor to the north by keeping this memory alive. For the Underground Railroad was, in its practice, the largest emigrationist scheme in US history, accounting for tens of thousands of emigrants from the US to Canada, all leaving as a condition of realizing the freedom denied them in the country of their birth.
There is perhaps no better vantage point than Ontario to consider the implicit tension in what Larry Gara has called the legend of the Underground Railroad. The institution lives on in the national memory in the US—more especially in the North—as a generous comment on the benevolence of whites north of the Mason Dixon Line. Their determination to aid fugitives from slavery in the South through the popularly imagined ubiquitous network of tunnels and false-bottomed carriages is believed to constitute evidence of their fundamental antagonism to racial oppression.[3] And yet just beneath the surface lurks a paradox: the terminus of the Underground Railroad was not among them. Canada, not the US North, represented the Promised Land for African American refugees from the US South.
The contradictions multiply on close examination. The Underground Railroad is generally imagined as an institution that transported African Americans from slavery to freedom.[4] In its actual operation, however, aid to fugitives almost always commenced only when they had first reached free soil on their own.[5] That simple condition of the Underground Railroad’s operation raises an unsettling question from the standpoint of American national myth: why would African Americans need to be smuggled out of territory which allegedly did not recognize the institution that oppressed them? From the standpoint of the Northeast, the answer appears to be a simple function of the fugitive slave provisions of the constitution and federal law tailored to Southern interests—an imposition of the slave South on the free North. From that of the Northwest, on the other hand, such an explanation does not suffice. In the first place, the statutes of Ohio, the largest and most important northwestern state, contained a fugitive slave clause that more threatening to African Americans than either the US constitutional provision or the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793.[6] Moreover, a large number of the political refugees in Canada were not fugitives at all. The attraction of Canada consisted not simply in the absence of legislation prescribing the return of runaways, but also in the lack of laws of a different sort—those regulating the lives of free African Americans. With respect to the Northwest through which the majority of fugitives passed, Canada as destination of the Underground Railroad is fraught with complex meanings that disrupt the self-congratulatory narrative of American freedom.
Teasing them out constitutes an especially pressing task in the case of the Underground Railroad, the legend of which has achieved its place of importance only to the degree that it has served the purposes of American national myth. In the face of the bleakness of the US’s racial past, there has been a longstanding attempt to discover a vibrant historical tradition of white racial liberalism in a nation in which one was largely absent. Those efforts have focused within late nineteenth and early twentieth century history on the labor movement, and in the antebellum US on the Underground Railroad, neither of which offers quite the significant trend of enlightened white racial sentiment that answers the purpose.[7] Historiography of the last few decades has been, of course, remarkably successful in opening public space to histories that were previously all but ignored. Yet that achievement may prove difficult to replicate in the case of displacing the mythologized Underground Railroad given the popular interest in the topic and its entrenched place in a public history domain increasingly subject, if not subordinate, to market forces. The comfortable familiarity of the implicit meaning of the legendary version of the Underground Railroad assures a ready market for public history and popular works that aim to hit the public in its comfort zone, and a new generation of these are rolling off the presses to coincide with the opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati this summer.[8]
Interrogating the Underground Railroad as national myth requires disengaging it from the national context it has been made to serve. As a specifically transnational institution, it does not represent a national story at all—one serving, in the words of the Director of the National Park Service, “all Americans in search of a shared past.”[9] Rather, in this historical process borders recede in importance as the histories of Canada and the US intertwine. Canada as destination of tens of thousands of African Americans makes that nation central to African American history, since for millions of the enslaved it, and not the “free soil” of the US North, embodied the Promised Land. The history of this movement opens up a new chapter in the consideration of the transnational migration of African-descended peoples in the Atlantic World. Although it is perhaps the most neglected of such Atlantic World migrations, it is one that not only substantially benefits from such consideration, but also provides avenues to explore further questions of agency within it. Canada as destination of the Underground Railroad also calls for a reappraisal of strategies of voluntary international migration. African American emigrationism, closely linked to colonizationism, has been traditionally viewed as a strategy of despair or defeat, one that reflected capitulation to the all pervasiveness of racial oppression rather than a means of its overthrow.[10] And yet in this case, African Americans, for whom international migration as the slave trade was the condition of enslavement, leveraged a significant step toward freedom in both sections of the US through another international migration, one in which they played the role of active agents. By leaving the country of their birth by the thousands, they struck a powerful blow for freedom within it.
In addition to being viewed largely from a US rather than an Atlantic World framework to which it is so naturally suited, historiography of the Underground Railroad has also suffered from an Eastern bias, although the majority of its traffic traversed the western route across the Ohio River through the states of the Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, ending up in Ontario). Just as Eastern and Western abolitionism were qualitatively distinct, the latter far in advance in embracing political means of struggle, so too were the Eastern and Western components of the Underground Railroad. The actual Mason Dixon Line in the East was sparsely populated; the western boundary, the Ohio River, boasted numerous river port towns and cities. The Ohio itself was a principal means of transport within the internal slave trade, and the economies on both banks were tied to slavery. As such, the entire Ohio Valley was a staunchly proslavery region—exceedingly hostile terrain for free African Americans. Cincinnati was a very different place from Philadelphia, the closest Eastern city to the slave South and the center of the coastal Underground Railroad.[11]
The Old Northwest was just in the process of being opened as a principal area of US expansionism in the New Republic period in which the seeds of what became the Underground Railroad were being planted. It had virtually no history of slavery at all—the institution having been forbidden in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Still, though the legal condition was banished from the region, the spirit of slavery gained early admission. More than a boundary separating slave and free soil, the Ohio River constituted the link between them, the tangible expression of their economic interdependence. It became a thriving trade route by which the farmers of the Northwest provisioned the plantations of the Deep South and by which slave traders steadily increased its supply of enslaved workers. The close interconnection of the commercial interests of Ohio’s booming river ports and the South’s “peculiar institution” created a region economically dependent on slavery and the slave trade.[12]
The effects of slavery on African Americans living to the north of the Ohio River were as tangible as for those to its south. As a result of the antislavery provision of the Northwest Ordinance, the region had no preexisting African American population inherited from slave times. From its incorporation into the Union, there was an attempt to extend the ban on slavery to African American settlement. When Ohio became the first state organized out of the territory in 1803, one of the first measures of its newly constituted legislature was the passage of a series of acts known collectively as the “Black Laws.” They prevented African Americans from exercising the rights of citizens, including voting and testifying in court, with other provisions aimed at denying them the right of entry altogether. The latter goal found expression in a clause requiring all Black persons to post the enormous sum of 500 dollars with local authorities anywhere they settled.[13]
The white population of the Northwest had formed the determination to keep persons of African descent out—or at least to restrict their numbers and circumscribe their existence. A member of the Ohio State Senate from the Cincinnati area, having been chased out of Massachusetts by his “disgust” at seeing African Americans exercising their right to vote, represented the majority sentiment. Expressing outrage at seeing “negroes coming in droves,” he asked, “is this the population that is to cover the rich bottoms, the fertile hills, the pleasant valleys, and at some future day, by the aid and under the misguided philanthropy of the negro worshippers, sway the political destinies of this great commonwealth[?]”[14] He, and the majority who thought like him, were prepared to resort to any means, including violence, to see that it was not. The port cities on the Ohio River’s northern bank where African Americans first settled became flashpoints, periodically flaring up into open conflict in the form of racial and political violence. The vast majority of the inhabitants on both sides of the river were staunchly pro-slavery and anti-Black—and willing to do virtually anything to prove it. The region became an armed camp. African Americans were menaced by slaveholders on the southern shore and slave hunters and kidnappers to the north. The pro-slavery fervor occasionally boiled over in particularly brutal fashion—mob violence unleashed on African Americans.
One of the first and most devastating of these attacks occurred in June 1829, when Cincinnati authorities announced their intention to enforce Ohio’s Black Laws. The city’s business leaders, inextricably tied to the system of slavery that its merchants helped provision, felt threatened by the growing number of fugitive slaves who took refuge in the black community. City leaders gave African Americans thirty days to post the 500 dollar bond or flee the state. As the deadline approached, hundreds of Cincinnati’s African Americans left for Canada. Those who remained were besieged by white Cincinnatians in the first of the city’s three major antebellum anti-black riots. The last of these, in 1841, was the most fierce and protracted, lasting for three days. On the third night, the mob laid hold of a canon, which it fired three times at a Black neighborhood at point blank range. The African American population drove back the invasion force for the second time in a decade, but only after Cincinnati’s African American men were rounded up and jailed; many were sold south as alleged fugitives, others expelled under the Black Laws.[15] John Rankin, Presbyterian minister and champion of African American freedom, summed up the racial atmosphere he observed among his fellow white Northwesterners: “Still this relentless prejudice, dark fiend of hell, cried they shall not be free among us! They shall not be free among us!!”[16]
Contrary to the usual notion, not all African Americans who went to Canada were seeking protection from the fugitive slave laws. Many left because, as Rev. David Smith put it, they were “devoured on every side by the wolves of slavery, prejudice and ostracism.” John Malvin advocated emigrating from the American Republic because, he said, “I found every door closed against the colored man in a free State, excepting the jails and penitentiaries, the doors of which were thrown wide open to receive him.” Eli Artis deserted Ohio, the place of his birth, in the early 1840s to escape its “mean, oppressive laws.” Henry Johnson, a native of Pennsylvania, abandoned Massillon, Ohio after a residence of twenty-three years because his daughter was expelled together with all the other African American children from school, by a vote of its trustees in compliance with state law. “One must know how I would feel about it,” he explained, from Canada. Ephraim Waterford, of free birth in Virginia, headed north of the border “on account of oppression in Indiana,” where he had resided for two years in the mid-1840s. The last straw for him was a new addition to the Black Laws that sought to prevent him from leaving his forty acres to his family on his death. “I told them, ‘if that was a republican government, I would try a monarchical one.’” He led an emigration to Canada of some three-dozen African Americans.[17]
By the late 1820s, considerable discouragement had set in among African Americans in the Northwest. The first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, editorialized in early 1829, “should each of us live to the age of Methusalah, at the end of the thousand years, we should be exactly in our present situation: a proscribed race…a degraded people, deprived of all the rights of freemen.” It reasoned, “the present prejudices in the way of the man of colour…are not of our creating, and they are not in our power to remove.”[18] An antebellum African American song captured this widespread sentiment:
Ohio's not the place for me,
For I was much surprised
To see so many of her sons
In garments of disguise.
Her name has gone out through the land,
Free labor, soil, and men,
But slaves had better far be hurled
Into the lion's den.
Fare ye well, Ohio, I am not safe in thee;
I'll travel on to Canada, where colored men are free. [19]
Compared to what they faced in the Northwest, Canada as destination appeared attractive. When approached in 1829 by the leaders of the Cincinnati exodus, the governor of Canada West invited the new settlers in and promised them that “so long as we remained true and loyal subjects, we should have every privilege extended to us that was enjoyed by any of her majesty’s subjects, no distinction being made on account of color.” Though the reality did not exactly match the promise, this advertisement of Canadian freedom, at least, represented one quite different from the Black Laws of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois that greeted the African American migrant to those locales. To be sure, Black Canadian settlers expressed frustrations as well as contentment, but they were at least not menaced with the fugitive slave laws. It was not for lack of effort on the part of slaveholders in the US South. At the behest of the state of Kentucky the US government had in the late 1820s undertaken negotiations with the British authorities, who rebuffed their advances. That left the occasional stray slaveholder or his proxy to make his way into Canada in the attempt to kidnap fugitives out, but without any notable success.[20]
In contrast, the white populace of the Northwest in no sense conceded to African Americans the right to settle there. As African Americans in Cincinnati fended off the mob that attacked those who remained behind in 1829, African American settlements nearby also found themselves under continuous assault. In Brown County, Ohio, the largest all-Black community on the Ohio River, created in 1818 by the manumission of some three hundred slaves on the death of their English master, was forced to settle on some of the worst swampland in the state of Ohio. Unable to scratch out a living, they were compelled to work for whites, who routinely failed to pay wages and physically and sexually abused their African American employees. The white population that did not exploit them economically periodically laid siege to their land in the effort to drive them out. In 1834, English visitor, Edward Abdy, described the plight of African Americans in another river town, Madison, Indiana. He wrote of a particular African American couple that