Slavery Ends and Freedom Seekers Arrive

Let's start with a question

What would it take for you to walk hundreds of kilometres, mostly at night, through forests and swamps, not knowing whom you could trust?

Thousands of people did exactly that in the first half of the 1800s. They were escaping slavery in the United States, and many were heading for Upper Canada.

Remember from earlier

In Strand A you learn that slavery existed in New France and in the British colonies, and that Upper Canada's 1793 Act to Limit Slavery stopped new enslaved people from being brought in. Under that law, children born to enslaved mothers were to be freed at age 25. People already enslaved stayed enslaved.

In Lower Canada, court decisions around 1800 made slavery very hard to enforce, and it slowly declined. But in 1800, slavery was still legal across British North America.

The end of slavery in the British Empire

• Enslaved people, free Black communities and anti-slavery campaigners (called abolitionists) worked for decades to end slavery.
• Britain's Slavery Abolition Act received Royal Assent in 1833 and took effect on August 1, 1834. It ended slavery in most British colonies, freeing more than 800,000 people, mostly in the Caribbean and South Africa.
• In British North America, slavery had already become rare. The Act freed fewer than 50 people there.
• The Act paid £20 million to slaveholders in other colonies for their "lost property". The people who had been enslaved received nothing. In many colonies, freed people were also forced to keep working as "apprentices" for several more years.
• August 1 has been celebrated as Emancipation Day since 1834. In 2021, Canada's Parliament officially recognized it.

The Underground Railroad

In the United States, slavery remained legal in the South. Enslaved people escaped north, helped by a secret network that came to be called the Underground Railroad (the name came into use in the 1830s). It was not underground and not a railroad! Its language was secret code:

• Conductors guided freedom seekers. Stations were safe houses. Passengers were the freedom seekers.
• People travelled mostly at night, on foot, by wagon or by boat, and followed the North Star.
• Black people, both free and escaped, did much of the most dangerous work. Some white allies, including many Quakers, helped too.

Many crossed into Upper Canada at places like Amherstburg, Sandwich (Windsor), Niagara and across Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Historians estimate that 30,000 to 40,000 freedom seekers reached British North America before slavery ended in the US in 1865. The numbers grew sharply after the US passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which let slave catchers seize freedom seekers anywhere in the northern states. Then, the only truly safe place was British territory.

Josiah Henson reached Upper Canada with his family in 1830. Later, in the 1850s, Harriet Tubman guided freedom seekers to St. Catharines.

The Blackburn case, 1833

Thornton and Lucie Blackburn escaped slavery in Kentucky in 1831 and settled in Detroit. In 1833 they were arrested to be sent back into slavery. Detroit's Black community rose up and freed them: Lucie was helped across the river to Upper Canada, and Thornton was freed by a crowd. They reached Amherstburg in Upper Canada.

Michigan asked Upper Canada to extradite (send back) the Blackburns. Upper Canada's Lieutenant Governor John Colborne and Attorney General Robert Simpson Jameson refused. They ruled that sending them back to slavery would be a far harsher punishment than any crime would bring in Upper Canada.

This was significant: it set a precedent (a model for future cases) that protected freedom seekers in British North America from being sent back. Some legal scholars see it as an early root of Canada's way of welcoming refugees.

Free, but not equal

Reaching British territory meant freedom from slavery, but not freedom from racism. Black people in the colonies often faced:

• being kept out of some jobs and neighbourhoods;
• segregated schools: in 1850, a change to Canada West's school law allowed separate schools for Black children, and some white trustees used it to keep Black children out of common schools, even when Black parents objected;
• the danger of kidnappers who crossed the border to seize people;
• unequal treatment by officials, as with the half-size land grants for Coloured Corps veterans.

Black communities fought back by building their own churches, schools and newspapers, signing petitions and going to court.