Bound for Canaan (37 page)

But at last, in Hamilton, Logue's luck turned. He found work splitting rails, and was accepted into the local sabbath school, where before the winter was over he had learned the rudiments of reading and writing,
and was introduced for the first time to the Bible, an encounter that would eventually change his life, and help propel him to the front rank of black abolitionists. From that time on, he never failed to find work at good wages.

 

I
t was here that the Underground Railroad, in a literal sense, finally came to an end, in Hamilton, St. Catharines, and Fort Erie near the Niagara frontier, in the inland towns of Chatham and London, in Amherstburg, Sandwich, and Colchester at the head of Lake Erie, in bustling York, later to be called Toronto, and to the north in frontier hamlets on Owen Sound. By the early 1840s, there may have been as many as twelve thousand former slaves living in Canada, the great majority of them in communities scattered across southern Canada West, present-day Ontario.
*
Without immigration agents to register newcomers, however, it was impossible to reliably quantify new arrivals, or departures. The refugee population was in constant flux: like many, Jarm Logue eventually moved back to the United States, where he would one day play a central role in one of the most dramatic events in the underground's history.

Some refugees, like Logue and Josiah Henson, were remarkably successful. Three years after his inauspicious arrival, Logue was leasing a two-hundred-acre farm and had saved several hundred dollars, more than many white immigrants. In Amherstburg, where it was said that four hundred thousand dollars' worth of Southern slaves were walking the streets, former refugees owned successful farms, a livery stable, a gravel pit, and the best hotel in town. Throughout Canada, refugees commonly found work in the skilled construction trades, and as shoemakers, tailors, barbers, cooks, and agricultural laborers. Others worked as waiters in the tourist hotels at Niagara Falls, and they were among the first guides who took visitors under the falls.

Many others, however, remained destitute, or trapped in the kind of
marginal existence that worried Henson. Even Jarm Logue, who was exceptionally acute, but who had no business experience, lost almost all his property when he took on a partner who was encumbered with debts; as soon as they had harvested their first crops, not only the crop itself, but their implements and livestock too were seized by creditors. Visitors to some settlements reported refugees living in utter destitution, and reduced to beggary. In the late 1830s their plight began to attract the attention of missionaries. Isaac J. Rice in 1838 abandoned a comfortable ministry in Ohio for a shack on a back street in the black section of Amherstburg, where he opened a dispensary and a school, and issued mournful appeals to abolitionists who, he begged to remind them, had not finished their work just because the victims of slavery had crossed the Canadian border. Levi Coffin, who visited Rice in 1844, regarded his home as the “main terminus” of the Underground Railroad in the West. Two years before that, Rice claimed to have provided clothes to three hundred refugees in the course of twelve months, a very plausible figure, and to be schooling ninety students. He and his wife were sometimes reduced to living on nothing but bread and beans, and at one point sold even their beds to buy food for the refugees who showed up in a daily stream at their door. Even those who admired his work found him personally off-putting, a man whose sense of Christian martyrdom, and identification with the suffering victims of slavery, ran so deep that he seemed to relish his own poverty, and to exhibit his hollow eyes, rotting teeth, and tattered clothes as badges of honor.

Rice competed for donations with another, almost equally unappealing American missionary, a peripatetic young graduate of the Oneida Institute named Hiram Wilson. One of the American Anti-Slavery Society's first contingent of lecturers, known as The Seventy, Wilson was also a veteran of underground work, having personally conducted at least one fugitive, and probably many more, across Lake Erie from Ohio to Canada. Since 1836 he had traveled on foot through Canada West, preaching the gospel to refugees, and establishing schools among them wherever he could. Even more than Rice, he had a gift for the self-pitying touch. “I am a stranger in my own house,” he wrote morosely to the
Colored American
, after one journey during which he had founded no fewer than ten schools, and had recruited fourteen teachers, all of them “ardently pious,” before setting out on yet another odyssey of three hundred miles “with but a shilling in my
pocket.” He added, “So urgent was my errand that neither the piercing cold, nor heavy storms, nor snowdrifts breast high, impeded my progress, nor prevented my walking 40 miles in a day.” A few months later, he wrote again, with an almost audible sigh, “How long I shall continue to labor thus without means of support, the Lord only knows.” (He would in fact manage to do so for more than twenty years, never flagging in either his commitment to the fugitive, or in his talent for irritating potential supporters.)

Wilson's peregrinations took him to every black community between York and Windsor. It was inevitable that he would eventually meet the rising leader of Colchester's more ambitious settlers, Josiah Henson. The two men immediately recognized in each other kindred souls, or at least an equally fervent belief that the ultimate liberation of the former slaves, the inner continuation of the Underground Railroad as it were, lay in the transformative power of education. Henson understood this in a painfully visceral way. When the Hensons were living at Fort Erie, Josiah's employer, the farmer Hibbard, had paid for the schooling of their eldest son, Tom. On Sundays, Henson would ask the boy to read something from the Bible to him before going to preach. He was apparently able to memorize long passages after a single hearing, a skill that concealed his own illiteracy. One Sunday, when he asked Tom to read to him, the boy asked where he should start. Henson told him to begin anywhere, not knowing how to direct him.

The boy happened to open the book to Psalm 103. When he read, “Bless the Lord, O my soul and all that is within me, bless his holy name,” Josiah's heart inexplicably seemed to melt in a wave of gratitude, as images from his slave life tumbled pell-mell through his mind: the wrenching loss of his mother, his betrayal by Isaac Riley, the dreadful flatboat journey to New Orleans, when he had nearly murdered Riley's young nephew. He began to weep with gratitude for his family's survival, which he believed with a devouring intensity of faith had flowed not from his own courage and physical strength—he had, after all, carried the two smallest children in a pack on his back for hundreds of miles—but from the profuse and mysterious grace of God.

When Tom got to the end of the passage, he turned to his father, and asked an unexpectedly devastating question, “Who was David? He writes pretty, don't he?”

Henson had never heard of David. He could not bear confessing his ignorance, and so replied vaguely, “He was a man of God.”

“Where did he live?” Tom persisted. “What did he do?”

Unable to escape his son's barrage of questions, Henson finally gave up and confessed that he had no idea who David was.

Tom looked at him in astonishment, perhaps with sudden disillusionment. This father who seemed omnipotent, who boasted of his physical strength and of his influence, could not even read. Henson's sense of identity hinged on maintaining the image of a man who, although a slave, was smarter even than the whites who gave him orders, a man who controlled the immediate world around him, in short, a hero even in his own eyes. But for this challenge he had been utterly unprepared.

“Why, father,” Tom asked, “can't you read?”

Henson admitted that he couldn't. The truth left him feeling devastated. Whatever else he might be, he was ignorant of everything that existed in books, including most of the Bible.

“Well, you can learn now, father,” Tom piped up.

“No, my son, I am too old, and have not enough time. I must work all day, or you would not have enough to eat.”

“Then you must do it at night.”

“But still there is nobody to teach me.”

“Why, father,
I'll teach you
,” Tom replied.

Henson was now torn by conflicting emotions. The perceptiveness with which he described them was acute, revealing not just his own confusion—shame mingled with hope, bitterness with resignation, rage with gratitude—but that which tormented countless black refugees in Canada. “I was delighted with the conviction that my children would have advantages I had never enjoyed,” Henson recalled, “but it was no slight mortification to think of being instructed by a child of twelve years old. Yet ambition, and a true desire to learn, for the good it would do my own mind, conquered the shame, and I agreed to try.”

The two studied each evening by the light of a pine knot or burning hickory bark. Henson's progress was so slow that Tom's initial enthusiasm began to flag. Sometimes he fell asleep during their lessons, and sometimes would “whine a little over my dullness, and talk to me very much as a schoolmaster talks to a stupid boy.” Josiah was close to despair. The let
ters that he wrote seemed no more than pathetic “little scratches.” He had finally encountered an obstacle that he could not surmount, and it shamed him mightily. However, by dint of Herculean effort, by the end of winter he had managed to learn to read enough to keep his hope alive. How much literacy he ultimately achieved remains an open question.

“It has made me comprehend better the terrible abyss of ignorance in which I had been plunged all my previous life,” he would later say. “It made me also feel more deeply and bitterly the oppression under which I had toiled and groaned; but the crushing and cruel nature of which I had not appreciated, till I found out, in some slight degree, from what I had been debarred. At the same time it made me more anxious than before to do something for the rescue and elevation of those who were suffering the same evils I had endured, and who did not know how degraded and ignorant they really were.”

Hiram Wilson would play a larger role in Henson's life than any white man since Isaac Riley. Allying his own connections to potential donors with Henson's determination and charisma would, in turn, provide Wilson with an opportunity to play out his pedagogical ambitions on a far grander scale than ever before. Just where they met, and how they spoke with each other, is not recorded. But they both agreed that only through education and self-sufficiency would blacks ever become independent of the white man. They envisioned an institution like none that existed in Canada, where in addition to the customary grammar school subjects, boys would also be trained in the mechanical arts, and girls, as Henson, who was no revolutionary in the sphere of women's roles, put it, “in those domestic arts which are the proper occupation and ornament of their sex.” The school's graduates would, in turn, become teachers themselves, spreading out to bring both basic literacy, practical knowledge, and the gospel of self-sufficiency to refugees throughout Canada.

Dawn, as they decided to call it, was not the first planned black settlement in Canada. In 1829, a company of immigrants seeking to escape from the coruscating racism of Cincinnati had purchased eight hundred acres of land near London, naming their new home Wilberforce, in honor of the great British parliamentary advocate of emancipation. Like the plan for Dawn, Wilberforce promoted an idealistic vision of private ownership and cooperative activity. However, in spite of support from both William Lloyd Garrison and the Tappan brothers, the colony was an embarrassing
failure. Its first leader, Israel Lewis, proved to be a rogue who absconded with most of the money that had been raised, and when Hiram Wilson visited in 1838, he was dismayed to find Wilberforce “a miserable concern” inhabited by only eighteen or twenty families, many of them wretchedly poor, all that remained of hundreds who originally had set out from Cincinnati.

Dawn's beginnings were more auspicious. Wilson excitedly wrote to a Quaker friend named James Canning Fuller, a gentleman farmer who had immigrated to the United States from England, and who had become very active in abolitionist work, harboring fugitives in his home at Skaneateles, New York, and serving as secretary of his local antislavery society. Wilson knew that if Fuller's interest was aroused, his resources were virtually limitless. On one occasion, Fuller was personally escorting an emancipated family back with him from the South when he was informed that the public coach they planned to take would not carry blacks; Fuller bought the vehicle on the spot, and continued north in style with his charges.

Fuller liked what Wilson told him about Dawn. During the summer of 1840, he easily raised sixteen hundred and fifty dollars for the colony from antislavery philanthropists, in the course of a trip to England. At an open meeting of black settlers in Canada, six trustees for the new school were elected, three of them black, and three white, including Fuller. Although the settlement as a whole continued to be known as Dawn, in deference to the source of Fuller's donation, the school was formally named the British-American Manual Training Institute. With Fuller's money, Henson and Wilson purchased two hundred acres of fertile, gently undulating land well wooded with black walnut, white oak, ash, hickory, and maple trees on the Sydenham River, one hundred miles east of Detroit.

On November 28, 1841, a delegation of settlers and well-wishers, both black and white, stood together in a semicircle on the snow-whitened banks of the Sydenham, beneath the branches of a great oak tree. To Wilson, the winter-bare branches seemed to symbolize the arms of God spread protectively over their endeavor. Kneeling in four or five inches of snow, they raised their voices in “a refreshing season of prayer.” Wilson set to work on the house in which he planned to live, on the site of an old Indian wigwam. He pulled up the wigwam's stakes with his own hands. Triumphantly he wrote, “I shouldered an axe, called a few colored men to my aid, cut away the brush, cleared off a beautiful building spot,
chopped the logs, and in three days got my house up as high as the [joist], 26 by 20 feet.”