A Sporting Chance. William Humber
and American territories of North America was brief, lasting from the Treaty of Paris, under which the French government ceded New France in 1763, and concluding with the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, resulting in the loss of the 13 colonies.
Records in New France indicate that 1,132 Blacks were held in slavery when the British assumed control. Farther south slavery was an integral part of American society. The American independence movement’s professed support for liberty and freedom did not include their own Black slaves. The Revolution kept alive the institution of slavery in the face of a rising tide of British opposition to its continuance.
Britain exploited this hypocrisy as early as 1775 by inviting slaves to join the British side against the American rebels. Throughout the Revolutionary War they promised freedom for those who did. American victory, however, ensured slavery’s maintenance until Lincoln’s proclamation ending slavery and the resulting Civil War in the 1860s. It provided a foundation for American policies of segregation lasting into the second half of the 20th century.
It was a legacy that might have been prevented with a British victory. Instead British North America after the American Revolutionary War consisted of largely English-speaking Atlantic Canada, French-speaking Quebec and great expanses of wilderness and scattered settlements of First Nations in today’s western Canada and Ontario (then known as Upper Canada). The British moved quickly to subdivide and settle the latter territory.
Only in these places could their authority ensure that evolving and progressive British ideas on race received practical definition. In 1793 the Upper Canada Abolition Act, supported by Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe, freed slaves who came into the province and further said that a child born of a slave mother would be freed at the age of 25.
Britain’s enlightened policies were clouded, however, by political exigencies. On the one hand 3,500 free Blacks who had fought on Britain’s side in that American war settled in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and a further 2,000 slaves fled to Canadian freedom behind British lines during the War of 1812, but on the other hand, white British Loyalists, fleeing north in the late 18th century, brought 2,000 Black slaves with them.
This contradictory picture of free Blacks alongside those in slavery is a kind of metaphor for the Black experience in Canada—neither as absolute in its imposition of second-class status as in the United States nor as benign and accommodating as white Canadians have believed.
The British Parliament legally abolished slavery in all British North American colonies in 1834 and for fugitive Black slaves this was like a welcome mat. British motives were at least partially self-serving. Free Blacks were particularly eager conscripts in defending their new-found freedom against any American incursion. They supported the various militia units defending British North America against unofficial American attacks during the Upper and Lower Canada Rebellions of 1837-38.
Canada was a land of promise. An “Underground Railroad” brought upwards of 40,000 fugitive slaves into Canada by the time of the American Civil War. This Underground Railroad was actually a series of “safe” houses, supported by “conductors” located along the way, throughout the United States, which protected fleeing slaves. Canadian courts, for their part, refused to extradite those who crossed the border unless they had committed crimes in the United States. Many Blacks settled in the Windsor and Chatham areas in southwestern Ontario while some opted for the larger centres of Toronto, Hamilton and the region around St. Catharines, while others went further north into the Queen’s Bush and even into the Owen Sound area.
They founded their own communities. Josiah Henson established the Dawn community near Dresden in southwestern Ontario in 1834, four years after his flight from slavery in the United States. It is generally assumed that he was the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s leading character in her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Black immigrants formed societies, cautiously participated in the larger community life and started their own newspapers. One escapee, Mary Ann Shadd, became the first female editor of a newspaper in North America in 1853. Other famous escapees included Harriet Tubman who returned to the United States at least 20 times to assist 300 other slaves fleeing to Canada.
By the middle of the 19th century, however, the British gradually transferred more administration to local control as the threat of American invasion receded. Canadian settlers were more equivocal than their British masters in matters of race. Like their neighbours in the northern United States, they rejected the institution of slavery but often supported separation of the races. Poorly educated in a wilderness environment, white Canadians in Ontario were like their counterparts in British Columbia who opposed Chinese and Japanese immigration. In both cases the white population claimed these minorities worked for lower wages when, in fact, it was their visible difference that offended them.
Canadians in Ontario had some degree of local control over education before Confederation. Segregation had been permitted with passage of the Common Schools Act in 1850. Toronto was an exception to this practice. William P. Hubbard, an honour student of the Toronto Model School in the 1860s, later became the city’s first Black alderman and acting mayor.
The 1860 case of John Anderson also brought the fugitive slave matter to a head. A Canadian court ruled he should be returned to the United States for having committed a murder during his escape from slavery. Behind the scenes, however, the British Governor General, Sir Edmund Walker Head, with the active support of the British Colonial Office had decided that regardless of the verdict they would not turn Anderson over to the Americans. These bewigged and often foppishly depicted British authorities had taken an extraordinarily bold stance. They would soon hand over local administration, however, as the colony achieved nationhood in 1867. From that point forward Canadians would decide the fate of their Black citizens.
Black settlement wasn’t limited to Ontario. Some slaves had fled to British Columbia at the time of the Fraser River gold rush during the late 1850s and early 1860s, but the longest established Black communities were in Atlantic Canada. Unlike Ontario, where both fugitive slaves and “free” Blacks arrived in large numbers in the 30 years before the American Civil War, Nova Scotia was home to Black Loyalists from the time of the American Revolutionary War, along with rebel Maroons deported from Jamaica following their defeat in 1789 Second Maroon War which had erupted in defiance of the island colonial government. Many were deliberately placed on unproductive land, however, and gravitated in time to their own communities like Africville in Halifax.
Africville was created in the middle of the 19th century as a separate Black community. Located in the north end of the city, it grew around its churches. These not only provided an unofficial link to the white community but also assumed a crucial role in educating students abandoned by the mainstream educational system.
Its citizens helped build Halifax and were an important part of its service industry. The placement of railroad tracks, sewage disposal facilities and other unwelcome urban infrastructure contributed to Africville’s decline in the 20th century. By the time of Canada’s centennial in 1967, the refusal of public officials to invest in the community’s maintenance ensured its decline. Residents were relocated and Africville was eventually demolished.
In the United States the American Civil War provided for the emancipation of its Black population. At first the prospects for newly freed slaves looked good. Black universities and schools were founded, state legislatures welcomed elected Black politicians, and constitutional rights were extended to guarantee citizenship and voting rights. The short-lived Freedmen’s Bureau was part of the process of rebuilding a stable union after the war. This reconstruction period generally lasted from 1865 to the withdrawal of federal troops from the American south in 1877.
One face of Canada—The all-Black Coloured Diamond Baseball Team of Halifax, Nova Scotia, circa 1920s. Courtesy of Photography Collection, Public Archives of Nova Scotia.
Gradually, however, a reaction set in among America’s white population characterized by fraudulent race science theories depicting Black citizens as intellectually inferior. Separate public facilities in everything from schools to washrooms became common practice. New polling taxes, literacy tests and intimidation by