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Out of Chatham: Abolitionism on the Canadian frontier

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 8; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14788810.2011.563135

1740-4649

Heike Paul,

Short Stories in Global Literature

Abstract Abstract In the 1850s, one region in Canada became the site of intense abolitionist activity: Canada West (south-western Ontario) and, prominently, the town of Chatham. Chatham can be described as a kind of border town as it is located close to the US–Canada border; it was one of the terminal points of the Underground Railroad and one of the first Canadian destinations of abolitionists looking for ways to network. Noted abolitionists lived, worked, and passed through Chatham in the mid-nineteenth century. Therefore, in the 1850s, the town turned into what would later be called Canada's "black Mecca." This article investigates the complicated story of Chatham as a mid nineteenth-century Canadian border town, a story that reverberates with the tension of real-world white racism and African American abolitionist intellectual life. For the fugitives and black residents, Chatham seems to have been a safe place of transit and reflection to ponder available future possibilities, as well as a place of belonging. In Chatham, African American educator and writer Mary Ann Shadd published the abolitionist newspaper the Provincial Freeman; Martin Delany, the "father of black nationalism," who had a medical practice in Chatham, wrote his novel Blake (1859-62)and planned settlements in Africa; the Presbyterian minister William King founded the Elgin settlement for former slaves south of Chatham; and John Brown plotted his rebellion at the so-called "Chatham convention", also hoping to recruit blacks living in Canada for his attempt to found a black state on US soil. In the wake of the transnational turn in American studies, the author draws on "border studies" and "border theory," fields developed with a focus on the Mexico–US borderlands. In the context of this article, it serves the analysis of the border situation to the north of the United States and allows attention to be drawn to the overall desideratum of studying anti-slavery thought in a transnational context – beyond borders as well as at the borders – while also paying close attention to local practices and particularities, such as those discernible in the case of Chatham. In an exemplary fashion, this Canadian town is an abolitionist place, where in the mid-nineteenth century a black diasporic culture develops and interacts with various local and transnational forces. Keywords: abolitionismtransnationalismblack diasporaCanadaMary Ann ShaddMartin Delany Acknowledgements Research for this essay was made possible by a faculty enrichment grant from the Canadian government, for which I am very grateful. During my stay in Toronto, Leslie Sanders and Karolyn Smardz Frost gave greatly appreciated advice on this project. Many thanks also go to the guest editors and my two anonymous readers for their generous criticism, and to Stephen Koetzing and Tanja Aho for research assistance. Finally, I want to thank Klaus Loesch for comments and criticism on various versions of this essay. Notes 1. Arguably, urban Toronto further north was the main center of abolitionist activity in Canada West, yet, considering its size, Chatham, as will be argued in this article, is in many ways a profoundly remarkable location; here, black and white abolitionists engaged in intensive networking with ties across the border in all kinds of directions and with long-term resonances. 2. Fishkin, "Crossroads of Cultures," 20. 3. West, Keeping Faith, xiii. 4. Pettinger, Always Elsewhere; Spencer, "Henry Box Brown." 5. Kohn, Meer, and Todd, Transatlantic Stowe; Paul, "Cultural Mobility." 6. Diedrich, Love across Color Lines; Keil, "German Immigrants." 7. Guterl, American Mediterranean. 8. For an extensive bibliography on hemispheric American studies, see Bauer, "Changing Profession." 9. Nwankwo, "US African-American Hemispherism," 581. 10. Adams, Continental Divides; McKittrick and Woods, Black Geographies; Siemerling and Casteel, Canada and Its Americas. 11. Clifford, Routes, 24. Two African Canadian writers and critics, George Elliott Clarke and Rinaldo Walcott, have argued for the inclusion of Canada into conceptualizations such as the Black Atlantic and for taking into account the African Canadian diaspora past and present in North American racial discourses. See Clarke, Eyeing the North Star and Odysseys Home; Walcott, Black Like Who? For an internal Canadian dynamic, "[t]his means that the racialized terms of nationhood, belonging, geography, and citizenship, those discourses and experiences which attach identity to place, and vice versa – are terms which are not fully experienced by several communities. Black narratives of un-belonging, non-citizenship, and elsewhere not only rupture the homogeneity of nation-space by asserting blackness in/and Canada, they also stretch and reconfigure the meaning of unsatisfactory, racial, geographical boundaries. Black authors and critics diversely explode the apparent seamlessness of 'Canada' as well as the inter-connective geographies of Canada and 'elsewhere'" (McKittrick, "'Their Blood Is There,'" 28). 12. McKittrick, "Freedom Is a Secret"; Silverman, Unwelcome Guests. 13. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan. 14. McKittrick, "Freedom Is a Secret," 98–9. 15. Adams, Continental Divides, 66. 16. Adams, Continental Divides, 66. 17. Winks, Blacks in Canada, 241. 18. Fredrickson's seminal study, The Black Image in the White Mind, reconstructs American racial discourses and racial politics of the 1850s leading up to the Civil War. 19. Anderson, Voice from Harper's Ferry. Osborne Anderson's account is a valuable document that chronicles, in its own words, "the facts connected with one of the most important movements of this age, with reference to the overthrow of American slavery" (Adams, Continental Divides, 3). 20. Drew, Refugee. 21. Farrell, "History of the Negro Community," 131–2. Historian John Farrell quotes various sources – mostly newspaper articles – which use the phrase "little Africa" and which comment negatively on the influx of fugitives from slavery. 22. Collison, Shadrach Minkins, 261; Winks, Blacks in Canada, 245. 23. Drew, Refugee; Winks, Blacks in Canada, 245. 24. Winks, Blacks in Canada, 234. 25. Brown, "Colored People of Canada," 470. 26. Ward, Autobiography, 200. 27. Ward, Autobiography, 201. 28. Ward, quoted in Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 144. 29. Winfried Siemerling also notes the Canadian abolitionist activity of Shadd, Delany, and others in the 1850s. See Siemerling, "Trans-Scan," 137–8. 30. Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 2: 392. 31. By contrast, upon visiting England, Harriet Beecher Stowe was accompanied by her husband, Calvin Stowe, who spoke at public occasions while she remained in the background. Her biographer Joan Hedrick writes: "After the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe became highly sensitive to her public image and did much to cultivate an outward posture of true womanhood" (Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 239). Not so African American writer Mary Shadd, who was frequently criticized and derided by black male contemporaries for her apparent lack of the "proper" feminine decorum. Cf. Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, xi. 32. Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 185–6. 33. Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 38. 34. Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 44. 35. Whereas Shadd herself is conspicuously silent about the quotidian racism, we find it documented in many texts by other black authors – for instance, by Samuel Ringgold Ward. See Ward, Autobiography, 71. 36. Cf., for instance, Provincial Freeman, January 31, 1857; February 28, 1857; June 18, 1859. 37. Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cury, 30; Simpson, Under the North Star, 256; Winks, Blacks in Canada, 217. 38. Pease and Pease, Black Utopia, 84; Winks, Blacks in Canada, 209. 39. Winks, Blacks in Canada, 209. For details on this very complicated process, see Hepburn, Crossing the Border. 40. Winks, Blacks in Canada, 210; Drew, Refugee, 206. 41. Simpson, Under the North Star, 257. 42. Winks, Blacks in Canada, 216. 43. Today, the descendants of Abraham Shadd are involved in the Chatham-Kent Black Historical Society and the museum at the Elgin settlement. The entire Buxton community was involved in creating the Buxton Museum as a Canadian Centennial Project in 1967. 44. Ward, Autobiography, 218. 45. Simpson, Under the North Star, 257. 46. Winks, Blacks in Canada, 210. 47. Winks, Blacks in Canada, 210. 48. What many consider local gossip invented to discredit King has recently been related to me by an elderly woman in Chatham who wants to remain anonymous. 49. Pease and Pease, Black Utopia, 180. 50. Robinson and Robinson, Seek the Truth, 24. 51. Stowe, Key, 22. 52. Winks, Blacks in Canada, 188. 53. Cf. Nwankwo, "US African-American Hemispherism," 581–2. 54. Levine, Martin Delany, 2. 55. Levine, Martin Delany, 2. 56. Provincial Freeman, February 23, 1856; cf. Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 117. 57. Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, 122. 58. Miller, Introduction, xix. 59. Delany, Condition, Elevation, Emigration, 174. 60. Delany, Condition, Elevation, Emigration, 177. 61. Delany, Condition, Elevation, Emigration, 179. 62. Delany, Condition, Elevation, Emigration, 182. 63. Delany, Condition, Elevation, Emigration, 178. 64. Moses, Liberian Dreams, xxix, 81–6. 65. Miller, Introduction, xiv. 66. Delany, Blake, 101. 67. Delany, Blake, 313. 68. Nwankwo, ''US African-American Hemispherism,'' 589. 69. Mackenthun, Fictions, 140. Cf. Also Sundquist, To wake the Nations, 135-223. 70. Levine, Martin Delany, 178-9. 71. Delany, Official Report,18. 72. Reynolds, John Brown, 260. 73. Smardz Frost, Home in Glory Land, 307. 74. Reynolds, John Brown, 262. 75. Reynolds, John Brown, 262.; Anderson, Voice from Harper's Ferry, 10. 76. McGlone, John Brown's War, 234. 77. Oates, Biography of John Brown, 246. 78. McGlone, John Brown's War, 214. 79. Hill, Freedom-Seekers, 21. 80. Oates, Biography of John Brown, 247. 81. Quarles, Allies for Freedom, 80. 82. Quarles, Allies for Freedom, 81. 83. Anderson, Voice from Harper's Ferry, 14–15. 84. Larson, Harriet Tubman, 175. 85. Miller, Introduction, xvi. 86. Simpson, Under the North Star, 35. 87. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan. 88. By contrast, the Dawn settlement around the well-known minister and former slave Josiah Henson and former Lane Rebel, the missionary Hiram Wilson, failed spectacularly due to mismanagement. 89. Ullman, Life of William King, 189. 90. Cf. McKittrick and Woods, Black Geographies, 8–9. 91. Due to the limited scope of this article, I could not address other abolitionist emigration schemes developed out of Chatham – to Haiti, Jamaica, and Trinidad. More attention also has to be given to the black churches in Chatham in the 1850s, which were primary institutions for black community life. Third, the so-called "True Bands" merit closer investigation – black self-help organizations developed first at Amherstburg in opposition to the practice of holding traveling fund-raisers for Canadian fugitive slaves, the so-called "begging" schemes, one of which was also established in Chatham. Fourth, a number of events and public "scandals" (such as the marriage of a black reverend to a white woman) also throw light on the black (and white) life in Chatham of the 1850s. 92. John Farrell states: "[t]he American Government, as early as 1826, tried to eliminate Canada as a place of refuge by asking the British Government for a treaty which would provide for, 'a mutual surrender of all persons held to service or labor, under the laws of either party, who escape into the territory of the other.' The British Government rejected the idea" (Farrell, "History of the Negro Community," 70; cf. Howe, Refugees from Slavery). The Webster Ashburton Treaty of 1842 (following the Act of Union of 1841) was a British treaty which explicated the grounds on which extradition could and could not be sought by the United States. 93. Fishkin, "Crossroads of Cultures," 17.