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Ontario Genealogy - Black Research
Fugitive Slave Narratives
Benjamin Drew wrote about the blacks in Canada 1856 in his 1856 book "A NorthSide View of Slavery. The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by themselves, with an account of the history and condition of the colored population of Upper Canada "
"The colored population of Upper Canada, was estimated in the First Report of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada, in 1852, at thirty thousand. Of this large number, nearly all the adults, and many of the children, have been fugitive slaves from the United States"
Some Narratives from the book: AMHERSTBURG
Contains a population of more than two thousand. The colored portion is variously estimated at from four hundred to five hundred,--the latter number probably being nearer exactness. A separate school has been established here, at their own request: their request was given them, but leanness went with it. I visited the school. There was an attendance of twenty-four,--number on the list, thirty. The school-house is a small, low building, and contains neither blackboard nor chair. Long benches extend on the sides of the room, close to the walls, with desks of corresponding length in front of them. The whole interior is comfortless and repulsive. The teacher, a colored lady, is much troubled by the frequent absences of the pupils, and the miserably tattered and worn-out condition of the books. Two inkstands were in use, which, on being nearly inverted, yielded a very little bad ink. The teacher appeared to be one of the working sort, disposed to bear up as well as she could under her many discouragements: but the whole school adds one more dreary chapter to "the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties." But there is a better time coming.
Charles Brown
I was born in Virginia, and was raised a slave. My grandmother was a free-woman in Maryland. One day, as she was washing by a river, a kidnapper came up, gagged and bound her, carried her into Virginia, and there sold her into bondage. She there had four children, my mother, my mother's sister, and my mother's two brothers. After about twenty or twenty-five years, when I was a very small boy, a man from Maryland, named Hanks, came through Virginia. He saw my grandmother, and knew her. "What!" said he, "are you here?" She told him how she had been kidnapped. He said, "You are free, and I'll get you your freedom." Her oath was good for nothing, but by Hanks's oath, she would get free. At night she was jerked up and carried to Orleans, and sold on a cotton plantation. She wrote on, a good while after, that she would get free, and come back and free her children. She got free herself, as I have heard, but 't was when she got too old to do any more work. My mother and all the folks there in Virginia knew about her being stolen, and about Hanks's coming there.
I was used kindly, as I always did my work faithfully. But I knew I ought to be free. I told my master one day--said I, "You white folks set the bad example of stealing--you stole us from Africa, and not content with that, if any got free here, you stole them afterward, and so we are made slaves." I told him, I would not stay. He shed tears, and said he thought I would be the last one to leave him.
A year after, I left for the North. I have been cook for large hotels. My health is now very poor,--I have had a bad cough for two or three years, from overwork--cooking sometimes for three hundred persons in a hotel. I have always supported myself, and have some money by me yet. I reside in Chatham, and came here to see a physician.
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