Letter to Queen Victoria, 1854
To Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria
May It Please Your Majesty:
We, the Coloured Inhabitants of Canada, most respectfully, most gratefully and most loyally approach you Gracious Majesty, on this, the anniversary of our death to Slavery, and our birth to Freedom. With what feelings, or what words can we adequately express our gratitude to England for such a boon?
Our hearts are wholly your Majesty’s; and if the time should ever come when your Majesty might need our aid, our lives would be as they are, at your service.
What a happy, what a proud reflection it must be to your Majesty, to know that the moment the poor crushed slave sets foot upon any part of your mighty dominions, his chains fall from him — he feels himself a man, and can look up. Can it be conceived that he would not on that same spot turn, and whilst defending the hallowed soil, that memory would not fire his brain, and gratitude nerve his arm! Can your Majesty, imagine that from such a people, loyalty could be an empty name, or devotion be a dream! Faults of commission may be urged against us by those who grudge us our Freedom; but we carefully watch that such faults shall be the exception and not the rule; at the same time, we pray your Majesty in your judgment of us, to remember that whilst the invigorating food of education was jealously withheld from us, the brutalization cup of slavery was forced between our lips until we drained it to the very dregs.
The effects, more or less, must have been a mortal stupor, for which the hand of time and kindness can alone provide the cure. But amid all our trials, we beg your Gracious Majesty to believe we yet thank the Most High that the God of battle may give victory to your Majesty’s arms — that He will continue to bless your Majesty as a Queen, bless you as a wife, bless you as a mother; and that it will please Him in his infinite wisdom and mercy, long “to put back thee time” of removing you from your Earthly to your Heavenly crown. And as in duty bound, We will ever pray.
Toronto, Canada West
August 1st, 1854
Originally from the Provincial Freeman. August 5, 1854, taken from Peter C. Ripley et al, eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers, Volume II: Canada 1830– 1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 295–96.