Josiah Henson remembered the moment his life changed forever. On the morning of October 28, 1830, his feet touched the Canadian shore. Josiah threw himself to the ground and rolled in the sand, then rose to his feet and danced. One passerby commented, “He’s some crazy fellow.” Josiah called back, “Oh no, master. Don’t you know? I’m free!” Then he hugged and kissed his wife and children, who were also overjoyed. However, Josiah knew there was not much time for celebration. The family needed a place to live and a way to make a living if freedom was going to live up to their expectations.
THE PROMISED LAND
Fugitives and free blacks had sought refuge in Canada for decades, but after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, the trickle of people became a flood. The province of Ontario was located between Lake Huron and Lake Erie. It offered several doorways the Underground Railroad could use to enter Canada.
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Could slavery have been abolished without the Civil War?
province: a division of a country, similar to a state.
The Canadian border did not stop all slave catchers. Some of them entered Canada and posted reward notices. They approached Canadian employers and tried to buy escaped slaves. Slave holders also went to court, demanding Canada return their property.
The case of Thorton and Ruth Blackburn set the precedent for how the Canadian legal system would react to demands from American citizens and pressure from American politicians.
The Blackburns escaped from Kentucky in 1831 and moved to Detroit. Two years later, they were captured. Underground Railroad operators launched a dramatic rescue. On Sunday, June 16, a crowd of angry, armed blacks gathered near the Detroit jail where the Blackburns were being held in separate cells. Two women begged the sheriff to let them visit Ruth Blackburn one last time. He let them into her cell. The women emerged a short time later, their faces veiled as they wept loudly. When the jailer went to fetch Ruth later, he found one of the visitors in her place.
The next day, Thorton was brought to the door of his jail cell in chains, surrounded by the jailer and sheriff. A crowd of angry blacks greeted them outside the jail. Alarmed by the crowd, the sheriff tried to return Thorton to his cell. Before the sheriff could retreat, a man in the crowd tossed Thorton a gun. Thorton fired into the air, launching the Blackburn Riot of 1833.
extradite: to hand over a person accused of a crime to the country or state where the crime was committed.
vocational: related to skills or training needed for a specific job.
While the mob attacked the sheriff, Thorton ran. He made it across the Detroit River into Canada. The entire rescue had been engineered by Detroit’s leaders of the Underground Railroad.
The sheriff died from his injuries the following year. Many blacks were arrested after the riot and 10 eventually served jail time. White citizens struck back against African Americans following this event. They attacked blacks in the streets and burned the homes of African Americans. Many blacks sold or abandoned their property and moved to Canada.
United States officials sent notice to Canada demanding the arrest and extradition of Thorton Blackburn. They claimed he had started a riot and tried to kill the sheriff. Canadian police arrested Thorton and held him in jail. However, a Canadian court concluded that if Thorton was returned to the United States, even if he was found innocent of charges relating to the riot, he would still be returned to slavery.
Canadian law prevented extraditing people to a country that imposed harsher penalties then they would get for the same offense in Canada. Thorton and Ruth Blackburn lived out the rest of their lives in Canada as free people.
This case would determine how future runaway disputes between Canada and the United States would be settled. When American slaves crossed the Canadian border, they would not be returned to the United States.
Former slaves found freedom in Canada, but not equality. Some white Canadians resented the presence of blacks in their communities. Some provinces prohibited African Americans from buying land, building homes, or attending school. They did have more legal rights in Canada, however, than they ever had in the United States. They could become citizens, vote, and file a lawsuit. Building a new life was hard, despite these new freedoms. The joy of escaping slavery faded as refugees faced poverty and homelessness.
Josiah Henson understood the challenges his former countrymen faced. When the Hensons arrived in Canada, they had one dollar and the clothes on their backs. The family first lived in a run-down hut that had been used as a pigsty. With hard work, Josiah eventually purchased land overlooking the Detroit River. He and some other investors founded Dawn, a community for former slaves.
Dawn revolved around the British American Institute, a school that taught vocational skills. Settlers grew wheat, corn, and tobacco and harvested lumber for export to the United States.
Successful Settlement
Dawn was not the only settlement of former slaves. The Buxton settlement, also known as Elgin, was the most successful community. Reverend William King, a white Irishman, purchased 9,000 acres of land two miles from Lake Erie. He divided it into 50-acre plots and black “colonists” could purchase up to 50 acres for $2.50 an acre. The settlers had to clear the land and build a house. By 1857, 800 black settlers had cleared 1,000 acres of land. The town had a sawmill, brickyard, blacksmith and carpenter shops, shoe shops, and grocery stores, as well as several churches and schools. Descendants of these early settlers still live and farm in the region today.
secede: to formally withdraw from a country.
Border States: the slave states of Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky that bordered the North and refused to secede during the Civil War.
chasm: a major separation between two groups.
With a gristmill, brickyard, and rope-making factory, Dawn enjoyed success for a short time. But then financial troubles began. When the school closed in 1868, people moved away. Some left for other areas of Canada, but many returned to the United States after slavery was abolished at the end of the Civil War. African Americans wanted to return home.
TORN IN TWO
The sea off Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, was calm the night of April 12, 1861, but the nation was not. Months earlier, South Carolina had seceded from the United States and other Southern states quickly followed. Ultimately, 11 slave-owning states joined to form their own independent nation—the Confederate States of America.
The Confederate States of the South were called the Confederacy and the United States of the North were called the Union. The leaders of the Confederacy claimed that Fort Sumter, the fortress on the island in Charleston Harbor, belonged to them. The federal troops inside the fort, representing the Union, must leave, or else.
The new president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, said the Constitution did not allow any state to secede, and he refused to recognize the Confederacy. Lincoln ordered the troops inside Fort Sumter to stand fast.
At 4:30 on the morning of April 12, the shriek of mortar fire pierced the nervous silence in Charleston. The bombardment of Fort Sumter began, and with it came the Civil War that pitted North against South and decided the fate of slavery. Both sides believed the war would last no more than three months. Both sides were mistaken.
DID YOU KNOW?
Historians do not know exactly how many fugitive slaves escaped to Canada. Census records suggest that in 1861, there were between 20,000 and 23,000 blacks living there.
TO SAVE THE UNION
Although President Lincoln was personally opposed to slavery, in the first months of the war he insisted that his mission was to unify the country, not free the slaves. He told the Confederates that if they laid down their arms, they could keep their slaves. The president did not want to anger the slaveholding Border States, fearing they might join the Confederacy.
Fugitive Slaves Were a Cause of War
By the mid-nineteenth century, conflict over slavery had created a chasm between the North and South. Confederate states said one of the main reasons they broke from the United States was because Northern communities refused to return their runaway slaves. Abraham Lincoln was a politician from a free state who opposed the spread of slavery. When he was elected president in the fall of 1860, Southerners believed it was only a matter of time before Northern politicians made slavery illegal everywhere.
contraband: something that it is forbidden to possess.
reunite: to bring people together again after they have been apart for a long time.
Enslaved people had no intention of waiting for President Lincoln to change his mind. War created chaos and slaves took advantage of this. The war was barely a month old when Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend slipped away from a Confederate Army camp located on the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia.
The men had been ordered to dig cannon embankments so the Confederates could fire on Fort Monroe, located on an island in the bay. But one night, they stole a boat, rowed to the Union fort, and asked for refuge. Technically, the Fugitive Slave Law was still in place. Benjamin Butler, the Union general in command of the fort, was legally required to hand the fugitives over to their owners.
But Butler had a better idea. The day after the fugitives escaped, Confederate Major John Cary came to the fort under a white flag and demanded the slaves back. General Butler refused. “I shall hold these Negroes as contraband of war,” he declared. According to military law, a commander could seize enemy property being used for military purposes.
Since the fugitives had been building Confederate defenses, Butler felt justified in keeping them.
President Lincoln let General Butler’s order stand, and word spread throughout slave communities. By June 1861, more than 500 fugitives had sought safety inside Fort Monroe. No one knew if these “contrabands” were slaves or free people. But one thing was certain—the end of slavery had begun.
EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION
From 1861 through the end of 1862, the conflict between North and South went back and forth in a bloody tug-of-war. Neither side gained any significant ground, and men died by the thousands. Enslaved people in the Confederate states did work that enabled the South to keep fighting. Meanwhile, the fugitives who had escaped wanted to join the Union Army and fight, but were barred from the military. President Lincoln believed “that we had … about played our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game.” The change the president made would alter history.
On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This presidential decree declared all slaves in the Confederacy “henceforward shall be free.” The Civil War was no longer a conflict to reunite the nation as it had been before the war began. It had become a war for the very soul of America.
Would the United States be the land of the free or the land of slavery?
Reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation was mixed. Some abolitionists praised the move while others believed it did not do enough. The proclamation only applied to slaves in the Confederacy. Lincoln did not control this territory and could not enforce the law there. The slaves in the Border States were allowed to keep their slaves. Why did he arrange it this way?
While the proclamation did not free all slaves, it did have something that pleased all African Americans. Blacks, free and fugitive, were finally permitted to join the armed services. They enlisted in droves. By the end of the war, 179,000 blacks would serve in the Army and another 19,000 in the Navy.
TURNING POINT
On July 1, 1863, the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, erupted in a huge battle. When the guns fell silent three days later, more than 50,000 men lay dead or wounded. This battle shifted the balance of power to the North.
For the next year and a half, the Confederate Army fought a retreating action, slowly moving farther south with each battle.
An 1864 painting by Francis Bicknell Carpenter of President Lincoln presenting the Emancipation Proclamation to his cabinet
As Union troops pursued the Confederate Army, slaves fled the fields and farms. The Union Army organized large camps to provide food and shelter to these refugees. No one was sure what the status of these people would be after the war. The Emancipation Proclamation said slaves in the Confederacy were free, but was it legal for the president to single-handedly take away valuable property from thousands of Southerners?
What about the tens of thousands of slaves in the Border States who had not been freed by the proclamation? Would they remain slaves if the North won the war?
President Lincoln and abolitionist leaders knew the only way to permanently eliminate slavery everywhere was for Congress to amend the Constitution. As the war entered its final days, Lincoln used all his powers of persuasion to convince legislators to pass an amendment to abolish slavery.
Death and desertion shrank the Confederate Army. In early April 1865, Union forces trapped Confederate General Robert E. Lee in the town of Appomattox, Virginia. Down to only 9,000 men and with no hope of reinforcements, Lee surrendered on April 9, 1865. The long and bloody Civil War was over.
ratify: to give official approval of something, such as a constitutional amendment.
Less than one week later, President Lincoln was dead, shot by an assassin while he attended the theater. African Americans mourned him, afraid of what would happen now that their protector was dead. But abolitionists in Congress did not give up their fight. On December 6, 1865, the 13th Amendment was ratified. It abolished slavery throughout the nation and for all time.
With the end of the Civil War, the Underground Railroad was no longer needed. Stationmasters could lock up their safe houses. Conductors could forget their secret passwords. Stockholders could donate their money to other causes. The time had come for African Americans to begin their lives as free men and women.
However, the Underground Railroad did not disappear. In the next chapter, you will explore ways in which this campaign of civil disobedience influenced other movements in American history. In fact, this once-secret network remains a model of resistance for people around the world today.
ESSENTIAL QUESTION
Now it’s time to consider and discuss the Essential Question: Could slavery have been abolished without the Civil War?
Amendments
The 13th Amendment was not the only change to the Constitution following the Civil War. The 14th Amendment granted citizenship to African Americans and guaranteed equal protection under the law to all Americans. The 15th Amendment gave male citizens the right to vote, regardless of their skin color or whether they had previously been slaves. What about women? It wasn’t until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 that American women were granted the right to vote.
DESIGN A NEW HOUSE FOR A NEW LIFE
IDEAS FOR SUPPLIES
building materials (cardboard, poster board, sticks, straws, rocks, clay, duct tape, or paper clips), weighted objects to simulate heavy snow (coins or metal washers), something to create wind (such as a blow dryer or fan)
The climate is much warmer in the American South than in Canada. African American refugees had much to adjust to, but the long, cold winters of Canada were particularly challenging. In this activity, you will design a house to withstand the snows of Canada, which could rise up to 6 to 10 feet every winter.
Brainstorm some features your house will need to keep out strong wind, rain, and heavy snow. Draw your designs in your notebook. Build a model of your house.
*What building materials will you use to keep your house warm?
*How will you design it?
*How strong do your walls and roof have to be?
*How can you use the natural world around your house for protection?
Test the design and strength of your house by putting weights on the roof. Test the strength of your walls by aiming a blow dryer or fan at your house and turning it on. What changes do you need to make so your house can withstand a freezing climate and the storms of winter?
EXPLORE MORE: Very few slave cabins have survived to the present. To understand how slaves were sheltered, historians rely on the memories of former slaves. Read the descriptions of slave dwellings reported by people such as Mary Prince, Austin Steward, Frederick Douglass, and Jacob Stroyer. Based on their accounts, was slave housing adequate? Would you be comfortable living like these people did? Why or why not?
President Lincoln was criticized for not freeing all enslaved people with the Emancipation Proclamation. What did Lincoln’s freedom plan look like on a map?
“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free …
Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, (except West Virginia) ….”
On a blank map, use colors or symbols to identify where slaves were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and where they were not. Draw a line to distinguish the Union from the Confederacy. Study your shaded map.
*How did geography influence the political decision Lincoln made when he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation?
*Why did he do this?
EXPLORE MORE: Research the reaction of enslaved people in different parts of the country when they heard the news of the Emancipation Proclamation. Were reactions more positive in some areas compared with others?
FREE |
SLAVE |
PA |
GA |
CT |
MD |
MA |
SC |
ME |
MS |
NH |
VA |
NY |
NC |
RI |
KY |
VT |
TN |
OH |
LA |
IN |
MO |
IL |
AK |
MI |
FL |
IA |
TX |
WI |
OK Territory |
CA |
NE Territory |
MN |
|
OR |
|
KS |