he boy made it! He had escaped from his master in the South, traveled the Underground Railroad, and crossed the border into Canada. He had no shoes, hat, or coat, but he was free! He had made it to the town of Chatham, Canada West (Ontario), where so many other black people had settled. The slave-catchers who had chased him all the way to the border couldn't touch him here. Slavery was illegal in Canada, and the hated Fugitive Slave Act could not reach across the border. Or could it?

Suddenly, the terrified boy found himself surrounded by several grim-looking white men — white men who spoke with Southern accents! They grabbed him and told him he was going back; back to his master where he belonged. The boy struggled, but the men were too strong for him. Then another pair of hands seized him. Black hands. A black woman's hands!

The woman who had rushed to the rescue tore the boy from the grasp of the slave-catchers. Before the bewildered white men knew what was happening, she hauled the frightened boy to the town courthouse and began to ring the bell. She rang it so violently that within moments a crowd of people, black and white, had formed on the street. The angry mob rushed at the slave-catchers, who turned on their heels and fled for their lives. The boy who had traveled from the American South using the Underground Railroad was indeed now safe in Canada. His rescuer was Mary Ann Shadd.

The Underground Railroad, of course, was not a railroad at all, but a series of secret routes traveled by black people fleeing from slavery in the American South. Heroic people all along the routes risked their lives to guide runaways north to freedom in Canada. But what happened to the freedom-seekers once they stepped onto Canadian soil? Were they welcomed by white Canadians? Now that they had escaped from physical slavery, who would help them free their minds from the fear, ignorance, and superstitions that were the baggage of that evil institution? Mary Ann Shadd was willing to take on that task.

Mary Ann Camberton Shadd was actually born in the United States, in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1823. She was the eldest of the 13 children of Abraham and Harriett Shadd. Delaware was a slave state, but the Shadds were Free Blacks. Nonetheless, young Mary grew up in a society dominated by slavery. She knew its evils and she experienced the humiliation of racial prejudice. She learned early in life to despise slavery and intolerance. Her parents were active in the movement to abolish slavery, and their house was a station on the Underground Railroad. Giving assistance to runaway slaves was extremely dangerous. It could mean a prison sentence if a person were caught at it. Even worse, in Delaware and other Southern states it could even mean death at the hands of a proslavery lynch mob.

In the American South of the mid-1800s, blacks and whites alike were taught from the cradle that blacks were an inferior race, fit only for work. White Southerners believed they had a right to own slaves. They quoted biblical passages and so-called “scientific facts” that they said proved their arguments. They hated the outsiders for upsetting what they considered their traditional way of life. Even though people in the Free states of the North and in Canada were against slavery, many of them still believed that blacks could never be equal with whites. Some wanted to free the slaves, and then send them “home” to Africa.

The Shadd family certainly did not agree with this. Mary's father firmly believed that with education and fair opportunities, blacks could take their place in society and live together with whites. He passed on his beliefs to Mary.

Mary Shadd had an advantage that slave children didn't have. She attended school. In the South it was against the law to teach slaves to read and write. Mary was disgusted by this, so after she graduated, at age 16, she opened a school for black students in Wilmington. In addition to teaching, Mary wrote articles for a newspaper called the North Star. It was devoted to the abolition of slavery. Her writings and her work as a teacher caught the attention of Frederick Douglass, a former slave who was one of the most active black abolitionists in America.

Before 1850, the Free states of the North were safe for escaped slaves. But under pressure from the South, the American government passed the Fugitive Slave Act. This law allowed slave-owners, or their paid “slave-catchers,” to chase runaways into the northern states, catch them, and return them to the South. This law also ordered northern law officers to help the slave-catchers whether they wanted to or not. It even allowed slave-catchers to seize Free Blacks. All the slave-catcher needed was for one white person in the South to claim that the captive was a runaway.

The black population of the North, both Free Blacks and escaped slaves, started looking at Canada as the place where they could be safe. One of those who decided to move north to Canada was Mary Ann Shadd.

Mary arrived in Canada West in September of 1851. The British colony was already a haven for black Americans. In the 1790s the first governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe, had outlawed slavery, and in 1834 it had been abolished throughout the British Empire. Canada's role in providing refuge for runaway slaves had made southern slaveholders furious. They referred to Canada as “the vile, sensuous, animal, infidel, superstitious Democracy of Canada.” They tried to scare their slaves by spreading exaggerated tales about the cold Canadian climate, ravenous wild animals, and Indian raids. They told their slaves that Canada was thousands and thousands of miles away and that the rivers separating the U.S. from Canada were raging torrents, many miles wide.

One slave who didn't buy these false stories was Henry Bibb of Kentucky. He escaped to Canada, settling at Sandwich, near Windsor. There he published a newspaper called The Voice of the Fugitive, while his wife, Mary, taught school. Bibb's publication was of great importance because it served Canada West's growing black community. Many (but not all) of his readers had been slaves. Bibb also was Secretary of the Fugitives Union Association and a founding member of the Refugee Home Society. He was one of the most important and influential black men in Canada. Ironically, Henry and Mary Bibb were about to become bitter foes of Mary Ann Shadd.

When Mary Shadd left Delaware, she went first to Toronto. She wrote to one of her brothers, “… I have been here more than a week, and like Canada. Do not feel prejudice and repeat if you were to come here … you would do well… [every] man is respected and patronized [according] to his ability….” Soon after her arrival in 1851, she met Henry and Mary Bibb at an antislavery meeting. At the meeting she learned that teachers were needed in the Windsor area. Windsor was one of the main crossing points for fugitive slaves, and had a large black community. Unfortunately, black children were not welcome in white schools, nor was there a place for adult blacks who wanted to learn to read and write.

Mary Shadd set up her school in an abandoned army building called the Old Barracks, which dated back to the War of 1812. It was a drafty old building in bad shape that also was used to shelter newly arrived fugitives. Mary had about a dozen children in her day school and 11 adults for night classes. Aside from the building itself, which was almost impossible to heat in cold weather, Mary had two major problems money and the Bibbs.

In those days, a teacher's pay was exceedingly low, and for Mary the situation was even worse. She began by charging students 50 cents a month, but when she found that most families couldn't afford that, she lowered her fee to 37 cents. Even then, few families could spare the money. Some parents tried to pay for the school with firewood instead of cash, but after a while the fuel donations stopped, too.

As well as her own living expenses, Mary had to pay for school supplies out of her own pocket. The Bibbs suggested that she ask the American Missionary Association (AMA) headquarters in New York City for help. Mary asked the AMA for $250 a month the average salary for a teacher. The AMA agreed to only $125. It was not enough. Mary decided that, for the time being, she would not tell the parents of her students that she was getting help from a charity. She thought if the parents knew this, they might feel they didn't have to pay the tuition fees. Mary intended to tell them at a later date, when she was better established. This “secret” would cause her a lot of trouble later.

Meanwhile, Mary had to find a way to earn more money. She wrote a booklet entitled Notes of Canada West. It was a collection of facts about Canada that would be useful to black Americans who were considering coming to the country. Mary's booklet provided truthful information on Canada's climate, geography, and government, as well as pointers on farming and employment. It told readers that in Canada, if they obeyed the law and took the oath of allegiance, they would “enjoy full privileges of British birth in the Province.” In fact, it encouraged them to choose Canada. But in the U.S. black leaders such as Frederick Douglass were against emigration.

Mary Shadd did not believe in all-black communities, schools, and churches. She argued for integration. Only by living together, she claimed, could blacks and whites come to know and understand each other and overcome their fears and suspicions. She had no patience with prejudice between the two races, whether, came from blacks or whites.

Henry Bibb strongly disagreed with Mary. He believed in segregation and thought that black people needed their own communities, schools, and churches. To promote his plan, he and a white missionary, Reverend Charles C. Foote, had founded the Refugee Home Society (RHS). This organization purchased land and resold it under specific conditions to runaway slaves who had made it to Canada. Mary felt from the start that the RHS was going about things the wrong way, however good its intentions. In time, she even came to doubt those “good intentions.”

Because he disagreed with her, Bibb would not publish Mary's booklet on Canada West, so she had it printed in Detroit. When Bibb reviewed it in his newspaper, he both praised and criticized the booklet. Mary was upset at this. She had been having difficulties at school, too. She observed that Henry Bibb, who sometimes taught bible classes, was not qualified to do so. She also disliked Mrs. Bibb's teaching methods. She considered Mrs. Bibb to be harsh and suspected her of being “a drug-taking woman.”

In June 1852, Henry Bibb revealed in his newspaper the fact that Mary Ann Shadd had received money for her school from the AMA. This was devastating to Mary, because it made her appear to be dishonest. Bibb also claimed that Mary, who was for integration of blacks and whites, was running a segregated school for blacks only. This was not true, as Mary had opened her school to both black and white students.

Then Mary began to openly question the policies of the Refugee Home Society that Bibb and Rev. Foote had started. She asked why the organization reached out to fugitive blacks, but did nothing for Free Blacks coming to Canada. Many Free Blacks arrived just as poor and homeless as the former slaves. She pointed out that black people could purchase land from the government on much better terms than those offered by the Refugee Home Society. Moreover, they would have clear rights to the land, and would not be bound by the rules of the society, which she said served only Henry Bibb and his colleagues.

Bibb began to attack Mary Ann viciously in his newspaper. He said that her complaints added “nothing to her credit as a lady.” Of course, Henry Bibb's articles hurt Mary, but what really bothered her was that they were being read by the very people she wanted to help black people who were either already in Canada or thinking of coming. Henry Bibb was doing what many other editors of the time did. He was using his newspaper to express his own point of view, and he included large doses of falsehood. As Mary said in a letter to a friend, “What a vast amount of mischief a man like H. Bibb can do with [a newspaper] of his own to nod, insinuate, and ‘fling’ away the reputation of others …”

Mary thought about leaving the school, but eventually decided to stick with it, and “leave the result with God.” But she could not let Henry Bibb's attacks on her character go without answer. She sent word around that she was holding a public meeting where she would address all of the statements made about her in the Voice of the Fugitive. When Henry Bibb learned of this he sent Mary a note, warning her that if she insisted on talking about these things at the meeting, it would be “the worst day's work” she ever did.

Mary held her meeting anyway, and one of the resolutions passed was that the work of Miss M. Shadd as a teacher was “highly appreciated.” Bibb's newspaper, of course, gave the meeting only a brief mention.

That summer a cholera epidemic swept through the Windsor area. The Board of Health pronounced Mary's school unsafe, and when she reopened it in September only nine students showed up. Henry and Mary Bibb continued to make life miserable for her. She was attacked in almost every issue of their Voice of the Fugitive. The Bibbs also sent negative letters about her to the charitable foundation in New York that was supporting her. Finally, in January of 1853, she lost that financial support on “religious” grounds. Mary knew that religion had nothing to do with it. The real reason was her dispute with the Bibbs.

She continued to teach, difficult as that was with no money, but she was about to start another career that would have a far greater impact. Mary decided to fight fire with fire. She was going to publish her own newspaper, the Provincial Freeman. Mary Shadd was about to become the first black female editor and publisher in North America. But before Mary even started her new venture, she faced prejudice of a different nature. Readers would not accept a newspaper with a woman editor. There were a few female journalists at the time, writing mostly on topics such as fashion and social events. But for a woman to be writing about the important issues of the day or to edit a newspaper was simply unthinkable.

Luckily for her, she had a supporter. Samuel Ringgold Ward had visited Windsor the previous summer. A former slave, Ward was famous in the United Sates and Canada for his fight against slavery. He was an accomplished writer and a gifted speaker. At first Ward was impressed with Henry Bibb's newspaper and wrote some articles for him, but he soon came to share Mary Shadd's views on how the Refugee Home Society operated. Not surprisingly, he soon found himself being attacked in Henry Bibb's newspaper.

Ward agreed to lend his name to Mary's paper. Mary would do the editing and most of the writing, but the admired name of Samuel Ringgold Ward would appear as editor. Mary spent the next six months doing all the hard work that was necessary to bring a new publication into existence. At the same time, she continued to teach.

The schedule was exhausting enough. Then the preparations of the final weeks had to be rushed because of a tragedy. In the spring of 1853 Mary Shadd and Samuel Ward attended a meeting of a local debating society. Two of the young men at the meeting got into a fight outside and one of them was killed. In its report on the incident, Henry Bibb's paper blamed the people of Mary's upstart Provincial Freeman, accusing them of “holding illegal and uproarious meetings and thus encouraging violence.” Of course, this was not true. But Mary had to rush the final preparations of her paper so she could publish an accurate account of the incident.

The first issue of her Provincial Freeman came out in March. Its front-page headline read: “Devoted to Anti-Slavery, Temperance, and General Literature.” The publisher's motto was: “Self-Reliance is the True Road to Independence.” Mary Shadd wanted to do more than just report the news. Her mission was to attack slavery and erase the stereotype of black people as childlike beings incapable of looking after themselves without white help. She believed Henry Bibb and his colleagues promoted this way of thinking.

One of her main targets was the practice of “begging” for money from black and white charities. Mary wrote that black people newly arrived in Canada needed a little help to get started in their new lives, but then they should make their own living. There were plenty of jobs available in the growing province, she said, and cheap land was available for farming. Mary pointed out that black people living on charity only reinforced the view that they were lazy and helpless. She also reported that much of the money donated by generous individuals and organizations went into the pockets of the people who collected it. She went so far as to say that Henry Bibb was one of those who profited at the expense of black immigrants.

Racism of any kind angered Mary Shadd. She advised refugees from the South to abandon any prejudices about white people that they might have brought with them from their slave days. She never claimed that prejudice did not exist in Canada, because it did. But in Canada, she pointed out, prejudice was not supported by law. A white person who committed an offence against a black person could be taken to court. British law did not discriminate, she told her readers.

Mary wrote about other things that concerned her as well. She was a strong advocate for women's rights. It must have frustrated her that she had to speak out for women from behind Samuel Ward's name, especially since, after the first issue of the paper was published, he had sailed for England.

As always, Mary fought on, and as always she had money problems. Newspapers needed subscribers in order to survive, and many publications had folded after one or two issues. After her first edition, Mary went on the road selling subscriptions for her Provincial Freeman. She traveled throughout the United States because that's where the biggest market was, and she wanted to convince black Americans that a better life awaited them in Canada. She attended meetings and gave lectures, even speaking in slave states. This was dangerous because the proslavery faction often resorted to violence.

Within a year, however, Mary had enough subscription support to resume her publication. She set up an office in Toronto and began distribution to all the centers of black population in Canada West, as well as in Nova Scotia and various American states. Mary's family moved up to Canada to help her. Her brother Isaac and sister Amelia wrote articles and sold subscriptions, but it was still difficult to make ends meet. Mary was particularly annoyed when Torontonians raised money for an American antislavery newspaper, the North Star, while ignoring the lively new paper that was being published right in their own city.

In October 1854, she took a risky step and revealed that she was the editor of the Provincial Freeman. The backlash against the very idea of a woman editor was so great that she was in danger of losing subscribers. Mary again had to have a man, this time a Reverend William P. Newman, “front” as the editor. She then explained to her readers that she only had taken the editor's position temporarily. Mary also moved the newspaper's headquarters to Chatham, where about a third of the population was made up of black immigrants.

Over the next few years the Provincial Freeman developed into what many historians consider the best abolitionist newspaper of the times. Even people like Frederick Douglass, who were not always in agreement with Mary Shadd, admired the paper. But getting it off the press and into the hands of readers was never easy. The lack of money sometimes meant the paper didn't appear on time. Besides writing articles and being “ghost” editor, Mary went on exhausting tours, trying to sell subscriptions. She and her sister also taught school in Chatham to help meet expenses. In spite of all its difficulties, though, the Provincial Freeman outlived Henry Bibb's Voice of the Fugitive, which ceased publication when Bibb died suddenly in 1854.

In 1856 Mary married Thomas Cary of Toronto, a widower with three children. Mary and Thomas had two children of their own, but Thomas died in 1860, just two months before the youngest was born. Two years earlier, Mary had met the controversial abolitionist John Brown when he visited Chatham. Brown wanted to end slavery by armed rebellion. In October 1859, when Brown launched his doomed raid on Harper's Ferry Virginia, a reporter named Osborne Anderson was with him. Anderson was from Mary's paper and he was the only member of Brown's group to escape death in battle or by execution. When he wrote a book about that historic event, Mary Shadd was the editor.

The American Civil War, which began in 1861, spelled the end of slavery in the United States, but only after four bloody years of fighting. Although Mary Ann Shadd had become a Canadian citizen in 1862, she went to the United States in 1864 to help recruit black soldiers for the Union army. She was the only woman officially listed by the U.S. government as a recruiter.

After the defeat of the South, with slavery finally abolished, many of the black people who had fled to Canada returned the U.S. Mary Shadd returned too, and taught school in Detroit. She was the first woman to enroll in Howard Law School, and although Mary completed her studies in 1872, she was not allowed to graduate until 1881. The school did not want to grant a diploma to a woman. Mary continued to write, to teach, and to fight tirelessly for human rights and against discrimination in all its forms.

Mary Ann Shadd died in Washington, D.C. on June 5, 1893. She had made enormous contributions to the hard fight against slavery. She had dared to enter the male-dominated world of the media and publish a newspaper. She had become one of the few female lawyers of the time. In her 70 years on the face of this Earth she made a mark that will never be erased.