The painting hangs on the wall of the Canadian Gallery in the Royal Ontario Museum: a small oil displayed in a golden frame. It was painted nearly two centuries ago by a fairly obscure local artist called John Gillespie. It shows a bustling King Street on a beautiful day in the middle of the 1840s. The soaring spire of the new St. James Church — the immediate precursor of today’s grand cathedral — reaches up into the bright blue sky toward a few wisps of cloud. The wide sidewalks are filled with life: women in bonnets and long dresses pass from shop to shop; men in top hats stroll along the store-fronts; a pair of First Nations people chat by the entrance to the old St. Lawrence Market while two soldiers do the same nearby in their bright red uniforms and fuzzy black bearskin hats. Horses and riders trot by in the street. It’s an idyllic scene of a metropolis just beginning to grow into its own, home to twenty thousand people. It depicts the young city as the great British author Charles Dickens described it just a few years earlier: “[T]he town itself is full of life and motion, bustle, business and improvement.”
There, in the centre of the painting, surrounded by the commotion of King Street, is a yellow carriage. It’s heading away from us, disappearing down the street. The driver, perched atop the cab, has his back turned to us. We can’t see his face. You can barely tell he’s there at all: a few indistinct strokes of grey lost in the bright chaos of the streetscape.
But that patch of grey paint represents a harrowing tale of bravery. Sitting on top of that carriage is a man who was willing to risk everything for freedom — and for love.
Thornton Blackburn was born into slavery, but within sight of freedom. He grew up in Kentucky, living right alongside the Ohio River. The blue waters marked the official boundary between the slavery of the American South and the free states of the North. On his side of the river there was bondage and captivity; on the other side, liberty.
But crossing that river was a dangerous proposition. Those who were caught trying to escape slavery were often brutally punished. Some were beaten or whipped, some had their faces branded with a red-hot iron, some had ears cut off or limbs amputated, while others were castrated. It was a death-defying risk that might even lead to your execution.
And yet, Blackburn was about to try. He was in danger of losing the woman he loved — more than enough reason to make the perilous journey across the Ohio River.
He was a teenager when he met her. They were both living in Louisville; Ruthie was enslaved just a few doors down the street. She’d been born in the Caribbean — maybe even in Haiti, taken from the island as a child by some of the French refugees who fled the revolution just as Jeremiah Powell was about to arrive — before ending up in Kentucky. She and Thornton fell in love and got married, allowed to spend a little time together every weekend: from Saturday night to early Monday morning before their work began.
But now even those few hours were under threat. Ruthie was being sold down the river into the Deep South, where the back-breaking labour of the cotton fields would likely be accompanied by sexual abuse. The Blackburns’ only chance to stay together was to sneak across the river and escape Kentucky into freedom.
They made their move on a July day in 1831. At first, everything went to plan. They caught a ferry across the river using forged papers in case they were questioned. It was risky gambit; they were well-known in these parts and anyone who spotted them would be legally obligated to capture them and turn them in. But the ferry ride went off without a hitch. They made it across the river into Indiana.
But that was just the first step. Indiana was a free state, but it wasn’t entirely safe. Slave catchers prowled the North looking to capture runaways and return them for a bounty. The Blackburns would need to keep moving, getting as far from Kentucky as they could, if they were going to stay free.
So, it was time for the next step in their plan. They waded out into the water and flagged down a steamboat as it pulled away from the Louisville docks. The captain was deeply suspicious, questioning them closely, looking for any sign they might be fleeing slavery. But they’d appeared from the Indiana side of the river and their papers seemed to be in order. One day, he would be put on trial for believing them, but believe them he did. The Blackburns were allowed to book passage upriver, steaming away from Louisville, leaving their life of slavery behind.
In Cincinnati, they grabbed a stagecoach heading north, bumping along the rough roads of Ohio until they reached the shores of Lake Erie. Then, they caught a second stagecoach to Detroit. It was there, right across the river from Upper Canada, that the Blackburns planned to live their new life of freedom.
Detroit was still a small town: about two thousand people living on the edge of the frontier; the last stop before the Indigenous lands to the west. There, finally, the Blackburns were able live together as husband and wife. Thornton got a job as a stonemason, making his own money as a free man for first time.
But this new life didn’t last long.
It all began to unravel with a chance encounter. One day, while walking down the street, Thornton bumped into a man who used to work at the very same store in Louisville where he’d been enslaved. They had a pleasant conversation, catching up, and Thornton told him he’d been given his freedom. But when the man finally returned home to Kentucky, the lie was uncovered. The Blackburns might have been living hundreds of kilometres from the South, but they still weren’t safe — not even in a free territory like Michigan. The law said anyone anywhere in the United States who was found to have escaped slavery had to be sent back. The Blackburns were arrested and thrown into the Detroit Jail, waiting to be shipped to Kentucky in chains.
But the people of Detroit weren’t going to let them go without a fight.
Over the weekend, a crowd began to gather in the fields and forests around the jail: the town’s Black residents and their white abolitionist allies. They came armed with everything from pistols and swords to clubs and sticks. They were going to do everything in their power to make sure the Blackburns weren’t returned to slavery. Even if that meant violence.
Eventually, two women came forward out of the crowd. They asked if they could at least visit with Ruthie for a while before she was hauled away. They spent the rest of the day inside her cell, plenty of time to enact their plan. One of them switched clothes with Ruthie. And when two women emerged from the jail that evening, veils drawn over their faces in sorrow, handkerchiefs wiping away their tears, the sheriff didn’t notice that one of them was his prisoner. By the time he realized what had happened, Ruthie Blackburn had already slipped across the border into Upper Canada. Into freedom.
Thornton’s escape wouldn’t be as easy. It came down to the very last minute, as he was led down the steps of the jail by armed guards, chained and manacled, heading toward a waiting carriage. But the crowd stood in the way, at least two hundred angry citizens ready for a fight.
Blackburn convinced the sheriff he could make peace: if he were allowed to address the crowd, he could talk them into leaving and he would go without a fight. But when he stepped forward to begin speaking, someone in the crowd tossed him a pistol with the cry, “Shoot the rascal!” Suddenly, the prisoner was armed.
Blackburn wheeled on the sheriff. He pointed the pistol right at him before raising it into the air. He fired a shot into the sky. As he did, the crowd surged forward, and while the guards disappeared back inside the safety of the jail, the sheriff was pulled to the ground, knocked unconscious by a blow to the head.
Nearby, church bells began to ring out in alarm. Now another angry mob was on the way: white citizens coming to the defence of their sheriff. In the violence that followed, one young Black man was shot in the chest, his lung pierced; he would eventually die from the wound. In the chaos and confusion, Thornton Blackburn was bundled onto a waiting wagon and rushed away toward the border.
It was the beginning of a dramatic cart chase. With a posse hot on their heels, dogs barking and alarm bells ringing out, Blackburn’s rescuers rushed toward the Detroit River, urging their driver and his blind horse to go faster and faster. When they reached the river, they paid a boatman with a gold watch to take Blackburn across the water into Canada, where freedom and Ruthie were waiting.
Tensions in Detroit would remain high for weeks. In the wake of that night’s violence, nearly every Black resident was rounded up and thrown in jail; the others were placed under a strict curfew and not allowed to go anywhere near the river. A night watch was established to make sure those new rules were followed. There were protests, and the stables next to the jail were burned down; in retaliation, more than forty Black homes were torched. White citizens attacked Black citizens in the streets. The army was called in and martial law was declared. Before long, nearly all the Black residents of Detroit had fled across the river into Canada. The Blackburn Riots were the first race riots in the history of Detroit. The town had paid a heavy price, but the Blackburns were finally free.
For a few hours. Later that same night, they were arrested by the Canadian authorities, and thrown into a Canadian jail.
John Graves Simcoe hated slavery. As a member of Parliament in England, he’d given abolitionist speeches in the House of Commons. When he was picked to be lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, he made it clear: he saw no place for slavery in his new province. “The principles of the British Constitution do not admit of that slavery which Christianity condemns,” he wrote before he officially took his post. “The moment I assume the Government of Upper Canada, under no modification will I assent to a law that discriminates by dishonest policy between natives of Africa, America or Europe.”
By then, slavery had already been abolished in England — a court decision had ended it fifteen years earlier. But hundreds of people were enslaved by the colonists of Upper Canada, many of them brought north by the Loyalist refugees as they fled the revolution in the United States. The British government had officially condoned the practice. So, if Simcoe wanted to get rid of slavery in Upper Canada, he was going to have to pass a new law to actively abolish it.
He didn’t wait long to act. In the summer of 1793, just weeks before he founded Toronto, Simcoe introduced a bill to abolish slavery. He’d been inspired by the horrifying tale of Chloe Cooley — a Black woman enslaved at Niagara who’d loudly resisted being sold across the river into the United States, kicking and screaming as she was rowed across the border. But actually getting that bill passed into law wasn’t going to be easy. Simcoe would need support. The bill would have to pass through the Legislative Assembly and then through the Legislative Council. Both of those bodies were full of slaveholders. And that, in part, was thanks to Simcoe himself.
The Legislative Assembly was an elected body, but the members of the Legislative Council were hand-picked by Simcoe himself — and he’d packed it full of slaveholders. At least five of the nine members were either slaveholders or from slaveholding families. They formed a majority. Simcoe, determined to abolish slavery in Upper Canada, had made it almost impossible to do.
In the end, he was forced into a compromise — the exact thing he had promised never to do. His new law didn’t abolish slavery immediately; instead, it would be gradually phased out. No enslaved person could be brought into Upper Canada, but all those already there would spend the rest of their lives in bondage. Their children would be born into slavery, too; they wouldn’t be free until they turned twenty-five.
And so, while the “Act Against Slavery” was the first bill to abolish slavery ever passed anywhere in the British Empire — introduced more than seventy years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States — it was still legal when Toronto was founded. During the city’s founding years, fifteen people were enslaved within its borders, as well as another ten just across the Don Valley. Some of Toronto’s slaveholders are still familiar names in the city: William Jarvis, James Baby, Peter Russell, and John Denison all have streets and neighbourhoods named after them to this day, while the Kanien’keha:ka chief Joseph Brant — who enslaved dozens of people outside the city — is remembered in the name of a school in Scarborough.
The Blackburns fled Detroit four decades after Simcoe’s bill became law, but slavery still wasn’t illegal in Upper Canada. It was another year before the practice was officially abolished across the entire British Empire. And there were still plenty of questions left to be settled concerning people who escaped American slavery by coming to Canada. The Blackburns weren’t safe yet. Their struggle wasn’t over.
They’d made it across the river into Canada, where they should have been free. Simcoe’s law made it clear: only people who were already enslaved in Upper Canada could be enslaved there; no one from outside the province. But the American authorities weren’t going to give up that easily. They wanted the Blackburns extradited back to the United States to face trial for their involvement in the riots. So, just hours after Thornton slipped across the border, the Blackburns were arrested and held in a Canadian jail while the government leaders in York figured out what to do.
Thankfully, they had some rather unexpected allies. It was the early 1830s and the Family Compact still ruled Upper Canada. And their hatred of all things American included a hatred of slavery. The law was clear, with a recent precedent set by the top judge in the province: John Beverley Robinson. As soon as someone set foot on Canadian soil, they were given the full protection of British law. That meant people who escaped slavery would not be sent back south.
But it suddenly seemed as if things might not be that simple. The Blackburns weren’t just being accused of escaping slavery, they were being accused of other crimes, as well. It wasn’t clear what would happen. As they awaited their fate, the question hung over them: Would Canada send them back to be tried in the United States even though it was perfectly clear they would be returned into slavery whether or not they were found guilty? Powerful abolitionists in York, like Reverend Strachan, leapt to the Blackburns’ defence, advising the new lieutenant-governor to refuse the extradition request. In the end, after an agonizing few weeks, that’s just what he did. The Blackburns were released. They were finally, truly free.
With their liberty finally secured, the Blackburns settled in Toronto. There was even a pleasant surprise waiting for them there: Thornton’s brother Arthur had escaped slavery and made his way north, too. The Blackburns stayed with him for a while, but eventually built a small farmhouse just a block away — not far from the Don Valley, at what’s now the corner of Sackville Street and Eastern Avenue. It was a modest home, with just three little rooms and a cellar, but they had a wonderful view out over the lake, with the iconic Gooderham & Worts windmill towering above the shore. The kept a big vegetable garden and a small orchard of fruit trees, while fishing and hunting in the nearby valley and the sprawling Ashbridge’s Marsh. Ruthie gave herself a new name for her new life in freedom: she was now Lucie Blackburn.
The couple would become community leaders in Toronto. They helped to found Little Trinity Church on King Street, which still stands there to this day. And when William Lyon Mackenzie launched his rebellion, just a few years after the Blackburns arrived, they were ready and willing to protect the government that had once protected their freedom. When a group of rebels tried to cross a bridge across the Don River and attack the city from the east, they were met by a single Black man who stood on the bridge, blocking their path — believed to have been Thornton Blackburn or his brother. Years later, the front door of the Blackburns’ home would still be riddled with bullet holes put there by rebel muskets.
Their fight against slavery wasn’t over, either. There were still millions of people enslaved in the United States — including some of their own loved ones. Soon, Thornton would risk his life again, heading all the way back to Kentucky so he could track down his mother and bring her back with him to Toronto. And she was only one of countless people the Blackburns helped.
Their own legal case had cemented Upper Canada’s reputation as a safe haven for those fleeing slavery. And as American laws around people escaping from slavery grew even more draconian, tens of thousands would flee north to Canada.
The Blackburns played a major role in helping turn Toronto into one of the most important destinations at the end of the Underground Railroad. When they arrived in the city, Thornton got a job at Osgoode Hall, working as a waiter in the dining room. After a few years, the Blackburns had saved enough money to start their own business. They had a horse-drawn taxicab built for them, painted it yellow and red, and called it “The City.” It had enough room for four passengers inside the carriage, with their luggage and the driver — Thornton Blackburn — perched on top. Many decades later, its yellow and red paint job would inspire the colours of the Toronto Transit Commission.
The City was the first taxi in Upper Canada, and it made the Blackburns wealthy. Before long, they began to buy up property in a new neighbourhood called Macaulaytown — where city hall and Nathan Phillips Square now stand. It would one day become known as “The Ward” and gain a reputation as the city’s most notorious “slum,” but back in the middle of the 1800s, it was a largely Black neighbourhood, providing a new home for many who escaped on the Underground Railroad. The Blackburns rented out their houses at discount rates to many of those newcomers, helping them to establish themselves in their new city. Some, they even welcomed into their own home — including one mother and her seven children, one of whom would grow up to become Toronto’s first Black postal worker, Albert Jackson.
The Blackburns didn’t stop there. They were active in anti-slavery societies and supported a whole new settlement for those who’d escaped on the Underground Railroad. In the town of Buxton, they helped fund new businesses and industries that would allow its residents to prove they were just as capable of looking after themselves as white settlers were.
They helped turn Toronto into a vital bastion in the fight against slavery — an emerging metropolis just across the lake from the United States, where leading abolitionists could feel safe meeting, planning, and coordinating their fight. There was plenty of racism in Toronto, too, of course, but it was a far cry from the burning hatred that ruled in so much of the United States. Many of the city’s leaders — Tories and Reformers alike — were passionately opposed to slavery. Torontonians were known to drive slave catchers out of town. And when the brand new St. Lawrence Hall opened on King Street in 1850, not only was its first event an abolitionist lecture, it would bring anti-slavery leaders from across the United States, Britain, and Canada together at the historic North American Convention of Colored Freemen later that same year.
The climax in the fight came with the American Civil War. Despite Toronto’s abolitionist history, a disturbing number of people in the city supported the Confederate cause. When the South won an important early battle, the Legislative Assembly gave three cheers. A visiting Union soldier was jeered in the streets. The Queen’s Hotel on Front Street became a hotbed of Confederate spies and refugees, who rented out all the rooms and hung around the lobby and the bar in their tattered grey uniforms. From Toronto, Confederate agents planned fire-bombings in New York City and plots to kidnap the vice president, to seize a Union warship, and to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln by sending him clothes infected with yellow fever. George Denison — the wealthy grandson of one of York’s old slave-owning families — even helped buy them a steamship so they could launch raids on the northern states just across the Great Lakes.
But most Torontonians supported the Union. Tens of thousands of Canadians headed south during the war to take up arms in the fight against slavery — many of them Black. Some included the Blackburns’ own friends. Dr. Anderson Ruffin Abbott, the first Black Canadian to graduate from medical school, ended up running a hospital in a refugee camp in Washington, DC, and became friends with Abraham Lincoln. And when the American president began planning for life after the war, he sent a delegation to Canada to learn more about how people freed from slavery were able to live in peace and prosperity.
Finally, after four years of bloodshed and centuries of suffering, the war was won. The Blackburns had lived long enough and fought hard enough to see their dream come true. Slavery had finally been abolished across the United States.
By the time the American Civil War ended, Toronto was a very different city than it had been when the Blackburns first arrived. It was now a booming metropolis. The population was skyrocketing. New businesses and industries were opening all the time. The taxi business had changed with it. The city now had its first horse-drawn streetcar service. Big companies operated whole fleets of cabs, where once the Blackburns had been the only game in town. With times changing, Thornton Blackburn decided to retire, spending more of his remaining days at home with Lucie.
The view out their window had changed drastically over the last thirty years. The iconic old Gooderham & Worts windmill had come down, replaced by a distillery — an entire complex of factories that would produce more whiskey than any other in the world. The land around their property had been developed; it was now home to so many Irish immigrants employed by the distillery that the area had become known as Corktown. Even the Blackburns’ own backyard had been swallowed up by the city, expropriated to build a new school for local children.
Soon the schoolyard would swallow up the rest of the Blackburns’ land, too. They died as the 1800s drew to a close, laid to rest in the Necropolis cemetery. Their house was demolished and their story began to fade from history, the details of their lives forgotten for a century. It wasn’t until an archaeological dig uncovered the ruins of their home that interest in their remarkable tale of bravery and love would be sparked once again. In recent years, they’ve been resurrected with an award-winning biography — Karolyn Smardz Frost’s I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land — and countless articles. A nearby conference centre now bears their names and a few Torontonians even know that a colourful echo of the city’s first taxicab still lives on in the red paint of every TTC streetcar.
The Blackburns spent their final years there, together, at home, sitting on their porch, watching the city grow up around them. Two old Torontonians who’d risked everything to make it to the city, who’d fought hatred at every turn, who’d helped play their own small part in bringing an end to one of the most vile institutions the world has ever known, and who now, finally, could rest in peace. And in freedom.