SEVEN

THE STRUGGLE FOR LIGHT

He who does not help us at the right time does not help us at all.

—ATTRIBUTED TO GOETHE

THE NEXT MORNING, JOSIAH SET OFF IN SEARCH OF A JOB. HE described himself as “a stranger in a strange land,” referencing a phrase from the Book of Exodus spoken by Moses after he had left Egypt, when he was dwelling in the land of Midian.¹ Canada was not yet a nation—it was called Upper Canada at the time and had a population of just 213,156. Though it had been surveyed, it was virtually a backwoods. The land was filled with forests and wild animals, and a population consisting of First Nations and a smattering of pioneer settlers.

Josiah didn’t understand Canadians or their culture, but as soon as he arrived, he kept his eyes and ears open, just as in his days as a Washington market man. He asked anyone he met if they knew of anyone who was hiring. By noon the same day, he learned that a man named Mr. Hibbard might be interested. Hibbard, who lived seven miles from Black Rock, was considered rich for a Canadian. He had a large farm with some small tenements that he rented to his laborers. If hard and honest work would satisfy Hibbard, Josiah was certain they’d get along.

Josiah found Hibbard in the afternoon and struck an agreement for his employment. He asked if there was a house he and his family could live in. Hibbard showed him an old two-story shanty. Pigs had broken through the lower level, and by the looks of things, they’d been there a while.

Josiah evicted the pigs and prepared the house for its new tenants. If he was going to bring Charlotte and the boys here, he needed to make it nice. After all, this was home.

So he borrowed a hoe and a shovel from Hibbard and cleaned out the manure. He boiled water and mopped the floor as best he could. By midnight, the place was in a tolerable condition, and only then did he sleep with weary contentment. The next morning he returned with Charlotte and the boys, later joking that his family members were “the only furniture I had.”²

The family had nothing but bare walls and floors, but even Charlotte admitted it was better than their log cabin with a dirt floor and a cloud of oppression overhead. Josiah found logs and built boxes in the corners of the room and stuffed them three feet thick with straw. The Henson family, for the first time in their lives, had beds.

To his great delight, Hibbard discovered that Josiah’s work was more valuable than what he received from most of his hires. His new employee worked harder and smarter than the average farmer. Josiah gained favor with Hibbard, and Hibbard’s wife took a liking to Charlotte. All their needs were met. Food and firewood were abundant, and the Hensons were, at last, full and warm and safe.

Josiah worked for Hibbard for three years. Sometimes he worked for wages, and other times for a share of the produce. With his profits, the family bought some pigs, a cow, and a horse. The family’s conditions gradually improved, and Josiah began to feel that their sacrifices had been worth the trouble.

An old friend from Maryland escaped to Canada and came to visit. This friend, remembering Josiah’s wonderful sermons, started spreading the word that he was good in the pulpit. Soon Josiah developed a reputation. As the requests came in, he couldn’t help but say yes. The invitations came from churches with members from all walks of life, and soon Josiah labored in two fields—in Hibbard’s farms, and in the pulpits of churches across the region. He was invited to speak to rich and poor, black and white, literate and illiterate, and to all alike he spoke about their duties to God and to each other.

But an old problem bothered Josiah. Despite the fact that he was often called upon to minister to highly educated folk, he still didn’t know how to read. He knew that religion wasn’t so much about knowledge as it was about wisdom, and yet he still craved knowledge.

Hibbard, in a kind display of generosity, enrolled Josiah’s eldest son, Tom, in two quarters of school. The schoolmaster, in his own kindness, added two more. Tom was able to read the Bible to Josiah every evening. On Sunday mornings, he would read a passage and Josiah would memorize it before heading off to preach.

One summer Sunday morning, Josiah asked Tom to read to him.

“Where shall I read, father?”³

Josiah didn’t know where to direct him. “Anywhere, my son.”

Tom opened to Psalm 103. “Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless His holy name.”

As Josiah listened for the first time to what he later described as “this beautiful outpouring of gratitude,” he began to weep. All his memories rushed back in a flash. All the pain, the hardship, the abuse. All the evil that the Rileys had done. Of his father, sold south. Of his mother, long passed. Of his harrowing journey to freedom.

Bless the Lord, O my soul. It was all he needed to express the gratitude he now felt.

Tom finished the passage. “Father, who was David?” He looked up at Josiah and saw the tears running down his cheeks. “He writes pretty, don’t he?”

Josiah smiled and nodded.

“Who was David, Father?”

Josiah was unable to answer the question. He had never heard of David, but he couldn’t bear to acknowledge his ignorance to his own son.

“He was a man of God, my son.”

“I suppose so,” Tom said. “But I want to know something more about him. Where did he live? What did he do?”

Josiah saw that evasive maneuvers couldn’t outwit his sharp little boy. He confessed that he didn’t know.

“Why father?” Tom asked. “Can’t you read?”

The question was worse than the rest. All pride drained from Josiah’s heart.

Josiah shook his head and admitted he couldn’t.

“Why not?”

“Because I never had an opportunity to learn, nor anybody to teach me.”

“Well, you can learn now.”

“No, my son, I am too old, and have not time enough. I must work all day, or you would not have enough to eat.”

“Then you might do it at night.”

“But still there is nobody to teach me. I can’t afford to pay anybody for it, and, of course, no one can do it for nothing.”

“Why, father, I’ll teach you!” Tom said. “I can do it, I know. And then you’ll know so much more that you will be able to talk better, and preach better.”

Josiah’s ambition to be a great leader, and his deep desire to learn, were strong. He agreed to try.

Starting that night, and every evening to follow, by the light of some hickory bark or a pine knot, Josiah began to learn to read. His progress was slow, and Tom was discouraged. He would complain about his father’s slowness, or bark at him like a schoolmaster with a troublesome student. Sometimes Josiah fell asleep in the middle of their lesson. His days were long and tiresome, and they had just a few minutes each night to work on the project.

But father and son persevered, and by winter Josiah had learned to read. By spring, his newfound ability was a great comfort. Until he learned to read, Josiah had never comprehended the cruel nature of the owners who kept their slaves in the dark. This gross injustice made him hate slavery even more, and he decided it was time to do something to elevate others who were suffering the same oppression.

SELF-IMPROVEMENT

After three years with Hibbard, Josiah found new and better employment. He was hired by a gentleman named Benjamin Riseley in the autumn of 1833. The new boss was progressive in his thinking, and the two men talked about the challenges facing new refugees in Canada.

Josiah knew he and his family were not the only ones to escape from America and settle wherever they first arrived in Canada. Hundreds of black people lived in his neighborhood. But even after gaining their freedom, their way of life hadn’t improved much.

Newly free slaves, delighted in their emancipation, often accepted the first job offers they received and settled for wages far lower than what they could have earned. For generations, the word “no” had never been an option, and they’d been trained to believe they were incapable of accomplishing the same things as white people. They entered into unprofitable agreements, such as renting wild land on short-term contracts and committing themselves to clearing a certain amount of acreage. Their leases would expire by the time they cleared the land, and the landlord would happily raise himself a bountiful harvest. Then the tenants would move on and start all over again. Others, tempted by the high prices paid for tobacco, raised nothing else, eventually flooding the market. The price of tobacco crashed, while the prices of wheat and corn rose.

Josiah knew many men who were no further ahead in ten years than when they’d first arrived. They were happy to get paid for their work, but that was the height of their ambition. They didn’t dream of becoming independent landowners themselves. Josiah made it his mission to arouse ambition in the hearts of his fellow escapees. They needed to organize, diversify, and learn how to negotiate.

Riseley agreed with Josiah’s views and allowed the preacher to hold meetings at his house. Josiah invited a dozen of the smartest black workers he knew, and they discussed the subject. He pointed to how white men, for two hundred years, had taken a course of bold action, and in doing so, had, in his own words, “acquired an indestructible character for energy, enterprise, and self-reliance.”⁴

Over the next year, Josiah hosted a number of meetings in Riseley’s home and convinced about a dozen free men to join with him and invest their earnings in land. The plan was that, like the white men before them, they would find a piece of land and colonize it. They would settle some wild parcel, something they could call their own. On this land, every tree felled and every bushel of corn raised would bring profit to their own families. For the first time in their lives, they would truly be their own masters.

The group deputized Josiah to explore the country and find a suitable place. They all agreed they’d go wherever Josiah himself was willing to settle.

It was time to find a home.

SEARCHING FOR DAWN

After the harvest of 1834, Josiah set out on foot to travel the region between Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, and Lake Huron. He hitched rides whenever possible. A minister named Benjamin Cronyn recorded in his diary that he gave Josiah a lift in his covered wagon in Brantford, on his way to Hamilton.⁵ When Josiah came to the territory east of Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River, he felt the soil’s fertility was far better than anything else he’d seen. The township’s name was Dawn. Could this be home?

Josiah returned and reported his findings to the group. Wisely cautious, they encouraged him to revisit Dawn in the summer of 1835, to see if the land was still good in the opposite season. While he waited for time to pass, he discovered a large tract of government land near Colchester, Ontario, about thirty miles southeast of Detroit on the Canadian side of Lake Erie, and about 250 miles from where he had first crossed into Canada.⁶

The land had been granted, “with conditions,” to a man named Mr. McCormick, who had rented it out to settlers for as much as he could squeeze from desperate people. They had all since moved on—or rather, it’s likely that McCormick had run them off once they’d done the hard work of clearing his land.⁷

Josiah’s tiny community couldn’t afford to miss a season by clearing and preparing land; here was land ready for planting. A dozen or so families decided to join him and temporarily rent McCormick’s land while they saved up to purchase the piece of Dawn that Josiah had discovered.

The families moved in the spring of 1836 and were soon rich in wheat and tobacco. It turned out to be incredibly profitable—so much so that they stayed for seven years. But it was not their own land. The government, which had taken back the land from McCormick—presumably he had not fulfilled the conditions stipulated in the land grant—could put it up for sale at any time and they’d likely be driven off by wealthier buyers. All their improvements—irrigation, fencing, buildings—would be lost. It was hard to both settle land and save for the future at the same time, but Josiah’s heart was now set on Dawn.

Meanwhile, the population of escaped slaves in Upper Canada increased rapidly. They spread throughout the towns and into the interior. Immigration from America was constant, and some of it was, in fact, Josiah’s own doing.

JOSIAH HAD PROMISED THE SCOTTISH BOAT CAPTAIN, BURNHAM, that he would use his freedom well, and he had made good on that promise. But he felt he could do more. There were still so many who lived in captivity. Josiah had paved a path to freedom and wanted to help others escape. When he preached, he preached on the “importance of the obligations they were under; first, to God, for their deliverance; and then, secondly, to their fellow-men, to do all that was in their power to bring others out of bondage.”⁸

One Sunday, after Josiah had preached such a sermon, a young man named James Lightfoot approached him and begged him to rescue his brothers in Kentucky. Josiah wrestled with the proposition for days. It would mean a difficult journey—four hundred miles on foot through the free states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and on into Kentucky. But this was what it meant to use his freedom well. Ultimately, his mission would prove successful—not only did he rescue the Lightfoot brothers, but he helped another group escape to Canada as well.⁹

Josiah, of course, wasn’t the only emancipated black person who saved others. William Still, a wealthy coal merchant born to freed Maryland slaves, served as a clerk for the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, a citizen band of freedom fighters.¹⁰ In his fourteen years as an Underground Railroad conductor, Still helped almost eight hundred slaves escape. He documented many of the stories of these rescues in his 1872 book The Underground Railroad Records.^*

After her escape from Maryland to St. Catharines, Ontario, Harriet Tubman made more than a dozen trips back to America to help at least seventy people escape to Canada, earning her the nickname “Black Moses” for leading so many people out of slavery. A legend persists that southern slavers offered a $40,000 bounty for her capture, “dead or alive.” This figure is highly unlikely, considering that a typical slave sold for a few hundred dollars, and a prime male might fetch $1,000. An $800 reward was posted for Peter Pennington, who escaped with Tubman’s help on November 16, 1856. If a $40,000 reward had been offered, it would have made national news, as it would be the equivalent of more than $1 million today. The US government offered $50,000 for John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, in 1865.¹¹ The $40,000 figure was likely concocted by Sallie Holley, a New York antislavery activist, for an 1867 newspaper article.¹² The only published notice that’s been found concerning a reward for Tubman’s capture is an October 3, 1849, advertisement in the Cambridge Democrat offering a $300 reward for the return of “Minty [Tubman’s birth name was Araminta Ross] and her two brothers, Ben and Harry.”¹³

The Underground Railroad ran north to Canada and south to Mexico and the Caribbean. Some escapees were transported in wagons, boats, and trains, but many walked on foot. Approximately 100,000 people made the journey in all, many of them led by conductors. It was a dangerous choice to return to the South and rescue slaves, but people such as Tubman and Josiah did so repeatedly. Although we don’t know how many trips he took during his first decades in Canada, Josiah returned to America again and again, by his count rescuing 118 people^* from the strangling grip of merciless slaveholders.

AS MORE AND MORE SLAVES ESCAPED TO CANADA, THE SUPPLY OF cheap labor became a windfall for some already-established Canadian pioneers. Josiah saw it all around him. Clearing and settling the woods of Upper Canada was labor intensive, and there was a serious demand for workers. He and other self-emancipated blacks weren’t afraid of hard work, but they were still selling themselves short.

Though he had no formal training, Josiah started lecturing on crops and wages and profit and loss. He insisted that each man should raise his own crops, save his wages, and secure the full profits of his labors. He didn’t try to hide what he was doing, and the traders whose exorbitant profits he was trying to diminish often attended his speeches. Josiah reasoned that their overall profits wouldn’t shrink if free black men followed his advice. Rather, they would have more people with whom to trade.

Realizing that for many, finance was a tricky topic to navigate, Josiah handled questions carefully. His sensible and kind nature never offended his opponents, and the white landowners soon realized that he wanted to benefit everybody involved in the nation-building effort. In Josiah’s view, the future of Canada would be inclusive of black people, white people, and native people alike. They would own their own farms, educate their children, and cultivate true independence.

But war with American settlers was brewing, and Josiah would first need to defend what they had built so far.

REBELLION

Nearly a thousand Canadian rebels with American sympathies were growing tired of Great Britain’s colonial rule. They joined together with American adventurers into a secret organization called Hunters’ Lodges.¹⁴ Membership swelled to as many as 80,000, and small groups began to make raids into Canadian lands along the Detroit River. It was a threat to Upper Canada’s sovereignty, and hundreds of black Canadians volunteered for service during the rebellion. They helped create fighting units called the “Coloured Corps” in Toronto, Hamilton, Windsor, and Chatham, the area where Josiah lived.

A far later version of Josiah’s autobiography reports that during the Canadian rebellion he was appointed captain of the 2nd Essex Company of Coloured Volunteers. No external record has been found to confirm this statement, but it is not outside the realm of possibility. Rev. Jermain W. Loguen, another black preacher, also claimed he was invited to command a black company, and a free black man named William Allen boasted that he was the first black captain in British North America. He was later awarded a special sword for his outstanding leadership during the rebellion.¹⁵

Although Josiah perhaps served in the war, his captaincy might be an autobiographical embellishment made by his editor, as white officers typically commanded black companies at the time. That said, it seems reasonable that natural leaders like Josiah would be placed in charge of their fellow soldiers, and the motivation for black men in Canada to fight against the Hunters’ Lodges would have been extremely high. These free men were willing to help defend the nation that had given them a home and refuge from slavery.

Josiah’s autobiography states that, though he couldn’t shoulder a musket, he carried a sword, and that his company held the highly strategic Fort Malden, in Amherstburg, Ontario, from Christmas 1837 until May 1838. It also mentions that his company captured a schooner, called Ann or Anne, along with its three hundred arms, two cannons, musketry, and provisions for the rebel troops.

The Ann incident might be the only time in history that a company of foot soldiers captured a sea vessel.¹⁶ On January 9, 1838, American patriots attempted to raid the town of Amherstburg by crossing the Detroit River on the schooner. Thanks to a quick drop in the Canadian temperatures during the skirmish, the schooner froze solid in ice floes and was easily boarded by all three of the town’s regiments, including bands of militia and First Nations warriors. The Canadians successfully defended their town, capturing twenty American prisoners, including their commander, Brigadier General Edward Alexander Theller.^* After the rebellion, both sides returned to the status quo.

A PARTNERSHIP FOR PROSPERITY

Prior to the rebellion, while Josiah lived and farmed in Colchester, he had met a white Congregational missionary from Massachusetts named Hiram Wilson. As a boy, Hiram had attended a manual labor school called the Oneida Institute, and then he enrolled at the recently founded Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. When the school refused to discuss slavery as part of its theological conversations, he moved to Ohio and earned his degree at Oberlin Theological Seminary. Hiram then moved to Upper Canada as an agent for the American Antislavery Society. He was an abolitionist and a dreamer, and over the next six years he raised and borrowed enough money to start at least ten schools for free black people in Upper Canada. He recruited fourteen teachers, mostly fellow Oberlin graduates, and soon gained the attention of a Quaker philanthropist named James Canning Fuller, an Englishman living in Skaneateles, New York.

Hiram Wilson took an interest in Josiah’s community and promised to do whatever he could to help them acquire land in order to start a permanent settlement. He wrote to Fuller and asked for the philanthropist’s help. On a visit to England in the summer of 1840, Fuller convinced many of his friends to support Hiram’s cause. He returned with $1,650 to benefit freed slaves in their new land.

Josiah’s small community—and blacks throughout the region—were overwhelmed by the sum. Many members of Josiah’s group couldn’t even comprehend the figure. But Josiah and Hiram knew exactly how they wanted to spend the money, if they could convince the community to go along with their plan. The two men decided the fastest way to reach consensus was to call a meeting. They sent word to all the black settlements in the area and invited them to send delegates, and together they hosted a convention in London, Upper Canada, in June 1838.

At the meeting, Josiah and Hiram urged the group to spend the funds on establishing a manual labor school, so their children could gain a theoretical and practical education. The school would have all the benefits of a grammar school plus a robust hands-on component. Girls would learn domestic skills such as cooking and sewing. Boys would be taught mechanical arts, such as blacksmithing, mill working, and carpentry.

Despite being known as a land free of slavery, Canada was still rife with prejudice. In many districts, it was impossible to overcome the racism of white settlers, and black children were often barred from attending local schools. Starting their own school would not only train up their own people to then train others, but it would gradually enable black people to become independent of white men for their intellectual progress and physical prosperity.

There were some at the convention who opposed the Wilson-Henson plan, likely wishing to simply divvy up the proceeds among the various settlements. But over three days of debate they came to a consensus that they would build something of permanent usefulness. Hiram and Josiah’s proposal was unanimously adopted. The Canada Mission Board appointed a committee of three to choose and purchase land for the school, with Hiram and Josiah as the leading men. Fuller likely served as the silent partner, though some speculate that a man named Henry Shelby was the third man who joined in the search for the perfect property.

Hiram and Josiah traveled for several months, but no site seemed as good as the one Josiah had seen years earlier: Dawn.

The area, today the city of Dresden, Ontario, was nothing but wild forest prior to 1790. There were no roads or highways, just trails to various First Nations camps. The land teemed with deer, bears, wolves, foxes, and wild turkeys, as well as fish in the lakes and streams, and would make an attractive spot for settlers.

In May 1790, Alexander McKee, a deputy agent of the British Indian Department, negotiated with the Wyandot, Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi First Nations to acquire title to what is now much of southwestern Ontario. The British government paid in goods worth £1,179 13s. 9d. in Quebec or Halifax currency for all their lands, including the Dresden area, in the form of 39 gallons of rum, 400 pounds of tobacco, plus guns, ammunition, blankets, clothing, and other useful items.¹⁸

The first settler in Dresden was Gerard Lindsley, who purchased the lot that would become Dawn in 1825.¹⁹ The pioneer had sailed up the Sydenham River and landed at his forest lot.^* He quickly located a freshwater spring and built himself a log cabin nearby. Lindsley was completely isolated, and he remained sole monarch of all he surveyed for several years, with only an occasional native visitor.

The first black settlers to put down roots at Dawn arrived by at least 1823, when freedom seekers Weldon Harris and Levi Willoughby purchased Lot No. 3 on the 3rd Concession, a fifty-acre parcel that extended north to the river flats.

Several more black families soon followed. As early as 1839, when Dresden was still a dense forest, settlers of all races and creeds from a forty-mile radius would meet on the flats of the southern banks of the river for religious camp meetings. The meetings could often run a week or more, with families bringing tents along with “stands for the preachers, seats for the sinners, and pens for the saved.” The camp site continued to be used for river baptisms until at least 1949. The Christian connection may have been what drew Josiah to the Dawn area in the first place, and there’s a chance that he may have participated in the gatherings on his scouting trip.²⁰

Dawn was a loose society, at best, but by the time Josiah arrived, around fifty black families lived in the area, and he would have found the community inviting. The land itself was heavily forested, and there were wetlands and grasslands that would provide game to feed the community, along with rich land and dense hardwoods. It would be a good place to call home.

THE BRITISH AMERICAN INSTITUTE

In November 1841, Hiram and Josiah used a portion of Fuller’s funds to purchase two hundred acres on the Sydenham River. It was fine, rich soil, densely covered with black walnut and white birch trees. The price was $4 per acre.

Josiah also purchased the adjoining lot of two hundred acres, with his own money, and prepared to move his family to their very own piece of land.

Thirteen months after their initial purchase, just a few weeks before Christmas in 1841, the British American Institute (BAI), a manual labor school, opened its doors. The BAI started with twelve students and Hiram Wilson as their teacher. His wife, Hannah Maria Hubbard Wilson, also became a teacher at the school. The school’s board of trustees, consisting of six men—three white and three black—signed a Declaration of Trust leaving Hiram Wilson, as BAI president, and an executive committee to realize the BAI vision. Josiah’s exact role in the first two years is not known, but it’s likely that he spent much of that time building a home and clearing the trees from his own land in order to provide farmland to feed his family. It’s also likely that in the first year, there would still be a final crop from their Colchester lands.

The school’s mission was to integrate basic education and profitable labor to ex-slaves of all ages, and to introduce them to the economic system so they could become self-sufficient freed people. The institution also provided temporary living space for refugees who had just arrived in Canada. Hiram and Josiah’s plan was to make the BAI a self-sustaining institution. Students would help to work the BAI land as a means of paying their own way.

The BAI was funded by Christians, Quakers, abolitionists, and several organizations. Significant funding came from the American Baptist Free Mission Society (ABFMS) and the Canada Mission Board, and Hiram Wilson made sure to lay out his dream in a letter to his supporters south of the border:

At this Institution a suitable selection is made of the most promising characters among the negroes, to be trained up in habits of industry, and to receive a secular and religious education suited to their capacities and future prospects, so as to qualify them to become teachers and benefactors to their deeply injured and suffering brethren. The value of these labours will appear still more important, when it is recollected that it is only by improving the intellectual and moral condition of the colored race, that prejudice against color can be overcome, on account of which they are now suffering in their newly adopted country.²¹

JOSIAH MOVED HIS FAMILY TO LOT NO. 3 ON THE 4TH CONCESSION of Dawn in 1842, and many of his friends soon joined him. Like some of the other early investors in the Dawn area, in time he would grow to own several lots and houses (likely for his adult children). He also built up a successful farm operation that employed others. Perhaps because grooming Isaac Riley’s horse had been one of his first jobs, Josiah seems to have always liked horses, and at some point he began to invest in and breed fine stallions as well. This flourishing home base allowed him to travel far and wide in his efforts to elevate the plight of black refugees in Canada and raise funds on behalf of the British American Institute.

Until now, Josiah felt that black families had only been able to share the miseries of society, but now they would share in its blessings. Economy and education were the two great means by which their oppressed race could be elevated to equality in civilization. The new school at Dawn could train up generations of newly freed blacks to become independent and self-sustaining. The institute could prove that blacks were, indeed, equal to whites, both in education and industry. The BAI could become a beacon of hope for those who were still enslaved.

Once work began in earnest, the members of the new community made progress quickly. By March 12, 1843, Hiram and the community had cleared and mostly fenced twelve acres, built three houses, and constructed a 1.5-story schoolhouse that sat up to sixty students and slept twelve in the loft above.

The plan was for students to work three to four hours per day on the farm in order to raise food for their own support. Unfortunately, many students treated the BAI as a charity built for their benefit and didn’t seem to realize that it was a working farm. They came for the winter school term, when their labor was basically useless, and left in the spring to work on steamboats or other paid summer jobs, making use of their newly acquired education. Many who did remain had to work at clearing the densely wooded land, which meant that expenses needed to be covered by outside donors.

The institute was growing at a rapid pace, but James Canning Fuller’s startup funds were quickly depleted. The BAI was chronically short of funding.^* Hiram Wilson traveled to England in May 1843 to solicit more money, leaving his wife and others to care for the BAI in his absence. He was gone for nearly five months, managing to raise £258 after costs. This was enough to float the operation and purchase one hundred acres from Josiah. By 1844 the British American Institute was three hundred acres in size, and there were high hopes that it would be enough land to sustain its work.²²

On September 30, 1843, Hiram wrote that the school had “sixteen adults and about twenty youths,” and that “their improvement has been highly satisfactory.” He added, “A steward is engaged to superintend the manual labour, and two teachers are employed in giving a sound English education.”²³

The BAI continued to grow rapidly. By 1844, American abolitionists were publicizing Dawn. Levi Coffin, the Quaker abolitionist from Cincinnati known as the “president” of the Underground Railroad—which was now nearing its peak—made his first visit to the school that year. By the following year, Hannah Wilson was teaching seventy students.

Although there hadn’t been many black settlers in the area before Josiah’s arrival, the abolitionist press quickly made Dawn and the BAI a magnet for fugitives and a major destination on the Underground Railroad. The advantage of community and the opportunity of a practical education attracted refugees at a rapid rate. It would be a mistake to say that Josiah started Dawn, or that he alone was to be celebrated for its success. Josiah was the spiritual and celebrity leader of Dawn, but the settlement was far bigger than any one person. Dawn wasn’t a community with a master plan—it grew naturally. Farms were cultivated, businesses blossomed, churches were erected, and mission outposts served the poor, all independent of the school.

At the time, the Sydenham River was deep enough that boats of up to three hundred tons could navigate directly into town from Detroit and the Great Lakes. Naturally, homes and businesses sprouted along its banks, and it’s not unlikely that the community developed a marine route for the Underground Railroad that led straight to Dawn’s doorstep.

But what was Dawn, exactly? There was as much confusion about it then as there is today. Dawn was not the BAI, nor was the BAI Dawn. Josiah raised funds for the BAI, but he also personally helped the settlers at Dawn. The BAI had a board, while Dawn was a free-form, grassroots community. The nearby town of Dawn Mills was not Dawn. The surrounding township of Dawn was not Dawn. Dawn was something more spiritual, more of an idea and an area of refuge than a place with well-defined borders. It was a vision.

Still, the BAI unquestionably played an integral role in attracting people to the area. In 1845, a developer named Daniel R. VanAllen, of nearby Chatham, bought the original Dawn settler Gerard Lindsley’s seventy-acre farm, just northeast of the BAI lands. In November of the same year, VanAllen, who is now considered the founder of Dresden, turned twenty acres of his land into more than sixty one-eighth-acre lots. The main street of Dresden ran (roughly) in a straight line, dodging stumps and quagmires along the way. Around the same time, an Irish-born developer, William Wright, started building another village, Fairport, just southeast of Dresden.²⁴ Between the BAI, Dresden, Fairport, and all the surrounding farms that made up the settlement, Dawn was, indeed, starting to rise.

DAWN WASN’T THE ONLY FREE BLACK SETTLEMENT TO SPRING UP IN southwestern Ontario, of course. While most refugees initially landed at places like Fort Erie or Windsor, in time, like Josiah, they, too, moved farther inland to build their own lives. Black colonies emerged. While some black people settled in cities such as Chatham, London, Hamilton, Toronto, and Colchester, there were those who felt it necessary to give fugitives a chance to acclimate to freedom before thrusting them into the wider Canadian society.

In a way, all the black settlements were like refugee camps, in that they lacked a definite sense of permanency and were supported predominantly by white outsiders. The newcomers faced prejudice—many Canadians were hostile to the black settlers—and the life of land-clearing and city-building was incredibly arduous. These small pockets of freedom continued to develop nonetheless. Other well-known colonies included the Elgin Settlement near Buxton, Henry Bibb’s Refugee’s Home Society near Windsor, the Wilberforce Colony, and settlements at Port Royal, Shrewsbury, and rural locations in between.^* Each of these colonies was supported by white abolitionists, Christian denominations, and wealthy patrons. The Elgin Settlement was likely the largest—at 9,000 acres—and certainly the most organized. But Dawn was easily the most influential and best known of the settlements, thanks in part to the British American Institute.²⁵ In time, however, the settlements had to compete for an ever-shrinking pot of donor money both at home and abroad. It is hard to imagine the cost of resettling tens of thousands of abused, illiterate, uneducated, hungry former slaves on wild land not yet a nation. Each of the black colonies required a huge amount of sustainable funding, and there never seemed to be enough to go around.²⁶

WITHERING GROWTH

The Dawn community continued to grow through the summer of 1845. Former slaves from Virginia introduced tobacco and hemp, and the BAI started a brickyard that was said to have produced almost 100,000 bricks in its lifetime.²⁷

The trustees and the executive committee, with Josiah and Hiram as their fundraising agents, did their best to make the school self-supporting, hiring the students to work the land and build businesses to increase income. But it was never enough. The Dawn Settlement ballooned to more than five hundred inhabitants, and the BAI itself grew far too quickly. The need was great, and the institute’s expenses far exceeded the donations that Hiram and Josiah could solicit.

As the debts mounted, the BAI came under heavy attack. At least some of the controversy arose from disagreements over how much former fugitives should be set apart from society. Some felt that by providing shelter for the students, where they could live and learn away from the rest of society, the BAI was advocating colonization. They held that fugitives should instead be fully integrated into society, and above all, that they should not beg for money. It was a war that no one would win.

The BAI could likely have become a self-sufficient enterprise had it been given time and support to grow slowly. But the influx of refugees from America was constant, and the school’s leaders simply weren’t up to the task of keeping pace with the growth. Hiram Wilson was a visionary dreamer, not a manager, and Josiah Henson, though a man of remarkable intelligence and talent, was an uneducated former slave who could barely read and couldn’t write, let alone run a college. There were the costs of employing teachers, building mills and houses, feeding the poor, and the additional overhead of simply running the BAI. The institute and its leaders took on debt at an alarming rate. They were working with an unsustainable business model, and something drastic was needed to fix it.

The American Baptist Free Mission Society saw this financial predicament brewing and moved to hire a capable leader to help right the ship. William P. Newman was an escaped slave from Richmond, Virginia, who had studied at Oberlin College before becoming a minister at Union Baptist Church in Cincinnati. The ABFMS offered Newman the job of secretary of the settlement’s executive committee, and he arrived at Dawn in June 1845.²⁸

Unlike the people-pleasing Josiah, Newman was aggressive and decidedly partisan. The two men were bound to clash far sooner than later. For now, Newman’s job was to reorganize the BAI’s executive management, and by the late fall, he believed he had turned things around.

On October 4, Newman reported to Dawn’s patrons that sixty acres of timber had been cleared and cultivated in the previous three years. Josiah’s community had built a large schoolhouse, several houses, and a barn. They were starting on a potashery, likely for making soap, glass, and fertilizer. They had also erected two large buildings that would be ready by December 1, presumably as expanded boarding and teaching space.²⁹

Newman informed the patrons that Josiah had raised $220 to help pay the BAI’s deficits, and that he had spent the summer preaching among the black settlements at his own expense. The school had eighty students, and Newman predicted they would reach one hundred by winter. They could triple that number if only they had space to house them all, he noted.

Newman ended by saying that “in the fullness of confidence and fraternal solicitude, we commend to the kind consideration and sympathy of the benevolent public our beloved brethren, Hiram Wilson and Josiah Henson[,] as the accredited agents for our Christian enterprise.”

Less than three weeks after his appeal, Newman wrote, “The institute is in a better condition than ever before. We have now some 90 students and they are coming in almost daily.” However, he went on to mention that when two ladies had arrived the previous day, there was nowhere to house them; they had to turn away another man due to housing and food shortages. Rather casually, he noted that “Brother Wilson and Henson have left on an agency and should they fail to obtain help, we must stop operations in a few weeks for the want of food.” How could the BAI be both doing better than ever and on the verge of collapse? The letter is baffling.

Things went downhill quickly. Before the end of 1845, and despite his kind words just a few months earlier, William Newman charged the executive committee, Josiah and Hiram included, with maladministration. He had examined the financial records and believed something was amiss. Newman asked Josiah to return from one of his New England preaching trips to discuss the missing money. Josiah and Hiram defended themselves at a public meeting, and they were unable to produce an exact account of all the funds they had collected. Nevertheless, the executive committee declined to prosecute.

Newman resigned from the BAI and returned to his Cincinnati congregation later in 1846, though that didn’t stop him from continuing to attack Dawn’s leadership. He claimed that the black residents of Dawn disliked Hiram Wilson. He tried to use Frederick Douglass’s antislavery newspaper, The North Star, to denounce both Hiram and Josiah. For Newman, the battle had inexplicably become personal.

Hiram certainly didn’t help resolve the controversy surrounding the BAI, and with it, the Dawn Settlement in general. He was an able organizer on his own, but he was a terrible team player. He was careless with finances and easily flattered. Moreover, he was an inveterate people-pleaser.

Both Hiram and Josiah believed the BAI should remain factionless, and tried to make all sides happy. There was a group within Dawn that obviously didn’t want them running things. The leader of this group was, of course, William P. Newman.

It was only a matter of time before the “moderate” British abolitionists who supported Josiah and the “extremist” American abolitionists who supported Newman would wage battle for total control of the British American Institute.

PREACHER MEETS POET

After several years without a discernible position within the BAI, Josiah was authorized as an official fundraising representative for the institute. Fundraisers typically earned a 20 to 25 percent commission for their efforts. The commission covered their expenses, served as a salary, and compensated them for having to be away from their own farms back home for long periods while traveling.

Josiah was bold in his fundraising efforts and managed to elicit the support of some very influential men. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow recalled meeting Josiah on June 26, 1846, when the preacher visited Craigie House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to convince the famous poet to sponsor the BAI: “In the evening Mr. Henson, a Negro, once a slave, now a preacher, called to get subscription for the school at Dawn, in Upper Canada, for education of blacks. I had a long talk with him, and he gave me an account of his escape from slavery with his family.”³⁰

Though he was new to fundraising, Josiah was well-spoken and had a great presence. Longfellow wrote: “There was never anything more childlike than his manner.… The good-natured ebony face, the swarthy-bearded lip, the white teeth, the whole aspect of the man so striking and withal so wild,—It seemed as if some Egyptian statue had come to life; and sat speaking in the twilight sonorous English not yet well learned.” Josiah evidently made quite an impression, as Longfellow’s account books record that he donated to “Father Henson” many times over the next thirty years, including $10 on June 5, 1856, and $20 in March 1875. Altogether, he donated the combined equivalent of around $10,000 by today’s income standards.³¹

MILLS WITH A MISSION

Despite the controversy with Newman, Josiah’s good reputation remained intact. Now a Methodist Episcopal elder with a three-hundred-mile district under his care, Josiah preached constantly. He lectured on justice and equality for black people and raised awareness and funds for the work of the BAI at Dawn. He was quickly becoming a leading figure in the abolitionist movement, and was revered by abolitionists throughout the nation. Soon people gave him a new name: Father Henson.

During this financially challenging time for Dawn and the BAI, Josiah looked for new ways to produce income for the settlement and institute. The lands on which the Dawn community had settled were covered with a beautiful forest of hardwoods, but the settlers didn’t need trees. They needed arable ground to raise crops to feed their families. When the former slaves cut down the trees to clear the land, they were burning the piles of wood simply to get rid of them.

Burning down forests could in fact be an easy way to make money, though perhaps it was not the best way to profit from trees. Starting in 1845, farmers in the area realized they could raze their forests, collect the ashes, and sell them to the newly constructed ashery in Dresden. The facility leached the ashes, boiled the lye into a gritty powder, and shipped it in barrels to Chatham, and then on to England and Ireland, for bleaching linens.

Josiah often roamed through the forest, and the waste appalled him. He wasn’t the only one. When a new settler named Parker Smith arrived, he noted that the locals grazed cattle in the forests all winter to forage for elm branches when they ran out of hay. He found it even more difficult to see Canadians use premium “curled maple and splendid walnut stuff” as mere cooking fuel.

Josiah needed to find a way to convert this abundant natural wealth into money. He left home for America in the autumn of 1847. Mills in New York sawed logs just like those in Dawn’s forests into lumber and then sold it for huge profits. In New England, he found a market hungry for black walnut, and birch in particular, both of which were plentiful and being wasted back home.

Josiah reached Boston and reported his findings to some of the philanthropic men he’d met on previous preaching trips. A minister named Ephraim Peabody introduced him to Samuel Atkins Eliot, a prominent Boston politician, who was kind enough to hear Josiah’s ideas and draw up a business plan for him. Josiah then presented this plan to Amos Adams Lawrence Jr., the son of the wealthy merchant-philanthropist Amos Lawrence Sr.

This Amos Junior was far kinder than the men named Amos that Josiah had known in Kentucky. A Unitarian from Boston, he was a well-known figure in the US abolitionist movement. Josiah’s plan was presented to several men of similar means, all leading Bostonians, and they contributed about $1,400 to help Josiah with his new enterprise, around $500,000 by today’s standards.

Josiah returned with the money to Canada and immediately started constructing a building for a sawmill in Dawn. The improvement to the community’s morale was astonishing. Rather than selling ashes, they’d be selling hardwoods. More money would soon be on the way. People began to work with renewed vigor, and the clearing and cultivation of the land became a happy affair.

Unfortunately, Josiah’s financial planning skills again fell far short. By the time he finished framing the mill, his funds were exhausted. The sawmill would sit idle for more than a year while he figured out how to raise the funds to complete it.

Despite the setbacks with the sawmill, the Boston philanthropists connected deeply with Josiah and supported his efforts, and they funded several of his other initiatives. Josiah, for example, realized the community needed a grist mill to grind corn. He wrote that a man had to walk three or four miles (likely to the gristmill at nearby Dawn Mills) “with two or three bushels on his shoulders, through paths in which the mud was knee-deep, leave his corn at the mill, and then go repeatedly after it in vain; he would be put off with a variety of excuses till he was quite discouraged, and would conclude that it was almost useless for him to raise any grain; and yet there was no other way for him to have a bit of bread or corn-cake.”³² Josiah decided he would personally build a grist mill in 1846. He returned to his Boston friends, raised $5,000, and oversaw construction of a steam-powered mill on the BAI lands. He was soon proud to report that “in a short time we ground the corn for the entire neighbourhood, and this venture was a decided success.”³³

THINGS WERE NOT GOING SO WELL FOR HIRAM WILSON. HE BECAME seriously ill in early 1847, going so far as to write that he was “nigh unto death.” Hiram went to England for the spring on a health respite. By the time he returned to Canada, his wife, Hannah, had died, leaving four motherless children behind.

It was a severe blow to the passionate missionary. The BAI’s debts continued to spiral upward as more and more people in need arrived at Dawn. Josiah and others took on personal debt to help carry the institution, but by the summer of 1848, no one but Hiram had any credit left. There had never been enough money to adequately sustain the BAI, let alone bring it out of the red.

Hiram and Josiah’s plan had been to create income sources from within the Dawn community, but they’d come to rely heavily on loans they simply couldn’t repay. The idea of a manual labor school was sound, but neither of the founders had understood the importance of long-term financial planning. Perhaps if they had turned more people away, they could have remained solvent. But the pair seemed unable to grasp the school’s finite financial capacity. Both men wanted to help all who were in immediate need, but their choices imperiled the long-term sustainability of the BAI.

Another death struck a blow to the institute. James Canning Fuller, Hiram and Josiah’s silent partner in the founding of the BAI, passed away. The Quaker philanthropist had been a lifelong friend of Hiram’s and a longtime trustee for the school.

Hiram decided to resign from the BAI, citing his extremely poor health, but he also complained to the board about his “lack of discretionary and controlling power.” Like Newman before him, he claimed bad leadership and mismanagement as part of his reason for leaving, which was true, but he was unable to recognize that as one of the leaders, he had been a large part of the problem.^*

The BAI’s leadership now faced great challenges. Fuller and Hiram Wilson were gone. Money had stopped flowing in from England, in part because funds were being diverted to the Irish Potato Famine. Meanwhile, Americans and Canadians were reluctant to give to a settlement so obviously mired in conflict.

With no clear leader, something desperately needed to be done to save the institution. As Hiram Wilson wrote, “The Manuel [sic] Training Institute here ran well for a season, and accomplished much good; but since my resignation… it has run down, and can hardly be resuscitated again without a miracle.”³⁴

It was clear that William P. Newman wished to gain total control of the BAI on behalf of the American Baptists—likely for good reasons. He would also do whatever was necessary to accomplish his purpose, including ruining Josiah’s reputation.

Josiah would have to find a miracle.

CLEARING LAND, CLEARING DEBT

The BAI’s board of trustees convened again on July 10, 1848. The financial situation was so grave that the board of trustees, which usually left the operations to the executive committee, intervened. The institution carried huge amounts of debt, and two of the trustees gave public notice that they would not be held responsible. With all their strongest means of support dead or gone, the BAI’s best hope was to find a new sponsor.

Deciding to take drastic action, the trustees decided to break the BAI into two separate entities. One of them would own the school, most of the buildings, and all the arable farmland. The other would own all of the BAI’s debts, plus the sawmill and some forested land, to be used to pay off the institute’s debts over a period of four years.

Despite the fact that Josiah did everything in his power to help carry the BAI’s burdens on his own shoulders, he was not capable of running such a vast and growing enterprise, even with the executive committee’s help. Splitting the institution into two was a drastic but necessary decision, if only to shield the school from the mill’s debts.

It would be relatively easy to find someone to take over the school, but who would be willing to take over a debt-laden, nonoperating sawmill?

By early 1849, the BAI’s lumber industry was estimated to be worth up to $11,000, but the overall institution owed somewhere between $4,000 and $7,500, and no one wanted to take it on as their personal responsibility. Amos Lawrence of Boston finally reached out to Josiah and offered to extend a loan to pay the debt. In a letter, he outlined his three conditions. First, Josiah needed to find forty people willing to commit $100 each to pay off the debt. Second, Josiah would have to agree to be in charge of the lumber mill to ensure steady cash flow for the BAI. Third, Josiah would have to travel to England to solicit funds to help keep the school afloat, since their American donations had dwindled significantly.

Josiah agreed to travel to England, but he wasn’t able to find forty volunteers at Dawn willing to go in with him on the debt. In a last-ditch effort to secure Lawrence’s loan to save the BAI, he agreed to personally carry the BAI’s debt, in equal partnership with an original BAI trustee, Peter B. Smith, on the condition that Smith would oversee the mill’s day-to-day operations while Josiah traveled overseas.

Josiah also needed funds to complete the sawmill itself. Though certainly discouraged, he returned to Boston to raise funds. Three men in particular—Amos Lawrence, H. Ingersoll Bowditch, and Samuel Atkins Eliot—again agreed to help with the sawmill. The Unitarian abolitionists encouraged Josiah in his business enterprise, and the approval of these eminent men was like a salve for his soul.

Josiah ended up borrowing $2,800 for which he was personally responsible. He returned to Dawn, where he and his sons completed the sawmill. They installed steam-powered machinery. Although Josiah personally carried the loan, the mill belonged to the BAI and was rented back to him for $500 per year.

Josiah decided to put his sons in charge of the mill’s operation, while he turned his attention to how to discharge his towering debt, the equivalent of perhaps ten years of income.

Josiah chartered a boat, loaded it with 80,000 board feet of prime Dawn-milled black walnut from his own land, and hired a captain to deliver it to Oswego, New York, and then on to Boston. Josiah was able to sell the entire load to a man named Jonas Chickering for $3,600. He tried to pay off his loan to his Boston friends, but they encouraged him to reinvest it in the lumber business. Josiah returned to Dawn, and later that summer he brought a second large load of lumber by the same route. Sadly, the market had turned, and it appears he struggled to make a profit.

At some point during his trips to Boston in late 1849 and early 1850, Josiah was invited to become a Freemason. Upon his return to Canada, he joined the Mount Moriah Lodge No. 4—he would be listed as its secretary in 1866. The African Lodge had been founded by Prince Hall on July 3, 1776. Hall had previously met with General George Washington about the enlistment of 5,000 black soldiers, and he was one of the few black men who had fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Today, Prince Hall is considered the father of black Masonry.³⁵

For men like Josiah, fraternal organizations such as the Masons would have been a safe place to share struggles, discuss ideas, and help each other. The principal tenets of Freemasonry—brotherly love, relief, and truth—were desperately needed in those dark times, and former slaves as well as Christian leaders flocked to the organization.

Take, for example, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, the founders of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. By the end of the nineteenth century, most AME bishops and many ministers were Prince Hall Masons. One minister, Jordan W. Early, used his Freemason association as a means of escaping a branding. The pastor was riding his Shawneetown, Illinois, preaching circuit when he was cornered by well-armed white men. Early showed them the sign of Masonic fraternity and they let him go on with his work.³⁶

Black church leaders obviously understood the need for racial equality, solidarity, and self-improvement, and they saw Freemasonry as a tool to bring these values into black society. Many of the internationally known abolitionists, such as Dr. Martin Delany, Rev. Thomas Stringer, Abraham D. Shadd, Rev. Thomas Kinnard, and Rev. Benjamin Stewart, were Masons and assisted fugitives on their journey to freedom. Several lodges became Underground Railroad way stations, and Masons that were ministers, including “Father Henson,” became heavily involved.

During one of his trips to Boston, Josiah became friends with Samuel Atkins Eliot. An abolitionist, Eliot had been the seventh mayor of Boston and had served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the Massachusetts Senate; he would later serve in the US House of Representatives.

Eliot, impressed with Josiah, had helped him pay for the sawmill, and now he offered to pen the story of Josiah’s life. Josiah told his story to Eliot, who wrote it up and then read it back to him for his approval. Josiah’s autobiography, entitled The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself, was published in Boston in early 1849 by Arthur D. Phelps.

Henry Bibb and J. W. C. Pennington also penned slave narratives that year, but there were those in the abolitionist community who wished they hadn’t. Frederick Douglass, for one, was critical of narratives that divulged too much information. After all, if free slaves openly shared their methods and escape routes, it could be a huge disservice to those who were attempting to follow a similar path. Josiah’s memoir, to his credit, is light on specific details that could compromise others, including his own brother who remained in slavery in Maryland. Josiah tells the harrowing story of his time in slavery, but when it comes to his escape, speaks in general terms. He even left out the names of his former masters.

Josiah had no way of knowing then that his story would help spark the Civil War.

JOSIAH’S LITTLE BOOK GARNERED SOME ATTENTION AT THE ABOLITIONIST reading room in Boston as well as in abolitionist households throughout the north. One of those readers was likely a young woman who was about to begin researching and writing a book of her own. On one of his trips home from Boston, Josiah made a fourteen-mile detour to visit this woman who would shortly change the course of history. As a later edition of Josiah’s memoir recalls:

I was in the vicinity of Andover, Mass., in the year 1849, where Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe resided. She sent for me and my travelling companion, Mr. George Clark, a white gentleman, who had a fine voice for singing, and usually sang at my meetings to add to their interest. We went to Mrs. Stowe’s house, and she was deeply interested in the story of my life and misfortunes, and had me narrate its details to her. She said she was glad it had been published, and hoped it would be of great service, and would open the eyes of the people to the enormity of the crime of holding men in bondage. She manifested so much interest in me, that I told her about the peculiarities of many slaveholders, and the slaves in the region where I had lived for forty-two years. My experiences had been more varied than those of the majority of slaves, for I was not only my master’s overseer, but a market-man for twenty-five years.³⁷

EVERY BLACK A FUGITIVE

By the time of the 1850 census, there were almost 23.2 million Americans, of which more than 3.2 million were enslaved. But how does one count a slave, exactly? Was a black slave equal to a white man? Certainly not in the eyes of the government. While many Americans believed that those of African descent were still human, the pervasive belief was that they were somehow lesser so. How much less? According to the law, 40 percent less.

In what was surely one of the most racist pieces of legislation in history, the Three-Fifths Compromise set into American law the principle that a person of color was only worth 60 percent of his white counterpart when being counted in the US census. The census helped determine each state’s number of seats in the US House of Representatives and played a role in taxation. Enshrined in the US Constitution at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, the “compromise” allowed the Founding Fathers to satisfy the southerners, who wanted the extra representation in Congress, as well as the northerners, who didn’t want southern states to have this advantage based solely on a large slave population. But the deal was anything but democratic—it still gave southerners more power in the legislature while reducing their overall tax burden compared to counting slaves as full people.³⁸ The outcome did not, of course, ingratiate the North to the cause of southern slaveholding.

Throughout the mid-1800s, slaves continued to pour north. Some made it to Canada, while others settled in the free northern states. The American South grew more and more agitated with each passing month, and soon the northern states were feeling pressure to stop helping escapees.

In June 1850, the Ohio Statesman’s editor considered using military force against the Underground Railroad. A large number of fugitives had crossed into the free state, and the newspaper speculated that a time might soon come when, “in order to preserve the peace of the State among them, it may be necessary to call on the light troops in the vicinity, and even upon the militia.”³⁹

On September 18, the US Congress passed the Compromise of 1850. Congress’s goal was to preserve the unity of the American nation by addressing the concerns of both slave and free states, but historians disagree as to whether the agreement diffused any of that tension or further entrenched both sides. Regardless, the safety of all African American refugees was suddenly put at risk.

The new law included a ban on slave-trading—but not slavery—in the nation’s capital. But it also amended the Fugitive Slave Act to allow anyone to declare ownership of an escaped slave by affidavit alone. No longer was proof or evidence needed, just a statement that the individual in question was an escapee. The act now emboldened kidnappers to chase free black people on behalf of supposedly aggrieved slaveholders, and some went so far as to attempt to kidnap at least two AME bishops.

Any black man, woman, or child could simply be grabbed from the street and hauled before a federally appointed commissioner. The already lax approach to due process was obliterated. Under the new law, new judges were paid five dollars for every person they released, and ten dollars for every person they sent south.

The act was incredibly invasive even toward white people. Aiding runaways had been illegal since 1793, but now everyone—law enforcement and ordinary citizen alike—was required to help catch fugitive slaves. It was illegal for any American to “withhold knowledge he might possess of any chance meeting with the fugitive.” Not only could someone be arrested for helping a slave escape, but even those who refused to assist slave-catchers could spend six months in prison and be fined up to $1,000, the modern income equivalent of nearly $250,000—for an average laborer, an impossible figure to pay.⁴⁰

For northerners in free states, the new law brought the issue far closer to home. No longer could they try to ignore southern slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act galvanized the antislavery movement. Antislavery groups and free black people rightly argued that the system openly bribed commissioners to send kidnapped people into slavery while forcing citizens to participate in the brutal system. Frederick Douglass averred that the Fugitive Slave Act created a crisis of faith as the country became “the enslaver’s hunting ground.” When the law passed, Rev. Daniel Payne, an AME bishop, visited Canada, and Father Henson himself gave him a tour of Dawn and the area to help him determine whether “Canada would be a safe asylum for our people.”⁴¹

Harriet Beecher Stowe, the woman who had been so interested in hearing Josiah’s story, was absolutely furious about the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act. She believed her country was forcing its citizens to support an immoral and unjust system. She had come by her activism honestly: She had been raised in a Christian family that debated social justice issues every single night over supper. Her preacher father, Lyman Beecher, favored the “back to Africa” colonization movement and the creation of Liberia as a new nation for freed slaves.^* Stowe’s grandmother kept African American servants who had probably originally been slaves. Prior to the Compromise of 1850, as a young wife and mother, Stowe had met other formerly enslaved people while living in Cincinnati. Whenever she crossed the Ohio River to the slave state of Kentucky, she witnessed the cruelty firsthand. When she discovered that her recently hired servant was a runaway, she hid the woman until her husband and brother could help the woman escape to Canada.

In 1850, Stowe’s husband, Calvin Ellis Stowe, accepted a position at Bowdoin College, and the family moved to a rented house in Brunswick, Maine. As before, Harriet Beecher Stowe continued to hide runaways. But now she was a criminal, and she railed about the injustice to her family.

Harriet’s sister-in-law, Isabella Porter Beecher, wrote several letters in which she urged Stowe to write a piece on the evils of slavery, saying, “If I could use a pen as you can, Hatty, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.”⁴²

Stowe knew that slavery was a topic that could split communities in two. She saw what was happening to the nation. She understood the stark divide between the free state of Ohio and the slave state of Kentucky. Even her father’s Christian college, Lane Seminary, had witnessed riots and rebellion over the contentious issue. But Stowe could stay silent no longer.

Her sister-in-law’s encouragement won her over, and in December 1850 Stowe made her decision: “I shall write that thing if I live,” she wrote in a letter to her husband.⁴³

FLAUNTING FREEDOM

Josiah brought a third shipment of lumber to New England in the late autumn of 1850, but this time he wisely eliminated the costly middlemen. Despite the fact that the Fugitive Slave Law had just passed in Congress, and it was a serious offense to harbor or help fugitive slaves, he shipped his lumber directly to Boston via the Saint Lawrence River, where, without an agent or other third party, he paid his own border duties and got the lumber through the Custom House.

When the customs officer gave him the bill for the import duties on his lumber, Josiah remarked that the officer might find himself liable for having dealings with a fugitive slave. He joked that it might be better if the officer let him through without having to pay any tax.

“Are you a fugitive slave, sir?” the officer asked.⁴⁴

“Yes, sir,” Josiah replied. “And perhaps you had better not have any dealings with me!”

“I have nothing to do with that,” the official said. “You have acted like a man, and I deal with you as a man.” Josiah enjoyed making a scene, and the bystanders enjoyed it, too. If he felt any fear, he doesn’t mention it in his memoirs. Josiah was always a very bold man, but perhaps he didn’t fear the new law because if he had been arrested, his wealthy Boston friends would have seen to his immediate release. Josiah paid the officer and went on his way.

DESPITE JOSIAH’S BEST EFFORTS, THE LUMBER INCOME SIMPLY WASN’T enough to cover both his own debt and the BAI’s ongoing expenses. A new sponsor had to be brought in, and one was ready.

Pursuant to the trustees’ decision of 1848 to split the BAI into two entities, the school was passed to the American Baptist Free Mission Society, which hired Rev. Samuel H. Davis, the black pastor of Detroit’s Second Baptist Church, as headmaster. By June 4, 1851, there were about sixty scholars. By most accounts, Davis was a good man and a solid teacher, but he was never more than the nominal Baptist leader at Dawn, especially after William P. Newman decided to return to Canada. Passage of the amended Fugitive Slave Law had rattled the American preacher, and in 1850, he wrote an angry letter to Frederick Douglass’s newspaper venting his frustrations with the federal government and the terrible decision Congress had made, asking, “Would not the Devil do well to rent out hell and move to the United States…?”

Sadly, Newman also used his letter to Douglass’s newspaper to officially abandon his belief in pacifism, stating, “I am frank to declare that it is my fixed and changeless purpose to kill any so-called man who attempts to enslave me or mine.”⁴⁵

Josiah’s pacifism and Newman’s militarism stood at odds, but somehow the men still managed to work together, albeit with great tension.

While Davis and Newman and the Baptists now ran the institute, Josiah, a Methodist, was still seen as Dawn’s visionary leader and spokesperson. And true to his promise to Amos Lawrence, he began to prepare for his trip to England. Lawrence and his charitable Boston Unitarians would pay for the voyage. They hoped he’d bring in significant donations on behalf of the BAI.

In the following year the ABFMS would take over the farming tenancy of the BAI land. Despite all his other duties, William P. Newman assumed Josiah’s lease and the operations of the sawmill. The BAI now seemed securely locked into the hands of the American Baptists.

* William Still was the youngest of fourteen children born to Charity and Levin Still. Although William was born in the free state of New Jersey, his mother was a Maryland runaway; thus, her son was still legally considered a slave under federal law. Charity and Levin’s oldest sons, Levin Jr. and Peter, were sold from Maryland to Kentucky and on to Alabama. Peter and his family escaped when he was about fifty, but Levin Jr. was whipped to death for visiting his own wife without permission. Thanks to William Still’s meticulous records, he had the pleasure of reuniting his brother Peter with their mother after a separation of forty-two years.

* The number 118 is peculiar. Josiah had denied 18 slaves their freedom when he brought them from Maryland to Kentucky. Did he feel he needed to make up for what had been lost? Was this number achieved purely by chance, or did Josiah set out to reach this particular number?

* Another version of the story states that Brigadier General Edward Alexander Theller fired cannon at Amherstburg. The local militia, completely ignoring the fact that they were outgunned, peppered the schooner with musket fire. Their bullets tore the rigging to pieces and killed the helmsman, which caused the schooner to run aground. According to one source, “the Canadian militia waded to their armpits in the freezing January water, boarded the schooner, and captured Theller and his crew.”¹⁷

* Prior to being named the Sydenham, the river was known as Bear Creek, and before that, by its native name, Jonquakamik, meaning “Milky River.” Visitors to modern-day Dresden will immediately agree that the first name best describes the sleepy, white chocolate river.

* An 1856 report says they ran a deficit of $120 in 1841 and of $331 in 1842. The entire property at that time was worth $1,000.

* The Elgin Settlement, which was supported by the Presbyterians, rang a donated Liberty Bell every time a new freedom-seeker arrived in town.

* Hiram Wilson remarried and went on to establish another fugitive haven in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1849. He opened an American Missionary Association school, housing approximately 125 refugees in his own home between 1850 and 1856. Though Hiram was described as “a distinguished, self-denying philanthropist,” his career was always mired in problems. He continuously sought funds to support his ambitious plans, and continued his long-standing feuds with Newman and another Presbyterian minister, named Isaac J. Rice, not realizing it would ruin the reputations of all three men. Benjamin Drew, A North-side 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 (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1856), 18.

* Liberia was the brainchild of the American Colonization Society (ACS). Established by Robert Finley in 1816, the society supported the migration of free black people back to Africa, where ACS founded a colony on January 7, 1822. Though those favoring colonization were mainly Quakers and evangelicals, even some proslavery groups were in favor of “repatriation.” Within forty-five years, the ACS had helped 13,000 Americans move back to Africa. At one point the colony was even called the Republic of Maryland. The settlement remained a colony of the ACS until it declared its independence in 1847; the United States recognized it as a sovereign nation fifteen years later, in 1862.