NINE

THE REAL UNCLE TOM

A man’s character is his fate.

—HERACLITUS

JOSIAH IMMEDIATELY UNDERSTOOD THE IMPORTANCE OF UNCLE Tom’s Cabin and later wrote of its launch: “When this novel of Mrs. Stowe came out, it shook the foundations of this world. It shook the Americans out of their shoes and of their shirts. It left some of them on the sandbar barefooted and scratching their heads, so they came to the conclusion that the whole thing was a fabrication.”¹

The backlash against Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel came rapidly and rabidly. Critics argued that Stowe’s writing was far too emotional to reflect events in the real world. After all, it was a novel. It wasn’t based on facts. And in any case, she’d overlooked many of the “benefits” of slavery. In early 1853, even some northerners and abolitionists opposed the novel. The most liberal antislavery advocates didn’t think the book was strong enough in its call for immediate emancipation. Others were dismayed that it casually endorsed colonization instead of abolition. Still others thought the main character, Tom, simply wasn’t a strong enough black man.

Stowe wasn’t concerned about the politics. For her, slavery was a religious and emotional challenge. Her stated goal was “to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race.”² On this point she certainly hit her mark, with many moderate antislavery advocates praising the book for putting a human face on slavery. The American masses, for the first time, were feeling sympathy, and maybe even empathy, for their brothers and sisters in chains. The Fugitive Slave Act had been a tipping point, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a hard shove toward enlightenment.

Naturally, proslavery advocates saw the novel as sectarian propaganda. They insisted that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible, and that Stowe had fabricated an unrealistic, one-dimensional picture of slavery in the South.

The Daily Dispatch in Richmond opposed Stowe’s entire premise in an August 1852 editorial, saying, “In the name of justice and propriety, to what are we coming, if such a course is to be pursued? What can Southern men expect as the fruits of such a literature?” The editor lamented the book might lead to “the ultimate overthrow of the framework of Southern society.”³

Proslavery newspapers were mocking and sarcastic in their reviews, which had titles such as “More Anti-Slavery Fiction,” “A Few Facts for Mrs. Stowe,” and “Uncle Tom Mania.” Editors lamented that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin seems fated to be an ever-springing fountain of discord,” and “We tremble for the traditional chivalry of the South.”

One New Orleans publication shared the story of a doctor who left twenty-one of his slaves with the option to return to Liberia one year after his death if they so wished, and the newspaper quickly and confidently concluded that “not only do these circumstances contradict Mrs. Stowe’s book, but in what contrast do they stand to her mercenary conduct!”

The Daily Picayune complained that Stowe had amassed tens of thousands of dollars from the sale of her novel, but hadn’t spent any of it in “purchasing the freedom of a meritorious slave.”

A “Georgian gentleman” wrote anonymously to De Bow’s Southern and Western Review that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was “one of the most incendiary papers ever issuing from the American press. It is insulting to the South, because Mrs. Stowe wants the world to believe that all she has written is true!” He went on to estimate that the current value of all the southern slaves “amount[ed] in round numbers” to $1 billion, and that they produced $120 million per year in cotton, rice, and tobacco alone: “If Mrs. Stowe and her associates in America and Great Britain, think that the Southern people are so inconsiderate as to give up their property for nothing, and then keep the negroes in a state of idleness as they are kept in Jamaica, they are certainly mistaken.” The Georgian racist ended by reminding his readers of the Pharisees who put heavy laws on their people but never lifted a finger to help. He signed his letter to the editor with Veritas—Truth.⁴

In addition to newspaper editors, fiction writers in both North and South said Stowe’s story was an exaggerated and flawed depiction of slavery. They responded by writing proslavery, anti-Tom novels as a rebuttal.

In 1852, Mary Henderson Eastman published a book called Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life As It Is.⁵ Henderson had been born to one of the so-called First Families of Virginia, and had grown up in elite planter society. Her best-seller, published in Philadelphia, sold upward of thirty thousand copies, making it a strong commercial success.

A more direct counter to Stowe’s work was W. L. G. Smith’s Life at the South; or, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” As It Is: Being Narratives, Scenes, and Incidents in the Real “Life of the Lowly.” In this iteration, Uncle Tom is convinced to run away by a northern abolitionist schoolteacher. Tom soon realizes the abolitionists want to enslave him, and he tries to escape after being mistreated in Illinois. He eventually ends up in Canada, where his master is waiting to “rescue” him and take him back to “good old Virginia.”

In New York, Charles Scribner published Rev. Bayard Rush Hall’s Frank Freeman’s Barber Shop. The tale centers around a slave named Frank who is convinced by abolitionists to run away from his idyllic life on a southern plantation, with promises of freedom and a prestigious career. Frank realizes he’s been deceived when he ends up running a barber shop frequented by his new abolitionist “masters.” Frank is then rescued by members of the American Colonization Society, who pay for his passage back to Liberia, where he can live happily ever after.

These supposed “sequels” generally had three things in common. First, they presented slave owners as benign, if not helpful and kind, toward their slaves. Second, the slaves were presented as satisfied, and often happy and grateful, with their treatment. Slaves who were loyal and obedient to their masters were well-fed, well-dressed, and well-housed. Third, the abolitionists, sometimes called “philanthropists,” were depicted as villainous agitators who stirred up trouble with tall tales and promises of riches and freedom in the north.

ONE OF THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST STOWE’S NOVEL WAS THE IDEA that slave owners might possibly whip a slave to death. Many newspapers denounced this outcome as unlikely, if not impossible. Stowe, however, asked her readers to consider the case of Souther v. the Commonwealth of Virginia.⁶

On September 1, 1849, a Virginia slave owner named Simeon Souther, in the presence of two other whites, murdered a slave named Sam. He had learned that Sam had gotten drunk, and as punishment Souther had tied his victim “with ropes about his wrists, neck, body, legs, and ankles, to a tree” that morning. Once he was bound, Souther whipped the prisoner with apple and peach tree switches. He then beat the slave with a flat wooden board. When he grew tired, he forced two of his slaves—one male, one female—to hit their fellow slave with the shingle as well.

While still tied to the tree, Sam endured a beating in which Souther “did strike, knock, kick, stamp, and beat him upon various parts of his head, face, and body.”

Souther then “applied fire to his body, back, sides, belly, groins, and privy parts” before washing Sam with warm water that had been steeped with red pepper pods. He then forced his two slaves to wash Sam with the fiery liquid.

“After the tying, whipping, cobbing, striking, beating, knocking, kicking, stamping, wounding, bruising, lacerating, burning, washing, and torturing,” Souther untied Sam and threw him to the ground, where he “did knock, kick, stamp, and beat [Sam] upon his head, temples, and various parts of his body.”

In the afternoon, Souther had Sam carried indoors. He forced one of his slaves to lock Sam’s feet in a pair of wooden stocks and tie a rope around his neck, which he fastened to a bedpost, “thereby strangling, choking, and suffocating” the slave. Souther continued to “kick, knock, stamp, and beat him upon his head, face, breast, belly, sides, back, and body,” and he forced his two slaves to “apply fire to the body” until Sam died.

Souther and the prosecuting attorney demurred the indictment, but the court overruled them. Souther then filed an abatement, stating he hadn’t been properly examined, and “prayed judgment that the indictment be quashed.”

Souther was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to prison by a jury, but he immediately moved for a new trial on grounds that “the offense, if any, amounted only to manslaughter.” When this request was denied, he moved twice that the court clerk not charge him for the per diem cost of the jury that had ruled against him.

The very fact that Souther performed much of his abuse in the presence of two white witnesses suggests he may have had no idea that his behavior was either wrong or illegal. Moreover, the court record indicates that Souther “frequently declared while the said slave was undergoing the punishment, that he believed the said slave was feigning and pretending to be suffering and injured, when he was not.”

Souther pled not guilty, and his lawyer argued that an owner couldn’t be indicted for malicious, cruel, and excessive whipping of his own slave, as there was a precedent case for this. If that excessive punishment killed the slave, it wasn’t the owner’s fault. It wasn’t premeditated, and therefore, it wasn’t a crime.

In the end, the court ruled that “it is believed that the records of criminal jurisprudence do not contain a case of more atrocious and wicked cruelty than was presented upon the trial.”

Souther served just five years for torture and murder.

Stowe’s book was not an exaggerated account of the evils of slavery, of course. In fact, the true depths of slavery’s violence and cruelty have never fully been told.

Such appalling crimes never saw the light of an honest courtroom, because even if a slave survived such heinous torture, they weren’t allowed to testify against a white man in a court of law. Justice, as the powerless know well, is blind in one eye.

THE ATTACKS AGAINST HARRIET BEECHER STOWE WERE VILE AND wide-ranging, and often they became appallingly personal. She was labeled a socialist, anti-Christian, and plain ugly.

The Daily Dispatch said Stowe’s “very name has grown to us distasteful in the extreme.” It went on to complain about abolitionism in general: “What a hell of a world these poor maniacs would make if they were just allowed to fashion it after their own notions.”⁷

The Southern Literary Messenger printed an epigram about Stowe:

When Latin I studied, my Ainsworth in hand,

I answered my teacher that Sto meant to stand,

But if asked, I should now give another reply,

For Stowe means, beyond any cavil, to lie.

Other attacks were simply chauvinistic. One newspaper nicknamed her “Mrs. Breeches Stowe.” A Memphis Daily Appeal reader anonymously wrote that “Harriet Beecher Stowe terms the abolition crusade against the South a ‘holy war.’ It should be remembered she is a strong-minded woman.”

Worst of all, perhaps, was an entry in the Daily Picayune. The New Orleans publication reported on June 15, 1853, that Mrs. Stowe had taken a trip during which she was taunted by a Mr. Justice Haliburton, who showed her his leather razor strop, which was supposedly “made of nigger skin.”⁸

THE FEMALE FRONT

Harriet Beecher Stowe went to London to secure the copyright for her books, both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and her upcoming novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. She was virtually mobbed wherever she went in the city, and was wined and dined by royalty. On May 7, 1853, Stowe spoke at the Stafford House, the London home of the Duchess of Sutherland, where the Countess of Shaftesbury presented her with a gigantic petition titled “An Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of Women of Great Britain and Ireland to Their Sisters the Women of the United States of America.”

The petition, oddly, had been conceived and drafted by a man, albeit a rather illustrious one. The Earl of Shaftesbury, on behalf of British women, implored the daughters of America to raise their voices against slavery. The British plea concluded with a powerfully sympathetic appeal: “We acknowledge with grief and shame our heavy share in this great sin. We acknowledge that our forefathers introduced, nay, compelled the adoption of slavery in those mighty colonies. We humbly confess it before Almighty God; and it is because we so deeply feel and so unfeignedly avow our own complicity that we now venture to implore your aid to wipe away our common crime and our common dishonor.”

The document circulated throughout the British Isles. Volunteers had collected the signatures of British women from all walks of life, and many of them had likely read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In total, more than 563,000 women signed the document, which was leather-bound in twenty-six massive folio volumes.

Neither Great Britain nor the United States permitted women to vote, but the women of Britain had made their voices heard. Stowe, calling it “a singular monument of an international expression of a moral idea,” promised to establish a committee of women in America who would attempt to get a petition going back home.

CRITICS CHECKED

Stowe, for her part, seems to have remained strongly antislavery and devotedly Christian throughout the highs and lows of her novel’s warm reception and scalding resistance. She truly believed in the justice of her stance, and that the task of writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been assigned to her by a higher power. As she wrote in the preface to an 1879 edition of the novel: “I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.”

But Stowe went further in early 1853. Rather than letting the anti-Tom novels gain attention and discredit the truths behind her novel, she decided to fight fire with fact. Her response to critics was a book called The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon Which the Story Is Founded, Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work.⁹ The book was a giant annotated bibliography of her sources, pointing to hundreds of documented cases of real-life incidents that were similar or identical to those portrayed in her story.

Although the book is more like an encyclopedia than anything else—it was called “ponderous (and rather unsaleable)” by one critic¹⁰—it sold more than 90,000 copies within a month of being published.

The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin contained facts and figures, along with newspaper clippings, quotes, book excerpts, letters, slave inventories, interviews, and wanted ads. One of her primary sources of information was T. D. Weld’s book American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. Published in 1839 by the American Anti-Slavery Society, it was a compilation of horrific stories. It had been a best-seller more than a decade earlier.

Once again, the rebuttals to The Key came fast and furious. One newspaper titled its review simply “Mrs. Stowe Again.” Another review was titled “Southern Slavery and Its Assailants.” The Southern Literary Messenger wrote, in June 1853, that “Mrs. Stowe obtrudes herself again upon our notice, and, though we have no predilections for the disgusting office of castigating such offences as hers, and rebuking the incendiary publications of a woman.…”¹¹

A New Orleans newspaper started its review with “Mrs. Stowe and her books together have sunk so low.…” It went on to rationalize that dead-or-alive wanted posters weren’t actually to be taken seriously, but were simply “mere pieces of bravado on the part of masters.” This, of course, was a serious misdirection, as wanted posters themselves often told of previous abuse suffered by runaways. Consider a July 23, 1836, wanted ad posted in the Mississippi Gazette:

A negro man who says his name is Josiah, that he belongs to Mr. John Martin, living in Louisiana, twenty miles below Nathchez. Josiah is five feet eight inches high, heavy built, copper colour; his back very much scarred with the whip, and branded on the thigh and hips in three or four places thus: “J.M.” The rim of his right ear has been bitten or cut off.

In addition to the evident physical abuse the wanted ads inadvertently confessed, the very fact that they existed proved that slaves were considered property. A New Jersey slave owner advertised in his local paper for “the return of his nine-year-old Negro girl who was stolen by her mother.”¹²

Although there exists the argument that southerners weren’t really racist, but had simply grown up with the belief that black people were inferior or inhuman, misses the point entirely, for that belief was the very essence of racism. In reality, antebellum America was profoundly racist. In the year Stowe’s novel was published, a Philadelphia outfit published Bone Squash’s Black Joke Al-Ma-Nig, a deeply racist almanac containing “new an’ original nigga’ stories, black jokes, puns, parodies, serenades, songs, coon’s cons, cun-un-ori-fums, cuts ob great coons, portraits of great possums, an’ dog-berry-o-types ob fun.”¹³ It wasn’t the only one. The American—and global—psyche was, as it still is, in many parts, cruelly opposed to the rights and freedoms of minorities.

Although Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped awaken Americans to the fact that slave owners were both wrong and racist, something fundamentally new had occurred with the publication of Stowe’s Key. Rather than simply sweeping aside the “fiction” of a novel, editors were forced to justify and defend every story and fact presented, like a criminal attorney suddenly put on the defensive. Stowe cited real stories of real people, of events and situations that could be corroborated and proved.

Harriet Beecher Stowe had named names. She had described the various people who had inspired the characters of Mr. Haley, George Harris, Eliza, Legree, and the rest. One of those characters, of course, was of particular interest. Who was Uncle Tom?

Stowe wrote in The Key: “The character of Uncle Tom has been objected to as improbable; and yet the writer has received more confirmations of that character, and from a great variety of sources, than of any other in the book.” Stowe spends several pages describing the inspiration for various scenes in Uncle Tom’s story, and then she declares: “A last instance parallel with that of Uncle Tom is to be found in the published memoirs of the venerable Josiah Henson… now pastor of the missionary settlement at Dawn, in Canada.”¹⁴

Josiah Henson would soon be world famous.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE MENTIONED JOSIAH’S NAME ON EIGHT occasions in The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.¹⁵ She even quoted the passage in his memoir where he raised the ax to kill Amos Riley Jr. on their journey by boat to New Orleans.

Josiah isn’t the only historical person whose life contained scenes similar to Tom’s, of course. There were striking parallels between Stowe’s novel and the life of Solomon Northup, and although Stowe also compares Josiah to another character in her novel, George Harris, her use of Josiah’s life story is largely focused on Tom’s character.

Josiah and Tom were also dissimilar in many ways. Tom was private, Josiah very public. Tom was not ambitious or successful in the sense of worldly achievements, while Josiah was very much both. Tom turned down Legree’s offer to become overseer, while Josiah accepted Isaac Riley’s offer. Tom witnessed the flogging of his wife, while Josiah recounted his father’s torture. Tom murdered his overseer, but Josiah couldn’t bring himself to fell the ax on his master’s son. Tom escaped slavery by dying. Josiah simply escaped.

But there were significant overlaps between the lives of Josiah Henson and Tom, and readers who were familiar with Josiah immediately saw them. Their real-life and fictional slave masters both separated a mother from her child while she begged him not to tear the family apart. Both Josiah and Tom lived on plantations in Kentucky. Legree constantly beat Tom. Tom was sold to pay his owner’s debts; Josiah nearly met that fate. Tom was sent to Louisiana, a fate Josiah just barely escaped. Both escapees crossed the Ohio River. Above all, it was Josiah’s faith in God in the face of hardship that fused him to Stowe’s hero, for both Tom and Josiah were strongly religious men.

Indeed, it was faith that drove Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the first place. As she explained in an 1853 letter, “I wrote what I did because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity—because as a lover of my country, I trembled at the coming day of wrath.”¹⁶

Without question, faith and religion played a crucial role not only in Stowe’s work but in the battle between North and South in general. America has, until recently, always considered itself a Christian nation, but Frederick Douglass begged to differ, writing, “Between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked.… I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”^17*

The character of Uncle Tom was inspired in part by the Christ-like character and faith of Josiah Henson. The fact that Josiah never resorted to violence to win his freedom spoke volumes to Stowe. Josiah represented all that was good and truly faithful in American religious life. He had, in some sense, become a living hero.

On April 15, 1853, Martin Robison Delany, who was one of the first three black people admitted to Harvard Medical School, and would go on to become the only black officer who received the rank of major during the Civil War, wrote a letter to Frederick Douglass in which he confirmed Stowe’s estimation of Josiah. He wrote, “It is now certain, that the Rev. JOSIAH HENSON, of Dawn, Canada West, is the real Uncle Tom, the Christian hero, in Mrs. Stowe’s far-famed book of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’”¹⁸

Delany, who was also the first African American male to publish a novel, suggested to Douglass that perhaps Stowe owed Josiah something more substantial than a citation in her book: “Since Mrs. Stowe and Messrs. Jewett & Co., Publishers, have realized so great an amount of money from the sale of a work founded upon this good old man, whose living testimony has to be brought to sustain this great book… would it be expecting too much to suggest, that they—the publishers—present Father Henson… but a portion of the profits? I do not know what you may think about it; but it strikes me that this would be but just and right.”¹⁹

Josiah was not, of course, Uncle Tom in the flesh, but the moniker stuck from the moment it was mentioned. Unfortunately, no monetary gift was ever sent to him, and money problems would continue to plague the BAI and Josiah personally. His debts now included the cost of Charlotte’s funeral and burial.

Still, Josiah was honored to have played a small role in Stowe’s colossal work. He later reflected:

After Mrs. Stowe’s remarkable book, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” was published and circulated in all parts of America, read openly at the North and stealthily at the South… many thought that her statements were exaggerations. She then published the Key to the book, to prove that it was impossible to exaggerate the enormities of slavery, and she therein gave many parallel cases, and referred to my published life-story, as an exemplification of the truth of the character of her Uncle Tom. From that time to the present, I have been called “Uncle Tom,” and I feel proud of the title. If my humble words in any way inspired that gifted lady to write such a plaintive story that the whole community has been touched with pity for the sufferings of the poor slave, I have not lived in vain; for I believe that her book was the beginning of the glorious end. It was a wedge that finally rent asunder that gigantic fabric with a fearful crash.²⁰

A FALLEN FRIEND

Josiah’s foray into the sawmill business had turned out to be an utter disaster. He had begged and borrowed to raise the money for the mill, and he and his sons had worked hard to build a high-quality operation that could benefit the community. The mill had been very profitable when Josiah and Newman had held the lease, as the Sydenham River connected them with a world market hungry for lumber.

The mill could have remained a highly profitable entity for years to come, but after Newman and the Baptists left, John Scoble rented the sawmill to an unnamed third tenant in 1853. The lessee employed more than forty men, but when, after a few years, there was a recession, the subtenant claimed bankruptcy, fleeing to America without paying his workers. The starving employees took out their anger on the mill itself and tore it to pieces for firewood. Josiah, reflecting sadly on the mill’s demise, wrote, “Thus they ruthlessly destroyed this valuable building, the establishment of which had cost me so many anxious hours, and had proved to be such a valuable piece of property in my hands. When it was gone, I felt as if I had parted with an old idolised friend.”²¹

A HOPEFUL SPRING

Armed with a request from the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and the money Josiah had raised in England the previous year, John Scoble and Rev. John Roaf cleared all the BAI’s debts. Josiah reported that Scoble paid back some of the liabilities at full price and bought up other debts for as little as sixty-two cents on the dollar.

Josiah had personally borrowed $2,800 from Amos Lawrence, Samuel Atkins Eliot, and J. Ingersoll Bowditch to finance the sawmill, and the lenders knew he had “exerted himself faithfully” to make it a success.²² He had tried to pay them back earlier, but they had insisted he reinvest it. The mill was now gone, but Josiah’s debt remained. Scoble appears to have liquidated the debt in late June 1853 for $1,500, but in the process he turned the lenders against Dawn. Eliot spoke for the trio in saying that he believed Scoble should have raised funds to pay off the BAI’s debts, rather than making them take a loss. In a letter, he wrote that they were “immensely disgusted with the behaviour of the London gentlemen.”²³

Although the debts were paid, the BAI remained in a poor position. The institute’s school was gone, and its sawmill lay in shambles. But the Dawn community, Josiah included, placed their hopes in John Scoble, saying, “Surely he will commence building next year.”²⁴

WILLIAM P. NEWMAN’S AMERICAN BAPTIST FREE MISSION SOCIETY resented John Scoble’s control of the BAI’s school. Its members decided to give up the society’s farm tenancy to the BAI’s lands. In 1853, Newman and his fellow Baptists departed the BAI, taking anything that was portable with them.

Facing extensive repairs and unable to find a farm tenant that met his requirements, Scoble decided to farm the property himself. But he had never farmed before, and he wasted a huge amount of money building up his new enterprise. Scoble bought expensive farming equipment to work the farm “scientifically.” He often bought the most expensive cattle in the market, without accounting for the fact that he didn’t have enough to feed them once they were brought to his stables.

Scoble often asked Josiah to accompany him to the market. Josiah occasionally suggested that the new purchases of cattle would require a large amount of feed to make it through the long Canadian winter, but although Scoble often asked for his opinion, he invariably ignored it. Josiah wrongly concluded that the abolitionist knew what he was doing and must have had past farming experience.

Looking back from the vantage point of more than two decades, Josiah wrote of Scoble’s early days: “It is my candid opinion that, in the beginning, he intended to benefit the coloured race, and to have a splendid school which should be the pride of the neighbourhood. If he had been a practical instead of a theoretical farmer, he doubtless would have accomplished those blessed results.”²⁵

Although the BAI was making little visible progress in the hands of John Scoble, a number of prominent abolitionists and their families invested in the Dawn area. When William Whipper, then the wealthiest black man in North America, visited Dawn, he was so impressed that he invested heavily in nearby Dresden. Starting in 1853—with his sister and brother-in-law, James and Mary Ann Hollensworth, managing his investments—Whipper built a flour mill and a dock for ships, purchased an inn, and helped to establish key industries with his banking and development talents. He lent money to both black and white people, and he contributed thousands annually to the Underground Railroad. He personally helped hundreds of slaves escape in train cars and a steamboat that he owned.²⁶

James and Cornelius Charity started a crockery shop and a corn mill. They also owned a ship and some rental housing, along with four hundred acres of farmland. Surveys from the time list three ministers, two grocers, two dry-goods store owners, a barber, two innkeepers, a lye factory, and the area’s first medical doctor. Every single one of these local leaders was of African descent.

But Dawn wasn’t simply a refugee community for escaped slaves. White entrepreneurs also came to the region. Alexander Trerice and his Irish father-in-law, William Wright, the founder of Newport, for example, built a lime kiln and a sawmill on a bend in the river. Dawn was open to people of all colors. The area included poor white people, First Nations people, Scottish, Irish, and German families, and, according to the 1871 census, one man from South America named Don Juan E. Barbero.

Dawn would soon encompass several thousand acres, cobbled together from hundreds of land purchases by former slaves, including those in Josiah’s little group. Hundreds of farmers raised livestock, grew corn and wheat, and cultivated apple orchards. The next decade added more shops to Dresden, including its first ice cream parlor, called Sweet Briar Cottage.

By the end of 1853, John Roaf and John Scoble had cleared away all the BAI’s liabilities. Even though a few jealous detractors spread rumors to the contrary, Scoble seems to have received no monetary kickbacks from the settlement of accounts. The British abolitionist was lauded for his swift and decisive actions.

Many at Dawn praised Scoble, and the community’s growing success seemed assured. Despite the BAI’s new debt-free position, however, the institute’s long-term survival was anything but assured, and there were a few who remained unconverted.

A NEW ENEMY EMERGES

Mary Ann Camberton Shadd Cary was born on October 9, 1823, in Wilmington, Delaware. Shadd was the oldest of thirteen children born to free black parents. When it became illegal to educate African American children in the state, the Shadds moved to Pennsylvania, where Mary Ann attended a Quaker school.²⁷

After graduating, Mary Ann started a school for black children in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and later taught in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and New York City. After passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Shadd attended the first North American Convention of Coloured Freemen, held on September 10, 1851, at St. Lawrence Hall in Toronto.²⁸ Hundreds of black community leaders attended. The event was hosted by prominent abolitionist figures, including Josiah Henson and Henry Bibb. Bibb was a fugitive slave who, along with his freeborn wife, Mary, ran a newspaper called The Voice of the Fugitive.²⁹ The Bibbs met Mary Ann at the convention and convinced her to accept a teaching position near their home in Windsor.

Mary Ann Shadd and her brother Isaac moved across the American border to Canada. Shortly thereafter, backed by the American Missionary Association (AMA), Shadd started a racially integrated school. Henry and Mary Bibb favored segregation for black children, and the dispute informed many editorials written by both sides in The Voice of the Fugitive. The public dispute caused Shadd to lose her AMA school funding, but the fight had taught her a valuable lesson about the immense power of the press.

Starting on March 24, 1853, Shadd began printing an antislavery newspaper called Provincial Freeman, and in doing so, became the first female editor in North America. The paper’s motto was “Self-Reliance Is the True Road to Independence.”

Shadd’s weekly publication was intended to encourage black emigration while reporting on the lives of blacks in Canada. Shadd was one of the first people to advocate for African Americans to flee the United States and immigrate to Canada; like many others, she idealized Canada as a haven for black people, calling it the “New Canaan.” She promoted Canada as a nation with strong antislavery views and no legal racial discrimination, though neither were entirely true—she herself faced persecution.

Shadd moved the paper to Toronto the following year, bringing her small staff with her. Their first edition in their new location arrived on March 25, 1854. Her brother Isaac ran the day-to-day operations, while Shadd and her coeditor, Samuel Ringgold Ward, wrote much of the content. Shadd signed her work as either M. A. Shadd or M. A. S. C. and wrote in an aggressive, gruff, masculine voice as a way to hide the fact that she was a woman.

Nearly from the beginning, Mary Ann Shadd loathed Josiah Henson. Their paths couldn’t have been more different. She was an educated free woman; he was a nearly illiterate fugitive slave. Shadd was an American; Josiah was now staunchly Canadian. Shadd advocated for full racial integration. As a teacher and freewoman, she believed in education and self-reliance—to her, segregated settlements like Dawn were obvious fodder for criticism. Shadd hated “begging” above almost anything else, because she believed that fundraising cast poor blacks in an unfavorable light. Because he was so well known as a speaker and fundraiser, Josiah was a particularly easy target for a newspaper in need of attention. While Henry Bibb would suffer some of Shadd’s wrath via her Provincial Freeman, most of her vituperation would be saved for Josiah Henson and John Scoble.

Part of the controversy stemmed from the fact that Dawn and the BAI were often confused with each other. Hundreds of letters and newspaper columns from the time intermix the terms “Dawn Institute,” “BAI settlement,” “Dawn School,” and so forth. Many believed the institute was owned by the citizens of Dawn, which it was not. James C. Brown, one of the original board members, insisted that the BAI should be owned by “the coloured people of Canada” in general, instead of the people of Dawn specifically.³⁰ Shadd, like most others, simply didn’t understand that Dawn and the BAI weren’t one and the same. In reality, the BAI was an independent school set within the general area known as Dawn, and it was owned by no one—it was controlled only by whatever trustees happened to possess the powers of stewardship at any given moment.

It didn’t help that, by the summer of 1854, William P. Newman began actively informing Shadd about the troubles at the fledgling institute he’d so recently lost to the British. Where was the new school they’d been promised? Josiah himself later admitted that he had “silenced the questionings and murmurings,” as he still believed in Scoble’s integrity and purpose.³¹ But unfounded rumors circulated that Josiah had been raising funds for the BAI, taking a big commission, and then giving the rest to Scoble to pay for his increasingly comfortable lifestyle. Henson and Scoble were in cahoots. The institution had become their personal slush fund.

Mary Ann Shadd paid a visit to Dawn in the summer of 1854 and printed a report in her newspaper on July 22: “I find myself in the flourishing settlement called Dawn.… In the village of Dresden, carpenters are busy completing the fine buildings owned by [William] Whipper, smiths, waggon-makers all are at work.” As for the BAI itself, Shadd noted that it had neither a school building nor dormitories. She saw only a small government-run school. While Josiah doesn’t mention it in his memoirs, it appears that the government was renting a building on the BAI lands, which operated as a small public school of sorts.

Her criticism was fair. Josiah had raised plenty of money for the BAI, and Scoble had received revenues from renting the sawmill and some of the farmland, but where had the profits gone? Even Scoble couldn’t deny the fact that while the institute was languishing, he was enjoying life in the nicest house in town.

Shadd informed her Provincial Freeman readers that everyone was preparing for an August 1 dinner celebration, likely in honor of Canada’s Emancipation Day. The event would be attended by “great guns,” including Frederick Douglass, and John Scoble planned to “divulge a great secret on the August occasion, connected with the ‘future’ of Dawn Institute.” She added that local blacks had already “been told by him that they will not be asked to approve the scheme, but only to ‘carry it out.’”³²

Shadd had heard what Scoble’s plan would be: she reported that it was to raise thousands of dollars to construct a new institute building. But whatever his stated plan, she believed the fundraising would be just another way for him to line his pockets.

Shadd scoffed at the idea. To her, the BAI was nothing but a profit center for Josiah and Scoble. She wrote, “The plan itself will furnish another pension-department for its begging agents, at five hundred or a thousand the year, as does another ‘institution’ in this country.”³³

ANOTHER VIEW

There was another visitor to Dawn in 1854 who wrote a report of what he found, Dr. Robert Burns of Toronto. His piece for the Canadian Free Press about his October 20 visit was quickly reprinted in Shadd’s Provincial Freeman.

Burns first mused that “the land appertaining to the Dawn Institute must now be somewhat valuable,” and that it would “give us much pleasure should the Institute be speedily made something beyond a nonentity.”³⁴

But Burns then gave his readers a quick and highly inaccurate overview of the BAI’s history, saying it was officially called the American Educational Institute, and that it had been founded in 1838, paid for by $1,703 from James Canning Fuller, with a mission to settle refugee families on the land. It is not known where he got any of this information.

Burns reported that there was no BAI school and no working sawmill, only the small wooden building used by the government school. He estimated that six to eight people lived on the property, possibly as tenants, and that he was shocked to see the disappearance of the boys’ academy and boardinghouse. When William P. Newman and Rev. Samuel H. Davis had been in charge just a few years earlier, sixty students had lived and studied in the two-story brick building. Unfortunately, a storm had torn the roof off, likely in 1852, and rather than restore the building, Scoble had simply allowed the pigs and cows to move in. When the building became too dangerous to remain standing, Scoble tore it down. That was probably in the late summer of 1854, right before the August 1 emancipation celebration.

Burns paints a grim picture of the BAI under Scoble. He went on to mention another two-story wooden house “with doors open, windows all broken,” which was supposed to be a girls’ dormitory.

Burns’s disappointment and disgust at the waste is evident. “My impression is, from all that I have heard and seen, that from 25,000 to 30,000 dollars have from first to last been collected on behalf of the Institution.” It is unclear how Burns arrived at this figure; it’s an amount equivalent to something like $8 million to $12 million today. But what he was insinuating was that much of it had been channeled into Scoble’s pockets, with Josiah as his “Uncle Tom” sidekick.

Burns ended his report by warning readers to oppose Scoble’s attempts to incorporate the trust. He called upon John Scoble to issue annual reports on his progress and provide an audited account of the BAI’s books immediately.

John Scoble vehemently refused.

SHIFTING GROUND

Perhaps by choice, or perhaps pushed out by Scoble, the government school moved from the BAI lands to the nearby town of Dresden in 1855. It was a subtle shift. The town of Dresden was thriving, even without the help of the BAI. With the loss of the school, there was literally no public good emanating from the institute, and the blame was placed squarely at the feet of John Scoble and Josiah Henson.

Meanwhile, Mary Ann Shadd moved her newspaper to Chatham the following year, where William P. Newman joined her as editor. Together, the pair redoubled their efforts to destroy the reputations of both men.

The Provincial Freeman hated what it considered “begging,” or fundraising. It believed that asking for money was degrading to blacks and that it put too much financial control into too few hands. Not that it stopped either Newman or Shadd from doing the exact same thing for their personal causes. Josiah simply couldn’t win—either he stopped fundraising, or he enabled others—whether Scoble or the warring committee—to retain control over the direction of the struggling school.

In the spring of 1855, James C. Brown, one of the original BAI trustees, went on the offensive, determined to wrest control of the institute from Scoble’s hands. On Monday, April 2, Brown held a meeting at the Second Wesleyan Chapel in his hometown of Chatham. There, he leveled all sorts of accusations.

He claimed that eighty of the BAI’s three hundred acres had been given to Josiah for “begging services,” and that twenty acres had been sold to Hiram Wilson, one of the BAI’s original founders. Brown complained about the Boston gift that had been used to build the sawmill and the 25 percent commission that Josiah had allegedly received for his services as a fundraising agent. He railed against the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and about how John Scoble had seized control; the once prosperous institution, he said, was now defunct, and yet still piling on debts. Brown noted Scoble’s ongoing refusal to have the accounts audited and said the man generally directed his affairs with “petty tyranny, confusion, [and] bickering.”³⁵

Brown certainly had some grounds for his complaints. Evidently John Scoble had, indeed, turned a personal profit from the BAI lands. Despite already having been accused of ruining a grove set aside “for a Methodist Camp Ground and Students Pleasure Grounds,” Scoble brazenly hired upward of twenty men to fell trees on the BAI lands just to turn them into wooden barrels. Still, James C. Brown had no way to stop him.

The BAI’s original declaration of trust had called for at least six men to sit on the board, and as many as twelve. For years, the board had consisted of James C. Brown as the sole independent trustee and John Scoble holding the other five votes. Brown declared he would try to elect a new board at the next annual meeting and overthrow Scoble if possible.

THE NIGHT OF THE ANNUAL MEETING ARRIVED ON AUGUST 29, 1855. Despite multiple requests from James C. Brown and others, John Scoble repeatedly refused to allow the gathering to meet inside the former government schoolhouse. Scoble informed the crowd that they would now need to consult with him before holding public meetings on the BAI lands, and worse still, that he was “the sole proprietor, in trust, of the Dawn property.” If they didn’t like it, they would have to sue him in court. Brown’s group was furious.³⁶

Josiah tried to make peace between the opposing parties, but it wasn’t enough. Mary Ann Shadd, who’d never spent a day in slavery in her life, wrote for her own paper, a few weeks later: “Dawn, for one day, at least, was something like a slave plantation. There, the ‘master man’ [Scoble], declaring that he got his rights in England from the donors, not from the Trustees.… There were parties that in the south would be called “nigger drivers”—Josiah Henson, senior, and sons, and Nero Harding.… It was humiliating, Sir, to see those old men, Henson and Harding, with feet tottering almost on the brink of the grave, running readily to do the dirty work of their white friend.”³⁷

The group moved to the nearest house, where James C. Brown moved to elect new trustees for the BAI. The vote was tallied, and six men were elected. Not one was from Dawn. In an attempt to repossess the BAI and get it back on track to fulfill its original purpose, they commissioned Mary Ann Shadd as their fundraising agent. If they could seize control of the BAI, they could evict Scoble. By this point it was clear that Scoble had changed. No longer the fiery abolitionist, he was an entrenched, paternalistic leader of a failed institution who was personally profiting from the trust’s buildings, farms, and forests.

Apparently voting Scoble out didn’t work, because in mid-October, William P. Newman wrote, in the Provincial Freeman, that James C. Brown was looking for funds “to obtain legal advice about Dawn, and to file the bill in Chancery against the original Trustees.”³⁸ Brown also called for another meeting to discuss their next steps toward reclaiming the BAI.

Josiah was now often called “Father Henson.” In his article, Newman called him “Daddy Joe.” He maintained his five-year-old claim that the funds “the mendicant of Dawn” had raised in England were received under false pretenses, despite the fact that Josiah was later found innocent of the charge and had never had access to the collected funds.

Luckily for Josiah, Shadd and Newman had to put their attacks on hold in July 1856, when the Provincial Freeman office was seized for a debt repayment. Newman stopped working with the paper, and it took Shadd until November 25 to get the paper back on its feet and renew her campaign.

A NEW LOVE

The third and fourth years passed, and still there was no school. The black settlers at Dawn began to believe what Shadd was saying in her renewed onslaught. They began to talk with Josiah personally, saying they thought he was in league with John Scoble, and that in some way the two of them were making money off the BAI’s three hundred acres.

Scoble only made matters worse when he invited his brother-in-law’s impoverished family to join him on the BAI lands. Josiah felt bad for the poor family—he fed them often at his house—but the optics were not good. The BAI lands, which were supposed to support a school, were instead racking up debts while enriching two white families, and potentially Josiah himself.

Through all of this, and in the rare quiet moments, Josiah thought of Charlotte. He was still devastated by her loss. Charlotte had been his faithful companion. They’d raised eight children together. In the four years since her death, Josiah had kept company with no one. He assumed he’d be a widower for the rest of his life.

But slowly, Josiah opened himself up to the idea of another companion. Her name was Nancy Braxton. She was a widow and a longtime Sunday school teacher, and she had one son and two daughters. Nancy’s mother had been a slave, but she had been such a good laundrywoman that she’d earned enough money to buy her husband’s freedom as well as her own. Nancy had been raised by a Quaker lady in Baltimore and was well-educated.

In the autumn of 1856, Josiah went to Boston and visited Nancy several times before finally summoning the courage to ask her to be his wife. Two years later, they married in Boston. Josiah was now sixty-seven. They would remain together for the rest of his life.

THE BROTHERS HENSON

Josiah’s new marriage brought hope and joy to his life. And yet his mind was often occupied with how to help his older brother John, who was still enslaved in Maryland, to a woman named Jane Elizabeth Beall. Beall was a granddaughter of none other than Adam Robb—the very same tavern owner who had purchased Josiah as a child and later sold him to Isaac Riley for horseshoeing services.³⁹

Up to this point, Josiah had been pulled in many different directions. For decades, he had been busy preaching, raising funds for Dawn, and defending his reputation, not to mention providing for a family with eight children. It was during one particular meal in London, at the table of one of the nation’s richest men, that his enslaved brother John had flashed powerfully into his mind. Josiah had gotten caught up in the larger abolitionist cause, but he had neglected a problem much closer to home—securing his own brother’s freedom.

Before visiting England, Josiah had actually tried several times to rescue his brother. He’d sent a prominent New York abolitionist, William Lawrence Chaplin, to convince his brother to escape, but John was terrified and wouldn’t make the journey. Chaplin, known for his abolitionist activities as “General Chaplin,” returned a second time, but John still wouldn’t go. Chaplin traveled to nearby Washington and attempted to help two other slaves to freedom. Unfortunately, one was owned by Georgia senator Alexander H. Stephens, and the other by another Georgia senator, Robert Augustus Toombs, who would later become a founding father of the Confederacy and its first secretary of state. On August 8, 1850, a posse of six men chased Chaplin’s wagon to Silver Spring, Maryland, where they opened fire on the occupants before ramming a fence rail through their wheel spokes, forcing the wagon to stop. Chaplin was beaten badly and thrown into prison, then charged with having “abducted, stolen, taken, and carried out [two fugitive slaves] from the city of Washington.” Additional charges were brought against him for supposedly assaulting the men who had arrested him. He had not been armed, however. Since there was a dispute over whether the arrest took place in DC or Maryland, he was apparently jailed in Washington for six weeks, and subsequently imprisoned in Maryland for thirteen.

Rather than let him hang, a group of abolitionists, led by the philanthropist Gerrit Smith, organized the Chaplin Fund Committee to raise money for his bail and defense. The two Georgia slave-owning senators were no doubt pulling strings in the background. Chaplin’s bail was set at an appalling $19,000, which would take a modern unskilled laborer more than 150 years to pay off.⁴⁰

Fellow abolitionists raised the bond money. These supporters included a Quaker family, the Hathaways of Farmington, New York, and a father and son, Asa B. Smith and William R. Smith. The Smiths sold their farms to help raise the money, putting themselves in poverty for years to follow. But they managed to win Chaplin’s release on Christmas Eve of 1850.

Years passed, meanwhile, and John languished in slavery. He may be the same John Henson who attempted to escape but was jailed as a runaway in Washington, DC, on June 22, 1858, before being returned to Maryland. Josiah had been able to maintain frequent communication with his brother, and although the rescue attempts had failed, Josiah certainly wasn’t a man who gave up on anything. So he decided to pursue a more lawful way of securing his brother’s release and see if he could purchase him.

The fact that John had already tried to escape gave his owner, Beall, an incentive to sell him; John was in his sixties, past the age where he was valuable to her as a worker. Josiah learned that she would be willing to sell him for $400, which was more than triple the value her family had thought he was worth eleven years earlier. Josiah calculated that he’d need to raise $550 to purchase his brother’s release, bring him to Canada, and provide a home for him at Dawn.

Josiah reached out to his antislavery friends in Boston, particularly Amos Lawrence, and they agreed to help him republish an updated story of his life. The book was printed by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s publisher, John P. Jewett and Company,^* and the new version was decidedly more upmarket than the 1849 paperback. The revised memoir was bound with a purple hardcover and contained an illustration of Josiah and his signature on the frontispiece, along with an introduction by Harriett Beecher Stowe herself.

It was well known that Josiah had been part of the inspiration for the character of Uncle Tom, and his backers wanted to profit from the connection. The book’s new title was Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Father Henson’s Story of His Own Life.

It might seem strange to release an old book with a new name—Josiah’s book was published in at least eight editions during his lifetime—but this was not unusual. Sojourner Truth’s narrative went through five editions. Frederick Douglass wrote three versions of his autobiography, with one British version going through nine editions in just two years. Olaudah Equiano’s memoir, which was first published in 1789, had gone through thirty-six editions by 1837.

Because of Josiah’s heightened popularity, the new book had an advance sale of five thousand copies, but Jewett did little to market the work, and it didn’t become particularly well known.⁴¹ Josiah took a bundle of the books on his back and traveled through New England with them, quickly succeeding in raising the funds he needed.

He then hired Charles C. Berry, cashier of the City Bank in Boston, to negotiate the purchase of his brother’s freedom. The banker did well. Through his connections in Maryland, Berry was able to secure John Henson’s freedom papers for $250—still overpriced—on September 8, 1858. Josiah joyfully sent the ransom money, and John was soon transported to Baltimore. From there he took a boat to Boston and was reunited with his brother after decades apart. Josiah brought John to his home in Canada, where he lived for the next fifteen years.^*

Despite the ongoing struggle with Scoble, Shadd, and Newman at Dawn, Josiah ended his 1858 memoir on an upbeat note, painting a picture of the progress made by former slaves in their new land:

I have been requested by many friends in this country to devote a chapter of my book to the fugitive slaves in Canada; to a statement of their present numbers, condition, prospects for the future, etc. At the time of my first visit to Canada, in the year 1830, there were but a few hundred fugitive slaves in both Canadas; there are now not less than thirty-five thousand. At that time they were scattered in all directions, and for the most part miserably poor, subsisting not unfrequently on the roots and herbs of the fields; now many of them own large and valuable farms, and but few can be found in circumstances of destitution or want.

Josiah noted how, when he had arrived in Canada in 1830, there had been no schools or churches for blacks, but now there were plenty of both. He described their farms and the food they grew: “corn, wheat, rye, oats… apples, cherries, plums, peaches, quinces, currants, gooseberries, strawberries… sweet potatoes… tobacco and hemp.”⁴²

Josiah credited Queen Victoria for their freedom and invited jobless black Americans to find their way north, where the soil was good, their children could be educated, and they would be protected from abuse. As he approached nearly three decades of service to the black people of Canada, he ended his note humbly: “My task is done[;] if what I have written shall inspire a deeper interest in my race, and shall lead to corresponding activity in their behalf I shall feel amply repaid.”⁴³

OPPOSITION SILENCED

Mary Ann Shadd’s early battles with Henry Bibb had taught her the power of the press and its ability to make or break people’s lives. Though she had done much to advance the cause of escapees to Canada, she had done much harm as well. Her newspaper’s prospectus stated the point of her work best: “It will open its columns to the views of men of different political opinions, reserving the right, as an independent journal, of full expression on all questions or projects affecting the people in a political way; and reserving, also, the right to express emphatic condemnation of all projects.”⁴⁴

No one had received more emphatic condemnation than the leaders at Dawn. Shadd’s and Newman’s tirades against the BAI had wreaked havoc on the institute and its ability to raise funds and operate. But on August 22, 1857, after forty-nine issues and more than three years of constant attacks on Josiah’s character, Mary Ann Shadd’s Provincial Freeman shuttered its doors for good.⁴⁵

THROUGHOUT THE NEXT YEAR, JOSIAH CONTINUED TO WORK AND advocate on behalf of black people in Canada and beyond. In July 1858, he traveled to the Convention of Colored Citizens of Massachusetts in New Bedford, in celebration of the twenty-fourth anniversary of the liberation of the 800,000 slaves of the British West Indies. Apparently Stowe’s Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done much for Josiah’s reputation. William Wells Brown presided over the meeting, and the minutes reported that a “fervent prayer was then offered by Rev. Josiah Henson, of Canada, ‘Uncle Tom,’ as he is generally known.”⁴⁶

Charles Lenox Remond, a black abolitionist, gave a stirring speech about freedom and emancipation. He declared that “colored people would gain nothing by twaddling and temporizing.”⁴⁷ He was sorry, he said, that so many black people allowed themselves to be led by white men, even considerate ones. He wanted black men to stand up for themselves and fight.

Someone in the crowd yelled that they wanted to hear from Josiah. Remond said he “didn’t believe Father Henson could understand our position.” He believed Massachusetts blacks were the focus of attention at this celebration, and he didn’t want to hear about Canadian liberty. He wanted liberty in America, or nothing else. “We must depend upon our own self-reliance. If we recommend to the slaves in South Carolina to rise in rebellion, it would work greater things than we imagine. If some black Archimedes does not soon arise with his lever, then will there spring up some black William Wallace with his claymore, for the freedom of the colored race.”

Remond moved that a committee of five men be appointed to write an address to southern slaves, suggesting they mount an insurrection. He knew his resolution was revolutionary and treasonous, but he wanted to stir up “men who would encourage their brethren at the South to rise with bowie-knife and revolver and musket.”

Josiah remembered Nat Turner’s Rebellion, which took place in Virginia in 1831. A little less than a year after Josiah’s escape, Nat Turner, a slave preacher, and his band had killed up to sixty-five people over a period of three days. Twice as many slaves were killed in retaliation.⁴⁸ Turner was hung, and some speculated his body was skinned, beheaded, and quartered. According to a later report, “Turner was skinned to supply such souvenirs as purses, his flesh made into grease, and his bones divided as trophies to be handed down as heirlooms.”^49*

The crowd cried for Father Henson’s opinion. Josiah, now almost seventy years old, took the platform and declared that he didn’t want to fight any more than he thought Remond actually did. If the time for shooting came, he suspected Remond would be nowhere to be found. Josiah thought the convention should study the West Indies’ emancipation and see if there were some lessons to be learned that could help win freedom in America. Failing that, they should find ways to help more people escape north. Josiah conceded that Canada wasn’t perfect, by any means, but it was the only place he’d found real freedom for his people. “A good run is better than a bad stand,” he declared.

Josiah raised another good point. How would Remond’s manifesto be circulated among southern blacks without alerting their white overseers? And how would they fight without weapons or education? Josiah boldly declared that he didn’t want to “see three or four thousand men hung before their time,” and said he would “oppose any such action, head, neck and shoulders.”

Remond replied that he didn’t care whether his motion passed or not. He argued that if the manifesto couldn’t be circulated in the South, then adopting it couldn’t do any harm. As for the claim that many would die, Remond declared that if he had “one hundred relations at the South, he would rather see them die today, than to live in bondage. He would rather stand over their graves, than feel that any pale-faced scoundrel might violate his mother or his sister.”⁵⁰ Remond said that he only regretted that he didn’t have a spear with which to skewer every slaveholder at once, and that he wanted liberty or death. He insisted the insurrection could be accomplished in minutes, and that overthrowing the slavery system could be “instantaneously attained.”

The convention put the idea to the vote, and Remond’s motion lost.

Even though Josiah had won a temporary victory, a greater war was about to unleash itself in the land of the free and the home of the slave.

THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

Back in Dresden, yet another meeting was called on January 17, 1859, with James C. Brown, William P. Newman, and Samuel H. Davis in leading roles. Evidently, they’d made little progress on wresting control from Scoble’s hands. They now set their sights on the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society committee that had formed in London almost a decade earlier to assist Josiah.

First, they wrote a letter to the BFASS in which they repeated their story: the majority of the BAI trustees had signed over their powers to the BFASS committee via Scoble in Toronto on September 12, 1851, provided the BFASS take on the debts and carry out the purposes set forth in the declaration of trust.

“We have waited seven years for you to do as you have promised us, through Mr. Scoble,” they complained. “The school which we had was broken up, the worship of God was discontinued, and we [are] abused by your Agent, for the crimes of American tyrants and the color of our skin.”⁵¹

The group added that Scoble was receiving somewhere between $800 and $1,000 in rents for the BAI lands, but keeping the money for personal use. This was almost certainly true. Scoble’s attempts to farm had failed miserably, and Josiah had taken up the BAI’s farm tenancy in 1847 and held it for at least three years. In this time, he would have paid rent to Scoble in exchange for the right to clear trees, plant crops, and pasture cattle. Josiah, therefore, was simply guilty by mere association with the hated white man.

BY 1859, MORE THAN EIGHT YEARS HAD PASSED SINCE JOHN SCOBLE had promised to rebuild the school. Josiah had no power to force him to act, and neither did anyone else. Luckily, Scoble couldn’t claim title to the land, so he had no power to sell it. The BAI had been ground to a stalemate.

Josiah repeatedly tried to bring it up in conversation with Scoble, but Scoble invariably refused to discuss the topic. “Let them growl,” he replied.⁵²

On November 19, 1859, Samuel Davis chaired another meeting at the Baptist Church in Dresden to talk about the institute and how they might be able to unjam the gridlock. The only way they could get rid of Scoble was to bring a lawsuit. In order to do that, they needed money to fund it. Mary Ann Shadd had been unable to raise the funds they needed, and their call to the various black settlements had also failed. They needed a better way to raise funds.

SHOTS FIRED

In November 1860, the nation elected Abraham Lincoln as president of the United States. But it was a country divided. Lincoln was seen as “anti-southern,” and it was only a matter of time before the outbreak of war.

Slavery was not the only cause of the Civil War. Religion played a role—southern “Christianity” versus northern humanism and transcendentalism—as did cultural and political differences. The South favored states’ rights, whereas the North preferred more centralization. As in most wars, money and power lay near the root. But although many in the modern South choose to underplay or forget it, the issue of slavery—along with its societal, religious, cultural, and economic implications—was the fulcrum on which all else turned.

On December 20, 1860, the slave state of South Carolina seceded from the Union. In February 1861, the Confederate States of America was formally established, with Jefferson Davis as its president and Montgomery, Alabama, as its capital. Their motto was “Under God, our Vindicator,” and the unofficial anthem was “God Save the South.”

By the time Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, six more states—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—had joined the Confederacy. Each state’s written declaration made it clear that slavery was the main point of contention, with Mississippi making it emphatically clear: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.… [A] blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

Less than one month later, at 4:30 a.m. on April 12, 1861, Confederate forces, under General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard (the “Little Napoleon”), fired a ten-inch mortar at Union-held Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. It was the first shot of the Civil War.

Three days later, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the rebellion. Several slave states refused to send troops against their neighboring slave states, and by May 20, four more states—Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina—had joined the Confederacy.

By the time Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the Battle of Appomattox nearly four years later, upward of 750,000 Americans lay dead across the nation’s fields and forests. Among them were as many as 80,000 slaves. Potentially more than half of the fallen had died from the outbreaks of yellow fever, pneumonia, and smallpox that had plagued camps in both the North and the South.

Black soldiers captured by Confederate troops faced far harsher treatment than white soldiers as prisoners of war—the Confederate Congress even threatened to enslave all black POWs. Nevertheless, approximately 10 percent of the Union Army was made up of black soldiers. Roughly 179,000 black men served in the US Army, and another 19,000 served in the Navy, along with nearly 80 commissioned officers and thousands more in noncombat support functions. By the end of the war, 16 black soldiers had been awarded the Medal of Honor for their bravery.⁵³

But prejudice certainly still existed in the North. Black soldiers were usually placed in segregated units headed by white officers. They were paid less than their white counterparts, and they had to pay for their own uniforms. What other choice did they have? Many simply needed jobs. Many more proudly enlisted to fight for the freedom of their friends and families.

Even though, because of the British Foreign Enlistment Act of 1819, it was against the law for British subjects to encourage others to serve, it was up to aging men like Josiah to convince young black men to join the fight and help free their four million enslaved brethren.

SEVENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD JOSIAH REGRETTED THAT HE WAS TOO OLD to fight. As he wrote, “My sword had been turned into a ploughshare.… If I could have carried a gun, I would have gone personally, but I thought it was my duty to talk to the people.” Josiah told them “that the young and able-bodied ought to go into the field like men, that they should stand up to the rack, and help the government.”⁵⁴

This was no slave-led insurrection. This was a civil war, funded by the federal government. When the American Civil War broke out, free black men in Canada began to dream of continental emancipation. They had been trying to liberate their American brethren for years, and this was their best chance at freedom for all.

There were rewards for enlisting early. The “bounty system” was a program of cash bonuses to entice enlistees into the army, and it worked very well. Between 1861 and 1865, the government paid out nearly $750 million in recruitment bonuses. In July 1861, Congress authorized a $100 bounty for three years of service, and on March 3, 1863, expanded the bounty to $300 for three years’ service and $400 for five years’ service. At a time when average annual incomes ranged from $300 to $1,000, these amounts were significant.⁵⁵

At least two members of Josiah’s family enlisted, including his oldest son, Tom, who moved to California and signed onto a man-of-war in San Francisco. Josiah counseled other men around Dawn, in general terms, to do the same. He casually mentioned that if any of them wanted to go enlist early in order to receive the enlistment bounty offered, he would personally provide for their families until they could send the bonus back to them.

This encouragement bordered on the illegal under the Foreign Enlistment Act, which forbade any subject of the British Empire—including those in Canada—from enlisting or recruiting fellow citizens to fight for a foreign power.⁵⁶ But men like Josiah had been raised in America, and some had great affinity for the nation of their birth. Often, remnants of their families remained enslaved in the United States. Canada was their home, but their allegiance was continental.

The bounty system was rife with defects, the largest being the ability to “bounty jump.” The widespread practice saw men enlist, collect their bonus, desert the army, reenlist, and collect another bonus. Some men would move from recruitment station to recruitment station, while others would simply change their clothes, shave their beards, and return to the same registrar using a different name.

An entire industry of bounty brokers soon emerged, and these speculators often pocketed a sizable portion of an enlistee’s bonus. Some bounty brokers even resorted to recruiting non-able-bodied men and receiving their bonus before their shortcomings were discovered and the men were discharged.

A number of people from the Dawn area went south to enlist. Sadly, some of them lost their bounty money to “sharpers.” Sharpers were truly despicable con men—they targeted freshly enlisted soldiers in an effort to relieve them of their freshly pocketed bounties, often by getting them drunk and robbing them, by pickpocketing them, by cheating while gambling, or by running any number of scams and frauds.

Josiah proposed to travel with a second group of Canadians so that they wouldn’t have the same thing happen to them. One black man, named John Alexander, decided to join Josiah’s company. He was a poor man, with a wife and children, and the opportunity to have them fed while he went to earn a living fighting for the North seemed worth the risk. While he was gone, Josiah had clothing and meat sent to Alexander’s family.

Josiah and his group traveled to the border and crossed into the United States, but at some point on the journey, Alexander seems to have deserted the pack. When Josiah arrived in Massachusetts, he received a telegram from his wife, Nancy, telling him to “remain in Boston and not return.”⁵⁷

John Alexander had returned to Dawn and falsely declared that Josiah had “tried to induce him and others to enlist.” Alexander testified to the statement before a magistrate, and Nancy warned her husband that he would be arrested as soon as he arrived home. If the charge was proven true, Josiah would spend seven years in prison.

At first Josiah thought about staying in Boston until the excitement had subsided. Perhaps he could wait out the war entirely. But then he remembered his purpose for having made the trip in the first place. Josiah believed he was helping men enlist in what he believed was a righteous war. He believed that black people should take part in the great struggle for freedom. Josiah told one of his companions, after receiving the letter, “God helping me, I will not run away when I have done no wrong.”

The aging Josiah returned to Dawn and rode in a wagon straight to his front door. He wanted others to know that he wasn’t ashamed to be seen. He arrived home on a Thursday afternoon at about 4:00 p.m., and his family tearfully begged him to get away from Dawn. Josiah insisted that he would remain and see his name cleared.

Early the next morning, before 7:00 a.m., a local constable, William Nellis, walked up the lane. Josiah was talking with his son-in-law when he saw his old friend approach.

“Good morning, Mr. Henson,” the constable said pleasantly. “Have you any potatoes to sell?”

“Good morning,” Josiah answered. “Yes, sir, I have some.”

“I should like to buy a few if you can spare any.”

“How many do you want?”

“Ten or fifteen bushels.”

“I can spare one hundred bushels.”

“Oh, I do not want so many.”

“Very well,” Josiah said. “I suppose it is only one good black potato about my size that you want, and you can have it if you will come and get it.”

The constable stepped forward and put his hand on Josiah’s shoulder. “Mr. Henson, you are my prisoner in the name of the Queen.” He handed him a writ.

“All right, Bill,” Josiah said. “Let me have a bit of breakfast, and then you can have me.”

The two men went into the house. Nancy and his children were crying. Josiah invited the constable to eat, but he declined, saying he had eaten breakfast. They talked for half an hour. Josiah then stood and grabbed his hat. “I am ready,” he said. “How are we going? The writ says you must take me.”

“If you will have your horse and wagon prepared, I’ll pay for it.”

“I will do no such a thing,” Josiah said. “You must take me, and if you have no other way, go get a wheelbarrow, for I will not walk with you.”

The constable argued with his friend for an hour or two, until it was approaching noon. Finally Josiah stopped toying with the man. “You can go your way when you like,” he said. “And you may tell the squire I will soon be there.”

Josiah arrived at the courthouse that Friday afternoon to discover that the magistrates wouldn’t let him make a statement of defense or even hire a lawyer to plead his case. One of the magistrates was prejudiced against Josiah because of his position in the lawsuit against the BAI trustees, but the other magistrate, Squire Terrace, was his friend. It was the pair’s job to interpret the law, but because they couldn’t agree, the case was referred to another judge.

The third judge also couldn’t decide on the case. He suggested they consult the county attorney.

The county attorney was a man from nearby Chatham, a Mr. McLean. He was an old friend of Josiah’s—Josiah had worked for his grandfather. McLean was known for keeping his word and doing his duty.

“I am surprised to find these charges against Mr. Henson,” McLean said. “He is a common-sense man, and knows the laws better than the majority of the people. There must be a screw loose somewhere in this affair. If what John Alexander has declared on oath be true, nothing will prevent Mr. Henson from seven years’ imprisonment in Kingston under the Foreign Enlistment Act, which does not allow a man to entice or persuade another to enlist in the army.” He looked at Josiah. “Mr. Henson, give me your version of the case.”

Josiah recounted the whole story, and didn’t try to dodge the facts. He admitted he’d given John Alexander’s wife some food and clothing, and said, “I would give them to any one, white or black, if I had them to give, and the individual needed them.” He added that he hadn’t expected Alexander to turn his generosity against him, for Josiah intuited that the only “proof” they had was his gift to Alexander’s family, which Alexander called bribery to get him to enlist.

“We all know Mr. Henson’s character,” McLean ruled. “He is an honest, upright, Christian man.… [W]hat is the character of his accuser?”

McLean deferred his decision until Monday morning, and sent people to make inquiries into the truthfulness of Josiah’s accuser.

On Saturday afternoon, Constable Nellis allowed Josiah to return home under house arrest. That evening, a man who had heard about the case came to Josiah’s house.

“There is a man loading his boat up the river,” he said. “He comes from the same district where John Alexander lived before he prowled about Dresden… says Alexander is a thief, that he stole a lot of clothes from a line in a yard there.” He went on to explain that the man loading his boat, named Mr. Smith, believed there was an arrest warrant pending to Alexander, but that Alexander had fled before his arrest.

Josiah asked the constable for permission to see Terrace. The magistrate listened as he relayed the facts.

“Go home and be quiet over Sunday,” the judge said. “Monday morning before the sun rises I will be at the river, and if I can find that Smith… I will have him in court on Monday morning by nine o’clock.”

Josiah stayed home all day Sunday, grateful to God for providing a way out. His family worried that the judge wouldn’t find Smith, and that Josiah would go to prison for potentially the rest of his life. Though Josiah’s fate hung in the balance, he was certain all would end well.

Early on Monday morning, Terrace walked the riverbank until he spotted a boat about half a mile off.

“Is there a man named Smith on that boat?” he yelled.

“I’m the man, sir.”

“Come ashore, I want to speak to you.”

Smith told the magistrate that he had worked with Alexander, that he was “a mean, lying thief, and [that] he could prove it.”

Terrace immediately subpoenaed the man to appear in court at nine.

At 9:00 a.m. on Monday morning, John Alexander sat in the courtroom with a triumphant look on his face. Terrace called the witness.

“You have worked with John Alexander,” the attorney said. “Is he a trustworthy man? Has he a good, reliable character?”

“He is one of the greatest rogues out[side] of prison,” Smith answered.

Alexander tried to interrupt him, but Smith looked him square in the face and said, “You know if you stepped your foot where you used to work with me, you’d be hustled off to prison, where you ought to go if you got your desserts.”

“What do you say?” Squire McDonald asked. “Is the man a rogue… has he no character?”

“He has none, sir,” Smith replied. He explained again how Alexander had dodged arrest for his crimes in another county.

“Well,” McDonald said, “if John Alexander has no character, Mr. Henson has his acquittal.”

Josiah’s friends and family cheered.

Josiah sent word to Alexander that their part of the world was too small for the both of them, and that if he saw the man again, he might be tempted to shoot him. Alexander sent friends to ask for his forgiveness, and Josiah told them Alexander would need to admit his meanness in the presence of three of Josiah’s friends.

John Alexander, to his credit, apologized to Josiah and his entire family for endangering Josiah’s life.

“It was about the meanest thing you could do to defame me in my absence,” Josiah said. He explained that his character was one of his most prized possessions. But Alexander was clearly shaken, and Josiah felt conciliatory. “I forgive you,” he said. “Go and sin no more.”

EMANCIPATION OVERTURNED

Abraham Lincoln had long deliberated over the issue of slavery. As a wartime president, his goal was to reunite the country. As he considered emancipation, he struggled to carefully balance the weighty loads of public opinion, diplomatic pressure, military abilities, and his responsibility to the Constitution. It was a moral issue at its core, but Lincoln was still a politician eyeing reelection.

Although Lincoln considered compensated emancipation as a form of southern appeasement, others began to take matters into their own hands. As slaves crossed north of Union military lines, two generals declared emancipation. In late August 1861, General John C. Frémont started freeing slaves in Missouri; the following May, General David Hunter copied the action in parts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

Lincoln overrode both his generals, arguing that only the president had the power to declare such an edict. In truth, he feared that these radical actions might push Missouri and other proslavery Union states toward the Confederate cause. He asked Frémont to rescind his orders, and when the general refused, Lincoln publicly revoked the proclamation. He relieved Frémont of his duties on November 2, 1861.

NORTHERN WRITERS USED THE PRESS TO PUT ENORMOUS PRESSURE on President Lincoln and his Congress. Stowe published prolifically in the New York Independent during 1861 and 1862, one of the city’s leading newspapers. She primarily wrote letters to the editor, frequently employing scripture references and biblical phrasing to elicit strong emotional and religious responses from her readers. She was well informed, and her incisive critiques of the government struck a nerve. She poked and prodded, cajoled and persuaded, and lobbied for altruistic and immediate action against slavery.

As Lincoln delayed taking action, Stowe grew more frustrated and her writing took on a harder edge. She wrote to the Independent in August 1861 declaring, “We consider this war is a great Anti-Slavery War, not in form, but in fact: not in proclamation, but in the intense conviction and purpose of each of the contending parties, and still more in the inevitable overruling indications of divine Providence.”⁵⁸

On July 31, 1862, Stowe wrote, “The time has come when the nation has a RIGHT to demand, and the President of the United States a right to decree, their freedom; and there should go up petitions from all the land that he should do it. How many plagues must come on us before we will hear the evident voice, ‘Let this people go, that they may serve me.’”⁵⁹

Though President Lincoln had begun to set his course, the public did not yet know it, and the finest writers in the nation put increasing public pressure on him to do the right thing. But it would take far longer than the northern abolitionists hoped for him to respond to their pleas.

OVERDUE AND UNDERWHELMING REVELATION

For the past three or four years, Josiah had rented a portion of the BAI lands from John Scoble. As time wore on, the conflicts between the two men grew. They disagreed about rent payments, and Josiah pressed for property improvements; then Scoble wanted more money for his services as manager.

It had taken nine years for Josiah to come to the full realization that John Scoble was not the heroic abolitionist he’d envisioned him to be. In December 1861, he sat the Englishman down for a serious conversation on Scoble’s plans for the institution.⁶⁰

“The people about here are beginning to talk hard about you and myself,” Josiah said. “I do not want to let them have any cause to think ill of us. If you will be so kind as to give me some intimation when you propose to commence the school-buildings I can satisfy them.”

“When I get ready,” Scoble replied curtly. “When I please.”

“It is quite unfortunate for me,” Josiah replied meekly. “For my honour is impeached, as I have always defended you.”

“What’s your honour to me? I don’t care what they say. I did not come here for the coloured people to dictate to me.”

“If you really do not intend to build us a school, you ought to leave the farm, and let us manage for ourselves,” Josiah replied.

This angered Scoble. “Pay me what I have expended during the many years I have tried to make this place meet its expenses, and I will go at once.”

Their relationship had been strained for several years, but suddenly the scales fell from Josiah’s eyes and he saw through the man’s motives. Scoble had no plans to build a school for black students. He had no plans to make the BAI a financially sustainable enterprise. Scoble had used Josiah for rent and influence in order to support his own family and in-laws. Josiah called the British abolitionist on his ruse and demanded he make changes immediately, or he would sue him for nonperformance of his duties as the man entrusted with the BAI.

John Scoble had had enough. He put his son in charge of the BAI premises and promptly left for Toronto to file a pair of lawsuits against Josiah. It was one thing to ward off attacks from Mary Ann Shadd, William P. Newman, and James C. Brown, however, but no one could withstand a fight from Josiah Henson. Josiah was seventy-two years of age, and the old man had yet to be bested by anyone.

JOSIAH HAD TO MOVE QUICKLY. HE PERSONALLY OWNED THE GRISTMILL on the BAI property, but he no longer held the lease to the land it was on. If he didn’t remove it before the lawsuit got underway, he would almost certainly have problems with Scoble’s son. The last thing Josiah wanted was for the gristmill to end up in the same position as the sawmill.

Josiah devised an ingenious plan. He sold the mill to a local Dresden businessman, William Wright, the Irishman who had developed Fairport just east of the town. Wright, along with Josiah’s son-in-law, who was the miller, got twenty men together on a Sunday evening, and as soon as midnight struck, they carefully and quietly took the whole thing apart.

Josiah gleefully wrote that “by ten o’clock on Monday morning the mill had vanished, as if by magic, from its old resting-place, and by noon it was carried off, in ten or twelve teams that were in readiness, to Dresden.” The men rebuilt the gristmill on a lot owned by Wright.⁶¹

The joke around town was that the gristmill had been spirited away by ghosts. One reporter wrote: “We cannot account for the strange behaviour of the spirits, but it is surmised that the Rev. Josiah Henson and Mr. Wright [may have been] employed as mediums.” The gristmill remained in Dresden, in “splendid working order,” for at least another fifteen years.

JOSIAH HAD TRUSTED SCOBLE AND PATIENTLY WAITED FOR HIM TO act for almost a decade. The lawsuit was the final straw, and Josiah was now back on his own, separated from his disappointing longtime partner. If the BAI was to be revived, and reopened as a school to train freed blacks, it would be up to him.

Josiah glumly reported in his memoir that he asked for help from the other settlers at Dawn: “I went to the coloured people and told them, sadly, that I had been greatly deceived, that we should never have a school until we gained possession of the property, and that if I had a power of attorney to act for them I would consult an able lawyer, and ascertain what could be done.”

A group of black men got together, likely including James C. Brown and Samuel Davis, and deputized Josiah to explore options. Josiah immediately went to London, Ontario, and hired two experienced lawyers to take their case. They advised Josiah to stay in the background, as he had clear conflicts of interest, and to find a front man who was closely related to the BAI.

Josiah approached James C. Brown later that same night and personally pledged his entire life savings if Brown would bring the suit. Josiah would mortgage himself to the point of bankruptcy, if necessary, in order to win the fight for the BAI.

The Brown v. Scoble lawsuit would soon commence.⁶²

A PUBLIC CHALLENGE

Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the influential New-York Tribune, was a man ahead of his time. He promoted temperance, opposed capital punishment, and fought against land monopolies. He zealously opposed slavery. Greeley wrote an editorial in the Tribune on Wednesday, August 20, 1862, titled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” It was an open letter to Abraham Lincoln, with Greeley posing as the spokesperson for the twenty million northerners still loyal to the president.⁶³

Greeley opened by saying that Lincoln should “EXECUTE THE LAWS.” In the scathing piece, he accused the president of being “strangely and disastrously remiss” in his duty to enforce the Confiscation Acts, which allowed the Union to free any slaves it captured from Confederate territory.

Greeley further blasted Lincoln for annulling Frémont’s proclamation, and encouraged the president to realize that there could be no liberty while slavery remained. The “Union cause,” he wrote, “is now suffering immensely, from a mistaken deference to rebel slavery.”

Greeley reiterated his hope that the president would proclaim emancipation and ended by warning that without the help of black “scouts, guides, spies, cooks, teamsters, diggers and choppers… we cannot conquer Ten Millions of People united in solid phalanx against us, powerfully aided by Northern sympathizers and European allies.”

Two days later, Abraham Lincoln responded to Greeley’s article with a letter of his own. He tried to defend himself and correct errors and suppositions, and he forgave the accusatory tone, waiving it “in deference to an old friend, whose heart I have always supposed to be right.”

The president cut straight to the quick: he wanted to save and restore the Union above everything else, regardless of whether slavery continued or ceased.

Lincoln continued: “My paramount object, in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy Slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.… What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union and what I forbear I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”

He concluded: “I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.… I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.”

Needless to say, the letter Lincoln intended to please everyone pleased no one.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE WAS ALSO FURIOUS THAT LINCOLN HAD overruled and fired Frémont, and she, too, had started calling for immediate emancipation by presidential proclamation. When Stowe read Lincoln’s response to Greeley’s plea, she countered with a biting biblical-themed parody in the New York Independent on September 11, 1862, rewriting Lincoln’s words to reflect the priorities of “the King of kings”: “My paramount object in this struggle is to set at liberty them that are bruised, and not either to save or destroy the Union. What I do in favor of the Union, I do because it helps to free the oppressed; what I forbear, I forbear because it does not help to free the oppressed. I shall do less for the Union whenever it would hurt the cause of the slave, and more when I believe it would help the cause of the slave.”⁶⁴ Stowe and others kept hammering away at Lincoln, and they would soon see nation-shifting results.

WHISPERS OF LIBERTY

Eleven days after Stowe’s parody appeared in the New York Independent, Abraham Lincoln released a copy of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. It was September 22, 1862. This early version included compensation for slave owners and resettlement of emancipated slaves. Both provisions were dropped from the final proclamation. Lincoln announced that he would sign the proclamation exactly one hundred days later, on the first of January.

Stowe and her fellow abolitionists were not confident that Lincoln would fulfill his promise. How could they ensure that political pressure from the South, and from slavery-approving states in the Union, wouldn’t prevent Lincoln from following through on his commitment? Stowe’s brother Henry was especially skeptical, saying, “It’s far easier to slide down on the bannisters than to go up the stairs.”⁶⁵

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE PROVED TO BE A SAVVY POLITICAL PROMOTER. She regularly approached northern politicians with her ideas, including US senator Charles Sumner, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, and one-time presidential candidate John Charles Frémont.

Finally, tired of Lincoln’s slowness to proclaim an immediate emancipation, Stowe decided to personally approach the president. She wrote to her publisher on November 14, 1862, “I am going to Washington to see the heads of department myself and to satisfy myself that I may refer to the Emancipation Proclamation as a reality and a substance not to fizzle out at the little end of the hour.… I start for Washington tomorrow morning—and mean to have a talk with ‘Father Abraham’ himself.”⁶⁶

On Tuesday, November 25, 1862, ten years after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe met with the president in Washington, DC. She had taken along her daughter Hattie and her sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker.

Though there is no document or diary entry detailing all that was said in the meeting or meetings Harriet had with the president in late November 1862, it seems to have been a very jovial affair. Harriet wrote to her husband, Calvin, that she had a “really funny interview with the President.” The biography of Stowe written decades later by her son and grandson reported that

Mrs. Stowe, in telling of her interview with Mr. Lincoln… dwelt particularly on the rustic pleasantry with which that great man received her. She was introduced into a cosy room where the President had been seated before an open fire, for the day was damp and chilly. It was Mr. Seward who introduced her, and Mr. Lincoln rose awkwardly from his chair, saying, “Why, Mrs. Stowe, right glad to see you!” Then with a humorous twinkle in his eye, he said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war! Sit down, please,” he added, as he seated himself once more before the fire, meditatively warming his immense hands over the smouldering embers by first extending the palms, and then turning his wrists so that the grateful warmth reached the backs of his hands. The first thing he said was, “I do love an open fire.…” “Mr. Lincoln,” said Mrs. Stowe, “I want to ask you about your views on emancipation.” It was on that subject that the conversation turned.^67*

Stowe’s meeting with the president evidently changed her opinion of him.^* She wrote to her publisher, on November 27, “It seems to be the opinion here not only that the president will stand up to his Proclamation but that the Border states will accede to his proposition for Emancipation—I have noted the thing as a glorious expectancy!”⁶⁸

WOMEN AT WAR

Harriet Beecher Stowe was simultaneously fighting the war against slavery on another front. It had been nine and a half years since the women of Great Britain had presented her with twenty-six massive, leather-bound books filled with 563,000 signatures, begging their American sisters to pursue the immediate abolition of slavery. But the demand for American cotton continued, and that demand had driven the growth of slavery.

Although the times had changed, the insatiability of human consumption had not. The British had abandoned slavery across their own empire, and yet they were still heavily dependent on southern cotton, and as the Civil War progressed, Stowe observed the proslavery sympathies of Great Britain rising back to the surface.

But Stowe also realized that women could turn the tide. Women could win the war.

She decided to remind her British sisters of their own words. In Washington, she sat down on November 27, 1862, and wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly titled “A Reply to ‘The Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of Women of Great Britain and Ireland to Their Sisters the Women of the United States of America.’”⁶⁹

Stowe wrote plainly and to the point: “It is an unaccountable fact, and one which we entreat you seriously to ponder, that the party which has brought the cause of freedom thus far on its way, during the past eventful year, has found little or no support in England. Sadder than this, the party which makes slavery the chief corner-stone of its edifice finds in England its strongest defenders.”

Stowe encouraged British women to get on board with the Union cause, lest American progressives leave England behind. “We loved England; we respected, revered her; we were bound to her by ties of blood and race. Alas! must all these declarations be written in the past tense?”

Stowe pointed out that France and the rest of continent immediately saw the justice of the Union cause, and England was the European exception. She called out the English Navy for considering lending their boats to the Confederacy, and skewered the British Evangelical Alliance and the British Christian newspapers for refusing to side with “the liberating party.”

Finally, Stowe invoked God’s blessing on her endeavor and invited British women to join the cause of abolition: “Mark our words! If we succeed, the children of these very men who are now fighting us will rise up to call us blessed.… We appeal to you, then, as sisters, as wives, and as mothers, to raise your voices to your fellow-citizens and your prayers to God for the removal of this affliction and disgrace from the Christian world.”⁷⁰

Although France and Britain remained officially neutral, elites in both nations tended to favor the Confederacy. Slavery was immensely profitable, making it attractive even for nations that had already banned it domestically. Just as we capitalize on the low wages in poor countries today for our clothing, France and Britain enjoyed their steady shipments of inexpensive American cotton, Caribbean sugar, Brazilian coffee, and other slave imports, such as tobacco and grain, in the 1800s. Just as we today sell guns to African, Middle Eastern, and South American warlords, Britain’s industrialists were all too happy to sell munitions to the South, enough so that Lincoln had to commission 500 ships to form a 3,500-mile-long blockade to prevent them from arming the enemy to the teeth.⁷¹

A NEW YEAR

I break your bonds and masterships,

And I unchain the slave:

Free be his heart and hand henceforth,

As wind and wandering wave.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “BOSTON HYMN,” 1862

At around 2:00 p.m. on the first day of the New Year in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln walked into the study in the White House—then called the Executive Mansion. He picked up a steel pen and dipped it into a two-chamber inkwell filled with purple-black iron gall ink. His hand trembled. He had just shaken hands for three straight hours with the attendees at a party, and he didn’t want anyone to think that his signature was shaky because he was still uncertain about his action.⁷²

Lincoln steadied his hand and signed his final version of the Emancipation Proclamation. He had finally come to the conclusion that it was not only a military necessity, but also an act of supreme justice. Later in the day, he reportedly said, “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper. If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” With the stroke of a pen, three million slaves were unbound from their legal chains.

The news echoed through the telegraph wires from Washington, DC, spreading like a shockwave through the nation. Crowds that had waited all day for the news erupted with excitement. Lincoln had done it. Henry Ward Beecher declared, “The Proclamation may not free a single slave, but it gives liberty a moral recognition.”⁷³

Harriet Beecher Stowe attended a New Year’s Day concert at the Boston Music Hall. The three-thousand-person event was studded with a sparkling galaxy of literary luminaries, including John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Henry David Thoreau, who had written and railed and spent time in prison in righteous civil disobedience against the slavery-approving nation, had died just a few months earlier and was unable to see the fruits of his labor.

Ralph Waldo Emerson surprised the audience with a poem he had written for the occasion, entitled “Boston Hymn.”⁷⁴ According to the music critic John Sullivan Dwight, “an electric thrill” tore through the crowd as the poem was read. It became famous almost immediately and was later adopted as the anthem of an all-black regiment in South Carolina.

When news of the Emancipation Proclamation broke over the wires, the city of Boston burst into pandemonium. The music hall crowd started chanting, “Harriet Beecher Stowe! Harriet Beecher Stowe! Harriet Beecher Stowe!”

UNCLE TOM’S CABIN FOREVER CHANGED HOW AMERICANS VIEWED slavery. Stowe’s conversational writing style inspired people in a way that political speeches could not. It personalized the arguments about slavery and helped Americans determine what kind of country they wanted to create. Uncle Tom’s Cabin demanded that America deliver on her promise of freedom and equality for all.

Some historians think it’s unlikely that Lincoln ever read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the president himself admitted he avoided novels. But it is impossible to believe that Lincoln was not at least familiar with Stowe’s work. Is it conceivable that, at a pivotal moment in history, Lincoln could have avoided reading America’s most popular and divisive book? As the novelist and political essayist George Sand wrote from France, it was “no longer permissible to those who can read not to have read it.”⁷⁵

Although slavery likely would have eventually ended even without Stowe’s novel, the simple fact remains that without Uncle Tom’s Cabin, there may not have been a President Abraham Lincoln. The Republican Party, of which Lincoln was the leader, had distributed 100,000 copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin during the election campaigns of 1860 as a way to stir up abolitionist support for the party. Lincoln received almost no support from the South, and slavery was the hot-button issue of the election. Without the abolitionist press and Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Lincoln’s corner, there’s no telling whether John C. Breckinridge’s Democrats might not have won the day. As Radical Republican leader and US senator Charles Sumner declared, “Had there been no Uncle Tom’s Cabin, there would have been no Lincoln in the White House.” And without Lincoln, there may have been no reuniting of the United States of America.

According to the Library of Congress’s circulation records, President Lincoln borrowed The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin on June 16, 1862, and returned it forty-three days later, on July 29. The dates correspond exactly to the time during which he drafted his “Proclamation of Emancipation.”

We may never know the degree to which Harriet Beecher Stowe influenced Abraham Lincoln himself. But it is clear that the northern writer used her celebrity platform to powerfully sway public opinion toward emancipation. And during the critical time when Lincoln was crafting the Emancipation Proclamation, he had Stowe’s Key near at hand.

LINCOLN’S EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION DECLARED THAT ALL slaves in states that were “in rebellion against the United States” were to be “thenceforward, and forever free,” and that the government and the military would recognize and maintain their freedom. He added an incredibly personal touch to an otherwise legal-heavy document, encouraging the newly freed slaves to abstain from violence, except in self-defense, and to “labor faithfully for reasonable wages.” He then offered them work in the US Army.

The proclamation, like most policy documents and laws, was not, by any means, perfect. Because it only addressed states in the Confederacy, it completely exempted many areas of the country, including forty-eight counties in Virginia, twelve parishes in Louisiana, and all of Tennessee, along with the Union states, including Josiah’s home state of Maryland. Frederick Douglass called it “the first step on the part of the nation in its departure from the [bondage] of the ages.”⁷⁶

Douglass and Lincoln both understood that the proclamation was only a temporary military measure—only Congress, in fact, could permanently abolish slavery in the whole United States. But it was a brilliant tactical move nonetheless. Lincoln’s decision likely kept England and France from intervening for the Confederacy to retain the economic benefits of slave-subsidized cotton. The proclamation deprived the South of a massive valuable slave labor force. Lincoln himself declared it a “military necessity.” It allowed more than 180,000 former slaves and free black men to fight for and serve the Union Army. As the Civil War dragged on for two more years, nearly half of them would die in combat.

Without black freedom, America as we know it simply would not exist.

FREEDOM IN MARYLAND

Though Josiah’s home state of Maryland remained a part of the Union and later dubbed itself the “Free State,” at the time it was in no hurry to give up slavery. Since Maryland was excluded from the Emancipation Proclamation, the state didn’t budge for nearly two years, during which time many Maryland slaves escaped north or to Washington, DC, or joined the Union Army. When Maryland did finally get around to holding a referendum to abolish slavery, on November 1, 1864, it passed by a margin of just 0.006 percent. Out of the nearly 60,000 ballots cast, the scales were tipped in favor of freedom by just 375 votes—and then only after the absentee ballots of Union soldiers were added.⁷⁷

FIVE DAYS AFTER ROBERT E. LEE’S SURRENDER TO ULYSSES S. GRANT, at around 10:15 p.m. on the evening of Good Friday, the twenty-six-year-old Maryland-born stage actor and southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth walked into Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC, raised his Philadelphia Derringer pistol, and shot President Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head from a distance of less than four feet.^*

The creator of the Emancipation Proclamation would die nine hours later, at 7:22 a.m. on Saturday, April 15, 1865, in a house across the street from the theater.

LAST TRAIN TO SPRINGFIELD

Lincoln’s funeral procession left Washington and passed through 7 states and 444 communities on its 13-day, 1,654-mile journey. More than 7 million people observed some part of the procession. It remains the largest non-televised funeral in American history.

With few exceptions, the crowds were segregated by race in nearly every city Lincoln’s body passed through. It arrived in Springfield, Illinois, on May 3, 1865, where two African American ministers, Rev. Henry Brown and Rev. William C. Trevan, led Lincoln’s cortege to the burial site. Lincoln’s barber of twenty-four years, William de Fleurville, declined to join the front of the funeral procession, but instead chose to walk in the rear, where Springfield’s African American delegation had been positioned.

The Great Emancipator was gone.

THE BATTLE IS ENDED

Less than one week after Lincoln’s burial, and exactly one month after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender, on May 9, 1865, the new president, Andrew Johnson, officially declared the end of the Civil War. Confederate president Jefferson Davis was captured the following day, evidently disguised in his wife’s overcoat and shawl.⁷⁸

We cannot underestimate the importance of the Civil War in the eradication of slavery. In 1850, the future of American slavery seemed bright. One US census superintendent estimated that the slave population would reach 10.6 million by the year 1910, and an Alabama politician hoped for 31 million by the following decade.⁷⁹ In 1856, the Southern Literary Messenger dreamed of the year 1950 and predicted that the American slave population by then would top 100 million. The following year, the Charleston Mercury declared that “the wants of white men must triumph over the negro’s absurd claim to liberty.”⁸⁰ Clearly, southern plantation society would not die willingly. South Carolina slave owner and senator James Henry Hammond insisted that “sugar, rice, tobacco, coffee… can never be produced as articles of wide extended commerce, except by slave labour.”⁸¹ Slavery was outrageously profitable, even by today’s most egregious capitalistic standards. Without the introduction of modern industrial agricultural equipment—and the Union boot that snapped the Confederacy’s neck—we might still own slaves today.

FIVE-FIFTHS

In an act long overdue for the land of liberty, President Johnson’s new government proposed an amendment to the US Constitution. The Constitution had been amended only twelve times before, and the Thirteenth Amendment took dozens of forms before it was passed.

The amendment was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, and moved on to the House, where, on January 31, 1865, it passed by a margin of just seven votes. The required number of states ratified the amendment on December 6, 1865, and twelve days later, Secretary of State William H. Seward proclaimed its adoption. The Thirteenth Amendment’s wording was short but groundbreaking: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

After centuries of cruel enslavement in the United States of America, the institution of slavery was officially abolished throughout the nation. Four million black people were now free, finally considered fully human—five-fifths—in the eyes of the federal government.

The Underground Railroad—and the fugitive settlement at Dawn—were no longer necessary.

RESOLUTION

The case of Scoble v. Brown over the management of the BAI dragged on for seven years. In 1863, Scoble’s shrewd Toronto lawyer requested that the court appoint a receiver to reimburse his client for certain expenses and legal costs, and for some reason, the court accepted the suggestion. Unfortunately, the BAI property no longer produced sufficient revenue to cover the costs, and it fell into receivership. William Wright’s son-in-law, Alex Trerice, served as the court-appointed receiver for the next five years.

On the other side, Josiah continued to foot the bill for James C. Brown in hopes of redeeming the BAI. Josiah later wrote: “In the beginning I paid two hundred dollars, and borrowed money from time to time by mortgaging, first one house and lot, then three houses and lots, then re-mortgaged them, then sold several lots to pay the mortgages, then re-mortgaged, and was constantly called upon to pay disbursements to the lawyers.”⁸²

The lawsuit was long and wearying, and Josiah eventually ran out of credit. The Toronto lawyer offered to settle if his expenses were paid. It had been a long and hard battle, and all sides agreed.

On March 24, 1868, the newspaper reported that “after a determined fight of seven years’ duration in which the better nature of Mr. Henson was most creditably shown, and in which he sunk much of his means,” a decree was granted by which Scoble’s control ceased.⁸³

After sixteen long and contentious years, John Scoble left Dawn for good. The court appointed a new board, which consisted of James C. Brown, among others, and incorporated the property with a new name: the Wilberforce Institute.^*

THE LAST AUCTION

The new trustees used their power to sell the BAI lands, with plans to use the profits to endow an institute in Chatham. They sectioned the land into lots, with one and a half acres set aside for a market and another six for a cemetery. The board transacted a number of private sales at different times, and then held a public auction on January 13, 1871. A large number of people from Dawn, Dresden, and Fairport snapped up plots of land. In total, the BAI properties sold for nearly $40,000. The trustees paid off the debts from the Scoble era of $8,000 and had more than $30,000 left over.^†

WILBERFORCE NORTH

In 1872, nearby Dresden incorporated as a village, and in 1873 the Wilberforce Institute built a four-room brick schoolhouse for $3,500. On March 29, 1873, the institute received a royal assent to merge with another school to form the Wilberforce Educational Institute of Chatham, Ontario. The new school was exclusively for black students and offered courses at all levels, from elementary school to university.⁸⁴

JAMES C. BROWN WAS LAUDED FOR HIS TENACITY IN WINNING THE lawsuit, but with John Scoble gone, Josiah bore the brunt of responsibility for the BAI’s failure. To be sure, Josiah did not play his cards well. He blamed many of his early faults on the system of slavery, but he changed little in later life. William King, leader of the Elgin Settlement just twenty-six miles south of Dawn, wrote, years later, that “Henson was more than a match for anyone that ever tried to curb his authority, or to call him to an account.”⁸⁵

Josiah had been unable to provide the stable leadership that Dawn needed. He had many wonderful qualities, but flaws as well, and those flaws would cause him no small measure of harm in his life. He lacked the critical thinking skills and foresight that could have allowed him to run the school efficiently. He didn’t question anyone who flattered or encouraged him, and Scoble had taken advantage of it.

At the end of the day, virtually all of the criticism leveled at Josiah came from three people: Shadd, Newman, and Brown, and their motivations and agendas were decidedly Garrisonian American Baptist from the outset. Once Scoble got involved, there was little hope for Josiah’s reputation to survive unscathed, as he clearly sided with the wrong man. But while Newman and Shadd did much to nourish doubts about Josiah’s aptitude, they went too far by maligning his character, and none of their investigations produced anything more than ambiguous fault-finding. Despite being accused constantly, and being called before committees and hearings to defend himself, and despite the unending newspaper vitriol from Newman and Shadd, no one ever brought forth any actual proof of wrongdoing on Josiah’s part. He hadn’t become a wealthy duke or industrial baron. He didn’t have fancy clothes or carriages. Nancy and his daughters weren’t adorned in jewels. No doubt jealousy played a large role, however; nor can we rule out the massive confusion that abounded in simply defining Dawn versus the BAI, or ignore the war for resources that existed between the black colonies. James C. Brown was a Chatham man and insisted that the BAI should be owned by “the colored people of Canada” in general, instead of by the people of Dawn specifically. In the end, Brown succeeded when the BAI’s wealth was transferred to the new Wilberforce Institute in his hometown of Chatham.

Speaking about Scoble and Josiah, The Anti-Slavery Reporter wrote: “Their honours, their exercise of authority, their emoluments, awakened jealousies around; and these stimulated murmuring, and refactoriness, and intrigues.… Under these circumstances, what could be expected but the result that followed?”

In fairness to Josiah, the controversy that grew around him wasn’t over Henson himself so much as over what he represented. Those who hated Uncle Tom’s Cabin—either because it seemed anti-South or degrading to blacks—disliked Josiah because of his fictional connection. Among abolitionists, Josiah found it impossible to win everyone’s approval, as the warring camps remained at odds. He was also caught in a denominational battle between the American Baptists and the British Congregationalists.

The British American Institute was completely and utterly financially unsustainable from day one. It’s absolutely remarkable and greatly to Josiah’s credit that it lasted as long as it did and was able to serve as many people as it had. It was impossible for the school to pay for itself by having students work three or four hours each day. In the early years, their labor was absorbed just in clearing the land, and all other financial support needed to be raised from outside sources. Hiram Wilson had to spend much of his time fundraising overseas, and the original board didn’t have the capacity to take up the slack. When the board members did help out, they had to be paid for their time, which required even more money to be raised.

The Anti-Slavery Reporter summed it up well: “In looking at the actual state of matters we need scarcely wonder at the result. To raise an institution of learning here were 300 acres of wild land in a remote and unsettled part of the country. The men to work the bush farm and carry out the plan were a few escaped slaves.”⁸⁶

Still, while scorned by some, he was loved by more. Josiah is one of the best representations of both human frailty and human greatness in history. If he was self-serving in some ways, he certainly did far more to help those around him than most. Josiah had raised untold sums of money for the community, yet he never had an official say in how the money would be spent. He was never a trustee, and there’s little evidence that he was ever anything more than a fundraising agent who occasionally served on the BAI’s executive committee. The BAI was always run by white men.

Hiram Wilson was a dreamer who picked fights with others. Samuel H. Davis was biased toward the American Baptists. John Scoble was selfish and polarizing toward the black settlers. The BAI failed as a result of poor management, religious sectarianism, and black factionalism. Dawn failed, in part, because of a lack of unity.

Despite his lack of official involvement, Josiah served as the patriarch of Dawn and as a spokesman for Canada’s growing black population. He used both roles as a way to raise funds for his mission. Historians must conclude that his motives, for the most part, were appropriate for the needs of Dawn, the BAI, and his own family. His opponents were wrong. Josiah was a larger-than-life personality who was caught in a maelstrom of abolitionist ideologies, warring denominations, petty jealousies, serious rivalries, racism, paternalism, overwhelming need, and a chronic cash-flow problem.

Josiah’s work at the BAI was done, even undone. The younger generations went to seek their fortunes in the newly emancipated United States. Josiah continued on his own path, doing the task to which he had been called.

So what did he think of all this? How did Josiah feel about the constant slander, the unproven accusations, and the ongoing character assassination? If he felt it, he never mentioned it. Josiah simply went about his business, working hard and plowing the profits back into his community. He knew his mission in life—to spread abolitionist ideas and the Christian faith, to educate young people, and to help those in need—and he didn’t stop for anyone or anything. Josiah spoke and preached often, sometimes three times on Sundays, with the aim of spreading the gospel and changing public sentiment about black people. His aim was to make blacks educationally and economically equal to whites in order to break down prejudice and gain their respect.

As with any refugee camp or workers’ collective, the Dawn Settlement was bound to collapse in the long run. In fact, all the black settlements in Canada disappeared in time. The needs of the communities were too great, the available resources too few. Moreover, after the Emancipation Proclamation, many former slaves simply returned to America as free citizens of a nation reborn. Dawn and the BAI had served its purpose, in a sense, and then it simply faded away.

The attempt had been laudable. As The Voice of the Fugitive wrote of Josiah: “The executive talent which could collect, organize and control a colony of runaway slaves and shape out of such hopeless material a virtuous and self-respecting community can hardly be inferior to that which fills with the highest credit the first places of our nation.”

The land had provided decades of food. The forest had provided the lumber that had sheltered five hundred souls. The BAI had educated hundreds of black, white, and native students. The Dawn Settlement had provided jobs for many and served as an inspirational focal point for the abolitionist movement. Finally, the BAI had ended with the modern equivalent of millions in assets to its name, making way for a new and necessary work that better fit the needs of the time. It had fulfilled people’s needs as well as it could for more than a decade, closed its doors when it was no longer needed, and donated its assets to help start a new endeavor.

Hiram Wilson had had a dream. The dream never would have gotten off the ground without James Canning Fuller and his British Quaker donors. Credit must also be given to Amos Lawrence and his Boston philanthropists, along with British and American donors, for patiently sustaining the work for a decade. James C. Fuller should be applauded for leading the lawsuit. Even William P. Newman, Samuel H. Davis, and John Scoble deserve some sliver of credit for Dawn’s successes, simply because they cared enough to be involved.

And then there was Josiah Henson. He shared Hiram’s dream. He found the ideal spot to settle. He continually used his fame to raise money on behalf of the community. He risked his life to rescue slaves, and he traveled the world to spread the message about their cause. He raised the funds to build the gristmill, and he boldly repatriated it when it was threatened with destruction. He borrowed the funds to build the sawmill, and he raised the funds to pay that money back. When it came to the final showdown with Scoble, who funded the lawsuit? Mary Ann Shadd failed to raise the funds, as did James C. Brown with his call to the other black settlements. Samuel H. Davis’s committee of seven was unable to raise the money as well. Josiah not only succeeded, but he served as Dawn’s patriarch for more than twenty-five years. Though he was not perfect, by any means, he had shouldered more of the labor, more of the debts, and more of the worries than anyone.

And, in the end, he was left with less than anyone.

Josiah, nearing ninety years old, was near bankruptcy. His landholdings and life savings had been decimated, and his home and farm were leveraged to the hilt. He may have owed upward of $8,000—it could take the average worker ten years to pay off such a debt. He described feeling as if a heavy weight “was pressing down my spirits and embarrassing my declining years when I could not labour as formerly.”⁸⁷ After all the good he’d done throughout his long life, he faced this last challenge: if he couldn’t find a way to pay off his debts, he could lose his home and the family farm.

* The American doctrinal chasm was deep and wide, and often proslavery Christian beliefs were immensely twisted, while others simply didn’t make much sense. The self-purchased former slave Olaudah Equiano wrote in his autobiography, “One man told me that he had sold 41,000 negroes, and that he once cut off a negro man’s leg for running away. I told him that the Christian doctrine taught us to do unto others as we would that others should do unto us. He then said that his scheme had the desired effect—it cured that man and some others of running away.” Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (London, 1789).

* Jewett later stated in an 1883 interview in The Manhattan that his was the first edition of Josiah Henson’s life story, and that he had personally written about a quarter of it. Jewett and Bishop Gilbert Haven had worked, through “tedious cross-examination,” to update the book on behalf of their nearly illiterate subject.

* After the Emancipation Proclamation, John Henson’s eldest son came to Canada to see his father. Josiah wrote, “The meeting would have done President Lincoln’s heart good if he had witnessed it.” Josiah Henson, “Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life”: An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson, edited by John Lobb (London: Christian Age Office, 1876), 154. Three years later, James returned and invited John to rejoin his wife and sons in America. James’s former owner and her husband had purchased a large dairy farm in New Jersey, but couldn’t get used to white servants. She convinced James to bring his family to her farm. James became the dairy superintendent, while John lived as a well-paid servant into his nineties. Although we don’t know the circumstances, we do know that Josiah’s younger brother, also named James, eventually made his way to Dawn. He was buried in a cemetery on the 9th Concession in Chatham Township.

* After nearly 185 years of being sold and handed down as a relic, Nat Turner’s skull was delivered to researchers at National Geographic. DNA tests are underway to confirm authenticity.

* Stowe’s daughter Hattie wrote to her twin sister, Eliza, that “it was a very droll time that we had at the White House I assure you.… I will only say now that it was all very funny—and we were ready to explode with laughter all the while.” Once the women returned to their rooms, they apparently “screamed and held our sides while we relieved ourselves of the pent up laughter.” Quoted in Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Six Encounters with Lincoln: A President Confronts Democracy and Its Demons (New York: Penguin, 2017), 215.

* Stowe would go on to publish a warm report on Lincoln noting his “dry, weary, patient pain.” Her article also contains Lincoln’s chilling premonition, “Whichever way it ends… I have the impression that I sha’n’t last long after it’s over.” Quoted in Harold K. Bush, Lincoln in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs from Family, Friends, and Associates (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 111.

* Three days earlier, the well-known actor had attended a speech at the White House. Afterward, he said to coconspirator Lewis Powell, “That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever give.”

* The new school was named after William Wilberforce, the English politician who led the movement to end the British slave trade for twenty years.

† Thirty thousand dollars in 1871 would have a real price of $608,000 today. An unskilled worker would need to earn $4 million to earn the modern equivalent of $30,000, or $8 million using production worker compensation. Thirty thousand dollars had the economic status of $9.24 million today and the economic power of $72.9 million. In other words, in 1871 it was a massive sum.