The stage was set for the African-American migration into Canada in 1772, when
England declared that any slave reaching Canadian soil was automatically free.
Following the War of 1812, sizable numbers of runaways started to settle in
Canada. People began to call it the "Promised Land," a term that came into
wider usage after slavery was banned in 1834 throughout the British colonies.
Over the next thirty years, between one and two thousand African Americans
entered Canada each year.
The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 -which gave a slave owner
or his appointed agent the authority to retrieve a fugitive even in the North
with the assistance of local authorities-- caused many escapees living in the
northern states to cross into Canada. According to the British and
Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, within a year of the bill's passage, some five
thousand people had emigrated. Among them were free men and women whose
very liberty was threatened by kidnappers, who increasingly abducted and sold
them South; and others who felt they were not completely free.
Advocates of immigration to Canada included Abraham Shadd, a free black
shoemaker who aided fugitives in Delaware and Pennsylvania during the 1830s and
1840s before settling in Toronto in 1851. His daughter, Mary Ann Shadd, opened
a school for fugitive children and edited the
Provincial Freeman. She was the first black
woman in North America to found and edit a weekly newspaper.
Most runaways settled in what are now the Ontario Province cities of
Chatham, London, and Windsor; in rural areas along lakes
Erie and Ontario; and in the all-black communities of
In 1837, Joseph Taper and his family fled from Frederick County,
Virginia, "in consequence of bad usage." While staying in Pennsylvania, he read
a runaway notice in a newspaper calling for his apprehension. Later, in
Pittsburgh, he learned of the presence of a slave catcher. Taper took his
St. Catharines, Ontario, where he rented a farm and settled
in raising crops and livestock. In 1840, he wrote to a friend back in
"Since I have been in the Queen's dominions I have been well contented,
Yes well contented for Sure, man is as God intended he should be. That is, all
are born free & equal. This is a wholesome law, not like the Southern laws
which puts man made in the image of God on level with brutes ... I have enjoyed
more pleasure with one month here than in all my life in the land of
Teenager Henry K. Thomas fled in 1836 from Nashville, Tennessee. His
mother planned his escape after she found out he was slated to be sold. Thomas
made his way across middle Tennessee into Kentucky. He was captured and jailed
in Louisville, just short of reaching the Ohio River. That night, although
shackled, he broke out of jail, stole a small boat, and navigated over the
waterfalls to the Ohio shore, where a man removed his chains. By 1850, Thomas
was living in Buffalo, New York, as a property-owning free man.
Learning of the Fugitive Slave Act, he took his family across the border,
settling in the town of Buxton where he purchased a farm. By the eve of the
Civil War, perhaps thirty thousand fugitives lived in Canada.