page_title: Black Canadians
section_title: Underground Railroad
hierarchical_section_title: Black Canadians / History / Underground Railroad
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of William Hall (VC)
context_page_description: Black Canadians is a designation used for people of full or partial sub-Saharan African descent, who are citizens or permanent residents of Canada. The majority of Black Canadians are of Caribbean origin, though the population also consists of African American immigrants and their descendants, as well as many native African immigrants.
  Black Canadians often draw a distinction between those of Afro-Caribbean ancestry and those of other African roots. The term African Canadian is occasionally used by some Black Canadians who trace their heritage to the first slaves brought by British and French colonists to the North American mainland. Promised freedom by the British during the American Revolutionary War, thousands of Black Loyalists were resettled by the Crown in Canada afterward, such as Thomas Peters. In addition, an estimated 10 to 30 thousand fugitive slaves reached freedom in Canada from the Southern United States during the years before the Civil War with the Northern states, aided by people along the Underground Railroad.
context_section_description: There is a sizable community of Black Canadians in Nova Scotia and Southern Ontario who trace their ancestry to African-American slaves who used the Underground Railroad to flee from the United States, seeking refuge and freedom in Canada. From the late 1820s, through the time that the United Kingdom itself forbade slavery in 1833, until the American Civil War began in 1861, the Underground Railroad brought tens of thousands of fugitive slaves to Canada. In 1819, Sir John Robinson, the Attorney-General of Upper Canada, ruled: "Since freedom of the person is the most important civil right protected by the law of England...the negroes are entitled to personal freedom through residence in Upper Canada and any attempt to infringe their rights will be resisted in the courts". After Robinson's ruling in 1819, judges in Upper Canada refused American requests to extradite run-away slaves who reached Upper Canada under the grounds "every man is free who reaches British ground". One song popular with African Americans called the Song of the Free had the lyrics: "I'm on my way to Canada, That cold and distant land, The dire effects of slavery, I can no longer stand, Farewell, old master, Don't come after me, I'm on my way to Canada, Where colored men are free!".
  In 1850, the United States Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which gave bounty hunters the right to recapture run-away slaves anywhere in the United States and ordered all federal, state and municipal law enforcement to co-operate with the bounty hunters in seizing run-away slaves. Since the Fugitive Slave Act stripped accused fugitive slaves of any legal rights such as the right to testify in court that they were not run-away slaves, cases of freemen and freewomen being kidnapped off the streets to be sold into slavery became common. The U.S justice system in the 1850s was hostile to black people, and little inclined to champion their rights. In 1857, in the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that black Americans were not and never could be U.S. citizens under any conditions, a ruling that appeared to suggest that laws prohibiting slavery in the northern states were unconstitutional. As a result of the Fugitive Slave Act and legal rulings to expand slavery in the United States, many free blacks living in the United States chose to seek sanctuary in Canada with one newspaper in 1850 mentioning that a group of blacks working for a Pittsburgh hotel had armed themselves with handguns before heading for Canada saying they were "... determined to die rather be captured". The Toronto Colonist newspaper on 17 June 1852 noted that almost every ship or boat coming into Toronto harbor from the American side of Lake Ontario seemed to be carrying a run-away slave. One of the more active "conductors" on the Underground Railroad was Harriet Tubman, the "Black Moses" who made 11 trips to bring about 300 run-away slaves to Canada, most of whom settled in St. Catherines. Tubman guided her "passengers" on nocturnal journeys (travelling via day was too risky) through the forests and swamps, using as her compass the north-star and on cloudy nights seeing what side the moss was growing on trees, to find the best way to Canada. Such trips on the Underground Railroad involved much privation and suffering as Tubman and her "passengers" had to avoid both the bounty-hunters and law enforcement and could go for days without food as they travelled through the wilderness, always following the north-star. Tubman usually went to Rochester, New York, where Frederick Douglass would shelter the run-aways and crossed over to Canada at Niagara Falls. Unlike the U.S. customs, which under the Fugitive Slave Act had to co-operate with the bounty hunters, the customs authorities on the Canadian side of the border were far more helpful and "looked the other way" when Tubman entered Canada with her "passengers".
  During the course of one week in June 1854, 23 run-away slaves evaded the U.S border patrols to cross the Detroit river to freedom in Windsor while 43 free people also cross
caption: William Hall of Horton, Nova Scotia was the first black man to win the Victoria Cross
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