in the line of laborers next to a colored man, and soon got into conversation with him.
“How far is it to Canada?” he asked.
And when the other fellow gave him a knowing look, he realized that he was at once understood.
“Want to go to Canada? Come along with us then. Our captain’s a fine fellow who will take you. We are going to Buffalo.”
“Buffalo? How far is that from Canada?”
“Don’t you know, man? Just across the river.”
At this Josiah decided to tell him that he was not alone, but that his wife and children were hidden not far off.
“I’ll speak to the captain,” said the other. In a few minutes the captain beckoned Josiah aside.
“The doctor says you want to go to Buffalo with your family. Well, why not go with me, then? Doc says you got a family. Bring them too.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Where do you stop?”
“About a mile back.”
“How long you been there?”
“No time at all,” replied Josiah after a moment’s hesitation.
“Come, my good fellow, tell us all about it. You’re running away, ain’t you? How long will it take you to get ready?”
“Be back in half an hour, sir.”
“Well, get you along then, and fetch them.”
But before Josiah had gone fifty yards, he called him back. “You go on getting the grain in. When we get off, I’ll lay to, over opposite that island, and send a boat back. There’s a lot of regular nigger-catchers in the town below, and they might suspect if you brought your party out of the bush by daylight.”
Josiah worked while his heart sang, and soon the two or three hundred bushels of wheat were aboard, the hatches fastened down, the anchor raised and sail hoisted.
He watched the vessel leave its mooring and run before the breeze. Already she seemed to have passed the spot at which the captain had said he would lay to. He was sure they were leaving without him; a moment before, his hope had been so great that now he was utterly crushed. What cruel sport they had made of him! But no, she swung around in the wind, the sails flapping as the ship lay motionless. The sun set, leaving the world in a dusk which would make it safe for him to lead his wife and children down to the water’s edge. Aboard ship he could see that they were lowering a boat, and the oars flashed as they rowed toward the shore.
The black man to whom Josiah had spoken had come along with two other sailors. They jumped ashore and the four of them started off together to the place where the other Hensons lay hidden. They searched the whole area, for at first Josiah was not sure just where his family had been. He could not believe his senses, but, yes, they were gone. He was frozen with horror, as he supposed that they had been found and carried off. The three sailors told him that as there was no time to lose, he must come along back to the ship with them. Filled with despair, he turned to follow, when he stumbled across one of the children, lying in the grass. In a moment he came upon the others, and finally found Charlotte, who lay speechless in a thicket. She had given him up for lost as he had been gone so long, and had supposed he had been captured. When she heard his voice along with the voices of several other men, she believed that he had been forced to come back for the rest of them. In her terror, she had tried to hide, and when he came upon her, she was gripped with silent paroxysms of hysteria in which she could understand nothing of what he said. They had to drag and carry her to the boat before she recovered herself sufficiently to understand that at last they were near freedom.
As they neared the ship at anchor in midstream, the captain, who was a Scot, leaned over the taffrail and shouted, “Come up on deck and clop your wings and craw like a rooster; you’re a free nigger as sure as you’re a live man.” And with that welcome they came aboard.
Round went the vessel, the wind plunged into her sails and the water seethed and hissed past her sides. The tension of the past weeks had been too abruptly released, and even Josiah cried that night.
The following evening they reached Buffalo, but it was too late to cross the river that night. The next morning the captain called Josiah on deck, and pointing to the distance, said, “You see those trees; they grow on free soil, and as soon as your feet touch that, you’re a man. I want to see you go and be a free man. I’m poor myself and have nothing to give you. I only sail this boat for wages, but I’ll see you across.” And then he called to the ferryman, “What will you take this man and his family over for—he’s got no money.”
“Three shillings will do it.”
The captain reached into his pocket and, pulling out a dollar, gave it to Josiah and said, “Be a good fellow, won’t you?”
“Yes, I’ll use my freedom well. God bless you.”
It was the morning of October 28, 1830, and when Josiah jumped from the ferry, he threw himself on the sand, kissed it, and jumped around shouting like a madman.
“He’s some crazy fellow,” said a Colonel Warren, who happened to be there.
“Oh, no, Master, don’t you know? I am free.”
The colonel burst into a shout of laughter and said, “Well, I never knew freedom made a man roll on the sand in such a fashion.”
Dawn in Canada
/ 1 /
Up until the time that Josiah Henson landed from the Buffalo ferry and stepped onto Canadian soil, we have no firsthand account of his life but his own. We know only what he chose to tell of his first forty-one years, but what he had to tell was in itself extraordinarily revealing both of the material conditions and the human relations developed by the slave system. There may be a great number of things left unsaid, or forgotten for a purpose, in the story of his early years as it appears in his autobiography; yet there is, on the other hand, much told by himself which is not entirely to his credit. He had great powers of observation and often a frank and ingenuous fashion of revealing the complexities of his own character.
Many of his faults he laid to the account of the system in which he had been brought up, but he did not change much in later years. We may infer that important events have been left out of his own story of the first period of his life because the second part of the book, which deals with Henson’s life in freedom, neglects to mention important happenings which we can learn from other sources. Almost from the moment that he landed in Canada there is a broader field than his own account from which to draw information about his activities. From a little after 1830 until his death in 1883 others were to record and to remember things which he might have chosen to forget. Old diaries, letters and papers can be found in Canada, and in some cases memories of him have been gathered from people still alive or others who have died fairly recently.
Once in Canada he was, indeed, as the captain who had carried him there said, a man, and considered so by all around him. No longer a chattel slave, no longer a fugitive in fear of his life, he must prove to himself and to the world that he was capable of making full use of his freedom.
At the time that Henson landed, slavery had not yet been abolished in the British colonies and was to remain on the statute
