a master a slave worked as hard as he was forced to work. In some the habit became ingrained so long as they lived under the conditions of the system, but the best rebelled. They learned to avoid both work and punishment until the time came when they could escape. In the first days of freedom, therefore, they were content with little.
It seems that to a large extent they had the same opportunities as the other settlers; they were considered equal under law, and they could take up land on the same terms as a white colonist. Many of them, however, did not know this; and, while all Canadian authorities have always been anxious to point to the unbroken tradition of legal freedom prevailing in that country, there may well have been a conspiracy of silence in regard to opportunity on the part of the white settlers. A supply of cheap and expert labor was a windfall in frontier days when every man was intent on carving out a homestead for himself in the wilderness. Real evidence of race prejudice was, however, absent until some years later.
Henson as a preacher, therefore, had other themes than purely religious ones to develop for his flock. The religious form in which they were cast served only to add more weight to the practical aspects of his proposals. He saw that they must either better themselves, as their neighbors were trying to do, or slip down into an inferior position in the community. In the first joy of their deliverance they had been content to feel themselves free to move about from place to place and to work or rest as they pleased. Generally, they worked for hire upon the lands of others and had no thought of working for themselves.
Mr. Risley, for whom Josiah worked after leaving the Hibbards, agreed to loan his house for meetings where the most intelligent and successful members of the growing colored community were called together to discuss plans for bettering their lot. Labor was scarce and they had been reasonably well paid; so it was that they found they had among themselves a sum in cash sufficient to allow them to settle on land of their own, if the project were undertaken on a cooperative basis.
“The joy we had at first taken in mere freedom has rendered us content with a lot far inferior to what might be obtained. We must benefit from the example which this country has set for us and strike out with energy and enterprise,” said Josiah. He was determined to prove that all which it was possible for the white colonist to gain was possible for them also. “I was not deterred from this task of persuasion by the perception of the immense contrast in all their habits and character generated by long ages of freedom for the one and servitude for the other; activity and sloth, independence and subjection.”
He reiterated that what others had done they too could do, and he brought his associates around to believing it. In a short time he had the enthusiastic support of all those who had come to his meetings and who had some influence in the group. They agreed to take charge of his family and deputized him to make a journey of exploration in search of a place where they might settle.
Josiah started out in the autumn of 1834 and traveled over the region that lies between Lakes Ontario, Erie, and Huron. The country is quite flat and was, at that time, very heavily wooded. He says in his autobiography that he traveled on foot, yet almost the first outside account of him dates either from this or perhaps the second journey which he was to make a few months later, when the Reverend Benjamin Cronyn recorded in his diary that he first saw Josiah Henson trying to get into a coach at Brantford.
Mr. Cronyn was on his way home from Ireland. He had with him “several thousand hunting dogs” which he expected to sell. The number would seem to be a printer’s error or the nightmare of someone who had been to a dog show. Mr. Cronyn was making the trip from Hamilton to Lake Ontario by covered wagon, and perhaps because he was a fellow-clergyman, he gave Josiah a lift and a good deal of advice on the nature of the surrounding country.
Henson, during his tour of the semipeninsula bounded by the three Great Lakes, came to a territory east of Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River which attracted him by its evident fertility. As it seemed in all ways suited to the purpose of the colony, he decided to go no further but to return and make a report. His companions were impressed with his enthusiasm, but as they had already experienced the violently alternating seasons of Canada, so different from the more gradual changes to which they had been accustomed in the southern states, they advised him to return again at another time of year. The climate of even that eastern portion of Canada whose temperatures are influenced by the proximity of the great inland seas like Ontario, Erie, and Huron, was a greater trial to these newcomers than it was to the white colonists, of whom the greater majority had come from Scotland. The cold winters were to play an important part in the future of the Negro settlers, and their adaptability to the climate was to be a subject of debate.
At the request of his associates Josiah waited until the following summer and then made a second trip to the region which he had surveyed. This time he pushed on a little further toward the head of Lake Erie. There he came on an extensive tract of government-owned Crown Lands which had been granted to a Mr. McCormick upon certain conditions, the chief of which was that within a given number of years he must prove to the satisfaction of a land commission that a percentage of the land had been cleared and was under cultivation. At such a time he would be given the absolute title to the property.
In this case, McCormick had very cannily rented the virgin land to such settlers as came along, and when they could not meet his terms, summarily evicted them, thus benefiting from the improvements which they had made. It was the customary skin game of the time and compares rather favorably, from a moral point of view, with the manner in which the railroads and the clergy were reserving immense tracts of the country for themselves.
At the time when Henson and his companions presented themselves as future tenant farmers, a good portion of the land in question had been cleared. This was a decided advantage in the matter of the immediate raising of crops with which to sustain themselves, for they had limited resources and no equipment and could not afford the time and labor necessary for the job of cutting trees and blasting roots. They settled on the land the following spring, and set about raising crops of wheat and tobacco. Their plan was to save all the money they could in order to purchase the land on which Josiah had set his heart when first he viewed it.
After the Negro group had worked these farms for about a year, Henson found out that to acquire the freehold deed to the property, according to the conditions of the grant, all necessary improvements must be made by the one to whom the grant was given. McCormick did not own the land as yet and was in no way entitled to the rent which he was exacting from them. They determined to pay him no more. Josiah applied to Sir John Cockburn, who held an official position in the province, and was told to address himself to the provincial legislature. There he found that the friends of his landlord were too powerful for him, and he failed in his first application for terms of his own. The following year, however, these friends of McCormick were out of office, and Henson’s group was able to take over the land subject to the improvement clause on which the former titleholder had held it.
They were thus free of the obligation to pay rent, but the land was not their own and, as they had no political influence, it did not seem likely that it ever would be. Henson was certain that some time short of the expiration of their term some man in office might well advise a wealthy purchaser to buy it outright. In this way they would lose all the profit of their work and be driven off. With this hanging over their heads there was little incentive to clear more land than was necessary to raise sufficient crops for their own needs. They remained six or seven years in this position.
During this time immigration from the United States went on at a greater rate than ever before, and members of the colony were joined by relatives and friends who had heard of their success, moderate though it still was at that time. They came singly or in little groups, having in many cases been forced to part with even their wives and children. In most cases they were destitute, but in the early years, at least, they were quickly absorbed as laborers, although some became barbers, bootblacks, or carpenters, for they came from the more privileged class of slaves who knew a trade.
The country
