to raise that crop. Various difficulties had been encountered in its culture, and it was particularly difficult to find efficient supervisors who were acquainted with methods of cultivation. Therefore, Grey asked Henson to go to India as a supervisor.
It is interesting to note that Henson spoke of this effort on the part of the government as “the intention to introduce the culture of cotton into India on the American plan.”
It would seem that he recognized that forced labor was to be the keystone of the imperialist project. He refused to go to India on the grounds that he was more interested in the fate of the Canadian colony. There is no evidence that he had any particular interest in the fate of the Indian peasantry nor that his refusal was due to the nominal support which he must have given to the freedom-for-India plank in the platform of the English abolitionists.
It is extraordinary to realize today that while the American abolitionists under Garrison had two main theses—the abolition of slavery and equal suffrage for women—the English abolitionists, at least in the most advanced group, had a third which demanded freedom for India. At various times Henson and the other Negro abolitionists in England spoke at public meetings whose main intention was to promote this third principle.
Samuel Gurney gave Josiah a card of introduction to the archbishop of Canterbury whom he visited at Lambeth Palace. This dignitary of the English Church received Henson most kindly and granted him an interview which lasted well beyond the allotted time.
“At what university, sir, did you graduate?”
“I graduated, Your Grace, at the University of Adversity.”
“The University of Adversity? Where’s that?”
“It was my lot, Your Grace, to be born a slave and to pass my boyhood and all the former part of my life as a slave. I never entered a school, never read the Bible in my youth, and received all of my training under the most adverse circumstances. That is what I mean by graduating in the University of Adversity.”
“I understand you, sir, but is it possible that you are not a scholar?”
“I am not,” said Josiah.
“But I should never have suspected that you were not a liberally educated man. I have heard many Negroes talk but I’ve never seen one that could use such language as you. Will you tell me, sir, how you learned our language?”
Henson then related to Archbishop Sumner the story of his early slave days and the manner in which he had sought to imitate his customers, particularly those who spoke good English and for whom he reserved the best of the farm produce which he sold in the Washington market. On leaving the archbishop, the latter pressed a bank note for fifty pounds into his hand.
Upon another occasion, Josiah was invited along with a large company of Sabbath-school teachers to spend a day on the estate of Lord John Russell, who was, at that time, prime minister of England. “His magnificent park, filled with deer, of varied colors, from all climes, and sleek hares, which the poet Cowper would have envied, with numberless birds, whose plumage rivaled the rainbow in gorgeous colors, together with the choicest specimens of the finny tribe, sporting in their native element, drew from me the involuntary exclamation: ‘Oh, how different the condition of these happy, sportive, joyful creatures, from what is now the lot of millions of my colored brethren in America.’” And he went on with his effort to do something for these brethren.
Henson collected money with comparative ease, for he found it as great a pleasure to meet wealthy people in England as he had found it in Washington, where he had known them in vastly different circumstances. He liked to flatter people and agree with them and to be continually busy with the details of his “enterprise,” its administration, and the thousand petty intrigues which it entailed. He liked to imagine himself a master diplomat, the colorful impresario of the entire Negro population of Upper Canada. As he had responded long ago to the jocular, patronizing invitation of the drovers who had thought it sport to befuddle him with drink in the taverns along the way as he had conducted his fellow-slaves from one master to another, so, now, he was not apt to question any overture which was made to him by persons who appeared to be friendly. He could not ignore the fact that the periphery of the abolition movement in England and America contained many doubtful elements. In America it was a constant source of discussion. It was well known among devoted members of the association that their ranks were likely to be penetrated by spies, traitors, and saboteurs in the pay of the slavers. Cases, rare enough in all truth, had been found where even Negroes sold their brothers for a price. There is no proof of any such accusation brought against Henson, however loose he may have been about money matters, and despite the fact that the later history of his life in relation to the colony at Dawn is one long record of protracted lawsuits.
Neither Josiah Henson nor most of those Uncle Toms who followed him have a price to be reckoned in money. Their price is the achievement of a certain celebrity, or even renown, as good men with whom to make mutually satisfactory terms when the case in dispute would give the right so unequivocally to the weaker party that no compromise would be possible if it were not for that very disparity in strength. With a desire for notoriety, which is often innocent enough, Uncle Tom is easily persuaded that his own prominence can work to the advantage of those to whom his aid is formally pledged. And with this desire go a certain blind eagerness and credulity which can lead him into the company of his worst enemies.
Henson was very sure that he was apt and alert, capable of judging men and their motives with a discernment derived from the lesson of his forty-three years of slavery. If he could flatter himself that he was the representative of the entire Negro population of Canada, though he knew it to be untrue, he could listen with greater readiness and a show of mock solemnity to those who approached him with a certain deference, presumably due to one who occupied the position which he allowed it to be believed that he held. He never denied that he was an important man, and he was seen in the company of men who were important in English affairs. Unfortunately they were not all abolitionists nor even antislavery men.
Some of these associates of Henson were men who had lost their property in the West Indies not twenty years earlier; the slaves held by the British plantation owners had been liberated in 1833. Many of these proprietors claimed that they had suffered severe financial loss in the subsequent exploitation of their holdings, although they had been richly indemnified by the government at the time of emancipation.
The landlords of Jamaica and Trinidad now looked to the Negroes who were settled in Canada as a source from which enough labor could be drawn to revive the plantations. The defenders of slavery remarked with solicitude that there would be fewer difficulties of a purely practical nature to contend with under a system which would closely resemble that which the ex-fugitives had known in the States. They added kindly that the world had seen what freemen of color could accomplish even in the face of the greatest adversity, and speculated on how much one could expect when Canadian adversity would be exchanged for patriarchal ease. Those men in England who felt that emigration would serve their interests were certain that the climate of the islands, pleasantly reminiscent of the South, would be a great factor in persuading the Canadian colonists to listen to their blandishments. They sought out all the men of color who visited England and endeavored to interest them in the project.
William Wells Brown was one of those who was approached, and he wrote of it in the following manner to Frederick Douglass, who was in America:
Knowing that there were many proprietors and agents dissatisfied with the abolition of slavery in the West Indies, and that a species of slavery had been carried on under the name of emigration, I frankly told these men upon what conditions I thought our people would go to the West Indies.
But as to going there to be bound or fettered in any way, I assured him, that no fugitive slave would consent to.
