The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto!

The first edition of The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto! was published by Natural Heritage Books in 2002 and reissued in electronic form a few years later. This new edition is fifty percent longer than the original and includes research findings from an archaeological investigation conducted in downtown Toronto in 2015. The authors are all highly respected. Shadd has written widely on African Canadian history and is also a curator and consultant on this subject. Afua Cooper is a multidisciplinary scholar, poet and historian who is currently leading the project “A Black People’s History of Canada”. Karolyn Smardz Frost is an award-winning writer, archaeologist and historian whose work with the Toronto Board of Education’s Archaeological Resource Centre in the 1980s involved thousands of school children and members of the public observing and participating in an archaeological dig on the site of the home of escaped slaves turned entrepreneurs Thornton and Lucie Blackburn.

The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto! is an excellent source of information about the long history of African Canadian presence in colonial Toronto. It reminds the reader that slaves of African origin were residents of what became British North America (BNA), along with freedmen and freedwomen and refugees from the American states seeking freedom from slavery laws in the USA prior to the end of the American Civil War and the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution that abolished slavery in December 1865.

In Upper Canada, it was Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe who supported the passage of a gradual abolition law in the province in 1793 with the passage of “An Act to Prevent the Further Introduction of Slaves, and to Limit the Term of Contracts for Servitude Within This Province”. One of the many illustrations in the book is a reproduction of the first part of this Act. This is one of the primary sources that illustrate the use of documents, texts, and artifacts that allow historians to develop historic narratives. The authors note that no slaves were actually freed by the Act, but it ensured that children of slaves would be made free at the age of twenty-five. Another feature of the act was the limit of period of indentures to a maximum term of nine years. The complexity of living under such conditions is evident in the case study of the Pompadour Family. The father, Mr. Pompadour was a free Black working for a wealthy family at the beginning of the 1800s. His wife Peggy, however, and their three children were all enslaved by the same family. Peggy was considered troublesome as she tried to run away, and, on more than one occasion, the man who “owned” her tried to sell her. A reproduction of an advertisement for the sale of Peggy and her son Jupiter is taken from the Upper Canada Gazette of February 22, 1806. As the historians note, this primary source of information sheds light onto the kinds of work that she performed: cooking, washing, and making both soap and candles. Jupiter was about fifteen and described as mainly a house servant but tall and strong and, one assumes, could be suited to physical labour. In telling the story of the Pompadours, the authors also drew upon textual records, such as a description of daughter Amy by Henry Scadding in his 1873 publication Toronto of Old, a death announcement of Mr. Pompadour from the York Gazette, and ration records from the Society for the Relief of the Sick and Destitute that had identified Peggy as a recipient for a time prior to August 1827. Slavery in all of the British Empire, including BNA, ended when the British Parliament’s “Slavery Abolition Act” passed in 1833 came into effect on 1 August 1834.

The authors clarify that, while they use the term Underground Railroad “to identify the population movement that brought African Americans to Canada in the years before the American Civil War”, about half of the freedom seekers, once described as fugitive slaves, managed the journey on their own with very little assistance from abolitionists and other allies in the USA. Free people were amongst the migrants, but their numbers are unclear. Perhaps many of the free people arrived after the “American Fugitive Slave Law” passed in 1850 threatened the freedom of both the escaped residing in northern states and free African Americans who might be captured by kidnappers.

The book is organized into 12 chapters. Several are general historical overviews of specific topics, including “Blacks in Early Toronto”, “Underground Railroad to Toronto”, “Life in the City”, “Living on the Outskirts”, “World of Children” and “Political Life”. These chapters include case studies of specific individuals and families who are known to us through primary and secondary sources. Young readers will appreciate the diverse illustrations that include early photographs, drawings reproduced from antiquarian books, images of advertisements and notices from contemporary newspapers, including the Colonial Advocate and the Provincial Freeman, 19th century maps and images from handwritten Census records, and modern photographs of artifacts uncovered at archaeological digs. Older readers can explore the detailed image credits that make up part of the end material. Occasionally, for example in the chapter “Social, Cultural and Religious Life in Toronto’s Black Community”, the narrative is somewhat dull when it strays into factual listing of church sects, church expansion and relocations. The chapter is still rich in social history, but secular readers may not appreciate the importance of the clergy and places of worship to the early Black community despite the authors’ sincere efforts.

One chapter focuses upon “Black Torontonians in the Civil War”. The authors use individual stories to illustrate their statement that “Canadian Black men who went to fight ranged from sailors and waiters through physicians and teachers. Not all came home.” The longest chapter is “Notable Black Torontonians”. It presents short biographies of 15 individuals or families. Two of the subjects are new to this edition, and others have been updated. It is clear from the writing that historians can piece together information from diverse sources including Census records, listings in city directories, published advertisements, obituaries, property records, and published works including the autobiography A Narrative of Thomas Smallwood, Colored Man issued in 1851. Given the sparseness of the historical records, the authors, at times. are forced to speculate. Artifacts unearthed from a couple of the biographies' properties reinforce the narratives of their lives.

As students are increasingly taught about the use of primary sources to understand the past, it is appropriate that the authors retained the final chapter from the first edition, “How Do We Know?” that describes the sources used by historians. In the new edition, they have added a new chapter titled “How Do We Know? Archaeology”. This chapter describes the archaeological work in the 1980s at the site of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn’s home under the playground of present day Inglenook Community School in east end Toronto near the mouth of the Don River, and the recent work conducted in 2015 at the Courthouse Site where Holly Martelle and her team from Timmins Martelle Heritage Consultants excavated a whole city block north of Osgoode Hall behind the Toronto City Hall that opened in 1965. Photographs from the excavations, images of artifacts uncovered, and descriptions of the early African Canadian residents who lived and worked in these places can introduce young readers to a specialized field that is important to our understanding of the past. This excavation work preceded the construction of a new Courthouse.

The Toronto-centred nature of the work may be off-putting to some, including readers from suburban Toronto who may never or seldom visit the parts of Toronto that made up the Town of York and later City of Toronto in the 19th century. Nevertheless, the book will be an invaluable addition to any school, public and personal library that seeks to document the history of and contribution to society of African Canadians and the role that the Underground Railroad played in boosting the immigration of Black people to what became Ontario. The extensive list of recommendations for further reading includes books recent and antiquarian (that can usually be found digitized) and articles, in addition to a fairly extensive list of “Suggestions for Junior Readers” that identifies books published between 1988 and 2022. Some older works that are likely very hard to source today have been dropped from the listing that appeared in the first edition. The volume includes a useful index.