Bound for Canaan (55 page)

Caught amid the collateral damage of this journalistic warfare were the reputations of the Dawn colony and Josiah Henson, Bibb's friend, whom the
Provincial Freeman
cruelly described as a “nigger driver” doing the bidding of white financial backers. There was no more evidence that Henson was personally dishonest than there was to convict Bibb. However, the old man's limited management ability had finally proved inadequate to the complexities of overseeing a two-hundred-person community, developing a local economy, and operating the manual labor school. Financial records were chaotic, at best. A sawmill long championed by Henson had come to nothing. When the manager to whom Henson had leased it absconded with three boatloads of lumber, the unpaid workers vented their anger on the mill, and tore it down to its foundations. “Thus they ruthlessly destroyed this valuable building, the establishment of which had cost me so many anxious hours,” Henson would gloomily recall. “When it was gone, I felt as if I had parted with an old idolized friend.” Meanwhile, mounting debts kept him on a treadmill of fund-raising as far afield as Boston and London, precisely the image of “begging” from whites that so incensed Shadd.

Another problem was more subtle. Henson could proudly point out that the institute had educated some five hundred students since it opened in 1841, and that not one of them had been arrested for even a misdemeanor by the local police. But he had idealistically envisioned the colony as a sort of black utopia that would grow steadily more populous over time. What happened, in fact, was that immigrants typically acquired the skills that the institute offered—basic literacy, and a crash course in farming—and then moved on to someplace where they could earn more money. Dawn was a stepping stone to a better life in freedom, but it was rarely a final destination. Management of the institute was eventually taken over by a British abolitionist, John Scoble, who was supposed to reorganize the community's finances, but who, in Henson's words, squandered its meager resources on “the most expensive cattle in the market, at
fancy prices,” and on “expensive farming utensils.” Scoble also pulled down the school buildings, “as they were too primitive to suit his magnificent ideas.” They were never rebuilt.

Perhaps Dawn's fatal weakness, however, was Henson himself. The indomitable leader who had carried his children on his back across hundreds of miles of frontier wilderness to freedom, who had returned to Kentucky to lead away fugitive slaves, and who through force of personality had brought into existence one of the most ambitious black settlements in Canada, had in his mid-sixties become an imperious and self-righteous patriarch who could admit no wrong, telling critics simply that his hands were too full “feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and instructing the ignorant” to bother with carping complaints. He had also grown increasingly vain, boasting of his (probably slight) acquaintanceship with “some of the noblest men and women in England,” and dilating at embarrassing length upon his having enjoyed a picnic on the grounds of the prime minister's estate, during one of his fund-raising trips to Britain. While he remained immensely popular as a preacher, in demand by both black and white congregations, Shadd's attacks effectively marked the end of his political influence outside Dawn.

For Henry Bibb, the controversy with Shadd ended in personal catastrophe. In October 1853 fire wiped out the office of the
Voice of the Fugitive
. Bibb was virtually ruined. Arson was assumed. Bibb suspected Shadd's partisans, but the culprits were never found. For a time he managed to put out an occasional single-sheet edition, but the paper never recovered its former influence. Bibb was still only thirty-nine years old, and as charismatic as ever, and for a man who had escaped from slavery seven times, the recovery of his fortunes and reputation might well have proved possible. Much was still expected of him. But in August 1854 he died suddenly from an undetermined illness, at the lowest ebb in his life as a free man, eclipsed by the star of Mary Ann Shadd. Meanwhile, if Shadd's coruscating attacks did not cripple the Refugee Home Society by themselves, they didn't help. In 1855, the touring abolitionist Benjamin Drew, who admired Bibb, found just twenty disappointed families living on the society's lands, complaining about the terms of land purchase, restrictions on the reselling of property, and the ban on alcohol. No more than sixty families would ever settle there.

Shadd too was damaged by their quarrel. Protests against both her
abrasive style and the fact that a woman dared even to engage in such public polemics compelled her to relinquish personal control of the
Provincial Freeman
in 1855. Her brother Isaac took over as publisher, and William Newman, a black Baptist minister with long experience in refugee affairs, as editor. A defiant, and well-justified, editorial in the
Freeman
blamed her surrender on a “wrongly developed public sentiment that would crush
a woman
whenever she attempts to do what has hitherto been assigned to men, even though God designed her to do it.” However, she continued to write much, if not most, of the paper's copy, and there was no slackening in her diatribes. She attacked long-suffering Hiram Wilson for allegedly enjoying “fine furnishings and valuable real estate,” and for distributing clothing and food only to blacks who supported him. She even mocked Frederick Douglass, who believed that blacks should remain in the United States to fight slavery, rather than immigrate to Canada. “Having been permitted so long to remain in our tub,” she wrote in 1856, “we would rather the great Frederick Douglass, for whose public career we have the most profound pity, would stay out of our sunlight.”

The only planned black settlement that Shadd did not attack was, on its surface, the most paternalistic of all. But it was also the most successful. The origins of the Elgin Settlement, also known as the Buxton Mission, were unique, even romantic. It was the single-handed creation of Reverend William King, a University of Glasgow–trained scholar, with a leonine shock of black hair, a craggy Presbyterian demeanor, and a commitment to abolition hardened by years of ethically troubled residence in the South. After immigrating to the United States from their native Ireland, King's family settled in Ohio, where their farm eventually became a station on the Underground Railroad. King himself, aspiring to a career as an educator, accepted a position as headmaster of a private academy in Louisiana, where he fell in love with and married the daughter of a wealthy slaveholding family. He feared the corrupting atmosphere of slavery on his family for “both the life that is now and that which is to come,” and resolved to have nothing to do with “the domestic institutions of the country.” However, when his wife, Mary, died suddenly in 1848, he was mortified to find himself, as her heir, the owner of fourteen slaves. By then King had lived long enough in the South to realize that simple manumission, difficult enough in itself in Louisiana, would consign the slaves to lives of poverty and hopeless insecurity. After considerable prayer, he de
termined to build for them, and with them, their own “City of God,” a “haven against social ostracism and legal discrimination,” where they could live as fully free men and women, in Canada.

King, in contrast to Henson, Wilson, and Bibb, had a real gift for administration, and never allowed pious hopes to cloud sound judgment. He traveled to Canada, where he enlisted support from the Presbyterian Synod, and acquired an eighteen-square-mile tract of land forested with oak, hickory, beech, and elm, near Chatham. He recruited twenty-four respected businessmen, including Wilson Abbott, Toronto's most successful black entrepreneur, to oversee the settlement's finances, through an incorporated company empowered to raise investment capital, to be called the Elgin Association, in honor of Lord Elgin, the governor general of Canada. Settlers would be required to pay a total of one hundred and twenty-five dollars for fifty acres of land, the standard allotment, either in a lump sum or in yearly installments. Land could neither be rented nor sharecropped until the purchaser had fully paid for it, and if resold within ten years, it had to be transferred only to other blacks. King left nothing to chance. Before a single settler appeared on the land, he wanted to ensure that the community would be a success, and that it would not only match in respectability and aesthetics, but demonstrably surpass, neighboring white towns. Each settler was required to clear at least six acres immediately, and to build a house that had to be a minimum of eighteen feet by twenty-four feet in area, be set back precisely thirty-three feet from the road, and be surrounded by a picket fence and a flower garden.

King personally led his band of settlers by steamer to Cincinnati, where he formally handed them their papers of manumission, and then by canal to Lake Erie, and across it by steamer to Chatham. Waiting for them when they arrived in December 1849, they found the first of many fugitives who would make their home at Elgin, Isaac Riley and his family, who had escaped from slavery in Missouri only a few months before. Another early settler was the notorious William Parker, who was wanted for treason and murder in the United States for his leading role in the Christiana, Pennsylvania, resistance. He was introduced to King by Henry Bibb. “[King] received me very politely,” Parker wrote in his 1866 memoir, “and said that, after I should feel rested, I could go out and select a lot. He also offered to kindly give me meals and pork for my family, until I could get work.” Many more affluent blacks settled in the surrounding area, includ
ing Mary Ann Shadd's father, Abraham, who bought two hundred acres of land nearby, and no doubt helped to soften her view of Reverend King.

From the start, King fostered an atmosphere of shared responsibility. The settlers, with King working alongside them, saw in hand, joined together in logging bees, chopping bees, and house-raising bees. “When we grew tired of the cold and hard work,” one settler recalled, “Mr. King would jump upon a stump and swing his axe around, calling out ‘Hurrah boys' and set us laughing over some nonsense.” King led rather than governed, with a deft touch for the sensitivities of men and women who had only recently slipped from the control of omnipotent white masters. He established a five-member court of arbitration, for which he disqualified himself. The court took over management of industrialization, emergencies, festivals, and general welfare, and handled complaints and disputes. Other committees elected annually saw to it that laws were enforced, and the settlement's strict regulations obeyed. Fugitives were always welcome, and at six o'clock every morning and nine every evening, a five-hundred-pound bell sent as a gift by the black Presbyterians of Pittsburgh rang out its clarion call across the forest, in King's words, “proclaiming liberty to the captive.”

Initially, the settlers faced harsh prejudice. Opposition coalesced around the demagogic editor of the
Chatham Journal
and regional power, Edwin Larwill, a deceptively elfin-looking tinsmith with a fringe of curly beard, whose followers collectively called themselves the “Free and Easy Club.” Declaring blacks to be “indolent, vicious and ungovernable,” Larwill told anyone who would listen that any further influx would destroy property values, lead to racial “amalgamation,” and provoke war with the United States. He demanded that a poll tax be imposed on blacks, and that they be barred from voting, and ultimately deported to the United States. To blacks, Larwill was an all-too-familiar type. In the United States, men with views like his filled Congress and state legislatures, mobbed black neighborhoods, and hunted fugitive slaves across the countryside. King maintained a low profile, at least initially, keeping a strict watch over the settlement, and counseling the settlers to give no offense to their white neighbors. At times, armed blacks patrolled the woods around the settlement, making it clear that if they were attacked they would fight back.

But King had a subtler strategy to overcome whites' fears. His trump
card was education. He set out to provide Elgin with the best school in the vicinity. He rejected the idea of an industrial school, like Dawn's, reasoning that it would channel blacks into low-skilled trades. Instead, he emphasized academics, beginning with English, arithmetic, and geography, and soon adding Latin and Greek. Within months after the school's opening, white children appeared, asking if they could attend, and then white adults. King welcomed everyone free of charge. Soon there were more white children in the Elgin school than in the district one. “The hard feeling against myself and the coloured people considerably abated,” King would recall. “The whites and the blacks mingled freely on the playground, and sat together in the classroom, and stood up in the same class, and they found that the young coloured children were equal to the whites in learning, and some of the coloured children often stood at the head of the class.” Indeed, the fugitive Isaac Riley's oldest son, Jerome, who had been among those waiting for King when he arrived in 1849, was often produced for visitors to demonstrate his faultless Latin recitation of Virgil's
Aeneid
. He would go on to become a medical doctor, and establish the first Freedmen's hospital in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. (Another graduate, William Rapier, would become a Reconstruction era congressman from Alabama.) By the end of the decade, black graduates from Elgin were teaching in district schools throughout the area.

White fears also ebbed as the settlement prospered. Elgin's farmers profitably cultivated wheat, tobacco, corn, and hemp for the burgeoning markets of Canada West, enabling many settlers to pay off their farms in just five or six years. The settlement could soon boast a steam-powered sawmill, a brickyard, and a grist mill, as well as its own post office, temperance hotel, savings bank, and several churches. As early as 1854, Elgin's taxpayers were contributing more to the public coffers than any comparable town in the region, causing land values to actually rise. By 1855 the settlement's population had grown to more than eight hundred. (It would reach one thousand by the 1860s.) A visiting reporter from the
New York Tribune
found industrious inhabitants, tidy whitewashed cabins, and gardens blooming with phlox, poppies, and cornflowers. He wrote warmly of the people he met: “Those of them who have been accustomed to farming and have had some capital to commence with, have done remarkably well, having cleared more land and made greater improvements, than the
greater majority of white settlers in the same time and under similar circumstances.”