Canada
Montreal
The British colonies of Upper and Lower Canada were united under a central government in 1841, and the two regions became known simply as Canada West and Canada East. Canada West consisted of what is now the southern portion of the Province of Ontario. It attracted most of the freedom seekers who fled the United States on the Underground Railroad. They were drawn to several refugee communities between Toronto and Windsor. Freedom seekers also settled in Canada East, today’s Province of Quebec.
Montreal’s most celebrated refugee was Shadrach Minkins.
City of Montreal
Frederick “Shadrach” Minkins
On the night of Wednesday, February 12, 1851, John Caphart, a constable from Norfolk, Virginia, arrived in Boston with legal papers and a power of attorney from fugitive slave Shadrach Minkin’s owner, John DeBree. Caphart was a man who had a “hard, bad face, and ugly, not only in form and feature, but expression,” a face “made for a slave hunter, or by his business.”
A plan was put into place. Early on the morning of February 15th, U.S. Marshals would surprise Minkins at Taft’s Cornhill Coffee House where he was working as a waiter. However, the man who was to identify Minkins did not show up. To avoid suspicion, two of the marshals ordered coffee. Minkins waited on them. When he went to get their change, two other marshals came in the shop and seized him. They rushed him out a back passageway and into the nearby Court House...more
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Images:
Special Collections, Benjamin F. Feinberg Library, State University of New York at Plattsburgh,
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Broadside Collection, Rare Books Division, Boston Public Library, cited in Gary Collison's Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press), 111 |
