Written By Chip Martin
The operator of the ferry that had just carried passengers across the Niagara River to the landing at Fort Erie from Buffalo that October 28, 1830 couldn’t believe his eyes.
Here was a Black man who’d made the crossing from Buffalo with his wife and four children suddenly acting like a crazy man the moment his foot touched British soil.
“I am free,” the 41-year-old man shrieked, while jumping up and down and astonishing bystanders with his antics. The ferry man thought the man was having some sort of fit.
Josiah Henson assured him he was fine, simply overjoyed to finally find freedom.
Henson was born enslaved on a Maryland plantation in 1789. He became a Methodist preacher, despite an inability to read. He tried to buy his freedom in 1829, but was betrayed by his enslaver. In response, he gathered his wife and children and fled north to Cincinnati and then walked 450 miles to Buffalo where they caught the ferry to Upper Canada which he learned had begun phasing out slavery back in 1793.
A steady stream of formerly enslaved persons had begun streaming into the British colony at Fort Erie, Niagara and to the west at Sandwich and Windsor. Henson and other new arrivals found work on area farms, but he was a natural leader and was given the task of finding a suitable location for a Black settlement.
He walked as far west as Essex County and found suitable land near Colchester where he and others spent six years working the earth before learning about a new Black Community planned in Dawn Township near Dresden. Henson moved his family there in 1842 and became the face of the settlement, travelling widely on speaking tours to raise money for it and the anti-slavery movement, in New England, the Midwest, New York and Britain.
Settlers at Dawn grew wheat, corn, tobacco and exported black walnut lumber to the United States and England. About 500 Black people called the settlement home and it became an important destination for travellers on the Underground Railroad.
In 1849, Henson published his memoirs in a book that sold well, inspiring American author and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, loosely based on Henson’s story. Her work became a best-seller and an influential denunciation of slavery.
Henson was not much of an administrator and the Dawn Settlement was plagued by bad management. He also found himself at loggerheads with Mary Ann Shadd Cary and other Black leaders for his insistence that self-segregating settlements were the best choice for new arrivals. Shadd Cary and others argued that integrating into existing white communities would lead to acceptance by the wider community more quickly and effectively.
Just before the Civil War, the struggling Dawn Settlement closed its doors and sold the land. The Josiah Henson Museum is now located there. It is now a provincial heritage site. His house and the church in which Henson preached are key features.
In his later years, Henson was granted audiences with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle and with United States President Rutherford B. Hayes at the White House.
He died at the age of 93 in 1883 and is buried near his former home. He is credited with helping about 200 freedom seekers along the Underground Railroad. A nearby historical marker states: “Henson’s celebrity raised international awareness of Canada as a haven for refugees from slavery.”
Certainly, had Josiah Henson not escaped to Canada, history in Southwestern Ontario might have unfolded differently.
Chip Martin, also known as Brian Martin, is the author of From Underground Railroad to Rebel Refuge: Canada and the Civil War.