Читать книгу Benjamin Drew. The Refugee. Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada онлайн

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When the first fugitive slaves arrived in Upper Canada, they generally stopped near the border following a strategic move. Since they had no funds, they could not move freely and deeply into the interior of the country and so, as exiles, they wished to remain close to the frontier hoping for an early return. In Blacks in Canada: A History, Robin Winks explains that

Small knots of Negroes settled at Welland and St. Catherines, back from the Niagara River; at Colchester, Windsor, and Amherstburg, opposite Detroit; near London, Chatham, and Dresden, in the center of the long peninsula of fertile lands that dipped south against Lake Erie almost to the latitude of New York City; and more slowly in Toronto, Oro, and in the Queen’s Bush (144).

On the eastern end of the peninsula Blacks found employment and acceptance to the extent that during the 1830s and well into 1840s many of the waiters in the hotels near the area of Niagara Falls were Black people. Even “travellers to the area agreed that Negroes could have steady employment and access to land as fertile as any settlers occupied” (Winks, Blacks in Canada 146). Their acceptance went so well that they also made it much further afield and began to settle in their own segregated communities to the degree that small communities of Blacks were spread throughout Canada West. They slowly got established throughout British North America, from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Victoria, Vancouver Island, around Halifax and southwards, and near Guysborough and Amherst, in Nova Scotia, around Lake Otnabog in New Brunswick, and in Montreal. Yet, the largest body of Blacks lived in Canada West.