Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region during the Final Decades of Slavery By dann j. Broyld

Abstract

Reviewed by: Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region during the Final Decades of Slavery By dann j. Broyld Richard Bell Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region during the Final Decades of Slavery. By dann j. Broyld. Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv, 296. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7706-8.) In July 1835, a slave trader named Bacon Tate sent his agents across the northern border of the United States to capture twenty Black fugitives. In the town of St. Catharines in Canada West (today’s Ontario), Tate’s men snatched three members of the Stanford family—husband, wife, and six-week-old child—under cover of night. They dragged the Stanfords back across the border, stopping in the town of Hamburg, New York, to rest and regroup. When this Black family’s friends in St. Catharines realized what had happened, they set off in pursuit, crossing the same Niagara River border. They tracked the Stanfords to a hotel room, where they found them bound and bloodied, and then hustled them into a coach and made their way back across the border. “I thank God that I am again in Canada!” Mrs. Stanford rejoiced when her family returned to St. Catharines (pp. 104–5). This arresting vignette shows that during the antebellum nineteenth century, the U.S.-Canada border was remarkably porous, and the flow of people across it was bidirectional. The transnational movement of Black people like the Stanfords lies at the heart of dann j. Broyld’s new book, Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the Niagara Region during the Final Decades of Slavery, which explores the entangled history of Black life in St. Catharines, on the Canadian side of the Niagara River, and Rochester, New York, which sits on the Erie Canal just a few dozen miles inland on the American side. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Black fugitive migration to northern and western New York spiked. Rochester became a major destination, and Broyld demonstrates that those arriving there often stayed and put down roots. They set up Black churches, took advantage of mutual relief organizations, and worked doggedly to gain a toehold in the labor market. But many arriving Black fugitives also felt pressure to leave Rochester. Their freedom was fragile, and the threat of capture and reenslavement at the hands of men like Bacon Tate forced hundreds to cross the border into Canada. Frederick Douglass had come to Rochester in 1847 to set up a newspaper. Together he and his wife, Anna Murray Douglass, sheltered a total of perhaps four hundred onward-bound men and women in their home during the ten years before the Civil War. Those transnational migrants often ended up in St. Catharines, having crossed the border via a connective system of roadways, waterways, and railways. The most wondrous of these was the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge, which opened in 1848 and carried an average of fifty trains per day by 1860. As the Stanford family discovered in 1835, St. Catharines was an imperfect sanctuary. But it held many attractions. Slavery was prohibited in Canada after [End Page 359] 1834, and the Webster-Ashburton Treaty made it illegal for U.S. citizens like Bacon Tate to stage renditions on Canadian soil after 1842. A Black community—a majority of whom hailed from the United States—quickly took root in St. Catharines as a result. While job opportunities were largely limited to domestic work and the hospitality industry, Black people in St. Catharines made gains in politics and took to celebrating Emancipation Day each August 1 with particular enthusiasm. Broyld reconstructs the connections between these two borderlands communities with insight and empathy, reminding us that cross-border collaborations were continuous and complex, and that the flow of Black people across the line was hardly one-directional. Indeed, when the Civil War came, many Black residents of St. Catharines returned to the Union to fight, serving in units like the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts. More startlingly, Broyld finds that more than half of the Black residents of Canada returned to the United States to settle permanently after...