We have seen that slavery, excepting on the soil of Great Britain, was not abolished in all other parts of the British Empire until 1833, and not in the United States until 1865. In 1792, long before either of these dates, self-government had been granted to Canada, and, under the two-crossed Jack, at the first meetings which were held by the parliament in Upper Canada, slavery was abolished on July 9th, 1793.[161] This was before our present Union Jack came into existence, so that in Canada alone, of all the outer lands over which this flag of 1801 has ever been raised, beginning from the very day on which it first was displayed, this three-crossed Jack has always, as in the Motherland, proclaimed freedom to the slave.
Canadians in this way feel added honour in the flag, and that it is more particularly their own; for on the continent of America, whether he came from the British West Indies, from the southern continent, from Cuba, or the United States, in all of which he was still the chattel of his owner, so soon as the slave reached the soil of Canada, and came under the colours of our Union Jack, that moment he was free.
The deep significance which this early law of Canada had given to the flag has often been attested by coloured men before their fellow-citizens and the world, and particularly by Frederick Douglas, the great coloured orator of the United States. While dilating upon the great advantage which had come to his own people since freedom had at last been granted to them in the United States, he would nevertheless contrast their condition with that existing in the neighbouring Canadian land, where the black child sits in the public schools by the side of his little white brother, and travels with him in the same carriage on the trains, and where the law is administered with impartiality for both white and black alike.[162]
In telling words he would revert to the time "when there was but one flag in America under which the fugitive slave could be secure. When the slave had escaped from the control of his owner, and was making his way through the intervening States to the free land of the north, whether he gained the summit of the highest mountains or hid in the recesses of the deepest valleys, the fugitive could find no safe resting place. If he mingled in the teeming throngs of their busiest cities, he feared detection; if he sought solitude on their widest prairies, beneath the silent stars, he was in dread of being tracked; not until he had sighted the red-crossed Jack, and, crossing the northern lakes, had touched the strand of Canada's shore, could the slave fall upon his knees and know that at last he was free."
Thus pure, unsullied in its life-story, this three-crossed Union Jack of Canada is the only flag on the continent of America which has always and ever been the "flag of freedom," a flag under which all men, as their birthright, have been born equal and free.
Canadians may well, therefore, be proud of their flag, for what truer glory can be claimed for any other flag—than this, which spells out FREEDOM in its every fold?
[CHAPTER XXXIV.]
THE FLAG OF LIBERTY.