[23] Mich. Hist. Coll., XIV, p. 659.
[24] A fairly good account of the Underground Railroad will be found in William Still's Underground Railroad, Philadelphia, 1872, in W.M. Mitchell's Underground Railway, London, 1860; in W.H. Siebert's Underground Railway, New York, 1899; and in a number of other works on Slavery. Considerable space is given the subject in most works on slavery.
One branch of it ran from a point on the Ohio River, through Ohio and Michigan to Detroit; but there were many divagations, many termini, many stations: Oberlin was one of these. See Dr. A. M. Ross' Memoirs of a Reformer, Toronto, 1893, and Mich. Hist. Coll., XVII, p. 248.
[25] The Buxton Mission in the County of Kent is well known. The Wilberforce Colony in the County of Middlesex was founded by free Negroes; but they had in mind to furnish homes for future refugees. See Mr. Fred Landon's account of this settlement in the recent (1918) Transactions of the London and Middlesex Hist. Soc., pp. 30-44. For an earlier account see A. Steward's Twenty Years a Slave, Rochester, N. Y., 1857.
[26] Ross in his Memoirs gives, on page 111, 40,000, but he may be speaking for all Canada. The number is rather high for Upper Canada alone.
[27] "The Kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force." There can be no doubt that the Southern Negro looked upon Canada as a paradise. I have heard a colored clergyman of high standing say that of his own personal knowledge, dying slaves in the South not infrequently expressed a hope to meet their friends in Canada.
[28] These being merely traditional and not supported by contemporary documents are more or less mythical and I do not attempt to collect the various and varying stories.
There are several stories more or less well authenticated of masters bringing slaves into Canada with the intention of taking them back again as Charles Stewart intended with his slave James Somerset and the slaves successfully asserting their freedom, resisting removal with the assistance of Canadians. Of one of the most shocking cases of wrong, if not quite kidnapping, a citizen of Toronto was the subject. John Mink, a respectable man with some Negro blood, had a livery stable on King Street, Toronto. He was also the proprietor of stage-coach lines and a man of considerable wealth. He had an only daughter of great personal beauty, and showing little trace of Negro origin. It was understood that she would marry no one but a white man, and that the father was willing to give her a handsome dowry on such a marriage. A person of pure Caucasian stock from the Southern States came to Toronto, wooed and won her. They were married and the husband took his bride to his home in the South. Not long afterwards the father was horrified to learn that the plausible scoundrel had sold his wife as a slave. He at once went South and after great exertion and much expense, he succeeded in bringing back to his house the unhappy woman, the victim of brutal treachery.
There have been told other stories of the same kind, equally harrowing, and unfortunately not ending so well, but I have not been able to verify them. The one mentioned here I owe to the late Sir Charles Moss, Chief Justice of Ontario.
[29] The same rule obtained in Lower Canada; (1827) re Joseph Fisher, 1 Stuart's L. C. Rep. 245.