[LINK] "African North Americans and the War"

[rfmcdonald]

Adam Arenson's New York Times blog post does a nice job of explaining the pragmatic movements across the US-Canadian border in the 19th century, using as an interesting example that of African-Americans seeking freedom wherever they could get it and providing examples of two volunteers, member of the 54th Massachusetts regiment Thomas Peter Riggs and his friend John W. Moore.

Most Americans assume the Underground Railroad was a one-way ticket to freedom, that African-Americans escaping the threat or reality of enslavement in the United States by escaping into Canada stayed there. They also assume that the African-Americans who moved north were all escaped slaves.

Many were, of course, and many did remain. But recently, scholars have tempered the celebration of such escapes with a focus on the difficulties faced by those of African descent north of the American border — and, I have found in my ongoing research — the large numbers who returned to the United States during the Civil War and Reconstruction, to determine whether they could find work, fight for citizenship and gain a sense of equal rights and opportunities in a nation now committed to ending slavery.

I call these men African North Americans, individuals of African descent who crossed or re-crossed the United States-Canada border in the years between 1850 and 1930. African North Americans sought a place to live securely with their families, to make and remake communities and to claim equal rights. Some stayed in the United States the rest of their lives. Others found Canada beckoning again; still others moved to Jamaica, Liberia and other countries. But many moved repeatedly around the Great Lakes and between the United States and Canada, seeking economic and social opportunities, without regard to the border.

[. . .]

As Moore explained, he had met Riggs in the winter of 1861-62, as they chopped wood together outside “Georgetown a town situated in Canada between Toronto and Guelph.” Moore was born in Ontario County, N.Y., and appears in the 1861 Canadian census, with his wife and four children, in Trafalgar, Halton County, Ontario, on the other side of the lake. Riggs’s family had traversed regularly from Schenectady to Prescott, Leeds County, Ontario, and to Howard, Kent County, Ontario.

Even when dictated to lawyers and signed with an X — as John W. Moore’s deposition was — these documents reveal the continuity of ties between antebellum experiences in Canada, shared wartime experiences, and a postwar life back on the American side of the Great Lakes borderlands, for United States Colored Troops veterans and those they left behind.