Josiah Henson, born into slavery in Charles…

1837 CE

Josiah Henson, born into slavery in Charles County, Maryland, serves in the Canadian army as a military officer, leading a Black militia unit in the Rebellions of 1837.

Henson had seen his father punished for standing up to a slave owner, receiving one hundred lashes and having his right ear nailed to the whipping-post, and then cut off.

His father was later sold to someone in Alabama.

Following his family's master's death, young Josiah had been separated from his mother, brothers, and sisters, when he was sold as property in an estate sale.

After his mother pleaded with her new owner Issac Riley, Riley agreed to buy back Henson so she could at least have her youngest child with her; on condition he would work in the fields.

Rising in his owners' esteem, Henson had eventually been entrusted as the supervisor of his master's farm, located in Montgomery County, Maryland (in what is now North Bethesda).

He had tried to buy his freedom by giving his master three hundred and fifty dollars that he had saved up over the years, only to find that it had been increased to one thousand dollars.

Cheated of his money and suspecting that his owner planned to sell him while on a trip to New Orleans, Henson had escaped to Upper Canada, crossing via the Niagara River in 1830, with his wife and four children.

Henson had first worked farms near Fort Erie, then Waterloo, moving with friends to Colchester by 1834 to set up a Black settlement on rented land.

Through contacts and financial assistance there, he had been able to purchase two hundred acres in Dawn Township, in next-door Kent County, to realize his vision of a self-sufficient community.

Here he had founded a settlement and laborer's school for other fugitive slaves from the United States, for whom Ontario had become a refuge after 1793, when Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe passed "An Act to prevent the further introduction of Slaves, and to limit the Term of Contracts for Servitude within this Province".

The legislation did not end slavery in the province, but it did prevent the importation of slaves, meaning that any U.S. slave who set foot in Ontario was free.

By the time Henson arrived, Blacks had already made Ontario home, including Loyalists from the American Revolution, and refugees from the War of 1812.

Henson also has become an active Methodist preacher, speaking as an abolitionist on routes between Tennessee and Ontario.

The Dawn Settlement will eventually prosper, reaching a population of five hundred at its height, and exporting black walnut lumber to the United States and Britain.

Henson purchases an additional two hundred acres next to the Settlement, where his family lives.