Bryan Prince

During slavery, Canada was often the last stop on the underground railway for runaway slaves. But for many, the United States would always be ‘home’ and after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, when blacks were finally allowed to enlist in the Union army, many returned to the US to fight. In his book, My Brother’s Keeper, author Bryan Prince looks at the African Americans living in Canada who would return to the US to fight, why they chose to go, and, in many cases, what their lives were like in Canada and what happened to them both during the war and after.

A few of these men were tricked into enlisting by unscrupulous recruiters who then cheated them out of part or all of their enlistment bonuses but most chose to return to fight voluntarily. Many of them would die to end slavery. Prince tells many of their individual stories, of their heroism and courage, and frequently of their deaths as the result of battle but more often disease. Many of them were soldiers but many enlisted as doctors, recruiters, or chaplains.

Prince also looks at what life had been like in Canada for many African Americans. He looks mainly at southern Ontario or, as it was then, Canada West. For many, it was no better and often, worse, than it had been in the US because the racism was more subtle. Blacks had the same freedoms in Canada as whites to attend school, to act as jurists, to own property etc, but legal didn’t always mean actual. Still, it did mean that many were able to gain knowledge and skills that were forbidden to slaves and, after the war, many returned to the US to teach.

But it wasn’t only slaves who fled north across the border. Many white Americans fled to Canada to escape debt or, once the war started, to avoid conscription on both sides. This occasionally created strange circumstances:

“’Not long since, a slave run away from Virginia, came here and settled down; a few months after, his master, “broke down”, cheated his creditors, escaped to Canada came and settled by the side of his former chattel. Their families borrow and lend now, upon terms of perfect equality.’”

After the war, many Blacks returned to the US, not perhaps a tidal wave as some had predicted but so many that at least one church was forced to close its doors. Interestingly and somewhat oddly, at the same time that many African Americans were leaving, many white southerners moved to Canada so they wouldn’t have to live under this new ‘tyranny’.

Perhaps the most touching and heartbreaking part of the books is a list of ads placed by former slaves now living in Canada seeking family and friends who they had been forced to leave behind when they fled or, in some cases, had been sold away from them while they were still living under slavery: mothers seeking children, husbands seeking wives, brothers seeking siblings, etc.

My Brother’s Keeper is a well-researched, well-written chronicle of African Americans living in Canada who returned to the US to fight in the Civil War. Some of them were doctors or ministers but most were just regular people who were willing to sacrifice everything for what they saw as a just cause in the country they still considered home. Illustrated throughout, it is a fascinating read for anyone interested in this little-known part of the history of both the United States and Canada.… (altro)