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72 4 MILLENNIALISM AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND’S MISSION TO FUGITIVE SLAVES IN CANADA Nina Reid-Maroney T he story of millennialism in the Church of England’s Mission to Fugitive Slaves in Canada begins with an ending: the conclusion to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Addressing her readers directly, Stowe steps out of the fictional world she has created and ends her book with a call for the destruction of slavery and for the education of emancipated slaves. Both goals are set out in prophetic language, laced with the hope that there was still a day of grace in which to act: “This is an age of the world when nations are trembling and convulsed.A mighty influence is abroad, surging and heaving the world, as with an earthquake. And is America safe? O, Church of Christ, read the signs of the times! Is not this power the spirit of Him whose kingdom is yet to come, and whose will to be done on earth as it is in heaven?”1 Most interesting in this concluding address to Stowe’s readers is the dual charge—first, to America (“both North and South have been guilty before God”), and then to the Christian church. Calling both nation and church to account in the same breath, Stowe draws attention to the ways in which millennial expectations were at once anchored in a national narrative of fall and redemption and set loose beyond America in that “mighty influence” that Stowe described as “surging and heaving” through a wider Christendom. The double strand of millennial expectation—tied to the American national experience, but also pulled outward in other directions—is at the center of my inquiry into the nature of providential religion and the ways in which it defined the antislavery culture of nineteenth-century Canada. On the Canadian side of the slavery question,millennial hopes and fears remained recognizably linked to the question Stowe asks—What will become of America?—even as the answer to that question was complicated by its decidedly global implications. Perched 73 The Church of England’s Mission to Fugitive Slaves in Canada at the edge of the British Empire and teetering on the moral precipice of someone else’s civil war, antislavery communities in Canada were shaped by the millennial expectations of those abolitionists who helped to found them. It is an important and neglected aspect of the history of Canadian antislavery movements , which derived much of their meaning from the part they were to play in the struggle for abolition in the United States. Even less familiar is the story of Canada’s antislavery communities at the nexus of American and English providential narratives, both of which focused, though in different ways, on the end of slavery. During the era of the Civil War, the Anglican presence in the established antislavery communities of Canada West meant that millennial thought of both American and English origins found expression in the daily work of the Mission to Fugitive Slaves in Canada. One of the most ideologically important black abolitionist communities in Canada West grew up on the on the banks of the Sydenham River in the County of Kent.The self-emancipated slave Josiah Henson and the Reverend Hiram Wilson, Lane Seminary rebel and graduate of Oberlin College, established a settlement for fugitives from American slavery.Their experiment centered on the founding of a sawmill and school: the British American Institute (1842). Steeped in Oberlin perfectionism and in the reformist understanding of the moral and intellectual value of manual labor schools, the British American Institute became the nucleus for the agricultural community of the Dawn settlement.2 By 1859, the school had closed and the formal organization of the Dawn settlement remained embroiled in controversy, but the black pioneers of the region remained, and continued to invest in land, businesses, and civic institutions , shifting the community’s center to the nearby village of Dresden. In the midst of ongoing court battles challenging the poorly funded and racially segregated schools that were established in the district under the protection of the provincial Common Schools Act of 1850, black abolitionists convinced the local committee of the Church of England’s Colonial Church and School Society (CCSS) to send them a schoolmaster.The CCSS agreed, and in July 1859, an English missionary named Thomas Hughes arrived to open a school and minister to the families of the village, black and white alike. Celebrated among his black parishioners...

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