The Journey from Tollgate to Parkway: African Canadians in Hamilton (review)

Adrienne Shadd’s The Journey from Tollgate to Parkway: African Canadians in Hamilton is a thoroughly researched and welcome contribution to both Canadian history and black history in Canada. Ambitiously examining four centuries of Canadian history, beginning with slavery in eighteenth-century Canada and ending in contemporary Canada, Shadd provides an impressively detailed history of African Canadians in Hamilton, Ontario.

Shadd presents a reasoned and refreshingly exhaustive discussion on the history of slavery in Canada: its introduction, institutionalization, and incremental abolition. Too often within the historiography, slavery is discussed as a swiftly removed blemish on Canada’s early history. Shadd’s treatment of the history of slavery in Canada not only illustrates the extent to which it was institutionalized and defended by colonial elites, but also concentrates on the lived experiences of slaves in Canada. Using documentary evidence such as newspaper advertisements and letters, Shadd demonstrates that while Canada did not develop a plantation system, Canada’s slaves were not a trifling presence and in reality suffered and fled from lives of forced servitude. These were not the ‘happy slaves’ often described by early historians.

A definite departure from many earlier works on the history of blacks in Canada, The Journey from Tollgate to Parkway challenges the myths that have influenced popular perceptions of black history in Canada. Shadd provides detailed narratives necessary to address and confront historical omission and the subsequent historical misrepresentations of local and national histories. One of the central historiographical myths that Shadd shatters is the notion that most blacks arrived in Canada as recently escaped slaves direct from American plantations. The exaggerated narrative of the escaped slave arriving on Canadian soil in desperate need of Canadian benevolence has profoundly influenced Canadians’ perception of their history. The romantic saga of the Underground Railroad, as Shadd consistently illustrates, belies the fact that slaves often escaped to northern states, established themselves and their families, honed their trades, and increased their wealth for years prior to making their way to Canada. Many blacks arrived in Canada as enterprising freemen and freewomen prepared to buy large tracts of land to build homes and neighbourhoods and contribute to the overall development of their new city and country of residence. The early history of blacks in Hamilton attests to this particular reality in living colour.

Most importantly, Shadd focuses on naming the heretofore-nameless African Canadians who came to Canada as newly escaped slaves, formerly escaped slaves, and free blacks. She names those individuals who were skilled and semi-skilled, propertied and moneyed, educated and illiterate. This recuperative enterprise is significant because many of the individuals she uncovers are integral to the history of Hamilton and have so far remained nameless, ignored, or caricatured. Shadd’s painstaking use of census data provides a long overdue introduction to individual black men and women who contributed to the expansion of commerce, to the scholarly and religious education of their communities, and to the political, social, and artistic character of the city and the province. Shadd recreates neighbourhoods and households using disparate census data, deftly piecing together families and tracing generations of black Hamiltonians and the journeys that would find them at the ‘Head of the Lake.’ Locally, nationally, and internationally relevant, these individuals and families boast remarkable and fascinating historical legacies that beg for recognition.

Unlike earlier works such as Robin Winks’s seminal Blacks in Canada (1971), Shadd’s study moves away from broad demographic descriptions and discussions concerned primarily with white responses to blacks in Canada by stressing almost exclusively the individual, communal, urban, and rural experiences of blacks living in and around the Hamilton region. Where actual documents are lacking and/or destroyed, Shadd uses primary and secondary sources from other black communities in Canada and the United States to provide informed, though speculative, reconstructions of the historical experience of blacks in Hamilton.

Despite its unambiguously local focus, Shadd’s useful and fully integrated summaries of historical events that intersect important watershed...