Hands Across the Border: The Abortive Extradition of Solomon Moseby

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30, no. 2, 2000 Hands Across the Border: The Abortive Extradition of Solomon Moseby David Murray Four years after the abolition of slavery within the British Empire in 1833, the government of Upper Canada authorized the return of Solomon Moseby, a fugitive slave, to Kentucky. Moseby had escaped slavery in Kentucky by stealing his master’s horse and riding to Buffalo, where he had then crossed the border into Upper Canada and, as he believed, to freedom. Alexander McLeod, the deputy sheriff of the Niagara district, took Moseby into custody and confined him in the Niagara jail until he received the orders to deliver Moseby into the hands of his former American master, who had journeyed to Canada to reclaim him. The local population of African Canadians had other ideas. They were not going to let a brother who had successfully made the journey to freedom on British soil be returned to slavery by British authorities. Led by their preacher, Herbert Holmes, a group of determined men and women mounted a vigil at the jail for three weeks in late August and September 1837 to prevent the authorities from sneaking Moseby across the border. When McLeod finally received orders to extradite Moseby, he surrounded himself with special armed constables and some soldiers from the nearby British detachment at Fort George. With this armed escort, he then tried to deliver Moseby to the Americans. What happened next constitutes the first race riot in Upper Canada. The African Canadians gathered outside the Niagara jail succeeded in aiding Moseby to escape custody. He then eluded the Upper Canadian authorities and eventually reached Britain. The cost for the liberators was very high. Their leader, the preacher Herbert Holmes, was shot dead along with another of Moseby’s rescuers , and several others were wounded in the melee. Upper Canada’s reputation as a safe haven for escaping American slaves was placed in serious question, as was the reputation of British justice. The Moseby episode has been examined from the perspective of the fugitive slave laws and the diplomatic relations prevailing between Britain and the United States.1 Canadian Review of American Studies 30 (2000) 188 Re-examining the documentation of this intriguing historical incident suggests that a full historical account has never been told. There are a number of layers to the Moseby affair. Each layer illuminates how the colonial justice system operated in Upper Canada and in the Niagara district at a time of significant political and social upheaval. Conventional historical accounts have not done justice to the organizational capability of the African Canadian community in what was for them a crisis affecting the security of all slave refugees in the colony. Within this community, the role of African Canadian women, first in deciding to resist the British authorities in order to defend their hard won freedom and then in leading this resistance has not received the attention it deserves. By going back to some of the earliest accounts of what happened in Niagara in September 1837, it is possible to highlight much more clearly how determined the African Canadian community in Niagara was in its campaign of active resistance against what it saw as British injustice. The contemporary account by the traveller Anna Jameson and the first historical reconstruction by Janet Carnochan on the sixtieth anniversary of the Moseby rescue in 1897 provide important clues to a very different version of this story. Niagara, like other parts of the new colony of Upper Canada, had a population of African Canadians even before the colony was officially created. One estimate has 300 African Canadians living there in 1791, many of whom were still legally slaves and had come as forced migrants with their Loyalist masters (Stouffer 12). Others were legally free or were indentured servants. Because of its border location, Niagara had also been the site of a number of attempts to return or to sell slaves. One of the most notorious attempts was the case of Chloe Cooley, who had been sold to a new American owner in March 1793 after being forcibly transported across the Niagara river by her owner, William...