Tensions

 Shannon Prince is the sixth generation descendant of residents of the Elgin Settlement, or Buxton, one of the settlements of escaped slaves who found safety in Canada. She is a curator and historian at the historic site and museum at Buxton, and her commentary at this spot in the exhibit says a lot.

This display case features a rifle and book by black settlers. The engraving is about the Harpers Ferry raid of 1859, one of the points of no return that would lead to the Civil War.

John Brown was a white abolitionist who spent time out west fighting for that cause. He came to Canada in 1858 looking for help in planning the raid on Harpers Ferry, where a federal arsenal was located. His intention was to start a revolution.

James Monroe Jones had been born in slavery in North Carolina, but bought by his father and brought to freedom in Canada. He became a well regarded gunsmith, and the rifle is one of his. He would help finance the Harpers Ferry raid. Abraham Shadd, the patriarch of a black Abolitionist family, relocated his family to Canada after his daughter moved there. The book is his journal.

Osborne Perry Anderson had been born into a free family in Pennsylvania and went north to Canada. He took part in John Brown's raid, evading death and capture, and lived to tell the tale, returning north.

The outer wall of the exhibit space features the timeline told throughout, spanning from 1850 to 1877.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was one of those pivotal points in the road to the Civil War. The use of the photograph of Peter at lower right is vivid. I have seen the photo before, but it is always haunting.

In 1852, the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin galvanized the north in its depiction of the cruelties of slavery. 

Two years later, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which enabled local settlers to decide for themselves as to if a new territory and state would be free or slave. Settlers from both factions rushed west into the area. 

The Civil War effectively began in the west, with abolitionist and pro-slavery settlers killing each other for years in Kansas and Missouri before Fort Sumter. One of the bloodiest incidents of that period was the attack on the antislavery town of Lawrence, Kansas.

The Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court in 1857 ruled that the federal government could not restrict slavery, and that black people, free or enslaved, had no rights that a white person was obliged to respect.

The Harpers Ferry raid on the federal arsenal took place in October 1859. John Brown led the raid, took hostages, and was brought down by Marines sent up from Washington. Colonel Robert E. Lee was the Union officer that oversaw the Marine response, and Brown would later be executed for treason. He would be called the Meteor of the War, the one man who did more than anyone else to bring it about.

Buxton was one of the black settlements, in what is now Ontario. Freed slaves established such communities, with businesses, schools, churches, and a new life for themselves.