soil, we have no firsthand account of his life but his own. We know only what he chose to tell of his first forty-one years, but what he had to tell was in itself extraordinarily revealing both of the material conditions and the human relations developed by the slave system. There may be a great number of things left unsaid, or forgotten for a purpose, in the story of his early years as it appears in his autobiography; yet there is, on the other hand, much told by himself which is not entirely to his credit. He had great powers of observation and often a frank and ingenuous fashion of revealing the complexities of his own character.
Many of his faults he laid to the account of the system in which he had been brought up, but he did not change much in later years. We may infer that important events have been left out of his own story of the first period of his life because the second part of the book, which deals with Henson’s life in freedom, neglects to mention important happenings which we can learn from other sources. Almost from the moment that he landed in Canada there is a broader field than his own account from which to draw information about his activities. From a little after 1830 until his death in 1883 others were to record and to remember things which he might have chosen to forget. Old diaries, letters and papers can be found in Canada, and in some cases memories of him have been gathered from people still alive or others who have died fairly recently.
Once in Canada he was, indeed, as the captain who had carried him there said, a man, and considered so by all around him. No longer a chattel slave, no longer a fugitive in fear of his life, he must prove to himself and to the world that he was capable of making full use of his freedom.
At the time that Henson landed, slavery had not yet been abolished in the British colonies and was to remain on the statute books until the Act of 1833. He had nothing to fear, however, from the Canadians, as the institution of slavery was everywhere in that country looked upon with disfavor. Henson was not the first fugitive to arrive in Canada, but the presence of Negro refugees does not seem to have attracted marked public attention until late in the 1840s, according to Fred Landon of the University of Western Ontario, who has done considerable research on the subject.
It is difficult to imagine today the psychological, material and moral situation of a slave who had newly gained his freedom, as Josiah Henson had. These were persons who had in many cases reached maturity without ever having earned their living in the manner in which a free man was, at least theoretically, supposed to do. On the other hand, they had been in most cases forced into or bred to a brutalizing and degrading system which demanded of them the limit of their physical strength. They consequently knew how to work, in the sense that they were capable of performing a certain limited number of operations without tiring physically. On the other hand, the system had neither obliged nor even allowed them to develop the initiative necessary to carry a project through to completion. Lacking liberty, there were no compensations for them in labor other than the avoidance of punishment. Now, in freedom, all the ties with the system were broken, yet these people had grown in and been formed by the life of the plantation.
Those who were already settled in Canada before 1840 were of a different temperament than those who were to arrive after that approximate date. In later years there were many who were to come only because they had been talked into it by an agent of the Underground who had a moral stake in the matter of the number of slaves that he might bring through. Then there were some who were actually driven out by such “shepherds” as John Brown, who cut them out of the herd and guided them north almost against their own will. In the earlier days the Underground was not yet running regularly, and anyone who could evade the pursuit through his own boldness and by the exercise of his ingenuity—indeed anyone who had been able to formulate and carry through the plan for escape by himself—was no ordinary slave. To win freedom it was necessary to be a man gifted with more than the usual amount of resourcefulness, courage, and perhaps luck. Josiah Henson was, indeed, such a man.
/ 2 /
It was to be some years before Henson was to become acquainted with the conditions of the other Negroes in Canada. He had first to apply himself to the business of finding the necessities of life, for he was entirely without money. He was among strangers, knowing nothing of the country or the people.
After making several inquiries Henson heard of a Mr. Hibbard who was willing to hire him. Hibbard gave him a sort of two-story shanty in which to live. It was not much but it was the first house that Josiah had ever owned, and he set about putting it in some sort of order because it had been vacant for several years. When he had worked through the day, cleaning and repairing it, he moved into this new home, as he has said himself, the only “furniture” that he possessed—the rest of the Hensons. Even Charlotte admitted that it was better than what they had known in Kentucky, and they set about making beds of straw, boxed in with logs, as they had done in the South. The great difference was that they now had wooden floors in place of beaten earth, and to his wife this seemed the most important gain that they had made by changing their state.
They were to remain with Mr. Hibbard for three years, sometimes working on shares and sometimes for wages. Josiah was able in that way to procure some livestock of his own. But there also developed a valuable friendship between the Hibbard family and the Hensons. Through the aid of Mrs. Hibbard they were able to procure genuine furniture and some of the other comforts of life. Mr. Hibbard was an educated man and began to teach Josiah’s older son Tom to read and write.
The boy used to read from the Bible to his father, and one day, when he asked where he should begin, he was surprised to be told, “Oh, just anywhere.” When he asked for an explanation of what he read, the child was astonished to find that his father could not tell him what the printed words meant.
“Why, Father, can’t you read?” he said.
Josiah was loath to answer him, for it was a blow to his pride to admit that he had never learned. But it was a direct question and must have a direct answer.
“I never had an opportunity to learn nor anybody to teach me,” he replied, perhaps thinking back to the incident in his childhood when he had been severely beaten for his attempt to learn.
“Well, you can learn now, Father.”
“No, my son, I am too old and have not time enough. I must work all day or then you would not have enough to eat.”
“Then you might do it at night.”
“But still there is nobody to teach me. I can’t afford to pay anybody for it, and of course no one can do it for nothing.”
“Quiet, Father, I’ll teach you. I can do it, I know.”
Josiah’s heart was filled with conflicting emotions because for so many years he had thought of himself as the superior of others and he could not admit the idea of being helped to read by his own child. The boy insisted that he could teach him, but Josiah was so overwhelmed that his ignorance was now known even to his own family that he left the house and passed the day in the woods in solitary reflection.
When he returned that night he set about improvising some sort of illumination by which they could study. Tallow candles were too expensive for him, and indeed for the neighboring white farmers, unless perhaps their wives dipped their own. A string wick floating in oil or fat gave not enough light by which to read, so Josiah gathered pine knots and some hickory bark and used their bright dry flame for a lamp.
Few people in those days stayed up long after sundown, for they rose early and worked long hours in the fields, so the father and son made slow progress at their reading. Josiah’s eyes were little used to deciphering what he complained were hen scratches. But they persevered throughout the winter, and by spring they had advanced so far in their studies that in his reading Josiah came to have an idea of the immense world of knowledge from which he had been debarred in his enforced ignorance.
About that time an old friend arrived from Maryland, where he had escaped from an intolerable master, and this friend made it known in the neighborhood that Henson was something of a preacher. Josiah was encouraged to hold Sunday meetings which, as ever in Negro congregations, did not have a wholly religious character, though they were ostensibly church services. Henson has said he found that to preach it was necessary to have only a minimum of theological knowledge.