Toronto
The population of this wealthy, enterprising, and beautiful city is estimated at forty-seven thousand, of whom about one thousand are colored persons. Of these no separate count is made in taking the census. The greater part of the colored people reside in the north-western section of the city. Their houses resemble those of the same class of persons in St. Catharines: but as they have not generally so extensive gardens, more time can be allotted to the beautifying and general care of their dwellings than in St. Catharines.
Many of the colored people own the houses in which they dwell, and some have acquired valuable estates. No distinction exists in Toronto, in regard to school privileges. One of the students in the Normal School was a fugitive slave, and colored youths are attending lectures in the University. There are three churches exclusively belonging to the colored people—a Baptist and two Methodist churches. They are excluded, however, from none of the churches, and in all of them a few of the African race may be found.
The colored people in Toronto are, on the whole, remarkably industrious. Their condition is such as to gratify the philanthropist, and to afford encouragement to the friends of emancipation everywhere. A portion of them sustain a lyceum or debating club (which is attended by both sexes) where debates are held, and original essays are read. A large majority of the adult colored people are refugees from the South. Several of these furnished their testimony in regard to the institution under whose fostering care they were reared. They gave their statements readily and with every appearance of truth. Their evidence is as reliable as any which can be obtained. No longer dreading the lash, they are free to utter their real sentiments, and to communicate their actual experiences. Some of the details would appear too shocking for credence, were it not admitted on all hands, that the only limit to the cruelty of a mean, ill-tempered, virtually irresponsible tyrant, is the capacity for suffering with which the victims of his malignity may be endowed.
Those who have been most cruelly treated and unjustly used, are most likely to undertake an escape. Those who have succeeded in the undertaking, therefore, may fairly be expected to give a very dark picture. Ought slavery then, as a whole, to be condemned by the evidence they present? We answer, that every slave is liable to the same maltreatment and abuse from which the fugitives in Canada have escaped; and that an institution which holds such liabilities over the heads of millions, and inflicts the most enormous evils on many thousands, might as well be set aside.
Again, in forming a judgment of slavery as to its merits and demerits, this testimony should receive at least as much weight as a class of anecdotes so readily chronicled, and so widely circulated, of individual slaves who have manifested great attachment to their masters, or refused to receive their freedom. The excellence of pious masters who exhort and pray with their slaves from the best of motives, is also deemed worthy of record; and if from such anecdotes, of slaves loving slavery, and of the kindness of some masters, inferences are drawn favorable to the continuance of slavery, facts of the opposite class, although it is a more ungrateful task to expose them, ought also to be fully stated, lest humanity and benevolence be lulled to sleep over evils which they should do their utmost to remove.
Let it not be understood, however, that in this work we intend to make a selection of the most atrocious cases of abuse. Any instances of kind, self-sacrificing masters, or humane, benevolent overseers, will be mentioned at greater length and in greater fulness than those of opposite character, to relieve, if possible, the canvas which truth is reluctantly obliged to crowd “with bitter and with black.”
What is here incidentally said in regard to the narratives of the fugitives in Toronto, applies with equal force to all statements of fugitives in Canada West in this work.
