Oldal 145 [145]
OCR
THE COLORED AMERICAN AND THE CANADIAN REBELLIONS Julien Mauduit maintains that the diverse American press reactions to the rebellions reveal U.S. attitudes about republican ideals during a time of territorial expansion. He asserts that the hostilities prompted the guestion if Americans could uphold their ‘republican morality’ while grappling with difficult geopolitical issues (Mauduit 387). With the ideology of American republicanism situated in the Declaration of Independence, with its claims of universal equality, consent and natural rights, few could ignore that document’s similarity to the Canadian rebels’ proclamations. The Richmond Enquirer, for example, predicted bloodshed and suffering from the revolts but also pointed out that, in one of Mackenzie’s addresses, “[t]he American Declaration of Independence is mentioned in terms of praise, and its principles held up for universal adoption. A parallel is instated between the course pursued by the people of Canada and that of the American colonies, show[ing] the exact similarity of their conditions” (2). Although some antislavery newspapers supported the rebels, William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the foremost abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, did not. He opposed them and supported neutrality by the Van Buren Administration. Britain, having eliminated slavery in 1833, could not be condemned for heavy-handedness in the Canadas. British Canada was a refuge for the escaped slave. As early as 1819, the British government opposed officially the extradition of escaped slaves, which was reaffirmed in legal decisions. While Canada did not offer social or economic equality, Black citizens, after three years’ residency, enjoyed legal equality with British subjects in suffrage and due process. They could serve on juries and pursue judicial remedies for injuries. The prohibition of slavery, non-extradition of escaped slaves and provision of civil rights simplified Garrison’s choice to join in Van Buren’s de facto policy of supporting the Crown. Despite venerating the Declaration of Independence himself, Garrison dismissed the cloak of Declaration-like rhetoric with which the rebels draped themselves. His Liberator denounced the insurrection as a ‘false’ form of liberty. His newspaper pointedly reprinted an editorial, “Violation of Neutrality,” by the Upper Canadian Governor Francis Bond Head where Head excoriated the rebels’ American allies (Head 3). For abolitionists like Garrison, slavery was the ultimate evil. British monarchical rule was preferable to the malignant, pro-slavery republicanism visible in the Texas independence movement against Mexico. Most of the Texas colonists of the 1820s and 1830s came from slaveholding U.S. states. Texas would likely become officially slaveholding, whether independent, as it became in 1836, or joined to the Union. This future was not lost on abolitionists. Republicanism, if adopted by an independent Canada, portended at the very least legal extradition of escaped slaves and, at worst, the adoption of slavery there. + 143 +
