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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 terri¬
torial 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 In¬
dependence 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 sim¬
ilarity 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 Adminis¬
tration. 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 inju¬
ries. 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 pol¬
icy of supporting the Crown.
Despite venerating the Declaration of Independence himself, Garrison dis¬
missed 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 Neutral¬
ity,” by the Upper Canadian Governor Francis Bond Head where Head exco¬
riated the rebels’ American allies (Head 3).
For abolitionists like Garrison, slavery was the ultimate evil. British monar¬
chical 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. Re¬
publicanism, if adopted by an independent Canada, portended at the very least
legal extradition of escaped slaves and, at worst, the adoption of slavery there.
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