Note 32 — THE SLAVE IN UPPER CANADA[A]

The contemporary accounts of this transaction, e. g., in the Christian Guardian of Toronto, and the Niagara Chronicle, are not wholly consistent. The main facts, however, are clear. Although there was some doubt as to the time, the military guard were ordered to fire. Miss Janet Carnochan has given a good account of this in Slave Rescue in Niagara, Sixty Years Ago, Niag. Hist. Soc., Pub. No. 2. It is said that "the Judge said he must go back," the fact being that the direction was by the executive and not the courts. The Reminiscences of Mrs. J. G. Currie, born at Niagara in 1829 and living there at the time of the trouble, are printed in the Niagara Hist. Soc., Pub. No. 20. Mrs. Currie gives a brief account (p. 331) and says that one of the party, one MacIntyre, had a bullet or bayonet wound in his cheek. In Miss Carnochan's account, her informant, who was the daughter of a slave who had escaped in 1802 and was herself born in Niagara in 1824, says that "the sheriff went up and down slashing with his sword and keeping the people back. Many of our people had sword cuts in their necks. They were armed with all kinds of weapons, pitchforks, flails, sticks, stones. One woman had a large stone in a stocking and many had their aprons full of stones and threw them too." Mrs. Anna Jameson, in her Sketches in Canada, ed. of 1852, London, on pp. 55-58, gives another account. She rightly makes the extradition order the governor's act, but errs in saying that "the law was too expressly and distinctly laid down and his duty as Governor was clear and imperative to give up the felon" as "by an international compact between the United States and our province, all felons are mutually surrendered." There was nothing in the common law, or in the statute of 1833 which made it the duty of the governor to order extradition, and there was no binding compact between the United States and Upper Canada such as Mrs. Jameson speaks of. No doubt the reason given by her for the order was that in vogue among the official set with whom she associated, her husband being vice-chancellor and head (treasurer) of the Law Society. The Christian Guardian, Niagara Reporter and Niagara Chronicle and St. Catharines Journal of September, October and November, 1837, contain accounts of and comments upon the occurrences, and sometimes attacks upon each other.

Deputy Sheriff Alexander McLeod was a man of some note if not notoriety. During the rebellion of 1837 and 1838 he was in the Militia of Upper Canada. He took a creditable part in the defence of Toronto against the followers of Mackenzie in December, 1837, and was afterwards stationed on the Niagara frontier. There he claimed to have taken part in the cutting out of the Steamer Caroline in which exploit a Buffalo citizen, Amos Durfee, was killed. McLeod, visiting Lewiston in New York State, in November, 1840, was arrested on the charge of murder and committed for trial. This arrest was the cause of a great deal of communication and discussion between the governments of the United States and of Great Britain, the latter claiming that what had been done by the Canadian militia was a proper public act and they demanded the surrender of McLeod. This was refused. McLeod was tried for murder at Utica, October, 1841, and acquitted, it being conclusively proved that he was not in the expedition at all.