United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

In 1850, the American Congress passed a bill known as the Fugitive Slave Act. It stipulated that any white person could arrest and detain anyone of African descent suspected of being a runaway slave. Even those who had been born free, unless they had irrefutable proof, were at risk of being captured and dragged into bondage. As a result, thousands of African Americans picked up and fled the northern states. For many, this destination was Canada. It was a phenomenal movement of refugees on what was known as the Underground Railroad: 20,000 people are estimated to have settled in Canada between 1820 and 1860. At the time of the fugitive slave law, Mary Ann Shadd, a young freeborn woman, was a teacher in the northeastern United States. Mary Ann was born in Delaware in 1823 into a prominent abolitionist family. When her services were requested by Henry and Mary Bibb, founders of the first Black newspaper in Canada, Voice of the Fugitive, she moved to Windsor (Ontario) and started a school in 1851 for the children of fugitive slaves. She also quickly became a leading emigrationist, hiding numerous fugitives in her home. In 1852, she published A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West which touted the country as a major refuge not only for escaping slaves but also free African Americans experiencing increasing restrictions on their lives in northern states. Her skills as an orator convinced many, but her public outspokenness got her into trouble. A dispute with the Bibbs over the question of separate schools for Blacks spilled onto the pages of their newspaper, the Voice of the Fugitive, and led to her firing from her teaching position. Shadd than decided to start her own weekly, where she could control how her ideas were disseminated. One of Canada’s first women journalists thus became the first Black woman in North America to found a newspaper. The Provincial Freeman began publishing out of Toronto on March 24, 1853. Because she was aware that her name on the masthead could alienate a readership that preferred the strict gender codes of the 19th century, she had asked Samuel Ringgold Ward, Black abolitionist and agent of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada, to become editor. Shadd then spent a year on the lecture circuit drumming up subscriptions and interest in her paper, which became a daily the following year. First and foremost, the Provincial Freeman was an anti-slavery paper. It focused on the importance of Black self-reliance and integration into Canadian society and denounced the practice of “begging,” or fundraising on behalf of the “downtrodden fugitives” by presenting them in an unfavorable light. It also championed women’s rights, providing a forum for activists Lucy Stone Blackwell and Lucretia Mott. Yet in spite of its success, the paper could not stay afloat, dependent for its readership upon a small educated elite. In 1860, it succumbed. Seven years of publishing a newspaper under such circumstances was nonetheless quite an achievement and places it among a very small group of Black publications, including Frederick Douglass’s newspapers. It is today a valuable resource for researchers. After the death of her husband Thomas F. Cary, a Toronto businessman she married in 1856, Shadd Cary left Canada with her two children. Hired by Martin Delany as perhaps the only woman to recruit Black soldiers during the Civil War, she later went on to study and practice law in Washington D.C., being one of the first women of her race to do so. She also became increasingly vocal and active on the issue of women’s rights and suffrage during her later years. Shadd Cary died on June 5, 1893. A woman who pushed the boundaries and limitations normally ascribed to her race and sex, she was designated a person of national historic significance in Canada, one of a number of posthumous honors she received. Shadd’s descendants, and those of her brothers and sisters, live all over Canada and the United States today. I am one of those descendants who have become active in the resurrection and preservation of the memory not only of Mary Ann Shadd but of the thousands of others who made Canada home during that period. Photo © Adrienne Shadd: Launched in 1853 in Toronto (Canada), the provincial freeman is the first newspaper founded by a Black woman in North America.