Authors: Betty DeRamus
People in Louisville would have crowded the public square for a chance to watch Mrs.
French sold as Rutha’s stand-in. Had such a sale taken place, it might have resembled
a nineteenth-century lynching with thousands of spectators yelling for blood or at
least signs of fear. However, Caroline French’s father, Cornelius Leonard Lenox, a
free black man with land and political ties, threatened to intervene. Meanwhile, George
French was able to appeal to General Charles Larned and obtain a writ of habeas corpus
to halt Caroline French’s transfer to Kentucky. While out on bail, she fled to Canada
and spent several months there. In the meantime, the Kentucky slave catchers shifted
their attention to Thornton Blackburn, figuring it was better to take home half a
prize than nothing.
On Monday, June 17, 1833, Thornton Blackburn stood at the door of the Detroit jail
in leg irons, guarded by Sheriff Wilson and his deputy as he waited for transportation
to the steamboat docks. He was scheduled to sail aboard the steamship
Ohio
to Cleveland at 4:00
P.M
. from the Howard and Waterman’s dock at the foot of Randolph Street. The sheriff
had been warned that black Detroiters planned to rescue Thornton, but he held up his
riding whip and announced that he could “scare every Nigger that would be there with
this.”
That afternoon, a crowd of blacks and mulattos armed with sticks, clubs, knives, pistols,
swords and other weapons gathered around the jail on Gratiot Street between Farmer
and Farrar, later the site of the downtown branch of the Detroit Public Library. They
demanded Blackburn’s release. Trying to cool their fire, Sheriff Wilson walked outside
three times to talk to the mob, but they continued to hurl threats and brandish weapons.
Blackburn then showed the same wiliness and boldness that had allowed him to escape
from slavery. He volunteered to talk to the crowd, saying it wasn’t worth having so
much trouble on his account. The sheriff agreed and Blackburn strode to the front
steps of the jail, where someone handed him a pistol. He pointed the cocked weapon
at the deputy sheriff and cried: “Stand back, God damn you, or I will blow you through.”
The deputy sheriff retreated into the jail, leaving the sheriff to face the mob alone.
While Blackburn struggled with the sheriff for Blackburn’s gun, the crowd shouted:
“Shoot him, blow him through.”
Blacks rushed from their hiding places, carrying clubs, knives, bayonets, pistols
and swords. The leader was reportedly a one-armed “boss barber” named John Cook, a
boss barber being a man who cut the hair of both blacks and whites. Some women carried
stones in their handkerchiefs.
Some four hundred people, more than the entire black population of the Michigan territory,
moved toward the jail. The
Detroit Courier
claimed that a large contingent of blacks had come over from Canada to take part
in the uprising, including members of the “negro settlement near Malden, composed
almost exclusively of fugitive slaves.” An elderly woman carrying a stake wrapped
with a white rag led the charge.
Lewis Austin half carried and half dragged Blackburn into the stagecoach that had
been brought to the jail to transport Weir, Blackburn and the sheriff to the dock.
As had probably been planned at the meeting at Willoughby’s home, some women had removed
the linchpin from the vehicle to disable it. Blackburn hid inside the disabled stagecoach.
During the melee, an elderly black man called Daddy Grace in some accounts and Daddy
Walker in others was forced to back his horse-drawn cart up to the jail steps. An
elderly black woman known as Sleepy Polly, who had never before shown a flicker of
life, grabbed Blackburn and dragged him into the cart. Meanwhile, the sheriff’s teeth
were knocked out and his skull fractured with a large stone. As the sheriff fell,
he fired his pistol and someone clubbed him in the head, knocking him unconscious.
In about a year, Sheriff Wilson died, apparently never recovering from his wounds.
The horse-drawn cart carrying Blackburn disappeared into the nearby woods. His escorts
were Austin, Prince Williams, Peter Sands, Alexander Butler, John Lloyd and Madison
Mason. The fugitives and his conspirators stopped in the woods long enough to remove
Blackburn’s leg irons and then rode on to the Detroit River. Just as Blackburn climbed
into the boat at the Detroit River, someone gave him a gold watch so he could pay
the boatman. He crossed the river to Canada where, in 1793, the government of Upper
Canada, which mostly consisted of Ontario, had begun the process of freeing its slaves.
It ruled that while those enslaved would remain so, any slave who entered the territory
would become free. Within a decade, Lower Canada, including Quebec and the Maritimes,
would pass similar legislation.
The Blackburns’ escapes had repercussions that flowed on into the twentieth century,
tearing apart old ways of life and creating new ones. In Canada, the Blackburn incident
became the first test of an extradition treaty Upper Canada and the United States
had signed in February 1833. Since escaping slavery was not a crime in Canada, other
charges had to be brought against the Blackburns. They were accused of inciting a
riot and arrested and jailed in Sandwich. The Territory of Michigan moved swiftly
to extradite them. Acting governor Stevens T. Mason, born in Virginia and only twenty-two
years old in 1833, sent all of the relevant documents to Sir John Colborne, lieutenant
governor of the province of Upper Canada. The Canadian government refused to extradite
Thornton and Rutha Blackburn. Lieutenant Governor Colborne argued that they had committed
no crime punishable under Canadian law.
After their release from jail in Sandwich, the Blackburns decided to stay in Canada,
where freedom was already on its feet and walking about. For a short time, they lived
in Amherstburg on the Canadian side of the Detroit River, a well-known haven for fugitives.
By the 1850s, in fact, Amherstburg would have such a large fugitive slave population
that a longtime resident would compare them to the plague of frogs that rained on
Egypt in Bible stories. However, in 1834, the year slavery officially ended in Canada,
the Blackburns left Amherstburg. Given the notoriety of their case and the persistence
of their Kentucky owners and pursuers, they must have realized they remained in danger
in a riverfront community. Detroit steamboat owner Sylvester Atwood could have told
them all about that. In the 1840s, slave catchers fooled Atwood, who was white, into
taking them on a Detroit River cruise to Amherstburg, supposedly so they could lap
up some sunshine. When he discovered they were hunting slaves, Atwood became so riled
that he placed an advertisement in a newspaper describing how he had been hoodwinked.
He also joined the antislavery movement. John “Daddy” Hall was another former slave
who knew from personal experience that Amherstburg wasn’t always safe. Slave catchers
had stolen him from his home in Amherstburg and sold him in Kentucky. In the 1840s,
he escaped to Canada but didn’t stop until he reached Owen Sound, one hundred miles
northwest of Toronto.
The Blackburns headed for Toronto, a center of black culture in Canada West until
the 1850s. Toronto’s black community supported church-related groups, literary societies,
temperance groups, the Upper Canada Anti-Slavery Society and the
Provincial Freeman,
a militant black abolitionist newspaper. Moreover, many black immigrants had houses
and businesses. Neither Thornton nor Rutha could write their names, but they still
had plenty of hustle and shine. Thornton became a waiter at Osgoode Hall, and the
couple built a small frame house and a barn on the outskirts of town on what would
become the front playground of Sackville Street School. The area was just marshland
then and a forest with a few streets snaking through it and a garden west of the house.
The very poor Irish would move to this area later, but the Blackburns preceded them,
moving there in 1834, the year the city was incorporated. In 1836, Thornton came up
with an idea that would make him wealthy. He had noticed public transportation in
cities such as Montreal and believed Toronto would embrace it. He got the pattern
for a cab from Montreal and had a carriage built, painting it red and yellow and turning
it into a cab for hire. It became the first cab company in Upper Canada, but others
soon sprang up. Thornton parked his wooden carriage drawn by a single horse near St.
James Cathedral at Church and Trinity. In a city where masses of mud often clogged
the streets and where only the rich owned carriages and horses, the idea of renting
a cab quickly caught on.
On the surface the Blackburns lived what looked like a conventional life, but their
Detroit adventures left an indelible mark on both Thornton and Rutha, who changed
her name to Lucie in Canada. The experience of being a fugitive slave marked for shipment
back to Kentucky was not something they could shrug off or put behind them. Not when
hundreds of people had risked their businesses and lives for them. Not when blood
had spurted and fires had flared up in their names. When their taxi business succeeded,
they remained in the same small frame house, buying the land it sat on and building
a small barn for their cab and horse. They lived simply, gardening, hunting, fishing
and pouring much of their company’s profits into black self-help movements. When the
North American Convention against slavery met at St. Lawrence Hall in downtown Toronto
in September 1851, Thornton Blackburn attended it as a delegate. The city directories
in Toronto for the years 1862 to 1890 call Thornton a “gentleman,” suggesting he no
longer had to work for a living. He had retired from the taxi business in the 1860s.
However, the cool nerve he had displayed during the Detroit uprisings never left him.
In the 1840s, he reportedly returned to Kentucky to rescue his mother, an almost unbelievable
event considering the circumstances surrounding his own dramatic escape from Kentucky
slavers. Yet, according to historian Karolyn Smardz, the family plot in Toronto contains
the remains of a woman named Libby Blackburn, who was eighty when she died in 1855.
When Thornton Blackburn died in 1890, he left his wife not only his property, but
seventeen thousand dollars. He was buried in the Toronto Necropolis Cemetery, and
his monument bears the inscription: “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord.”
His wife sold their home and moved to another part of the city. By the time the woman
known as Lucie Blackburn died in 1895, the Blackburn money was gone. And for many
years, Canada forgot all about this childless couple who couldn’t write their own
names but had traveled so far and achieved so much. However, their legacy came to
light in 1985 when a group of professional and amateur archeologists, many of them
schoolchildren, dug up the schoolyard at the corner of Eastern Avenue and Sumach Street
on the edge of central Toronto, searching for remnants of the Blackburns’ house. By
that time, stories about the Blackburns had appeared in Detroit magazines and newspapers.
The excavation on the grounds of the Sackville Street School in Toronto where the
Blackburns’ home once stood turned up no fancy silver or other glittery artifacts,
no sign that the couple had spent any time hosting dinner parties and sampling the
high life. Ironically, historical markers in Louisville, the city from which the Blackburns
escaped, now honor them. (Similar markers in Louisville also claim that “Slave traders
were often social outcasts avoided by all but fellow traders.”)
Meanwhile, in Detroit, the passions and protests roused by the Blackburn riots produced
lasting results. White mobs rioted all over America in the 1830s, but the Blackburn
riot was Detroit’s first black uprising. It seemed to go on and on. On July 11, 1833,
someone set the Detroit jail on fire, but it was quickly extinguished. Four days later,
the stables adjacent to the jail burned down and a hundred fifty dollars’ worth of
horses were destroyed. On July 25, Marshall Chapin, mayor of Detroit, asked Secretary
of War Lewis Cass to send a detachment of troops to Detroit “until the excitement
has subsided.” A citizens committee appointed to investigate the Blackburn riot recommended,
among other things, a 9:00
P.M
. curfew, the maintaining of city guards and the establishment of an efficient police
force. However, the city didn’t really improve its police force until after the infamous
Faulkner riots of 1863. In that case, a black man named William Faulkner was tried
and convicted of raping two girls, one white, one black, and sentenced to life in
prison. When a white mob tried to lynch him, police fired into the crowd, killing
one and wounding six others. The mob then swept into the near east side, attacking
blacks at random and burning buildings. Two victims of the violence later died. Several
whites tried to disperse the mob, but it took federal troops to end the violence.
In 1870, Faulkner was finally released when his accusers admitted they had lied.
However, after the Blackburn riots, patrols kept watch on Detroit and rounded up all
blacks on the streets and in the woods. Black people weren’t even allowed to dock
their boats. Some thirty were imprisoned. Some had to leave Detroit and others worked
off their sentences by repairing the streets. Daddy Grace worked for six months. Accused
of knowing who gave Blackburn a pistol, Madison Lightfoot spent three days in jail
but refused to talk. George French headed for Windsor, Ontario, and Tabitha Lightfoot
was fined for being a prime mover in the riot. Many others sought sanctuary in Canada
until it was safe to return. Some Detroit employers who had previously hired black
men and women refused to do so. Historian Norman McRae called it “Negrophobia.” When
a citizens’ commission issued its report on the incident, it noted, “Neither [black
Detroiters’] habits, nor their morals, with a few exceptions, make them a safe or
desirable addition to our population.”