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The life of the mind in the Promised Land

The Henson family arrives on the Canadian shore the morning of October 28, 1830. Source: Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life, An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson.

Photo: The Henson family arrives on the Canadian shore the morning of October 28, 1830. Source: Uncle Tom’s Story of His Life, An Autobiography of the Rev. Josiah Henson.

By

Nina Reid-Maroney

Black heritage

Published Date: Nov 10, 2011

In the spring of 1861, a young black Philadelphian named Parker Theophilus Smith sold his belongings – including his extensive library of ethnography, history, mathematics, natural science, metaphysics, moral philosophy, ethics and logic – and moved his family to Dresden in then- Canada West. One of his first letters from his new home included an account of a public celebration at which the local superintendent of schools spoke on the subject of slavery.

When Parker Smith heard the largely Black abolitionist audience being advised to wait for a “white deliverer” to bring freedom to the enslaved, he responded with a history lesson: “I wonder what white people ever waited until God sent them a deliverer to rescue them from slavery. What did the Angles, the Saxons, the Danes, the Franks and the Normans do when the Roman Empire encroached upon their territories?” Smith’s response to racial prejudice was formed in the intellectual world of Black Philadelphia, but it found a swift application in the complex ideological terrain of the Promised Land.

These brief lines from Smith’s correspondence offer an eloquent reminder that migration to 19th-century Canada meant not only the movement of people, but the movement of ideas. Smith’s letters show us particular and clearly delineated threads in a vast web of connection that reached across national borders and ran throughout the conceptual structures of the “Black Atlantic.”

I think of Smith’s traversing of this landscape as an intellectual migration – a term meant to dwell on the purposeful agency of ordinary people who believed that, in the face of oppression and sweeping historical forces that they could not control, ideas mattered. One hundred and fifty years later, the example of one Philadelphia shopkeeper of modest means provides compelling reasons for historians of the African-Canadian experience to focus new attention on the life of the mind.

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