pon the
principle that all men are born equal, did our colored brethren
hail their approach? No, on the contrary, they hastened as
volunteers in wagon-loads to the Niagara frontier to beg from me
permission that, in the intended attack upon Navy Island, they
might be permitted to form the forlorn hope--in short they
supplicated that they might be allowed to be foremost to defend
the glorious institutions of Great Britain."[2]

Rev. J. W. Loguen, in the narrative of his life, says that he was
urgently solicited by the Canadian government to accept the captaincy
of a company of black troops who had been enrolled during the
troubles. As the affair was then about all over by the joint effort of
the Canadian and United States governments, he did not accept the
offer but he makes this interesting comment:

"The colored population of Canada at that time was small compared
to what it now is; nevertheless, it was sufficiently large to
attract the attention of the government. They were almost to a
man fugitives from the States. They could not, therefore, be
passive when the success of the invaders would break the only arm
interposed for their security, and destroy the only asylum for
African freedom in North America. The promptness with which
several companies of blacks were organized and equipped, and the
desperate valor they displayed in this brief conflict, are an
earnest of what may be expected from the swelling thousands of
colored fugitives collecting there, in the event of a war between
the two countries."[3]

Josiah Henson, founder of the Dawn colony in Upper Canada and famous
as the reputed "original" of Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom, says in his
narrative that he was captain of the second company of Essex colored
volunteers and that he and his men assisted in the defence of Fort
Malden (Amherstburg) from Christmas 1837 to May of 1838. He says
further that he assisted in the capture of the schooner _Anne_, an
affair which took place on January 9, 1838.[4]

John MacMullen, in his _History of Canada_, says that among the troops
on the border during 1838 "were two hundred Indians from Delaware, and
a body of colored men, settlers in the western part of the province,
the poor hunted fugitives from American slavery, who had at length
found liberty and security under the British flag."[5]

A rather interesting aftermath of the rebelli