Henson, Josiah

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Henson, Josiah

June 15, 1789
May 5, 1883

Josiah Henson, an abolitionist clergyman, was born a slave in Charles County, Maryland. He gained a reputation as a diligent worker with a capacity for leadership, and his role as a slave preacher was eventually recognized by the Methodist Episcopal Church. Henson's last owner, Isaac Riley, made him a plantation manager and entrusted him on one occasion with the transportation of eighteen slaves to Kentucky. He remained a loyal slave until he was duped by his master in negotiations to purchase his freedom. In October 1830, he escaped to Canada with his wife, Charlotte, and their four children.

Once in Canada, Henson found work as a farm laborer and slowly established an itinerant ministry. He served as a captain in a company of the Essex Coloured Volunteers during the Canadian Rebellion of 1837. Henson devoted much of his efforts to assisting fugitive slaves. Working as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, he brought fugitives from Kentucky to the Canadian haven. He envisioned racial progress under the protection of British law, and he therefore encouraged black settlement in Canada. With the financial backing of several New England philanthropists, he helped found a manual labor school, the British-American Institute, at the Dawn settlement, near Chatham, Canada West (present-day Ontario). The Dawn school and the settlement's sawmill provided educational and employment opportunities, respectively, for African Americans fleeing southern slavery and northern racial oppression.

Henson toured England in 1849 and 1851, lecturing on slavery, meeting with prominent reformers, and raising funds for the British-American Institute. He presented some of the Dawn settlement's products, including walnut lumber, at the Great Exhibition of 1851. His management of the school and his fund-raising tours in England sparked criticism from some Canadian blacks, and upon his return he became embroiled in a decade-long struggle for control of the British-American Institute property. The school eventually closed in 1868.

Henson's international notoriety increased dramatically with the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in 1852. In her research for the novel, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) interviewed Henson and read his biography, a seventy-six-page pamphlet published in 1849, titled The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself. Despite some initial equivocations on the part of Henson and Stowe, he became identified in the public mind as the model for the fictional Uncle Tom, and he is best remembered for this connection with Stowe's widely read antislavery novel. Stowe wrote the introduction to his second narrative, Truth Stranger than Fiction: Father Henson's Story of His Own Life, in 1858. On his final tour of England, in 1876, he received an audience with Queen Victoria and was celebrated as "Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom."