In 1840, Bishop John Strachan, the notorious Anglican power-broker who had dominated Upper Canada’s politics and real estate for over two decades, hired a young Black student to carry out what seemed like a curious task — take a census of Toronto’s Black community.

Peter Gallego, then just 29, was the son of a successful York St. merchant who had fled to Canada some years earlier from Richmond, Va. — home to the Gallego Flour Mills, which exported huge quantities of its product to South America.

Besides studying theology under Strachan, Gallego and a friend, Edward de St. Remy, were also planning an abolitionist newspaper for the British American Anti-Slavery Society.

“(Gallego) maintains an exemplary moral character, is much esteemed among his own people, and is at present employed in taking a census of them,” Strachan wrote of his protege in an April 1840 dispatch for the British-based Church of England journal published by the Society for Promoting the Gospel in Foreign Parts.

When he completed his census later that year, Gallego had compiled a list of 525 Black Torontonians, including professions, addresses and other details. No one had ever undertaken such a project before, and some of the highlights — e.g., the names of prominent Black merchants — were denoted on James Cane’s 1842 topographical map of the city of Toronto and the surrounding areas.

The question is, why did Strachan commission such a census and what was this information ultimately used for?

Natasha Henry, a York University doctoral candidate and president of the Ontario Black History Society, says Strachan’s true intentions remain murky, but the broader historical context offers important clues. “It was six years after the (1834) abolition of slavery in the British colonies, and that had a strong impact on Canada,” she says. “The 1840s were a time of transition.”

Indeed, steadily deteriorating conditions for enslaved Blacks in the U.S., coupled with the promise of freedom in Upper Canada, gave rise to an accelerating exodus of refugees along the so-called Underground Railroad. Colonial officials like Strachan, Henry says, “wanted to get a sense of how the numbers were growing.”

Estimates on the size of Upper Canada’s Black population at the time varied sharply, from 12,500 to 20,000, and Gallego himself almost certainly missed some of the Black residents in his own Toronto census.

But the box score may have been less important than the other data Gallego had gathered, as St. Remy stressed in a detailed 1841 summary of the census that had been requested by Lord Charles Sydenham, the first governor general of British North America. In “The Report on the Toronto Negros,” St. Remy noted that the members of the city’s growing Black community included merchants, labourers, skilled tradespeople, wealthy landowners and farmers.

Refuting popular stereotypes — e.g., that Black men ran barber shops — he stressed that many worked long hours as masons, carpenters and plasterers. Interestingly, St. Remy also pointed out that members of the Black community had opted for city living because working on farms “(awakened) the recollections of pain and humiliation” associated with slavery and plantations in the U.S. south.

Yet this explanation can be seen as part of an intense debate raging across Canada West (as Ontario was known) about racial attitudes in a new country that had promised legal freedoms.

Some Black people were unabashedly enthusiastic. Jehu Jones, a Lutheran clergyman who came in 1839, marvelled at an all-Black military regiment and the hospitality he encountered when he arrived. “This province . . . seems to invite colored men to settle down among the people, and enjoy equal laws,” he wrote in a letter to the editor of a U.S. newspaper called the Colored American. “Here you need not separate into the disgusting sect of caste.”

Such views likely reflected the fact that Torontonians, at the time, tended to be not only more accepting and tolerant of newcomers, but also heavily invested in abolitionist political movements, which thrived in the city and would later attract high profile proponents, like Globe founder George Brown. What’s more, the city’s prosperous Black community had the connections and confidence to assert itself politically, advocating, for example, for a ban on travelling minstrel shows.

Yet the story in smaller towns and rural areas across what’s now southwestern Ontario looked very different. According to various accounts, including one by St. Remy, Black people who had settled in these regions regularly endured aggressive bigoted behaviour. School trustees refused to admit Black children to public schools and Black families with the means to purchase land routinely faced slammed doors.

With the growth in the Black population, observed historian Robin Winks in his 1971 book, Blacks in Canada, “Voices of protest could be heard in various quarters of white Canada against unchecked Negro migration.”

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Gallego himself had a very specific experience with rural racism. On a trip through southwestern Ontario in 1841, he found himself in increasingly uncomfortable situations, initially asked to leave a dinner table on a schooner between Toronto and Hamilton and then banished to ride on the external bench on a carriage ride from Hamilton to Ancaster (he opted to walk instead).

When Gallego finally reached London, Ont., and stopped at the Mansion Tavern, the owner burst into the dining room, hurled racial epithets and threw him onto the street. Gallego tried to press charges with the police, but the local magistrate turned the tables, ordering him to pay a 5 Canadian pound fine and spend 30 days in jail. A local judge managed to have him released after three nights.

Gallego blamed the incident on the infectiousness of “American prejudice.” “(W)e cannot but avail ourselves of every possible means for its suppression.”

It’s no coincidence that he related these experiences in a letter to Thomas Rolph, a prominent British physician who had come to Canada in 1833 and later befriended Gallego. Lord Sydenham had appointed Rolph as an immigration agent with a mandate to promote an apparently well-intentioned campaign to urge Blacks in Canada West to voluntarily emigrate to Trinidad as a means of escaping from “the strong and inconquerable aversion” they encountered in small white communities.

Gallego, who was 10 years younger than Rolph, had taken up this cause, travelling around the province, promoting voluntary emigration. One Black group even sponsored him to go to Jamaica in early 1841. “Disillusioned with the prospects for people of African heritage, he, like a number of other Black intellectuals and activists, was ready by that time to give up on North America altogether,” observed historian Karolyn Smardz Frost in a 2007 essay in Ontario History.

Over the next few years, Gallego made several trips to Jamaica and also travelled around Ontario, promoting the emigration plan, as did Rolph, in public meetings and pamphlets. Yet their fervent attempts to persuade Black residents to pull up stakes drew few takers, as well as some pointed rebukes. As one senior official remarked in an 1841 letter to Lord Sydenham, “I see no reason . . . to think there exists at present any desire on the part of that Race to quit the province, and I am certainly not disposed to take any measures for inducing them to do so.”

Gallego’s friend, St. Remy, also added his own views to the debate about the degree of discrimination in Canada West, urging senior colonial officials to pass a naturalization law that would make it illegal for school boards to exclude Black children.

Ultimately, Rolph gave up on his campaign and returned to England in 1843, although Gallego continued with his efforts for several more years. By 1855, he put his York St. property — a shop with a frame dwelling on a 21 x 210 foot lot — up for sale, apparently in preparation to leave the city.

Yet by that point, the narrative of Black immigration to Canada had changed dramatically. In 1850, the U.S. Congress, in a move meant to appease southern politicians and landowners, passed the so-called second Fugitive Slave Act. The law made it illegal for anyone to assist fugitive slaves and imposed stiff fines and jail terms on those who did so.

With civil war looming, the exodus of freedom seekers to Canada accelerated sharply. The 1861 census showed that about a thousand Black residents now lived in Toronto, more than half of whom lived in the Ward, on the streets north of Osgoode Hall.

Peter Gallego, however, was not one. He eventually made his way back to Richmond, Va.

Correction - March 20, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said Canadian theology student Peter Gallego studied theology at Trinity College. In fact, he studied under Bishop John Strachan and later enrolled at Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto.



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