Q&A: How a London boy was almost sold into slavery
Sylvanus Demarest was rescued in 1858 after slavers kidnapped him in London and tried to sell him in the U.S.
Emancipation Day was celebrated across the country this week. It's the annual celebration of the day the Slavery Abolition Act came into effect across the British Empire. Afternoon Drive Host Matt Allen spoke with Hidden Histories columnist Tom Peace about the 1858 kidnapping of a young black boy named Sylvanus Demarest by slavers, and a daring rescue that helped to maintain his freedom.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Matt Allen: What was the Demarest rescue?
Tom Peace: In September 1858, a 10 year old boy named Sylvanus Demarest was kidnapped in downtown London. He was kidnapped because he was black, and his white kidnapper was taking him to Missouri to enslave him.
It was stopped in Chatham by the Chatham Vigilance Committee because London's mayor, Elijah Leonard, witnessed this boy with this man on the train platform at the Great Western Railway Company - now the London Via Rail station.
He wired down to Chatham the information about this boy, and the vigilance committee met the train. There were about 100 to 150 people, several of whom were armed, and they pulled Demarest off the train and returned him to his family.
So this was a rescue in the mid 19th century. To give you a sense of the tensions of the time, the Great Western Railway Company actually charged five black men and two white men with trespass and disturbance of the peace. It was quite costly to defend them.
MA: Wow. So the Western Railway Company charged the folks who were rescuing Demarest?
TP: That's right. It shows some of the tensions in the 1850s around race and around enslavement and freedom in our region.
MA: How common was this type of event, Tom?
TP: I'm not entirely sure. I first learned of this event through my colleague Nina Reid-Maroney, who taught me this history through a program that she runs at Huron College called Phantoms of the Past.
The idea of that program is to point out important moments in our past that we often find no trace of in our landscape. If you go down to the Via Rail station today, at least as far as I know, there's no reference to this and you won't find signage related to it. There were at least two other events in the 1840s and 1850s where there was an attempt to re-enslave or to enslave free Chathamites down in Chatham.
We take our students down to Ohio every year, and in Ohio, there's something called the Wellington Rescue, where students from Oberlin College actually armed themselves to protect one of their Black neighbours who was being re-enslaved there. So it's not that uncommon, especially because there were these vigilance committees that were set up in the United States to ensure that people couldn't be enslaved or re-enslaved because of the colour of their skin in places where enslavement was illegal in the United States.
LISTEN | Hidden Histories: the Demarest Rescue
MA: Could you talk more about these vigilance committees? What were they and who were the people in them?
TP: They were a group of citizens, many of whom were part of the black community in Chatham. They were made up of people who were committed to fighting enslavement in the United States and in Canada. One way to think of them is that they were the public face of the underground railway. They weren't a hidden group of people, they were people who worked publicly to aid freedom seekers — people like Sylvanus — who were kidnapped.
The first committee was established in New York City in 1835, and they were common in free states. They rose to prominence in the 1850s when the US passed something called the Fugitive Slave Act, which was an act that basically made it legal for people to capture people who are fleeing their enslavement and then return them to their enslavers.
These vigilance committees really worked to protect people from being re-enslaved. In some cases, you can imagine how easy it might be kidnap a free black person and then enslave them. They really work to protect and prevent that in the ways that we see in this rescue.
MA: Why is it important to talk about this rescue in the lead up to Emancipation Day, Tom?
TP: I think it's really important to think about this rescue because it's London history. It demonstrates the complicated nature of this world before the U.S. Civil War and emancipation in the United States. It demonstrates that although people were free from legalized enslavement in Canada, they weren't necessarily free from these types of structures and from kidnappers like this man who was kidnapping Sylvanus.
It's also important to recognize that these are community organizations that rose up to prevent this from happening.
I think that that's a really important piece.