NEGRO BURIAL GROUND, 1830

Plaque located on the Mississauga Road between May and John Streets, close to the tourist-oriented Butler’s Burying Ground, Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Two solitary tombstones with barely legible legends are all that’s left of the cemetery, which is now a lawn in a park and near the street. Black members of this church had escaped slavery in the United States and were attracted by Upper Canada's promise of a limited freedom for blacks. That liberty for blacks was a tenuous matter was shown when two blacks were murdered while trying to free Solomon Moseby, a fugitive slave from Kentucky who was incarcerated in the local jail in 1837.

William Lyon Mackenzie, leader of the Rebellion of 1837, drew attention to the Moseby case in a full account in The Constitution (4 October 1837) when the notorious Sir Francis Bond Head, then lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, ordered the extradition of Moseby and his return to the slave-owner. The account precipitated a concerted effort to free Moseby who had been pursued across the border by his master who accused him of having stolen a horse to make his getaway. Moseby was captured in Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake) and imprisoned. More than 20 blacks and whites, including a number of women, resisted the British soldiers in a battle to free him from the jail. Several were wounded and two blacks, Jacob Green and Herbert Holmes, were killed. They were buried in an unmarked grave in the Baptist plot. Moseby made his escape to Montreal and then to England. These events remain one of the earliest instances of black and white unity against racism, slavery and oppression. Mackenzie’s Draft Constitution in 1837 declared in Article 8: “People of color who have come into this State, with the design of becoming permanent inhabitants thereof, and are now resident therein, shall be entitled to all the rights of native Canadians, upon taking an oath of affirmation to support the constitution.”