Great question! The underground railroad is a big deal to a lot of Canadians; it's an example of our tolerance and pluralism, something that Canadians are very proud of even if it has a tendency to be more myth than fact. There is even a Heritage Minute that discussed the underground railroad - part of a series of tacky but lovable short films produced by the Canadian government Historica Canada starting in the early 1990s to try and publicize some of the more dramatic aspects of our history. However, the lived experiences of black immigrants to Canada in the nineteenth century demonstrate that there was often little difference between racial attitudes north and south of the 49th parallel.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, around 40,000 black people had settled in Canada, many of them congregating in southwestern Ontario given its proximity to the border with the United States. There was also a sizable black population in parts of Nova Scotia, although I can't speak with as much authority on their experience (although a black activist from Nova Scotia, Viola Desmond, now appears on the $10 bill). This migration largely pre-dated Confederation in 1867, so the different provinces that would make up Canada were not yet united. The exception was Upper and Lower Canada -- modern Ontario and Quebec, respectively -- which had been forcibly united into a single province ("Canada") in 1840 and would remain unified until 1867. For the purposes of this question, "Canada West" refers to what was formerly Upper Canada, and what is now Ontario.
In many of the smaller cities and towns of the Niagara region in the southwestern part of the province, black immigrants made up a sizable minority. Kristin McLaren estimates that in 1854, some towns may have had black populations of 20% to 30%.^(1) This caused significant anxiety among many of the white families in these towns, who feared the influence that these immigrants would have on their culture. How many communities sought to isolate themselves from the growing black diaspora was to petition the nascent public school system to segregate classrooms along racial lines. In the counties of Essex, Kent, and Lambton in 1848, white communities mobilized to block black students from attending public schools. The justifications for segregation were sadly familiar:
Across Canada West, white Canadians articulated fears that black children would prove to be a bad moral influence upon their own children if both were allowed to attend the same schools. Giving his opinion on the reasons behind the introduction of the law allowing segregated schools, Chief Justice Beverly Robinson suggested in 1854 that white parents felt "an apprehension that the children of the coloured people, many of whom have but lately escaped from a state of slavery may be, in respect to morals and habits, unfortunately worse trained than the white children are in general, and that their children might suffer from the effects of bad example".^(2)
These petitions in favour of segregation were made without the consent of black communities, who in fact wanted to have their children educated alongside everyone else. Furthermore, there was an almost humorous degree of cognitive dissonance among white school trustees and other community leaders, who professed their abolition to slavery but maintained that black people living among them was "an annoyance" and feared that African "barbarism" would supplant Anglo-Saxon civilization.^(3) The tone of the above statement by Justice Robinson further illustrates this disconnect.
According to black Canadians who settled in Canada, they often found that racism remained a prevalent part of their lives, even if their legal status was demonstrably improved. Canadian attitudes in this regard were typical; as the title of McLaren's article suggests, the belief in the moral superiority of British culture - its democratic tradition, legalism, relative progressiveness, etc. - was pervasive and powerful, even when it clearly clashed with how non-white people were treated in Canada and other dominions of the British Empire.
White communities continued to pressure the government for some sort of legislation, and in 1850 the government yielded and passed the Schools Act. This legislation allowed for separate schools to be established on account of race in a similar fashion to how Protestants and Catholics could appeal for separate schools in areas where they were a religious minority. Even still, the implementation of segregation in Canada West was patchy. In Toronto, the largest city in Canada West, the black community was more affluent and organized and was able to resist calls for segregation, which never became the norm in the city. In 1843, the black community of Hamilton appealed to Governor Sir Charles Metcalfe, who intervened on their behalf to ensure that black children could attend the common schools. However, segregation did become the norm in towns and cities across the province. Its removal became a goal that black diaspora communities could organize around. Many petitions were sent to the government to allow black children to attend the common schools throughout the 1850s. In many communities the separate schools fizzled out within a decade, often because a critical mass of white students chose to attend the black schools. Regardless, this episode demonstrates the challenges faced by black immigrants to Canada in this period.
Just as the education system could be utilized to enforce white supremacy, so could the legal system. In his 2010 book Race on Trial, Barrington Walker argued that race was always centre-stage whenever black defendants were tried in Ontario courts. His exhaustive study ranged from 1858 to 1958 and considered court transcripts and decisions in thousands of cases involving black defendants. A common theme was the dehumanization of black subjects in order to affirm ideas of white supremacy as well as notions of British justice - themes that the author asserted were not antithetical. Sometimes this could manifest in unexpected ways. In a 1914 murder trial in Chatham, Ontario - another of those cities in the southwest of the province with a significant black population - the local newspaper argued that the black defendant ought to be shown leniency, as en example of British generosity towards the lesser races.^(4) Similar arguments were made by Constance Backhouse in her 1999 book Colour-Coded. In one of her examples, local authorities in Oakville, Ontario refused to prosecute members of the Ku Klux Klan who harassed an interracial couple at their home in 1930.^(5) Although black immigrants to Canada, and indeed their children who were born and raised as Canadians, were legally equal to their white counterparts, society and the law did not always view them as such. Many Canadians found no problem in condemning slavery while dehumanizing and demeaning those very slaves that had fought so hard to find their way north.
TL;DR: The arrival of black immigrants in significant numbers in the mid-nineteenth century, and their continued presence into the twentieth century and beyond, brought racial backlash from white, Anglo-Saxon Canadians that manifested in active and passive ways. These attitudes continued well beyond the decades following the arrival of the underground railroad migrants. Although not all communities witnessed similar reactions, it is fair to say the the integration of black Canadians into Canadian society did not go unopposed.
Footnotes
^(1) Kristin McLaren, "'We had no desire to be set apart': Forced Segregation of Black Students in Canada West Public Schools and Myths of British Egalitarianism," Histoire sociale/Social History (2004), p. 34
^(2) Ibid, 23
^(3) Ibid, 33
^(4) Barrington Walker, Race on Trial: Black Defendant's in Ontario's Criminal Courts, 1858-1958 (University of Toronto Press, 2010), 49
^(5) Constance Backhouse, Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900-1950 (University of Toronto Press, 1999), 173-191
Further Reading:
Hastings, Paula. “Territorial Spoils, Transnational Black Resistance, and Canada’s Evolving Autonomy in the First World War” Histoire sociale/Social History Vol. 47, No. 94 (June 2014)
Lake, Marilyn and Henry Reynolds. Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
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/u/benetgladwin has already answered this question for you very well indeed, but hopefully I can offer some additional information and context that will enrich the discussion here.
The first thing I would stress is that it's very difficult for us to estimate precisely how many African American people migrated to Canada during the period of antebellum slavery, and even harder to determine how many were people fleeing enslavement specifically rather than fleeing the threat of re-enslavement, false enslavement or the intensely racist dynamics at play in American society. Canadian authorities do not seem to have tracked radical demographics well; the 1850 census offers conflicting counts of how many black people lived in the region and seems to severely understate the total black population. In 1855, a writer in the Christian Watchman and Reflector put the number of people who could be described as 'fugitive slaves' at an estimated 40,000 people, a figure that Frederick Douglass' Paper reprinted as seemingly reliable in the same year ("Fugitive Slaves in Canada", August 24th 1855), though Douglass' paper is known for publishing some fanciful accounts about life in Canada. Some put the estimate lower at around 25,000 - 30,000; others put it at closer to 50,000. The situation is complicated by the fact black migration across the northern border comes in waves starting in the late 18th century, and so it may be that higher estimates are counting people who were not born into slavery but had parents who were. Black communities by the time of the Civil War would represent a mix of fugitive slaves, free people and people who were born in Canada.
But certainly the number of African American people who moved to Canada in the 19th century was into the many thousands, and most could probably be described as fleeing slavery in some way, whether they were considered fugitive slaves under federal law or not. At the peak of African American migration to Canada during the drafting of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, it's estimated that as many as one thousand black people a month for three months were leaving the United States for Canada. Records of enrollment and membership in black churches in the North do show sharp drop-offs in the number of people attending services around the time that the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, which would seem to confirm a large-scale movement of people in quite a short period of time, and a fear of the implications of the Fugitive Slave Act. Contemporary narratives - first-hand accounts of the enslaved experience written or dictated by African American people who had escaped slavery in some form - seem to suggest that the fear of capture not only of the individual, but of loved ones (a common theme in slave narratives is the trauma of familial separation), played a key role in persuading people to make plans to move to Canada. But if the dynamics of this migration are a little complex and obscured, this is nothing compared to unpicking the black experience in Canada during the antebellum period.
Certainly for many African American people, Canada - which was at this time still a British colony (or rather three British colonies) - had a certain mythologised status. The colonial legislature of Upper Canada (Ontario) had effectively outlawed slavery by introducing a gradual emancipation bill in 1793, right around the same time that the cotton gin was about to prompt an explosion in the internal slave trade of the United States. Upper Canada and its sucessor through the 19th century was thoroughly resistant to repeated attempts by the United States government to negotiate a formal treaty of extradition and rendition that would have established an obligation on the part of the Canadian authorities to return people fleeing the experience of slavery south of the border, and there is evidence of profound anti-slavery sentiment at the very top of the Canadian colonial bureaucracy by the 1820s. Gordon Barker records that in the northern United States in particular there developed what he calls "British principle talk".
For Barker, the British principle represents a perception among some African American leaders that the British valued a unique combination of equality in the eyes of the law and a resistance to prejudice in social and domestic life. Reassured in this thinking by the rising abolitionist sentiment in Great Britain that culminated in the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean gradually between 1834 and 1838, Canada - as a supposedly loyal subject of the British crown - came to embody this principle. Leaders who supported the idea of black people moving en masse to Canada touted what they perceived to be much greater political rights, social acceptance of racial integration, genuine religious freedom and the ability to own land (which is a common priority for enslaved people across the New World) and be self-sufficient from it as the main appeal of the northern colonies. Some African American leaders like Henry Bibb very actively called for African American people to move to Canada on the basis that they would be able to buy dirt cheap land and build thriving communities for themselves, whilst integrating into the broader, otherwise white civil society as electors and jurors. The ostensible tolerance and legal protections of the Canadian authorities were contrasted sharply against the fraudulent claim to value freedom and dignity that formerly enslaved people saw from the white elite of the United States.
Unfortunately, Barker's "British principle talk" was largely just that - talk. Whilst there may have been widespread support for the principle of anti-slavery among the Canadian public at the time, anti-slavery is not the same thing as anti-racism. Much of the anti-slavery activism in thought across the Western World was anti-slavery but not pro-equality; for many white people, their opposition to slavery was not based on the belief that race didn't matter, but that even African people - who they still thought of as inferior or degraded in some way compared to white people - didn't deserve to be subject to such a horrific institution. Whilst there certainly were white men and women in the 19th century arguing for full racial equality and integration they were in the minority among anti-slavery activists, who genuinely objected to the idea of slavery for anyone rather than to the idea of some kind of basic racial hierarchy. Canada was no exception to this rule. Whilst it was absolutely the case that Canadian laws granted people of African descent equality before the law, these laws did little to nothing to check the profound racial prejudices of white Canadians.
The overwhelming response from the white Canadian public to the arrival of thousands of African Americans was to marginalise and exclude them wherever possible. Some parts of the country were more accepting of black refugees than others, but the general pattern was one of protest and resistance from white locals to the arrival of any meaningful black population. In the 1830s, when African Caribbean people started to arrive to Canada in some number during the process of gradual emancipation in Britain's Caribbean colonies, there were anti-black protests in Upper Canada demanding an end to migration from the Caribbean region. Newspapers were filled with derogatory racial commentary that played up to the same stereotypes about black people as criminals, rapists and rebels. Racial segregation was strictly enforced in many churches, and white people were known to conspire to prevent black people from buying property in their neighbourhoods. Even black men who served in the Canadian military received a fraction of the benefits that their white compatriots saw, and enterprising black communities who tried to make a future for themselves in Canada's as-then unsettled regions would often find themselves pushed out by equally-enterprising, racist white settlers who followed them. Black children were widely excluded from schools - something that black parents who so valued the education denied to them in the United States found to be among the worst injustices that met them in Canada.
Although black people had a much greater notional standing in law, on the occasion that they took cases of discrimination to the colonial courts cases generally did not reflect a belief that all skin colours were truly equal before the law. Whilst Canadian courts seem to have been much more likely to find judgements in defence of black people than the vast majority of courts in the United States would have in this period, even pro-black judgements were often tinged with a racist undertone in their language and framing - either questioning the morality of the law or framing judgements in terms of mercy being given on someone of a lesser race. Black people from the United States who petitioned their elected representatives rarely enjoyed any response and black voters proved too few and far between to have any meaningful impact on municipal government; only in Nova Scotia did you not need to be a property-owner to vote by the 1850s. In what is now Ontario, only one non-white person is known to have been elected to public office anywhere in the province. Proposals for new black communities near existing white settlements often attracted letters of protest to both newspapers and local representatives. Violence was not unheard of; in 1852 very nearly the entirety of the property of the black community in St Catherine was destroyed by an anti-black mob, thought to have possibly stemmed from a fear of black labour taking white working class jobs in the city amidst an economic downturn.