Missionaries Among The Fuigitives in Canada

The following is an extract from the letter of a well known friend in Ohio:

"There are some meddling, mischievous, (I will not yet say wicked,) colored men, who are going about through the upper Province of Canada, and also in the States, traducing the character of the missionaries who are laboring among the fugitives from bondage on the other side of the lakes. I know many of the missionaries there, but am personally acquainted with Hiram Wilson and Isaac J. Rice, and can testify that two more laborious, SELF-DENYING, honest men do not exist on any missionary ground. These devoted men, instead of being maligned, should be encouraged and assisted by all philanthropists, and especially by all colored people who have any influence.

At present, I will not name the traducers of these men of God; but I know them well, and, if necessary, can tell you much about them.

Beware of these men, if they should come to you for the purpose above named; and cease not, my brother, to hold up the heads of the missionaries in Canada.

H. H.Hill, Hamilton

Hamilton Hill (1794–1870) was an Englishman working at Oberlin College from 1840 through 1864. Hill began as the college’s associate secretary and treasurer in 1840 before becoming the head secretary and treasurer from 1841 to 1864. He was also a member of the Prudential Committee from 1843–64. Hill married a fellow Oberlin College employee, Anna Hill. In 1849, he served as a delegate to the Peace Congress in Paris. Hill was known to hold antislavery sentiments and, in 1859, wrote to the British Foreign Anti-Slavery Society about the rescuing of a fugitive slave that took place near Oberlin. Sometime after 1864, he returned to England, dying in London in 1870. Davenport (Iowa) Daily Morning News, 23 May 1859; “For twenty-four years,” Oberlin Alumni Magazine, 40:4 ( December 1944); Seventy-Fifth Anniversary General Catalogue of Oberlin College, (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College, 1909), 152; James Harris Fairchild, Oberlin: The Colony and the College, (Oberlin, Ohio, 1883), 297.