Letters from Canada.—No. II.
F. Douglass, Esq.: Dear Sir:—The Canadian Parliament having been dissolved a few weeks ago, new elections have been ordered in all the Province. To many of your readers, the modus operandi of a Canadian election may be new and interesting. Let me say a few words about it. The Queen, through her cousin, the Governor, (for the Governor is the Queen's cousin whether he be related to her or not,) notice the Sheriff, or other returning officer, that the elections must be gotten through with by such a day. The officer, then, appoints a day for nomination, and a day for election. The nomination day and the election day are from ten to fifteen days apart. The candidates are brought out in this way: Several friends of Mr. So and So write to him, asking him to stand (not run, as you do in the United States) as a candidate for such and such a constituency. If he consents, (and he is very apt to,) the whole correspondence is published, and he lays down his platform of principles, if he has the good fortune to possess any principles. Or the proposed candidate comes out unsought, and tells how full of patriotism and devotion to the crown, and the "dear people" he is, and publishes his platform of his own free will and accord.
Then, on the nomination day, the voters meet in front of a Court House or at some other convenient place. The objects of the meeting are explained by the returning officer

and some friend of one candidate moves his nomination, and some other friend seconds it, and so it goes for all the candidates. When these several nominations are read, the friends of each candidate hold up their hands and hurrah. Then each candidate makes a speech, promising quite as much as he will ever perform showing how disastrous the election of his opponents would be, and how superior are his principles to those of all others nominated. The friends of each candidate applaud him, and the people go [ ] and the candidates go to work to secure their elections severally. Meetings are [ ] placards and handbills posted, newspapers chartered, lies told, and sometimes heads broken. The printers do well. It is a harvest time for them. The bill-posters work night and day. Each candidate has thousands of cards to "request the favor of your vote and interest for" himself. This goes on till the days of election, generally two days, as in Toronto, Hamilton, &c. Then each voter goes to the polls and declares for whom he votes, ballots not being used. So much for nominating electioneering and voting. When I shall become a voter here, I will tell you more about it.
A word about parties. Tories and Radicals, or Conservatives and Reformers, are the distinctive names. Some of the ultra Reformers are called Clear Grits. As to their differences in principle, I think this may be said. In Upper Canada, the Tories or Conservatives are high church men in religion, and what you New Yorkers call Hunkers in politics. While the Reformers or Radicals

are the liberalists in religion, and Free Soilers or liberty men in politics. The former stand by existing abuses, and go no further than the Reformers drive them. While the Reformers go for such modification of the laws as shall extend suffrage and put down all governmental monopoly. It is somewhat remarkable that our anti-slavery committees, and among those who sympathize with the fugitive, the great majority are Reformers; scarcely a Tory touching such a thing with the outer rim of the nail of his little finger - their aristocratic superciliousness showing itself in nothing more than in their attitude towards the black people. There are exceptions, besure, to this, but they are very seldom to be found. The British Colonist of this city, as bad a negro-hating paper as any you have in Rochester, is a tory paper. Its editor is a tory candidate. The Toronto Patriot, which abused George Thompson when he was here, is a tory paper. One of its conductors was a tory candidate until a day or two since. Mr. Larwell of Chatham, the reviler and abuser of the negro race, a sort of a Canadian Dr. Grant, is a tory, and a candidate for Parliament. But for all this, the black people here, as among you, generally support their enemies. They vote the Conservative ticket in most places, until they have become notorious by it. You know the most of the black voters of New York city and New York State vote against Gerrit SmithSmith, Gerrit

Gerrit Smith (1797– 1874), a New York businessman and land speculator, became best known for his philanthropic work for such reform causes as temperance and abolition. Between 1828 and 1835, he donated large sums of money to the American Colonization Society, but abandoned that movement in 1835 when his sympathies shifted to the immediate abolitionists. In the 1840s, he gave approximately 140,000 acres of land in upstate New York to three thousand black settlers, thus qualifying them to vote. Smith was a founder and frequent candidate of the Liberty party, running for governor of New York on that ticket in 1840 and winning a seat in Congress in 1852. When the Free Soil merger with moderate antislavery Democrats and Whigs lured away many Liberty party supporters, Smith helped bankroll that organization until 1860. Smith befriended Douglass when the latter moved to Rochester, and Smith frequently helped finance Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Like Douglass, Smith supported John Brown, but psychological stress caused by the failure at Harpers Ferry brought on the first of a series of bipolar episodes that greatly reduced his subsequent reform activities. Ralph Volney Harlow, Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer (1939; New York, 1972); Gerald Sorin, The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Political Radicalism (Westport, Conn., 1971), 269– 87; Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, N.Y., 1973), 170– 80; John R. McKivigan and Madeleine Leveille, “The ‘Black Dream’ of Gerrit Smith, New York Abolitionist,” Syracuse University Library Associates Courier, 20:61– 76 (Fall 1985); NCAB , 2:322– 23; DAB, 17:270– 71. , and vote almost invariably for the enemies of our cause. So in Canada, they mostly vote right against the friends of freedom, and for the enemies thereof. Here, however, we can with a good grace plead ignorance. Very few of our people take or

read political papers, or attend to political concerns, or the distinctions of parties. - What apology you can offer for the highly intelligent and refined man of color in the city and State of New York, I know not.
But I am happy to say that black Canadians are improving in this matter. They are beginning to examine matters for themselves, and to look at and remember the actions of politicians, and to the mortifications of certain tories in this city, many who had been heretofore induced to support the Conservative candidates, utterly refused to do so, at this election.
Well, I am pleased to say that some thing of which I complained in my former letter, [are not] as bad as I feared. Many of the Bethel congregation are utterly sick of the blackguardism of Mr. Taylor, the man whom the conference, to its shame, placed over the religious interest of our people in this growing and important city. This Taylor does not scruple to make the pulpit the point whence to utter the most ridiculous stuff, some of which in regard to some persons who desire and labor for the best weal of our people is very far from being true. But while the refugees of Canada suffer in their moral and intellectual interests from the ingnorant and indecent mock-ministrations of such men as Taylor, God grant that there may be very few such. It is gratifying to know that so many are feeling this to be so, that such men will, at [ ] distant day, look in vain for a congregation to preach or rant to.
Mr. Douglass, when you consider the freedom and the impartiality of the British laws; the opportunity which the descendants of Africa have here to place themselves upon a footing of equality with all the other classes; and the growing prejudice of some classes who feed their prejudice against us, upon the exhibitions made by this class of preachers; you surely cannot say I speak too frequently, too plainly, too severely on this subject.—What compensation could a denomination offer to us for the loss of our reputation and standing through those means? What advantage to us is it to have, what is called a church standing in the way of our social, moral and religious development and improvement?

Suppose that class of men who oppose intelligence, and rant about salvation, in opposition to improvement and the Holy Ghost, in opposition to intelligence, and their own vulgar indecencies, instead of the bible, should never find places to preach or people willing to hear them. Ten thousand times better were it that they should do some such honest business, as sawing or chopping wood, than they should live as priests, at the expense of intelligence and true religion, at the expense of the progress of a once cursed people. And if it be the pleasure of Bethel Conference, or any other conference, to cast upon such men, whose only influence upon us is evil, then we of Canada, at least, must learn to estimate Bethel Conference according to its true character and real influence in this respect. We must take the ground that no amount of HURRAH HALLELUGAH RELIGION is to be taken as a substitute, far much less as an obstacle in the way of our social, moral and religious improvement.
I hope no one will hold you or any one else than myself responsible for the above. And I feel sure that you will allow any one who differs from me, to express that difference, through your columns.
S. R. W.Ward, Samuel Ringgold

Samuel Ringgold Ward (1817-c. 1866) was a Congregational minister, abolitionist, editor, and orator. His parents carried him along on their escape from slavery on Maryland's Eastern Shore in about 1820. The family settled six years later in New York City, where young Ward received an elementary education. In 1833 he embraced religion and received ordination in 1839. His two New York congregations, at South Butler (1841-43) and Courtland (1846-51), consisted mostly of whites, but Ward vigorously agitated for the rights of both slaves and free blacks. The American Anti-Slavery Society appointed Ward a lecturing agent in 1839. As one of the earliest black supporters of political abolitionism, Ward acted as spokesman for the Liberty party after 1844. Ward studied law and medicine briefly, and also tried his hand at editing during the late 1840s. His Impartial Citizen, published from Syracuse, and another newspaper venture both failed financially. In 1851 Ward's leading role in the Jerry Rescue caused him to fear arrest and to emigrate to Canada. There he launched the Provincial Freeman in 1853 and acted as agent for the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada. In the latter capacity, Ward journeyed to Britain in 1853 on a fundraising tour. In 1855 Ward published his Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro and accepted a British Quaker's gift of fifty acres of land in Jamaica. He lived his last decade on that island, farming, writing, and ministering to a small Baptist congregation. Ward’s involvement in abolitionist activities necessarily brought him into close contact with Douglass, who remarked that “as an orator and thinker he [Ward] was vastly superior . . . to any of us,” and that “the splendors of his intellect went directly to the glory of his race.” Douglass, Life and Times (1881), 284; Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro: His Anti-Slavery Labours in the United States, Canada and England (1855; New York, 1968); NS, 2 February 1849; Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History, 2d ed. (New Haven, Conn., 1997), 206-08, 227, 265-66, 361,395; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 79, 98, 133, 138, 210.
Toronto, Dec. 10th, 1851.