She was born in 1823 at Wilmington in the slave state of Delaware, the eldest of 13 children of Abraham and Harriet Shadd, “free Negroes.” Her father had been a shoemaker but also an agent of the abolitionist press set up by white sympathizers in the Northern free states. He was also a “conductor” on the secret Underground Railroad that sheltered and forwarded escaped slaves on their northward flights to freedom.

In 1833 Abraham Shadd moved his family to West Chester in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a free state where his children could be educated outside the world of slavery. Here, an alert, intelligent Mary did well in a Quaker school that crossed racial boundaries. In fact, she went on to teach school herself, variously in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York City. And in 1849, now an independent, travelled 26-year-old, she produced an influential pamphlet, Hints to the Colored People of the United States, which urged self-reliance and self-respect upon Black inhabitants. But very soon the American Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 violently shocked Black hopes and sent Mary wayfaring further northward on her own into the free lands of Canada.
 

Mary Ann Shadd taught school in Windsor from 1851-53. She was founding publisher of a weekly newspaper in Chatham. A double-barreled abolutionist, she recruited for the Union Army during the Civil War. She was a school principal in the United States before becoming a lawyer in Washington, D.C., where she died in 1893 at age 70. [Photo, courtesy Dr. Daniel G Hill]

This law of 1850 required federal authorities in Northern states to enforce the seizure of Black “runaways” for return to trial in Southern slave states. Still more, the law invited virtual kidnapping, since bounty-seeking slave hunters might grab Black suspects in the North for transfer to the mercies of Southern courts, thus destroying the Northern free haven of security. And so Black migrations rapidly swelled northward into British Canada where slavery had been illegal since Britain’s own Imperial act of 1833 and where Upper Canada, which dipped down into the American mid-west, by law, had prohibited any future importation of slaves in 1793. Consequently, Blacks streamed into Windsor across from Detroit or over the Niagara frontier from upstate New York. Mary Shadd trekked north herself to examine this “Canada Venture.”

She arrived in Toronto, the Upper Canadian capital, in September 1851, and served as Secretary to a Black convention there. Capable and assured, eloquent and handsome, she was a striking figure with her light-brown skin and dark, commanding eyes. She liked Canada – “[I] do not feel prejudice,” she wrote from Toronto to her brother – and afterwards she went on to Windsor where Black immigrants were settling to launch a much needed school for their children. Mary soon found, however, that Blacks disagreed among themselves over policies of setting up their own racial schools and areas or of pursuing integration into the general community – a key principle she backed aggressively. In any case, in 1852 she produced for new immigrants a 44-page booklet, Notes of Canada West, which evaluated the various Black settlements of Upper Canada. Yet her stand against segregation annoyed Black elements that favoured it and they attacked her views in their established newspaper, The Voice of the Fugitive. Thus Mary launched her own paper in response, the Provincial Freeman. It began in the spring of 1853 under the nominal editorship of a Black, male Presbyterian minister (who could accept a woman editor?) and it endured, even if its frequent shortage of cash impelled Mary to make lecture tours back into the United States to speak against slavery while her sister-in-law Amelia ran the paper in her absence.
 

On right, Declared a National Monument in 1976, 1421 W Street N.W. in Washington, D.C., was the last residence of Mary Ann Shadd. On left, The Provincial Freeman was first published in 1853 by Mary Ann Shadd, the first black woman to publish a newspaper in North America. [Photos, courtesy Dr. Daniel G. Hill]

In 1854 Mary moved her influential paper to Toronto with its relatively sizable yet rooted Black community. The next year, she shifted it again, this time to Chatham which held some two thousand Blacks in its area, and which was near Buxton where her parents and others of her family had settled. Then in 1856 she married Thomas Cary, an industrious Black barber by whom she had a daughter and a son. In 1857 the spread of hard times across both the United States and Canada forced her to suspend her paper. Her husband died, all too prematurely, in 1860. Still, Mary Shadd went on, teaching, lecturing, writing until the coming of the American Civil War led finally to the end of slavery. Mary, indeed, was commissioned as a recruiting officer by the state of Indiana to help enlist Blacks for service in Union forces. And after the war, she decided to return to the United States and aid in the enormous task of educating and adjusting masses of ex-slaves for their new world of freedom. She went back permanently in 1868 to teach, write, and lecture tirelessly, settling in Washington – and also to become a lawyer by age 60. Her career as a committed activist (which further included support for woman suffrage) went on almost to her death in 1893, at 70. Over a courageous life, Mary Shadd had set her mark on two countries. And in Canada, she left descendants, close relatives, and friends in a maturing Black community, whose self-awareness and pride she herself had worked tirelessly to build.