[AL]: This is the return letter, going to David Brown, a prisoner in the Provincial Penitentiary in Kingston, and formerly of the Coloured Company of the Canadian Militia, from his commanding officer, Capt. Alexander MacDonald. This is one of the more remarkable items I’ve read in the penitentiary historical records - remarkable because we have so few letters between private individuals that were in prison. Remarkable because we have only this one from the 19th century. Remarkable because of the writers, as well.
Brown's letter to MacDonald is so fragile I did not want to even risk moving it for scanning or photograph. In his first letter, Brown asks MacDonald "to do, in your wisdom, what is possible" and "act on this poor fellow’s behalf" in order "to secure my release." Brown sent his letter on June 7, 1843; he had been in penitentiary since October 1842, inmate #657. Twenty-six when convicted and the child of freedmen, Brown was sentenced for seven years for shopbreaking, probably in the Hamilton area. MacDonald responds that "the step would not be allowed with any beneficial results" to interfere in the sentence; instead, he offers fairly rote advice, suggesting Brown "avoid all evil courses" and work on "gaining the good opinion of the officers" to speed his release, which would "give me pleasure." Evidently, this strategy had some success, as David Brown was pardoned in 1845 (a pardon at the time being at the discretion of the superior officers).
The Coloured Company formed in 1840 was the continuation of earlier units that were raised during the War of 1812 and the 1837-38 Rebellions. Capt. MacDonald's company served as frontier infantry and as an engineering and construction unit - they built part of the Cayuga Road between Niagara Falls and Lake Simcoe. The unit was, of course, completely segregated, mostly used for physical labour, only armed on occasion, and was disbanded in 1850. In Canada West, "Black life was marked by legal freedom and social and economic inequity and marginalization" (Walker) but military service, in the form of membership in the Company, was prestigious and respectable work for black men, especially in the eyes of a white settler society that was often martial, paternalist and hierarchical. This may explain, in part, the ease the unit had in recruiting and filling its ranks.
Being in the Penitentiary would have been a much more difficult experience for David Brown - besides the harsh discipline, silent system and utterly disordered management of the prison, black prisoners, especially freed slaves or their descendants (along with French Canadians) were viewed as being intrinsically 'villainous' and prone to conspiracy, escape and resistance. I wonder why. Often in the historical records black convicts occupy more space than white - a subject of disquiet and suspicion - but surprisingly, we know little about David Brown's time in the prison. Although prisoners were interviewed before release in the 1840s, this practice only became systematic, and a field for political contention, in the late 1850s. We have no idea what Brown thought of his treatment. The punishment register record three incidents of being lashed, and a half dozen bread and water diets, for talking or idling at work in the stone shed. In the majestic equality of the regulations, he shared these punishments with prisoners young and old, tried and untried, women and men, though far fewer of them had lived under the long shadow of slavery, and knew before entering the prison, from family, friends, community, and personal experience, the threat of the lash at the word of an overseer.
I chose this letter because of its uniqueness, because it shows agency and action even in the face of privation and confinement, and to rescue its meagre contents from obscurity. In writing this, I drew heavily from Ged Martin's "British officials and their attitudes to the Negro community in Canada, 1833-1861" (Ontario History, 1974), Loren Schweniger's "A fugitive Negro in the promised land: James Rapier in Canada, 1856-1864" (Ontario History, 1975), Barrington Walker's Race On Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario's Criminal Courts, 1858-1959 (UofT Press, 2010) and Robin Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (McGill-Queen's Press, 1997).
