John Anderson won freedom in a Toronto court in 1861

A Toronto court freed John Anderson, a man who escaped slavery in Missouri, on Feb. 16, 1861, ending a fight over extradition that drew crowds, lawyers and judges on both sides of the Atlantic into one of the most closely watched cases in pre-Confederation Canada.

The case is documented by The Canadian Encyclopedia and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. The two accounts agree on the outline and differ on some details, which are noted below.

Anderson was born into slavery in Missouri in the early 1830s. Both sources say he was enslaved by Moses Burton. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says he was sold in 1853 to a farmer in Glasgow, Mo., and the Canadian Encyclopedia says that sale separated him from his family.

The Canadian Encyclopedia says he escaped in late September 1853 after being refused a pass to visit them. It says that three days later he passed the farm of Seneca Digges, who pursued him with enslaved men of his own. Anderson admitted he had no pass. The encyclopedia says he stabbed Digges, who died of his wounds about two weeks later. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography spells the name Diggs.

Anderson made his way through Illinois and Michigan and crossed from Detroit into what is now Ontario. The two sources give different arrival dates, early November 1853 in one and about September 1853 in the other. He settled in Windsor, and he took the name John Anderson after arriving. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says his original name was Jack Burton.

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says the United States sought his return as early as 1854 and that Governor General Lord Elgin refused to issue a warrant. The Canadian Encyclopedia does not mention that request.

Years later, in 1860, he was betrayed to authorities. The Canadian Encyclopedia says a friend named Wynne told a local justice of the peace and that Anderson was first released for lack of evidence. It says he was brought to the Brantford jail on Sept. 28, 1860, after Detroit detective James Gunning produced witnesses, including Digges’s sons. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says he was jailed again in October on a warrant from a three-man magistrate’s court in Brantford. Within days, the encyclopedia says, the U.S. secretary of state asked Britain to hand him over.

The legal question turned on the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. The Canadian Encyclopedia says it allowed extradition only when the alleged crime was also a crime in the other country. Because slavery was illegal in the British colony, the request described Anderson as a "man of colour" rather than a man who had been enslaved, and the courts treated the matter as a murder charge.

On Dec. 15, 1860, the Court of Queen’s Bench in Toronto ruled 2-1 that Anderson had committed murder under Missouri law and could be extradited. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says the court was presided over by John Beverley Robinson. The Canadian Encyclopedia says Justice McLean dissented, arguing that the desire to be free was "a natural condition for all people."

The decision set off a public reaction. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes the case as a national sensation, with public meetings held in cities large and small and opinion overwhelmingly on Anderson’s side. It says police reinforcements were ordered because justices feared a jailbreak. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says Canadian and British opinion was almost universally hostile to the Dec. 15 ruling.

Thomas Henning, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada, then appealed to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says the Court of Queen’s Bench at Westminster granted a writ of habeas corpus in January 1861. That step angered many in Canada, who saw it as interference in the authority of colonial courts.

Anderson’s lawyers, including Hamilton attorney Samuel B. Freeman, went directly to the Court of Common Pleas in Toronto before the British writ could be served. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says Chief Justice William Henry Draper discharged Anderson on Feb. 16, 1861, mainly because the Brantford warrant did not actually accuse him of murder. The Canadian Encyclopedia says his lawyers also argued the killing amounted to manslaughter, which the treaty did not cover, and that Brantford authorities lacked jurisdiction because no Missouri court had charged him.

The ruling had lasting effects. The Canadian Encyclopedia says Britain passed a law in 1862 limiting its ability to interfere in colonial courts. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says the 1862 statute barred such writs where a concurrent jurisdiction existed, and that a Canadian act of 1861 took extradition cases away from magistrates’ courts.

Anderson travelled to England in 1861 and spoke at anti-slavery meetings. According to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, he sailed for Liberia on Dec. 24, 1862, and nothing more is known of him. Harper Twelvetrees published an account of his life in 1863.

His case belongs to a longer Canadian story that includes Harriet Tubman’s years in St. Catharines, the Buxton Settlement and the newspaper work of Mary Ann Shadd. It also followed the earlier struggle over Chloe Cooley’s 1793 ordeal. More background is in our overview of Canada’s role in the Underground Railroad.

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Sourcing: The Canadian Encyclopedia (Taylor C. Noakes, 2020); Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 9 (Robert C. Reinders, 1976). Where the two differ, both versions are given. Exact dates for the killing and Anderson’s later fate are not recorded in either source.