Writing Canada's antebellum Black history: the work of Fred Landon

White Canadian historian Fred Landon (1880-1969) was a pioneer in writing the history of Black freedom-seekers in mid-nineteenth-century Canada West and noteworthy for treating the publications of both Black and white writers and abolitionists as sources for the historical record and thus as equal contributors to historical knowledge of this period. He has been an important source for nineteenth-century Black history for both American and Canadian scholars, yet no analysis of his work exists. Landon's selectivity in citing sources, his recurrent topics, and his tone and diction together generate a sense of the Black presence in Ontario as a historical romance more than a search for equality, a romance that came to an end, and a search that was perhaps perceived to be no longer necessary once American Emancipation was secured. His work, though ground-breaking and well intentioned, orients readers to a narrative in which early 'Canada' saves refugees from American cruelty, and thus may have contributed to the mythology of Canada's benevolence on white-Black race relations, a key trait of Canada's anti-American nationalism to this day.