And then...

(image by Ross Palmer Beecher)

...there is Austin Steward's nemesis, a fellow named Israel Lewis, whom I posted about yesterday but said post disappeared, possibly because I linked it with an old image of "Zip Coon" and perhaps that angered the gods of banjos (and good taste.)

Israel Lewis was the Wilberforce Colony's first founder and ostensible fundraiser. But he got things off to a bad start by failing to pay the Canada Company the agreed upon fee for the land despite the fact that he had raised the funds to do so. As a result of this soured deal (exacerbated of course by a strong dose of subtle Ontario-style racism) none of the settlers were permitted to expand their properties, nor were their achievements in clearing and building properly recognized on their deeds.

Still, Lewis was a charismatic politician and managed to transcend these initial difficulties to get himself sent by the colony to the US un order to raise funds for a church and public houses. He then began to spend the lion's share of his time in New York, courting the society of wealth and influence, failing to ever send a penny back to Wilberforce.

Steward's efforts to thwart Lewis' grift were met with an equal measure of slander and litigation. In his memoir, Steward sites Lewis as the single strongest force of damage to the reputation and legitimacy of the Wilberforce Settlement. Stronger even in his mind than incidents of racism, which Steward views only as an indicator of ignorance and poor character on the part of certain individuals (alongside a vast portion of the American South.)

Nothing however raises Steward's ire more than the fact of Lewis, having achieved his borrowed (and temporary) prosperity, turning his back on the wife who had stuck by him as they'd fled from slavery and made their way up through the Ohio difficulties to a final settlement in the brutal Ontario landscape. In the NY circles of wealth and power, Lewis became too embarrassed by her company.

I imagine a story told one evening in Austin Steward's Wilberforce hotel, by the host to the young white guest who carries an instrument case with a round bottom and has just let his tin of burnt cork slip out of the haversack and roll noisily, endlessly, across the floorboards. I imagine Steward picking it up and considering it; finally choosing to say something along the lines of "So you want to be a black man. Let me tell you how it is." If Steward were to demand a zip coon style performance from his guest (sans cork, thank you very much, but let's see what you can do by the light of the moon on your face), it would be with the desire of bandying with it and bending the performance to the hotelier's will, displaying how a caracature like the Zip Coon does not do justice to the brilliant, damaging villainy of a greedy social climber like Israel Lewis.

Two further notes on this: Although Steward reports that Lewis died penniless, loveless and friendless in Montreal in 1839 (and in fact devotes an entire chapter in the closing section of the book to the dissolute character of the man), there are reports in the Canadian Archives of a "children's book" published in Kingston in 1844 by a certain "Israel Lewis (C.M.)" that is, "Coloured Man," leading us to wonder, did Israel escape his debts and live to grift another day? And didn't somebody once say that children's lit is the final refuge of a scoundrel? Or was that something else that got said like that?
And the second note. Wilberforce (and Austin Steward) had the terrible luck of appointing a deadbeat (from their point of view) fundraiser to be sent to England as well - a man by the name of Rev. Nathaniel Paul. This emmissary *also* squandered his colony funds and wandered the social circles of London, for months and years, getting caught up in the cause of British Abolitionism, but leaving his wife and children back in Wilberforce to be cared for by Steward and others.

And then, when the fathers of Wilberforce sent an emmisary after the emmisary, the second ran into the first boarding a ship back to Canada (with a cultivated British wife who was about to be shocked by the rude Ontario landscape) and so, having fulfilled his duty, went and disappeared himself into London Society, never to be heard from in Canada again. Still, apparently Rev. Paul had made powerful abolitionist speeches during his time overseas, so Austin Steward forgives him in his memoir as he does not forgive Israel Lewis.

But it makes one wonder: The landscape of Ontario must have been so brutal. Arriving in London, England, must have been, by comparision, so much like dying and going to heaven that you'd sell your own mother for a chance to stay, even for another day, and another, and then another and then another and then another.