Race and Hamilton

A number of Canadian scholars have emphasized that understandings of places and spaces have contributed to constructions of race in Canada.^{Footnote 10} Barrington Walker has observed that “[g]eographical space is yet another mark of difference through which groups experience the historical social process of racialization.” He argues that “we must think about space as something that is socially produced, both in a material sense (lower-class people live in slums as a result of class bias) and a symbolic sense (certain spaces come to represent people who are diseased, poor, filthy, dangerous, or prone to vice).”^{Footnote 11} Richard Thompson Ford has emphasized the role of legal and political decisions in creating racialized spaces.^{Footnote 12} Kay Anderson’s groundbreaking history of Vancouver’s Chinatown explores the discursive construction of that racialized space from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century.^{Footnote 13} Jennifer Nelson’s work on Halifax’s Africville has described the way that discourses linking poverty, race, space, and immorality were interwoven to create a justification for destroying that community in the 1960s.^{Footnote 14} My argument here is that a discursive construction on a much smaller scale occurred in late 1852 through Hamilton’s newspapers and at the criminal assize: it linked a particular place with not only blackness but Irishness, alcohol, illicit sex, and vice in general. The purpose seems to have been to satisfy participants and the public that the criminal justice system was responding in a colour-blind way to vice and crime—which it was in part but not completely.

In January 1852, Hamilton’s population was just over 14,000.^{Footnote 15} The size of its black community is somewhat uncertain owing to losses of parts of the 1851 census and other difficulties with the one taken ten years later.^{Footnote 16} In Hamilton and other cities in Canada West, households self-reported their census data. We have therefore been left with what appear to be the understandings of race, religion, and so forth held by the household member who completed the return. Some forms are meticulously clear and others are not. As a result, my counts differ somewhat from those done by Adrienne Shadd and others. However, our counts are more than twice the one presented in the published report of the Hamilton census.^{Footnote 17}

Hamilton’s black population was distributed throughout the city but not evenly. By my count, 247 people were identified in the census as “coloured.” The three (of five) Hamilton wards with the fewest “coloured” people were St. Patrick’s, in the southeast part of the city, St. George’s in the southwest, and St. Mary’s in the northwest.^{Footnote 18} As far as I can tell from the census returns and a contemporary city directory, Hamilton had no specifically “coloured” neighbourhood.^{Footnote 19} However, among those of African descent, a majority—about 140—probably lived in a narrow corridor about five blocks wide in the centre of Hamilton (between MacNab and Mary Streets) that ran north from King Street to Burlington Bay. This area encompassed St. Andrew’s ward and part of St. Lawrence. The greater part of this strip was St. Andrew’s, a long, thin ward about three blocks wide, bordered by the waterfront and MacNab, John, and King Streets. The surviving census records reveal 96 “coloured” people in St. Andrew’s ward, which was 2.9 percent of the total reported population of 3,339; 4.8 percent of St. Andrew’s households had “coloured” members (25 of 523). St. Lawrence ward lay east of St. Andrew’s, in the northeast part of the city. Of St. Lawrence’s total population of 3,386, 88 were “coloured” (2.5 percent), and 6.0 percent of households had “coloured” members (24 of 398).^{Footnote 20} Likely over one-third of St. Lawrence’s black population lived in a two-block-wide stretch that ran along the eastern edge of St. Andrew’s and across John Street.^{Footnote 21}

Churches and children seem likely to have been important markers of community. Like the churches of the other Christian denominations, the two “African” churches—Baptist and Methodist Episcopal—were centrally located, just north of the main commercial area, within the five-block-wide strip of St. Andrew’s and St. Lawrence wards.^{Footnote 22} Over two-thirds of Hamilton’s “coloured” children (under age sixteen) lived in St. Andrew’s and St. Lawrence wards. The area was not affluent, and few children attended school.^{Footnote 23} A few black households and lone individuals—fewer than fifty people in all—lived elsewhere in the city. A small, very poor community also lived on “the Mountain,” a steep, thickly wooded part of the Niagara Escarpment on Hamilton’s southern edge.^{Footnote 24} Nearby Dundas was more prosperous and important than Hamilton, but it probably did not have a significant black community.^{Footnote 25}

The road to Dundas ran—and still runs—generally westward from St. George’s and around a swampy area called Coote’s Paradise. Hidden in its depths, accessible from a spot near a toll booth on the road, lay a place known to the parties in this case as Prince’s Island, after Windsor Prince, a man of African descent, whose “island” it was said to be. I argue that, through the newspaper reports of the events described here and through the trials, the construction of Prince’s Island as a “den of vice” contributed in no small way to the conviction of one of the men for burglary and also distanced the black community at the city’s core from an association with criminality, in the interests of maintaining the appearance of colour-blindness.

The Burglaries

Around one o’clock in the morning on July 20, 1852, Oliver Dawsey, a twenty-eight–year-old man of African descent,^{Footnote 26} broke into the house of a rising young lawyer, Charles Sadleir, on King Street West in St. Mary’s ward, just west of central Hamilton.^{Footnote 27} Dawsey was accompanied by Jesse Tillason, also of African descent. According to Tillason, while he stood watch outside, Dawsey coolly and stealthily entered the house through a window. He drank some whiskey and, opening cabinets and containers, stole some bottles of ale, a piece of masonic regalia, a good deal of silver, some candles, and an overcoat.^{Footnote 28} Dawsey sorted the take in a nearby garden until the lawyer—roused by someone in his house—raised the alarm.

Dawsey and Tillason took off for a secluded spot just outside Hamilton’s western boundaries, about a mile off the road to nearby Dundas.^{Footnote 29} The place was called Prince’s Island by those who knew of it, although it was probably just hard ground in a marshy area (no boats were ever mentioned). A man of African descent named Windsor Prince kept a “shanty” there, where an assortment of people gathered who were involved in various ways in succeeding events.^{Footnote 30}

Other burglaries followed. Two weeks later, the Hamilton Weekly Spectator reported that on the night of August 3, a Dundas hotel had been broken into and money taken. The burglars—the writer thought there were three or four—had raised a side sash and opened the front door before being surprised by a resident.^{Footnote 31} Next, on Monday, August 16, a tin shop on Hamilton’s James Street—probably within five blocks of Charles Sadleir’s house^{Footnote 32}—was entered through the back window. The thieves took only “some $3 or $4 in coppers.”^{Footnote 33} Two days later, on Wednesday, August 18, a Hamilton hardware store on King Street (about four blocks east of Sadleir’s house) was broken into during the night and despoiled of “ivory-set cutlery, and plated spoons,” along with some coins. The Hamilton Gazette remarked that other burglaries had been reported, and that “a regular gang of . . . rascals” seemed to be haunting the city.^{Footnote 34} Burglaries had also taken place around the same time period in the village of Wellington Square, a bit farther north on Lake Ontario and now part of Burlington, but whether or not they were connected to these events is unknown.^{Footnote 35} Prince’s Island lay more or less equidistant from the Hamilton and Dundas burglaries.

The Last Burglary

Early in the morning on Friday, August 20, yet another break-in took place, at the house of William Notman in Dundas.^{Footnote 36} Notman was a Scottish-born lawyer and ex-member of the legislative assembly.^{Footnote 37} Having ignored his barking dog in the middle of the night, he was awakened by a police officer in the early hours of the morning to be told that he had been robbed (how the officer knew is unclear). Entrance had been made through a window off the pantry in the dining room, and two sets of footprints had been left on a newly painted windowsill. The room had been turned upside down, and a good deal of silver had been taken.^{Footnote 38}

On the night of Notman’s burglary, Oliver Dawsey left Prince’s Island, accompanied by Jesse Tillason and a third man of African descent, twenty-six-year-old Joseph Butler. A fourth man joined them.^{Footnote 39} He was likely Thomas Cavill, a white man born in England, in whose house in central Hamilton (about a block from Carpenter’s hardware store) Dawsey had recently taken up residence.^{Footnote 40} The burglary took place, the fourth man departed, and the other three returned to Prince’s Island. Dawsey and Tillason spoke of their successful “raise.” Apparently feeling unwell, and keeping Sadleir’s overcoat, Tillason went off to his mother’s house in Burford.^{Footnote 41} Dawsey spent Sunday in the bush, melting down the silver in a solution he was heating in a tree stump.^{Footnote 42}

On Monday, August 23, Dawsey and Cavill left Hamilton, taking the stage and the ferry to St. Catharines, where they hawked the silver lumps. Upon their return to Hamilton they were arrested, probably because of William Notman’s investigative efforts. Taking along two constables, Notman went to Tillason’s mother’s house. Tillason was caught as he tried to flee. His mother “began to upbraid him with his conduct,” but he said, “Give up Mother and in God’s name let the men have the things.” His mother turned over a substantial amount of silver to Notman and the police, but none of it was Notman’s. They returned to Dundas, and Tillason probably did some talking on the way, leading suspicions toward Dawsey and Cavill.^{Footnote 43}

Murder

While Dawsey and Cavill were making their way to St. Catharines, two young white brickmakers, William Edgar and Hugh Kenny, also visited Prince’s Island, with disastrous results.^{Footnote 44} They had started the day with alcohol at Simeon Cline’s inn on the Dundas-Hamilton road on the western edge of town,^{Footnote 45} and they were probably looking for more alcohol, women, and perhaps the revival of an earlier quarrel.^{Footnote 46} Some time passed; words—probably racially charged—were exchanged; and suddenly, while Kenny’s and Edgar’s backs were turned, Joseph Butler and George Foreman, age twenty-two and of African descent, charged them, running out from behind the house. Butler hit Kenny with what was probably a stone in a bag; Kenny blacked out and fell. Foreman struck Edgar with the blade of a heavy shovel; Edgar crumpled, his skull fractured in several places. Kenny regained consciousness, but Edgar died two days later.^{Footnote 47}

After the attack, Foreman took off into the bush with his Irish-born girlfriend, Ellen Cooper, and Mary Ashby, sometimes called Burns, who was also Irish-born. She was Tillason’s girlfriend. Butler remained at Prince’s Island for a while with two other women, Jenny Russell and one Mary Boyle (Russell, who was also Irish, had “got with” Oliver Dawsey when he lived at Prince’s Island for two weeks in August^{Footnote 48}). Around sunset a wagon came along, its driver gathering firewood. When Mary Boyle raised the alarm, Butler fled. Russell and Boyle helped load Edgar, who was unconscious, and Kenny, who could walk with help, into the wagon. They were sent off, Edgar to the place where he boarded (likely his employer’s), and Kenny to the home of the wagon’s owner near Prince’s Island.^{Footnote 49}

Foreman, Cooper, and Ashby paused briefly during their flight to steal some clothes. They were then arrested and charged with larceny. The next day, Butler and Dawsey were apprehended and charged with assault and burglary, respectively. Over the next few weeks, Tillason and Cavill were arrested and charged with burglary, and all were jailed to await trial at the assize that began in late October. A coroner’s inquest was held, and the charges against Butler and Foreman were changed to murder.^{Footnote 50}

The Den of Thieves

The arrests and committals for burglary and larceny attracted no newspaper attention, but the murder was big news. Jennifer Nelson has described how race and poverty intertwined with social understandings of immorality and criminality to render Halifax’s Africville a slum, a problem whose solution, in the eyes of Halifax’s urban planners and policymakers, could only be destruction.^{Footnote 51} Nelson observes that this logic emerged through a discursive process over time.^{Footnote 52} What took place in Hamilton in the fall of 1852 was a related process, although it resulted not in the discursive creation of a slum but in a small, hidden “den of vice.” This “den,” Prince’s Island, was suddenly brought out into the light in the newspapers’ reports of the inquest. The Hamilton Gazette’s report began,

The newspaper described the attack, embellishing the account with violent details that were not borne out by the evidence subsequently adduced at trial. If the coroner was told of the care Edgar and Kenny received, those details were omitted.^{Footnote 53}

The Spectator embellished less than the Gazette did, but it, too, disregarded any evidence that may have been adduced of efforts to ease Edgar’s suffering and to get help.^{Footnote 54}

The newspapers identified no other “associations,” either spatial or personal, for any of the individuals mentioned. Edgar boarded with a brickmaker in the western reaches of town, and likely he and Hugh Kenny worked there as well.^{Footnote 55} Kenny could well have been the son of H. L. and Jane Kenny, who had an inn in St. Mary’s Ward, close to Sadleir’s house and the brickmaking establishment.^{Footnote 56} They employed a young woman named Mary Burns, who may have been the same person as Mary Ashby.^{Footnote 57} No connections, however, were mentioned for Edgar or Kenny, probably not because they were unknown (after all, Edgar had died at his employer’s), but to spare the connections embarrassment. Edgar and Kenny, like Butler and Foreman, simply appeared on Prince’s Island.

Space, Race, and Guilt in the Burglary Cases

Richard Thompson Ford observes that, although we tend to suppose that cities develop naturally and are then “‘discovered’” by the law, spatiality in fact reflects the workings of power and ideology.^{Footnote 58} Ford says that “[s]pace, as we experience it, is in many ways the product, and not the fixed context, of social interactions, ideological conceptions, and of course, legal doctrine and public policy.”^{Footnote 59} The construction of the space of Prince’s Island as a “den of vice”—beyond the legal and social boundaries of Hamilton—continued in the trials that followed, although only the murder trial was reported in the newspapers. Crown counsel explored the various witnesses’ familiarity with Prince’s Island: when they had been there, and their observations of arrivals, departures, the melting of silver, and the hiding of tools. The evidence against Oliver Dawsey in the Sadleir burglary prosecution was extremely incriminating. In the Notman burglary case, the evidence against Dawsey and Tillason was compelling. George Foreman presented Dawsey as the ringleader, who proposed to Tillason that they “take a walk” and “make a raise” in Dundas, and after they returned, commented that “if it had not been for a damned dog they would have had a better raise.” According to Foreman, Tillason added that “they had had a good raise for one night.” As for Butler, though, Foreman testified simply that he had been around, would have heard these comments, and had left and returned with the others. Jenny Russell provided similar testimony.^{Footnote 60} The evidence against Butler, therefore, placed him on Prince’s Island, coming and going with Dawsey and Tillason but saying nothing, carrying nothing, and doing nothing that placed him at Notman’s house. Nevertheless, he was convicted of burglary.

The evidence against the white man, Thomas Cavill, was different. Neither Foreman nor Russell knew of Cavill—Foreman referred only to hearing of someone who ran away when the dog barked. There was no evidence of any association with Prince’s Island. There were other signs of guilt, though: a suspicious dog bite on Cavill’s leg, a boot print on a windowsill, and Cavill’s associations with Dawsey, especially his standing watch while Dawsey fenced the silver in St. Catharines.^{Footnote 61} Cavill was acquitted.

I do not think any of the men accused of Notman’s burglary had a lawyer. There were no defence witnesses, and there was only one—ineffective—cross-examination in the whole trial.^{Footnote 62} Exactly how the judge charged the jury is unclear. His notes indicate that he explained the elements of burglary and that he read the evidence and remarked on something else—but what that was is unfortunately illegible. He told the jury that they could find the prisoners guilty of larceny, and that Oliver Dawsey’s guilty plea was not to be used to incriminate the others.^{Footnote 63} Perhaps Butler might have escaped if he had had effective defence counsel; as it was, the conclusion seems inescapable that he was convicted because he was with Dawsey and Tillason on Prince’s Island. He was, of course, “coloured,” and blackness combined with liquor, Irishness, idleness, and illicit sex to make Prince’s Island entirely disreputable. Cavill was white and English by birth and had never been seen on Prince’s Island. He was acquitted, even though there was more evidence against him.

The Murder Trial and Hamilton’s Racial Geography

Race is ambiguous in the records of the murder trial, as if it was important but not allowed to play too significant a role. George Foreman was convicted of murder not because he was black but because the evidence was overwhelming that the shovel blade he had wielded had shattered Edgar’s skull. None of the evidence suggested that the blow had been struck in the midst of a skirmish, as the attack appeared to have been planned behind Prince’s shanty. With a better lawyer, Joseph Butler might possibly have escaped a murder conviction, but the verdict was not manifestly wrong. He was charged with being a principal “in the second degree,” meaning that he was “present aiding and abetting at the commission of the fact.”^{Footnote 64} Perhaps a better lawyer could have persuaded a jury—or an appellate court—that Butler had not been engaged in a common enterprise with Foreman because Butler (unlike the principals in the earlier cases on the subject) had been engaged in attacking Kenny, rather than Edgar, at the time. Defence counsel did object that there was no evidence that Butler had assisted Foreman in striking Edgar, but the judge overruled the objection, presumably because actually assisting was not a necessary element of the crime of being a murder principal in the second degree.^{Footnote 65} The convictions in the murder case were defensible on legal and evidentiary grounds.

I think, though, that race was present in two ways. First, justice was to be seen to be colour-blind. Second—and related to the first—the racialized moral taint that clung to Prince’s Island was not to be allowed to spread eastward to taint other people of African descent who lived in the centre of Hamilton.

A commitment to being seen as impartial and unswayed by racializing habits of mind seems present in Justice Robert Baldwin Sullivan’s notes and perhaps, also, in the remarks of Samuel Black Freeman, who conducted the case for the Crown. Opening the assize, Sullivan noted the murders and burglaries on the docket but attributed them to rapid population growth rather than, say, immigration or race.^{Footnote 66} Freeman opened the murder trial by denying any desire to create a feeling of prejudice against the accused.^{Footnote 67} He could of course have said the same of anyone on trial, and indeed he did make a similar remark in another trial at that assize.^{Footnote 68} Justice Sullivan was inconsistent in his ascriptions of racial categories in the notes he took on the cases. No note of race appears in the notes for Dawsey’s prosecution for the Sadleir burglary. In the second burglary case, at Notman’s, Sullivan made small notes of “coloured” and “white” perpendicular to the names of the four accused men in the style of cause, as if he were trying to keep them straight in his mind and notes. In the murder trial, though, right beneath the charges, Sullivan wrote, “The prisoners are both colored men.”^{Footnote 69} Perhaps the information in the stark statement would have been relevant for an appeal or a commutation application.

As for the witnesses, Sullivan identified Windsor Prince as “a negro” in his notes on the murder trial, but two other witnesses of African descent, Benjamin Harris and Peter Price, went unlabeled.^{Footnote 70} Such ascriptions and elisions are hard to interpret. The “aged and decrepid [sic]” Windsor Prince, who owned the shanty at Prince’s Island, would certainly have been seen as entirely disreputable.^{Footnote 71} The label “a negro” may have underlined this assessment: Eve Darian-Smith has argued that by the early 1850s, assertions of black inferiority were being grounded in a pseudo-scientific discourse about the biology of “the negro.”^{Footnote 72} “Coloured” was the purportedly neutral term, and the one most often used. Sullivan’s notes, therefore, seem to note race for particular purposes such as distinguishing Prince from the witnesses of African descent, whose credibility was not at issue, and perhaps, in the case of Butler and Foreman, for preparing the record for later legal developments. Bias, if present, is hard to conclusively identify, because the record is almost completely silent: colour-blindness was to be demonstrated in this high-profile trial.

Something else was going on, though. Prince’s Island had been presented in the newspapers as a shocking, previously unknown site of vice just beyond Hamilton’s boundaries. Most of the participants in the murder trial had probably appeared in court only a day or two before in the burglary trials; Sullivan’s benchbooks contain his notes on the Sadleir case, followed immediately by the Notman case, a very short, unrelated larceny case, and then the murder case. Since no records of who sat on the trial jury appear to have survived, it is unclear whether jurors heard more than one of these cases, but the process of choosing the 36 jurors for the three trials—by ballot, from a pool that would have contained as few as 72 and as many as 144 names—makes it extremely likely that at least some did.^{Footnote 73}

Ellen Cooper and Mary Ashby had been convicted of larceny earlier in the assize term, for the clothes they stole when they and George Foreman fled after the murder.^{Footnote 74} Some of the jurors in the later trials may have recognized them. Jesse Tillason, Ellen Cooper, Mary Ashby, and Joseph Butler testified in the Sadleir burglary case. Tillason testified about meeting Dawsey and Foreman and going to Prince’s Island, where he saw Dawsey with money, tools, and keys. Dawsey melted down spoons at Prince’s Island.^{Footnote 75} Ellen Cooper and Mary Ashby admitted their familiarity with Dawsey and Prince’s Island and described Dawsey’s doings there and Cooper’s involvement in acquiring the solvent he needed to melt down the silver.^{Footnote 76} Butler, too, disclosed what he had seen on Prince’s Island.^{Footnote 77}

The linking of the culprits and their friends to Prince’s Island continued in the Notman burglary case—indeed, this association appears to have been the reason for Butler’s conviction. George Foreman testified about the comings and goings of Dawsey, Tillason, and Butler, about a carpetbag that Dawsey forbade anyone to touch, about getting liquor, and about melting down silver.^{Footnote 78} Jenny Russell testified similarly.^{Footnote 79} The rest of the testimony concerned the burglary itself, the rounding up of the various culprits, the recovery of a certain silver tray, and the trip Dawsey and Cavill made to St. Catharines.

The focus on Prince’s Island intensified during the murder trial, since it was the site of the attack. Witnesses were asked if they knew of Prince’s Island and whether, or how often, they had visited it before the fateful day. Sometimes there was disagreement on this point: Hugh Kenny, the Crown’s lead witness, testified that he knew of “a place called Princes Island about a mile from the toll gate near Hamilton” but on cross-examination he denied having visited it before the day of the attack. He added, “The girls are of bad character. The place was one of general resort.” (He admitted, though, that he and Edgar had gone partly to see “the girls.”)^{Footnote 80} Windsor Prince, however, suggested that although this had been Edgar’s first visit to the Island, Kenny had been there earlier in August.^{Footnote 81} Mary Boyle’s and Jenny Russell’s accounts echoed Prince’s in this respect.^{Footnote 82}

Prince’s Island emerged as a whiskey-soaked site of idleness and fornication, much of it interracial. There was a lot of testimony about how drunk Kenny, Edgar, Foreman, and Butler were. The women were asked about their own drinking and how much time they spent on Prince’s Island: Mary Boyle was there occasionally, but Jenny Russell and Ellen Cooper were there most of the time.^{Footnote 83} Cooper testified about racially charged cursing and threats.^{Footnote 84} Prince’s Island bore a potent combination of markers of vice: Irish women, fornication, idleness, fighting language, and whiskey. Defence counsel emphasized these vices in order to discredit the prosecution’s evidence,^{Footnote 85} but this strategy must have had the effect of depicting anyone associated with Prince’s Island as morally beyond the pale. On balance, I do not think it resulted in a wrongful conviction, even of Butler, but it had another effect: deliberately or not, it discouraged the jury and the newspaper audience from drawing the conclusion that it was simply blackness that produced vice.

I have noted that the newspapers mentioned no familial or other connections for Edgar or Kenny in their initial reports of the death, even though both probably had some. No connections to Hamilton emerged for the men of African descent or the Irish women, either, unless one counts Oliver Dawsey’s residence in Thomas Cavill’s house for a couple of weeks.^{Footnote 86} The women likewise were asked about their connection to Prince’s Island but not to Hamilton or Dundas. However, Thomas Cavill, who was acquitted, had a house in Hamilton but was unknown on Prince’s Island.

At least two other men of African descent testified in the trial regarding the burglary at Notman’s: Benjamin Harris and Peter Price. Justice Sullivan made no note of race for them. Only one witness testified after them, and I have been unable to find anything about him—he may have been of African descent, too—so perhaps Sullivan knew he would remember their blackness without making a note of it. They played only small parts in the drama, and they had no association with Prince’s Island.

Peter Price was the cab driver who took Dawsey and Cavill to the St. Catharines ferry. He and his household lived a couple of blocks from Harris, also in the very centre of town, probably at 22 Hughson Street in St. Andrew’s Ward. Hughson Street was a central street that ran to the lake from close to the foot of the mountain and would seem a convenient location for operating a cab business.^{Footnote 87}

Benjamin Harris lived 100 or 150 yards from Thomas Cavill, more or less across the street from Courthouse Square.^{Footnote 88} In the Notman trial, Harris testified that he visited Dawsey in jail and offered to procure a lawyer for him “if he had anything he had got from Dundas.” Dawsey told him where to find Notman’s silver tray; Harris retrieved it and took it to one George Notman, who must have been related to William.^{Footnote 89} Harris provided no explanation for his actions—perhaps Dawsey asked him to return the tray, incriminating though it was—but from what can be learned of Harris, it seems likely that he was a community leader who felt rooted in Hamilton’s society and had experience with and even some faith in the legal system. He was an older, Baptist, Kentucky-born gunsmith. Although he indicated that he had a large family elsewhere (“on a farm”), he lived and worked in two-room accommodations with another gunsmith, a younger, Irish-born Baptist man, who was unmarked as “coloured” in the census.^{Footnote 90} Harris’s naturalization record suggests that he had come to Upper Canada in 1831, and he is the only foreign-born man of African descent in Hamilton whose naturalization record I have been able to find.^{Footnote 91} Adrienne Shadd’s work suggests that Harris was something of a community leader, who was involved in a number of efforts to use the law to defend people of African descent.^{Footnote 92} I suspect that Harris wanted to see Dawsey’s wrongs righted while ensuring that Dawsey had legal representation. Harris may also have been concerned to protect Hamilton’s black community from being suspected of producing such malefactors as Oliver Dawsey.

Price testified to having picked up Cavill and Dawsey separately in the centre of town and taken them to the ferry. Harris’s evidence focused on where he found the silver tray: near his own shop and Cavill’s house. Again, the association was with central Hamilton. Whether by design or not, the connection between blackness and vice in the case was not a straightforward one; that line ran through Prince’s Island.

I suspect, though, that there was a design, in part because of the judge’s inconsistent ascriptions of race, in part because of the defence’s strategy of focusing on the disreputability of Prince’s Island, and in part because Samuel Freeman was the crown prosecutor. Freeman was the key lawyer in the courtroom at the assize. During the Notman burglary case, he may well have been the only one. A local man who lived not far from the small black community in Barton, Freeman was a founding member of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada in 1851, and he soon after represented John Anderson, a former slave subjected to extradition, whose case was among the most controversial of the period.^{Footnote 93} Given Freeman’s commitments, he seems likely to have been inclined to try to confine the foul odour of immorality to Prince’s Island, rather than fanning it toward the neighbourhoods where other people of African descent lived.

It appears to me that contemporaries wanted to understand the trials and law as impartial in the face of racial difference: it was a connection to Prince’s Island—with its various markers of vice, including blackness and interracial sex—that was to be understood as producing crime. As a result, Joseph Butler was convicted of burglary while Thomas Cavill went free. Butler’s subsequent conviction for murder, though, was consistent with the law.