Lewis Champion Chambers is one of the forgotten figures of Canadian Black history and the history of religion in Canada. Born enslaved in Maryland, Chambers purchased his freedom as a young man before moving to Canada West in 1854; there he farmed and in time served as a pastor and missionary until 1868. Between 1858 and 1867 he wrote nearly one hundred letters to the secretary of the American Missionary Association in New York, describing the progress of his work and the challenges faced by his community. Now preserved in the collections of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, Chambers’s letters provide a rare perspective on the everyday lives of Black settlers during a formative period in Canadian history.

Hilary Neary presents Chambers’s letters, weaving into a compelling narrative his vivid accounts of ministering in forest camps and small urban churches, establishing Sabbath schools and temperance societies, combating prejudice, and offering spiritual encouragement. Chambers’s life as an American in Canada intersected with significant events in nineteenth-century Black history: manumission, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Underground Railroad, the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. Throughout, Chambers’s fervent Christian faith highlights and reflects the pivotal role of the Black church – African Methodist Episcopal (United States) and British Methodist Episcopal (Canada) – in the lives of the once enslaved.

As North Americans explore afresh their history of race and racism, A Black American Missionary in Canada elevates an important voice from the nineteenth-century Black community to deepen knowledge of Canadian history.

HILARY BATES NEARY has written on Ontario local history, and is particularly interested in the development of pioneer mills on the Thames. She has served on the London Public Library board and its Historic Sites Committee. Canadian Author

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“Hilary Neary makes a major contribution to scholarship by placing the reader in conversation with Chambers’s letters, thereby making available an untold story as a voice once silenced comes to life.” Noel Leo Erskine, Emory University

“Neary’s book offers an honest glimpse into our city’s past and the real history of Blacks in Canada — not the “anodyne one” we prefer to tell. As such, it’s a cornerstone for the interpretive work on which Fanshawe Pioneer Village can build.” London Free Press