Josiah Henson
2025 Black History Month: Unsung Heroes
Port Tobacco, MD
This Black History Month, the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project honors the unsung hero
Josiah Josephus Henson (6/15/1789 – 5/5/1883).
Josiah Henson was born on a farm near Port Tobacco in Charles County, MD, to enslaved parents. His mother was leased and eventually sold. In his autobiography, one of his earliest memories was of his father punished brutally for defending his wife from a White overseer’s rape attempt. For this he received 50 lashes, his right ear was nailed to the whipping post and cut off, and then he was sold South - never seen by the family again. Another indelible childhood memory was of the auction where he was torn from his five siblings and his mother who on hands and knees pleaded with buyers not to separate her from Josiah, her youngest child.
Henson is best known as the inspiration for the main character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While banned in the South, the book galvanized the abolition movement. Six months after reading the work, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. While some people questioned honoring the man who modeled Uncle Tom, many scholars consider the character among the most misunderstood and misrepresented in American literature and subsequently Josiah Henson as one of our nation’s greatest unsung heroes.
There is much more to Henson’s story. In 1830, after working his way up to supervisor of the last farm where he was enslaved and tricked out of being able to buy his freedom, Henson, his wife Charlotte, and their children traveled by foot to Kentucky and then escaped north to Dresden, Ontario, Canada. There, he became a preacher and founded the “Dawn Settlement,” providing housing and a school for other escapees. He also was an anti-slavery orator and civil rights campaigner, co-founder of the British-American Institute, and a conductor on the Underground Railroad, repeatedly trekking back into the U.S. to usher freedom-seekers to Canada. In total, he escorted more than 200 runaways to freedom. After the mother of his children died, he married Nancy Gamble, a widowed free Black woman who shared his work. Henson’s family remained in Dresden until his death.
Josiah Henson is the first Black man to be featured on a Canadian stamp. Charles County native and Arctic explorer Matthew Alexander Henson, one of the first U.S. citizens in recorded history to set foot on the North Pole, was Rev. Henson's great-grandnephew.