"By the mid-1850s, Chatham had given rise to a vibrant, prosperous black community. The transfer of the Provinical Freeman from Toronto highlighted the development of Chatham as a cultural mecca for black Canadians. For its size, it included an unsually large number of gifted black intellectuals, among whom were Martin R. Delany, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Issac D. Shadd, James Madison Bell, H. Ford Douglas, and William Howard Day. William H. Jones's British Methodist Episcopal congregation in Chatham rivaled the largest black churches in New York and Philadephia. The British Ephiscopal church was organized at a religious convention in Chatham in 1856. The third National Emigration Convention, held there in 1858, intensified the debate in Canada over African and Caribbean immigration. John Brown's secret convention in 1858 added to Chatham's substantial legacy in black Canadian history.

Black Canadians, by their daily lives, made a symbolic contribution to the antislavery cause, but many took more direct and formal action to free the American slaves. Abolitionism in Canada and the United States had common features - lecuring, raising funds, publishing newspapers, writing slave narratives, and convincing the uninitiated to do their part for the anislavery movement. But there were substantial differences. First, blacks played a more influential role in the Canadian antislavery movement than they did in the United States. This was natural. Many black abloitionists arrived in Canada with substantial antislavery experience. They joined nearly every Canadian antislavery organization and formed societies of their own, and after the mid-1850s, the overall movement was largely in their hands. Second, black leaders, always mindful of the antislavery potential of the black experience in Canada, believed that assisting black refugees as they established a new life was critial to the antislavery struggle."

Source:
The Black Abolitionist Papers: Volume II, University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill and London, 1986, pp. 18

In a letter, titled "The Colored People of Canada", William Wells Brown had the following to say:

"Chatham. At every place on the line of the railway, coming west, where I had an opportunity of coversing with the people, they all pointed to Chatham as the most important spot in Canada for the colored man. 'Wail till you get to Chatham, and you'll see heaps of our people," fell from many lips on the route. The appearance of the village to the right, as the train neared the depot, with its straggling low, unpainted houses contrasted strangely with the beautiful villas, and finely cultivated grounds of the wealthier classes of Toronto, Hamilton, and London, through which I had so recently passed. In my walk from the railroad station to the hotel, I was at once impressed with the fact that I was at Chatham, for every other person whom I met was colored. The population here is made up entirely from the Slave States, with but few exceptions. Every shade of the Southern sons and daughters of oppression, from the polite house-servant down to the coarsest field-hand, is seen upon the unpaved and dusty streets of this little town. Those who have ever passed down the valley of the Mississippi, or walked on the banks washed by the Potomac, will have his liveliest recollections of the appearance of the slaves revived by spending an hour in Chatham." - William Wells Brown

Source:
The Black Abolitionist Papers: Volume II, University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill and London, 1986, pp. 470