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<jats:p> This paper examines black Americans and their search for safety, liberty, and what Floyd Miller called “a black nationality,” on the eve of the Civil War. It is concerned with those nineteenth-century African Americans whose spatial movements, and their relationships to the state, can be defined and understood through their crossing of the forty-ninth parallel into Canada at some point during their lives. In Canadian towns and cities like Toronto, Windsor, Chatham, and Amherstburg, black American expatriates grappled with questions of political and national allegiance. They used Canada West as an outpost where they could devise strategies to confront the racial oppression that gripped their lives and enslaved their families. Through their newspapers, conventions, and churches, black subjects on both sides of the border engaged in a wide-ranging debate about where they belonge, and where to invest their hopes for the future (Miller). </jats:p>