Black residents of Windsor, Ontario during the U.S. Civil War: family histories answer questions left open by the 1860, 1861, 1864, 1870, and 1871 censuses
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes Black residents in the 1864 manuscript census from Windsor, Ontario. Conducted during the U.S. Civil War. this census provides unique insights into migration patterns, demographics in this Black North American border community at a crucial moment. Key findings from the census indicate that the majority of Black residents were born in the U.S., particularly in Kentucky and Virginia. Many families had crossed into Canada after 1850, to escape the Fugitive Slave Act. While statistical analysis of this census and our ability to match it to records from the 1860, 1861, 1870, and 1871 censuses is limited, the qualitative research, including oral histories and archival records, offers a richer understanding of Black migration and community formation. The article discusses several biographical vignettes, including Allen Sidney’s family, who successfully established themselves in Windsor while maintaining economic connections across the border; other families, including the Barnetts and Harpers, used Canada as a temporary refuge before returning to the United States. The study highlights the fluidity of the Detroit-Windsor border, where Black individuals moved strategically to maximize their freedoms and opportunities. The article underscores the limitations of quantitative data alone in understanding Black North American movements and emphasizes the importance of qualitative research in reconstructing lived experiences and offering deeper insights into migration decisions, social structures, and economic advancements.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".