Flour merchant Dwight Plimpton Janes was born in Vermont but lived in Montreal where he married in 1828 and then moved to his wife's hometown in Connecticut around 1835.
Janes joined the anti-slavery movement and butted heads with powerful people during the Amistad affair before returning home to Montreal in 1840.
Janes was a key player in the underground railroad, helping blacks escape slavery and find freedom in Montreal. He surely helped out Shadrach Minkins, a waiter and refugee from slavery who was busted out of a Boston court after being ordered back into slavery under the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850.
Minkins set up a couple of restaurants in Montreal - one called Uncle Tom's Cabin according to his biographer - before settling into his barber shop on Mountain below St. Antoine where he snipped hair from the mid-1850s. Minkins married an Irish immigrant and had a couple of children with her and died in 1875.
Janes was good friends with John Dougall, a proselytizing Protestant born here in 1841 and whose Montreal Daily Witness (1846-1938) took constant aim at booze and slavery.
"His sympathy with suffering humanity was exceedingly strong," Dougall wrote in his obit for Janes. "He was so well known as a friend of the slave that he was sometimes called the African Consul." Dougall hired Antonio, a teenage slave from the Amistad who moved to Montreal.