SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION IN UPPER CANADA
From the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, the British and French empires forced millions of African men, women, and children, and their descendants, into slavery. Canadian historians have documented more than five thousand Black and Indigenous people living in slavery from the late 1600s to the early 1800s in the area that now comprises Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritime provinces.
Evidence exists of both free and enslaved Black people living in the area that is now Ontario starting in the mid1700s. Accounts from the 1740s and 1750s describe Black fur traders operating out of the region around Niagara Falls, between lakes Erie and Ontario, when that area still belonged to New France. The first recorded Black slave in the area was Sophia Burden. Born in the British colonial province of New York (which later became New York State), she was sold to Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant in the 1770s and remained enslaved until 1792.
During the American Revolution from 1776 to 1783, the British government promised land, freedom, and rights to Black soldiers who would fight for the Crown against the revolutionaries. Tens of thousands of Black people joined the British side, and nearly four thousand of them emigrated to Canada after the British defeat. Although the vast majority settled in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, some arrived in the area now known as southern Ontario (then part of the Province of Quebec and re-designated as Upper Canada in 1791).
However, British law also enabled slaveholding white Loyalists to immigrate to Canada and to retain possession of their slaves.
In 1793, Upper Canada Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe, an abolitionist, proposed the first law in the British Empire to restrict slavery. A compromise with the slaveowning members of Upper Canada’s Legislative Council, the Act to Prevent the further Introduction of Slaves and to Limit the Term of Contracts for Servitude, enacted on July 9, 1793, did not liberate any slaves already living in Upper
Canada. However, the bill banned the trading and importation of new slaves into the colony, and it ensured that any fugitives arriving in Upper Canada would automatically be free. As well, any child born of enslaved parents would be freed after reaching the age of twenty-five. In this way, the bill ensured that slavery would eventually die out in Upper Canada. In 1807, Britain passed the Abolition of the Slave
Trade Act, making it illegal to buy or sell human beings in the British Empire.
During the War of 1812, hundreds of Black men fought to defend Upper Canada against American invasion. American soldiers returning to their homes in the South after the war told tales of free Black men wearing British military redcoats, and they reported that escaped slaves became free when they reached Canadian soil. This news prompted increasing numbers of enslaved African Americans to risk the long and dangerous trek to Canada.
By the time slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1834, there were very few enslaved people left in Canada. However, in the United States slavery remained legal in more than a dozen southern states.
In 1850 the United States passed the Fugitive Slave Act that allowed slave owners to track down and recapture freedom seekers who had escaped into the free states of the northern U.S. “From 1850 to 1860, therefore, the [Black] immigration that had been a trickling stream ever since the War of 1812 became a regular torrent,” historian Fred Landon wrote in his article “Canada’s Part in Freeing the Slave,” published by the Ontario Historical Society.
By the eve of the U.S. Civil War in 1861, an estimated twenty thousand to seventy-five thousand Black freedom seekers had settled in the area that is now southern Ontario. However, after the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished, many of those people returned to the United States.
The 1881 census put the Black population of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick at 21,500 people, or 0.6 per cent of the total population of eastern Canada.