What slavery looked like in Canada
A generation before it was the final stop of the Underground Railroad, Canada was the westernmost outpost of a British Empire that was the biggest slave trader in the world
They came in great, dusty columns trudging north; the persecuted refugees of a new country founded on freedom and liberty.
These were the United Empire Loyalists; the thousands of men, women and children loyal to the Crown who were forced into Canada by the victory of rebel forces in the American War of Independence.
“Neither confiscation of their property, the pitiless persecution of their kinsmen in revolt, nor the galling chains of imprisonment could break their spirits,” reads a stirring monument to the loyalists in Hamilton, Ont.
And they brought their slaves with them.
When Canadian historians talk about Africans coming here after the American Revolution, they generally focus on the Black Loyalists; freed slaves escaped from American masters who were emancipated by the British and settled in Nova Scotia. But not every African brought to Canada after the Revolutionary War was free.
In the official Act of Parliament that welcomed white Loyalist refugees to British North America, they were permitted to bring along “any negroes” in their possession without paying duty to the Crown. As many as 2,500 Black slaves were brought to Nova Scotia, instantly making it the most slaveholding territory in both the Maritime colonies and New England. “During the late 18th century, practically every county in mainland Nova Scotia had slaves, and this story remains to be told,” wrote historian Ken Donovan in 2014 .
In historical accounts of North American chattel slavery, Canada usually appears only as an enlightened Eden. We were the final stop of the Underground Railroad, and the place that legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass called “the real Canaan of the American bondmen,” a reference to the biblical Promised Land.
But if Canada came off as the good guy during the United States’ great reckoning with slavery, it’s only because British North America had undergone its own nightmare of human bondage. Only a generation before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Canada had been a place where human beings were listed for sale in newspapers, where enslaved children were given as gifts, where authorities hunted down fugitive slaves and where the murder and rape of enslaved Africans was endorsed by the Crown.
The Canadian slave most well-known to history is probably a young woman named Angélique, who was tortured and hanged in 1734 following accusations that she had set fire to a large section of Montreal. The man who pulled the lever that caused Angélique to plunge to her death was himself a slave.
James McGill, founder of McGill University, owned three black slaves and two Indigenous children . Marguerite d’Youville, the first Canadianborn Catholic Saint, likely owned an enslaved domestic servant.
When the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant was corralling Indigenous armed resistance to the American Revolution, he owned as many as 40 black slaves.
The Montreal Gazette published ads of slaves for sale, or offering rewards for escaped slaves. “FOR SALE: A Young healthy Negro Wench between 12 and 13 years of age, lately from Upper Canada, where she was brought up,” reads one from 1795 .
The first Canadian slave is generally believed to have come to Quebec City in 1628. Soon, New France was actively encouraging the use of both African and Indigenous slavery to build and serve the growing colony. Later, after the conquest of New France in the Seven Years’ War, Canada became the westernmost outpost of a British Empire that, for a time, was the world’s leading slave trader.
The arrival of unchallenged English rule to the continent after the Seven Year’s War arguably made the lot of Canada’s slaves worse, at least on paper. While French law had generally recognized slaves as humans of diminished rights, under English law any slave within Canada was mere property: Rape, murder, and assault did not apply, as the law required those offences to be committed against someone who was legally considered a human being.
Slavery in the British Empire would be dramatically reversed in the early 19th century, thanks to one of the most remarkable campaigns of political activism. After only a generation of coordinated boycotts, letter-writing campaigns, and other political pressure tactics, a nation of slave traders transformed into one that now saw anti-slavery as proof of its national superiority. By the 1840s, Great Britain was spending half of its naval budget on anti-slavery patrols off the West African Coast.
In Canada, the march towards emancipation was jumpstarted three decades earlier, largely due to the grassroots actions of the country’s own black community. In 1793, witnesses on the streets of Niagara-on-the-Lake saw the troubling scene of a screaming woman named Chloe Cooley being violently forced onto a boat by a group of armed men taking her to the United States. The action was perfectly legal; Cooley was owned by one of the men, United Empire Loyalist Adam Vrooman, who was well within his rights to beat her into compliance and sell her south. What made the incident noteworthy, however, was Cooley’s fierce and dogged resistance.
The incident prompted Peter Martin, a free Black Loyalist and veteran of the Revolutionary War, to appeal to Upper Canadian authorities. Appearing before an executive council whose names now adorn streets and landmarks across Canada (John Graves Simcoe, William Osgoode, Peter Russell), Martin told of the “violent outrage” committed against Cooley by men who intended to “deliver her against her will to persons unknown.”
What Martin would help inspire was the 1793 Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada. Although it ranks as the first piece of anti-slavery legislation in the British Empire, it was by no means a radical document. The act enshrined the legality of slavery, but banned the importation of slaves and set out a program to free the children of Canadian slaves once they had reached age 25.
Nevertheless, it began the slow fizzling out of an institution that would be definitively ended with London’s passage of the 1833 Slave Emancipation Act. Notably, although the act offered compensation to any slaveowner who had seen their slaves freed by the Crown, not one request came in from British North America.
By the time the question of slavery had begun to burst into open conflict in the United States by the 1850s, the institution was already so far in Canada’s rearview mirror that British North America had shifted quite comfortably into a haven for abolitionist sentiment.
Abolitionist Harriet Tubman was able to live quite openly in what is now St. Catharines, Ont., despite her actions of shepherding fugitive slaves to freedom being considered a federal crime in the United States.
While slavery and its legacies play a massive role in the American story, its presence in Canada is virtually unknown. Until recent years, one of the only dedicated books about slavery in Canada was the 1960 tome “Two centuries of slavery in French Canada.” Meticulously researched by the renowned historian Marcel Trudel, it upended a popular conception among Quebecers that slavery, if it existed, had been forced upon them by their English conquerors.
The book was so controversial in Quebec that Trudel was compelled to leave the province for a teaching position in Ottawa, according to novelist Lawrence Hill.