Black Skeletons in Canada's Closet

"There are estimates that over the 200 years of Canadian slavery, between 4,000 and 8,000 were held in bondage. Even at the height of slavery in Montreal, slaves constituted only 0.01 percent of the population."

"By contrast, at the outbreak of the American Civil War, slaves constituted 40 percent of the population of the Confederate States of America."

"The result was a society and economy wholly geared toward slavery in ways that never quite materialized in Canada. Full-time bounty hunters roaming the countryside for fugitive slaves, columns of shackled men and women being marched into frontier settlements, vast plantations of slaves overseen by whip-

 

wielding overseers; these were all scenes distinct to the territories south of the Mason-Dixon line."

Tristin Hopper: Canada's Best-Kept Secret, National Post

"Canada might not have been a slave society -- that is, a society whose economy was based on slavery -- but it was a society with slaves."

"Canada's best-kept secret."

Afua Cooper. Canadian historian: The Hanging of Angelique, a chronicle of Canadian slavery, 2006

 

"We have a duty to remember slavery, but it is not an identity, and we cannot let slavery define Black history in Canada."

Aly Ndiaye/Webster, Quebec artist and author

 

 

Abolitionist Harriet Tubman lived openly in what is now St.Catharines, Ontario, her actions in shepherding fugitive slaves to freedom aside, though it was considered to be a federal crime in the United States to aid and abet runaway slaves. They were enshrined in U.S. law as personal property. At the time, however, in the 1850s, Canada had long since surrendered as an abomination to humanity the keeping in bondage and owning of human beings.

 

But it was not always that way. During the American War of Independence, the paroxysm when the United States rebelled against the British Crown, to become a new country whose foundation was freedom and liberty, those living in those British-American colonies faithful to the Crown, known as United Empire Loyalists left the United States to trek north to Canada.  "Neither confiscation of their property, the pitiless persecution of their kinsmen in revolt, nor the galling chains of imprisonment could break their spirits", a monument to the loyalists proclaims.

Josiah Hanson, Philanthropist

Who knew there were Black Loyalists? These were freed slaves who had escaped from American owners emancipated by the British who settled in Nova Scotia. And then there were the others, the Black slaves who accompanied their owners as they made their way to Canada. The official Act of Parliament welcomed white Loyalist refugees to British North America, allowing them to bring "any negroes in their possession", along with them, exempt from paying duty to the Crown. 

An estimated 2,500 Black slaves were brought to Nova Scotia which became a slaveholding territory. "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. Nova Scotia has always been represented as the final stop of the Underground Railroad, which abolitionist Frederick Douglas called "the real Canaan of the American bondmen". 

A generation prior to Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, in Canada human beings were listed for sale in newspapers; enslaved children were presented as gifts, authorities hunted down fugitive slaves, murder and rape of enslaved Africans was permitted by the Crown. A young woman whose name was Angelique was tortured and hanged to death in 1734 after being accused of setting fire to a large section of Montreal. 

 

Incendiary, Marie-Joseph Angelique      Kit Lang

 

Mohawk leader Joseph Brant who marshalled indigenous armed resistance to the American Revolution was the owner of 40 Black slaves. Advertisements of slaves for sale were published in the Montreal Gazette, as well as rewards offered for the return of 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", read an ad from 1735. 

 

In fact 1628 is thought to have been the year that the first Canadian slave arrived in Quebec City where New France was actively encouraging the use of African and Indigenous slavery in order to build and serve the growing colony. Following the conquest of New France in the Seven Years' War, Canada was the westernmost outpost of a British Empire that became the world's leading slave trader. 

 

(Mario Tama/Getty Images)

French law recognized slaves as humans, albeit of diminished rights, while under English law any slave resident in Canada was considered property, nothing more. It took until the early 19th  century for slavery in the British Empire to be reversed when co-ordinated boycotts led to the outlawing of slavery in the British Empire and antislavery patrols off the West African coast. Emancipation in Canada began three decades earlier, the result of grassroots actions of members of Canada's Black community.

 

In 1793, Peter Martin, a free Black Loyalist, veteran of the Revolutionary War, appealed to Upper Canadian authorities at a executive council before which he appeared to speak of the "violent outrage" Americans committed against an escaped Black slave, Chloe Cooley, whom they violently forced aboard a vessel to return her to her owner in the United States. His appeal against the situation where Americans could enter Canada and violently abduct someone inspired the 1793 Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada.

 

The act, even while enshrining the legality of slavery, banned the importation of slaves, setting out a program to free the children of Canadian slaves who had reached the age of 25. The act, however, began an inevitable trajectory toward rejecting institutionalized slavery. One that London cemented with its passage of the 1833 Slave Emancipation Act. So that by the 1850s, while Americans were hotly divided over the issue, Canada had long since settled it. Publisher George Brown while negotiating the creation of modern Canada, accused the United States of perpetrating the "sum of all human villainies".

 

In Canada today here are 1.2 million Black Canadians, fifty percent of whom are first-generation immigrants. None of whom may know that centuries ago Black slavery was institutionalized in Canada. Because Canadians simply are unaware of this iniquitous part of Canadian history; best 'forgotten', laid high up on an unreachable shelf of stagnant memory.