Slavery in Canada
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Slavery in Canada was first practised by some aboriginal nations, who routinely captured slaves from neighbouring tribes as part of their accepted laws of war. However, chattel slavery (where slaves were the private property of their owners and their children were born into slavery as well) started with the European settlements, appearing soon after the colonies were founded in the early 1600s. Most of their slaves were used as domestic house servants, although some performed agricultural labour. Some of the slaves held by Europeans in Canada were of African descent, while others were aboriginal (typically called "panis.")
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[edit] Under French rule
The first recorded slave purchase occurred in New France in the region known today as Quebec in 1628. The purchase was of a young boy from Madagascar, who was given the name Olivier Le Jeune.
The citizens of New France received slaves as gifts from their allies among native peoples. Many of these slaves were prisoners taken in raids against the villages of the Fox nation, a tribe that was an ancient rival of the Miami People and their Algonquian allies.[1]
By the early 1700s, Africans began arriving in greater numbers to New France, mainly as slaves of the French aristocracy. When the British took over in 1759, there were more than 1,000 slaves living in Quebec.
[edit] Under British rule
The British aristocracy also brought African slaves.[citation needed] Just after the American Revolution ended in 1783, British Loyalists brought over 2,000 African slaves[2] to British Canada. Approximately 1,200 of the African slaves were taken to Nova Scotia, 300 to Quebec (Lower Canada) and 500 to Ontario (Upper Canada).[citation needed] A few others were taken to Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton Island, and Newfoundland.
Historian Marcel Trudel has recorded 4,092 slaves throughout Canadian history, of which 2,692 were aboriginal people, owned mostly by the French, and 1400 blacks owned mostly by the British, together owned by approximately 1400 masters.
The region of Montreal dominated with 2,077 slaves, compared to 1,059 for Quebec City overall and 114 for Trois-Rivières. Several marriages took place between French colonists and slaves: 31 unions with aboriginal slaves and 8 with black slaves.
In 1793, under the administration of Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe, legislation (the Act Against Slavery) was passed in Upper Canada that allowed for gradual abolition: slaves already in the province would remain enslaved until death, no new slaves could be brought into Upper Canada, and children born to female slaves would be freed at age 25. In 1803, William Osgoode, then Chief Justice of Lower Canada, ruled that slavery was not compatible with British law. This judgment of historic nature, while it did not abolish slavery, set free 300 slaves and resulted in the rapid decline of the practice of slavery. The Upper Canada Act remained in force until 1833 when the British Parliament's Slavery Abolition Act abolished slavery in all parts of the British Empire.
Most of the emancipated slaves of African descent in Canada were then sent to settle Freetown in Sierra Leone and those that remained primarily ended up in segregated communities such as Africville outside Halifax, Nova Scotia. (Today there are four remaining slave cemeteries in Canada: in St.-Armand, Quebec, Shelburne, Nova Scotia and Princeville and Dresden in Ontario.)
Around the time of the Emancipation, the Underground Railroad network was established in the United States, particularly Ohio, where slaves would cross into the Northern States over the Ohio River en route to various settlements and towns in Upper Canada (known as Canada West from 1841 to 1867).
[edit] Notes
- ^ Brett Rushforth, "Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance," William and Mary Quarterly 63 (January 2005), No.1, para. 32. Rushforth confuses the two Vincennes explorers. François-Marie was 12 years old during the First Fox War.
- ^ James W. ST. G. Walker, "Blacks", in The Canadian Encyclopedia
