Slavery in Canada

Canada has historically maintained the common notion that slavery did not cross the border with the United States and that the nation provided safe haven to enslaved people. However, institutional slavery has an extensive, if hidden, history spanning hundreds of years in Canada. In fact, slavery was legally practiced in Canada for longer than it has been abolished.

The sixteenth through nineteenth centuries saw thousands of enslaved people of African and Indigenous descent in Quebec, Ontario, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick. These formerly British and French colonies, which later formed the nation of Canada, developed different enslavement systems than enslaved societies elsewhere in the French and British empires, but they still endorsed the active trading of enslaved people and the goods they produced.

Slavery was not common in the countries of France and England, but both nations enslaved millions of Black people in their distant colonies, setting up a racist double standard among European colonizers. Violence and exploitation became key aspects of European imperialism. Colonial merchants owned the largest number of enslaved people, but farmers, the political elite, and the Church also were owners. Enslaved people acted as servants, farm labor, and skilled artisans whose work enabled the British colonies that became modern Canada to prosper.

Background

The earliest record of a Black enslaved person in Canada dates to about 1629, when British pirates sold a nine-year-old-boy from Madagascar to a Québec clerk. The boy was baptized Olivier Le Jeune, given the first name of a French clerk and the last name of the Jesuit priest, Paul Le Jeune, who baptized him. The boy lived in Quebec as a domestic servant for the rest of his life, which ended in 1654.

By 1689, the French monarch Louis XIV had officially sanctioned New France’s participation in the Atlantic slave trade after colonial administrator Jean-Baptiste de Lagny insisted the colony was economically dependent on forced labor. The Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, British, Danes, Swedes, and other Europeans put forth similar economic justifications for the forcible capture and transportation of roughly 12.5 million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. These men, women, and children endured daily violence, including chain lashings, public whippings, torture, sexual exploitation, abuse, and violence.

Many died in passage, and, of those who did survive the journey across the ocean, few lived past the age of twenty-five. However, in Canada, the majority of enslaved people were not of African but Indigenous origin. Indigenous North American populations subjugated war captives as a matter of custom before the French arrived, but this practice grew in record proportions as the West expanded.

Beginning in the 1670s, the French began receiving captives from their Indigenous North American partners as tokens of friendship during commercial and diplomatic exchanges. The Illinois people were notorious for raiding nations to the southeast to bring back captives. By the early eighteenth century, the practice of buying and selling these captives was firmly established.

Overview

The largest population of enslaved people of African descent was most likely in Nova Scotia, where many Loyalists fled after Britain lost the American Revolution (1775–1783), bringing their enslaved Africans with them as duty-free “property.” Enslaved people frequently resisted and fought back by escaping enslavers or helping other freedom seekers even while risking recapture and re-enslavement. In 1777, many enslaved people fled from British North America to Vermont, which had abolished slavery that year. Enslaved people also appropriated, adapted, or rejected imposed religions, destroyed tools, or even challenged their enslavement in courts, which contributed to the decline of African enslavement in Lower Canada in the late 1790s. Other free people of African descent in North America and Western Europe advocated ending slavery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which brought the beginnings of the abolition movement.

In 1793, Peter Martin, a formerly enslaved Revolutionary War veteran, testified before the legislature in Ontario, which became the first province in British North America to introduce a statute to limit African enslavement. Martin testified to how an enslaved woman named Chloe Cooley was violently transported to slaveholders in New York.

In opposition to slave-holding members of the legislature, Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe advocated for abolition of slavery. In the end, the statute of 1793 prohibited importing enslaved people but stopped short of freeing anyone. As a result, many enslaved people fled to the northern United States, settling in places that had abolished enslavement.

On March 25, 1807, the slave trade was abolished throughout the British Empire, including British North America. When it became illegal to buy or sell human beings, British participation in the transatlantic slave trade ended, but the holding and exploiting of enslaved people continued. It took the British Parliament’s passage of the Slavery Abolition Act to abolish the overall practice of enslavement across most of the Empire in August 1833. After 1833, people of African descent were legally free, although not equal. They faced widespread segregation, discrimination, prejudice, and inequality in Canadian society, which is at least partially a legacy of enslavement.

Slavery’s abolition allowed the British colonies in North America to become a destination for escaped enslaved people in the United States who proceeded North via the famous Underground Railroad. The railroad was a network of people, organizations, hiding places, homes, routes, transportation networks, and tactics that supported freedom seekers. The Underground Railroad was active for about thirty years. However, some historians have criticized the ways Canada as a nation has chosen to extol three decades of assistance to enslaved people over two hundred-plus years of abuse and captivity.

Even after obtaining freedom, Black people in Canada faced considerable racism in the country. Racist attitudes and practices severely limited their opportunities, and segregated education was legally enforced in Upper Canada in the 1850s. It would take another century to achieve formal protection from racist education, employment, and housing practices. Only in the 1950s and 1960s did several provinces enact laws guaranteeing fair employment practices, creating bills of rights, and establishing the first human rights commissions.

Bibliography

Bessiere, Arnaud, University of Montreal. From “Slavery.” Canadian Museum of History, www.historymuseum.ca/virtual-museum-of-new-france/population/slavery/. Accessed 8 June 2023.

Brown, Kyle G. “Canada's Slavery Secret: The Whitewashing of 200 Years of Enslavement.” CBC/Radio-Canada, 18 Feb. 2019, www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/canada-s-slavery-secret-the-whitewashing-of-200-years-of-enslavement-1.4726313. Accessed 14 June 2023.

Cooper, Dr. Afua. “Slavery in Canada.” The Ontario Historical Society, ontariohistoricalsociety.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/slavery‗in‗canada.pdf. Accessed 14 June 2023.

“The Enslavement of African People in Canada (c. 1629–1834).” Parks Canada, 31 July 2020, www.canada.ca/en/parks-canada/news/2020/07/the-enslavement-of-african-people-in-canada-c-16291834.html. Accessed 8 June 2023.

McRae, Matthew, and McCullough, Steve. “The Story of Black Slavery in Canadian History.” Canadian Museum for Human Rights, 16 Feb. 2023, humanrights.ca/story/story-black-slavery-canadian-history. Accessed 8 June 2023.