When people think about the history of chattel slavery, they tend to picture White slave owners living in the Caribbean, South America, or the United States. In general, Canada gets a pass when people hand out the blame for this particular chapter in history—and there are a few semi-legitimate reasons for this attitude. I’m going to review them briefly here because I think non-Canadians may find it interesting, although of course people born and raised here already know all this.
1. Slavery was a pre-existing social condition among the Indigenous people of Canada, long before Contact with White people. First Nations slavery was different from what kidnapped Africans experienced upon their arrival in the New World, but it was a violent and unjust system in its own way, and White Canadians were active participants in that system. This needs to be stated up front, because it partially accounts for the way history unfolded differently in Canada than it did in other parts of the New World.
I currently live in British Columbia, home to the Haida ,Tlingit and Nootka people of the northwest coast. The Indigenous people of this region were fierce warriors and active slave traders when British colonial ships and crews first encountered them in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. We know this because John Rodgers Jewitt, a young blacksmith serving aboard an American merchant vessel, was taken captive by the Nootka in 1803 after his captain and the rest of his crew were killed, and lived as a slave among them for three years.
Jewitt did eventually manage to win free of captivity. In 1807, he published his Journal Kept at Nootka Sound, an account of his experiences. This narrative is one of the earliest available primary sources we have about the people and cultures of the Northwest coast, and one of the few which gives any direct insight into how their slaves were treated.
In the majority of cases, people entered Indigenous slavery as prisoners of war. But after a person was taken captive, the condition of slavery could be hereditary, as their descendants weree born slaves and could be bought and sold as property. The Nations of the Pacific Northwest in particular traded slaves as far south as California; it was an important part of their economy and way of life.
In the early 1800’s, somewhere between 15-30% of the population in any given Indigenous community on this coast would have been enslaved people. The violence and humiliation that those slaves endured is not to be dismissed: they were dishonored people, they could be killed, mutilated and beaten as punishment by their enslavers, and both captives and their descendants could be bought, sold and traded as property. In short, the lives of Indigenous slaves were in some ways comparable to those of Black slaves in the Americas.
And to be clear, the Pacific Northwest was not the only place where such practices existed. A similar state of affairs could be found in midwestern Canada, where the Shawnee, Potawatomi, and other western tribes imported Indigenous slaves from Ohio and Kentucky and sold or gifted them to White allies in New France. The upshot of all this, and the reason that Indigenous slavery is relevant to Black History, is that it provides context to an important number.
Historian Marcel Trudel has estimated that there were fewer than 4,200 slaves held by White settlers in all of New France and the Canadas between the year 1671 and 1831. Of those 4,200 slaves, over 60% were Indigenous, rather than people imported from Africa or descended from African parents.
By comparison, the USA hosted nearly 700,000 African-American slaves by 1790, and by 1860 that number had grown to nearly four million.
The problem of slavery in the USA was literally orders of magnitude greater.
2. No large plantations existed in Canada, and without plantations there was no demand for a large enslaved labor force. No shiploads of human chattel were ever routed directly to Canada from Africa as part of the international slave trade—not because it was immoral, but because it would not be profitable. The vast majority of Black slaves who were bought and sold in Canada were imported from the USA or acquired through French colonies further to the South.
Black slaves did not always receive better treatment in Canada than they did elsewhere in the world. But because gang labor was not an institution in Canada, and because the population of Black slaves was relatively low, White settlers in the North were apparently less afraid of their slaves, and less aggressive in suppressing them.
It was never made illegal to teach Black people to read and write in Canada. Marriages between enslaved people were recognized by law, and slaves were encouraged to convert to Christianity. Nevertheless, mortality among slaves was still high, which suggests that the institution of slavery was not significantly less brutal simply because it was less common.
3. The province of Nova Scotia was always a stronghold of Presbyterian settlers with a strong Abolitionist ethos. Slavery was outlawed in the British Isles as early as 1778, and by 1790 there were important political leaders in Nova Scotia actively following suit to free their own slaves, and fight for the freedom of other enslaved people in the province. The legislature of Nova Scotia repeatedly refused to make slavery legal in 1787, 1789, and 1808. Furthermore, two important justices, Thomas Andrew Lumisden Strange and Sampson Salter Blowers, waged a quiet “Judicial War” to free enslaved people by forcing White enslavers to provide extraordinary proof of their ownership of any runaway slave—thus settling the vast majority of cases in favor of the Black person.
4. Canada inherited a new Black population from the American Revolution. People who sided with the British during the Revolutionary War were called Loyalists, and Black Americans were persuaded to join the Loyalist cause in 1779, when the British Commander-in-Chief Sir Henry Clinton made the Philipsburg proclamation. In this Proclamation, Clinton promised that any Black person who joined the British would receive “freedom and a farm” — full protection, as well as freedom and land.
Approximately 100,000 free and enslaved Blacks took the British up on this offer. They joined the Loyalist cause for the remainder of the Revolutionary War and served the British Army in the field, with both men and women working hard to support the British war effort, up to and including combat on the front lines. Although many Black Loyalists were abandoned by British troops, re-captured and re-enslaved by advancing American armies before the war’s end, some Black Loyalists did manage to escapeand took refuge in British-held territories elsewhere in the world.
An estimated 3,500 Black Loyalists came to Canada after the war, both as free Blacks and as the property of White Loyalists. This may seem like a small number—but the arrival of the 3500 Black Loyalists more than doubled the Black population of Canada overnight. And many of these new Black Canadians were free.
This background sets the stage for the event that was the beginning of the end of slavery, first in Canada, then in the British Empire as a whole, and finally even in the USA. And it all began with a Black woman named Chloe Cooley.
Cooley was brought to Canada as an enslaved person by a White Loyalist named Benjamin Hardison, and then sold to another White Loyalist farmer named Adam Vrooman. There were already many opponents of slavery in the British Empire, abolitionists who were working toward having the practice banned. Rumors began to circulate in Upper Canada that slavery would be abolished relatively soon—and many White enslavers were becoming worried about the loss of their investment. As in any panicky market, they were eager to sell.
Chloe Cooley was also aware of these rumors, however, and she was eager to be free. According to her enslaver, she was a defiant woman who regularly protested her enslavement by behaving in “an unruly manner,” stealing property entrusted to her on his behalf, refusing to work and engaging in truancy (leaving her enslaver’s property without permission for short periods of time and then returning). She may have been excited by the rumors that Emancipation might be coming soon.
So when Vrooman and two other White men arrived at Chloe Cooley’s door on a cold March night and tied her up with rope, Chloe fought ferociously .
Even as she was overpowered and dragged into the boat, Chloe Cooley screamed and struggled desperately. She did not win free of Vrooman and his thugs, nor did she escape the boat as it crossed the river. Nothing is known of her fate after that day, though we assume she was sold to the unknown American waiting on the other side of the water, and was never heard from again.
What we do know is that thanks to her resistance, Peter Martin, a Black Loyalist soldier who was freed after his military service to the Crown, witnessed her abduction. And Peter Martin took a White man named William Grisley, who had worked for Vrooman and who was in the boat to Niagara but was not involved in the kidnapping, to give their witness accounts in a report to Executive Council of Upper Canada.
As it so happened, John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, was dedicated Abolitionist. Simcoe was infuriated by the incident, and actually pressed charges against Vrooman. Unfortunately, since slavery was not yet illegal in Canada, the only label for such a crime was “disturbing the peace”, and eventually even those charges had to be dropped because Chloe Cooley had been Vrooman’s property, with no legal right to resist being exported from Canada and sold.
Simcoe was not satisfied with this outcome. In response, he drafted the first piece of legislation to actively limit the institution of slavery in the North, and rammed it through the local government into law. Despite the fact that at least half of those voting on the legislation were slave owners themselves, they put up little resistance to Simcoe’s fury.
Canadian history texts the resulting law “The Act Against Slavery”, but its full name was “"An Act to Prevent the further Introduction of Slaves and to limit the Term of Contracts for Servitude (also known as the Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada”.
The Act Against Slavery was not a dramatic overnight Emancipation Proclamation. It was intended to eliminate the institution of slavery steadily over time, without violence and without forcing the last generation of White enslavers to give up their property. Its biggest immediate impacts were that it forbade the importation of any new slaves into the country, established that any child of an enslaved mother would be freed at the age of 25, and coded it into law that the children of free Blacks were born free and would remain so.
For a single generation, slaves already in Canada could be sold outside the country or within its borders, but the passage of the Act guaranteed that slavery would become a thing of the past within two generations.
Other laws would follow, as Abolitionism went from a quiet rumble in Canada and Britain to an avalanche sweeping through the whole of the British Empire. In 1807, the Slave Trade Act made the buying and selling of enslaved people illegal, as an attempt to limit the enslaving of human beings as a profession. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 stamped out the practice of slavery fully, making it illegal to own a slave anywhere in the British Empire—with the notable exception of India.
It was the Abolition Act of 1833 that made Canada a destination of the Underground Railroad. While former slaves would still face discrimination and racism in Canada, it was illegal to enslave anyone here.
The upshot of all this is that this story doesn’t have the happy ending its heroine deserved. Chloe Cooley was not saved. To our knowledge, she was not freed.
But nevertheless, she resisted. And her resistance made all the difference.
The lesson I take from her story is this: when they come to take you, never go quietly.
Resources:
The Canadian Encyclopedia: Chloe Cooley
Newswire: Black History Month Stamp Honors Chloe Cooley
TVO Today: Enslavement is part of our history’: Understanding Chloe Cooley’s act of resistance
The Canadian Encyclopedia: Peter Martin
The Canadian Encyclopedia: Black Loyalists in British North America
To Admonish or Abolish: The End of Indigenous Slavery in British Columbia,
1830-1890 - University of Victoria Honors Thesis by Conner White