I Love My Country and…
Rev. Diane Rollert
This is not an academic dissertation. This is me, as a white person originally from the US and now living in Canada, trying to understand the history of Black slavery from this side of the border.
When I first immigrated here, all I knew about Canada’s history of slavery was the Underground Railroad. Yay, Canada! This was the good place, the place where slaves sang of being bound for Canaan. Canaan, the Biblical promise of heaven, was code for escaping to Canada. Slavery here in Canada? Never! Of course I was wrong. But, it turns out, that makes me about as knowledgeable as most Canadians born and raised here.
When I first spoke to people about anti-Black racism here, I was told that’s a US thing — not here in Canada. Oh yes, they’d say, we have work to do around Indigenous issues, but anti-Black racism? Not here, because Canada didn’t have a history of slavery like the States.
Wrong again. Which, once again, makes me as knowledgeable as any other — let’s say —white Canadian. If you grew up here, think about what you were taught in school about Black history in Canada. Every August 1, did anyone ever mention Emancipation Day to you? Do you remember what date slavery was technically abolished in Canada? Think for a moment.
August 28, 1833.
And the full name of the Slavery Abolition Act? Do you remember that? Here goes:
An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the manumitted slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Service of such Slaves.
“Compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Service of such Slaves.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself…
The other myth I learned when I first got here is that slavery in Quebec wasn’t that bad. The numbers were so low, I was told — as if enslaving any people, as long as they weren’t numerous, was somehow defensible.
After all, Samuel Chaplain hired the services of a free Black man, Matthieu Da Costa, as an interpreter and treated him well. Da Costa was said to be the first Black man to set foot in New France, sometime in the early 1600s.
But who writes the history of enslaved people when they are listed as property and not in human records? So much has to be inferred through dry and dusty bills of sale and the accountings of estates, and from the many newspaper notices calling for the return of enslaved men, women and children who had fled their owners. If they were treated so well, why were they fleeing?
To be chattel meant that you had no rights over your own body. An enslaved woman’s womb belonged to her owner. This was an innovation in the history of slavery elsewhere in the world and in the history of paternity in Western Europe. A child born of a slave would take on the status of their mother, not their father. That ensured a steady supply of new slaves, and the rights of white male slaveowners.
Here, in Nouvelle France, the elites owned slaves. Soldiers, merchants, fur traders, government officials, religious orders, the Grey Nuns, the Ursulines and the Jesuits owned slaves. Our opening words this morning referenced the story of Marie-Joseph Angélique, an enslaved woman, who would have been forgotten had it not been for the records of her trial. She was convicted of burning down a significant part of Old Montreal in 1734. She was owned by an upper-middle-class family. [[I removed a bad line break here]]
I’m sorry I haven’t seen the play based on her story. She maintained that she was innocent throughout her trial, as does the play. But Black Canadian historian Afua Cooper questions whether Marie-Jospeh Angélique might have felt she had nothing to lose and much to avenge. She was tortured and executed by a slave, Matthieu Léveillé.
After Matthieu Léveillé tried to flee from a plantation in Martinique three times, he was forced to become an executioner here. After all, executioner was not a job that most free men would have been willing to do. Marie-Joseph Angélique was Matthieu Léveillé’s first victim. The experience threw him into a deep depression from which he never recovered. Her body was left to hang in public, in Old Montreal, as a warning to others. A warning to who? To other slaves, I presume.
The land that would become known as Canada was part of a system that accumulated wealth by trading enslaved bodies and using enslaved labour. The labour didn’t have to be here on this soil to be part of the international system that built empires for the Netherlands, France, Portugal, Spain and Britain.
In 1760, when the British took control here, they brought more enslaved people. The system ran through the Maritimes, Quebec and Ontario. Slavery became the dominant experience of Black people not only in the colonies to the south, but also here in future Canada. From the perspective of white settlers at that time, Black skin meant you could only be one thing: a slave.
But then there was the US Revolutionary War. At least, that’s the name I know it by. The British recruited Black slaves from the American colonies to fight as Loyalists. They were promised their freedom and land. But when they arrived, they were betrayed. The land was never given, and some starved to death. The Black Loyalists had no choice but to stay in Canada. To return to the States meant being executed for treason. Many immigrated to Sierra Leone.
The same story would repeat during the War of 1812 between Britain and the United States. There were Black soldiers among the troops involved in the burning of the US capitol. (And that’s a story I never heard in school.) When they returned, they were betrayed by the British once again.
But there was also something inspiring that happened. The Black Loyalists demanded their rights. Black slaves here in Canada saw a new path to resistance and to freedom. What mattered was where you could go for freedom, and the border between Canada and the US was porous. In 1779, New York State passed an emancipation act, while slavery was still legal and very much alive in Ontario. So people crossed the border to the south, through an Underground Railroad that led away from Canada to New York.
Around this time, enslaved people starting using the courts to legally challenge their owners’ rights. A network of information connected Black resistance on both sides of the border. In 1804, when slaves successfully liberated Haiti during the Haitian Revolution, they brought inspiration and hope to enslaved peoples in the Caribbean and here — and they terrified the British, French and other European colonial powers.
Rebellion in Jamaica, inspired by Haiti, further rattled the imperialists. The insurrection was contained, but not until hundreds of slaves were killed, hundreds more fled and plantations were destroyed. At the same time, white British abolitionist opposition to the trans-Atlantic slave trade had been growing since the 1770s. In 1833, more than a million people signed an abolitionist petition, one of several.
That same year, 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act was passed. (That’s the Act with the long name that I mentioned earlier.) However, nothing in the Act mentioned compensating former slaves for all that they had endured for generations. No, it was about compensating the owners.
Slaves who were older than the age of six would be required to work as “apprentices” until they were 25. Over this span of 19 years, they would “learn” how to be free by working hard — as if, one historian writes, they didn’t already know how to work hard. During this phase, the former owners became even more abusive, attempting to gain as much advantage as they could while they were still in control.
At the same time, slave owners received compensation for the loss of their human “property” across the British empire. But compensation wasn’t just for those who owned slaves directly. Some who had invested in plantations in the Caribbean, for example, received compensation for the loss on their investments. What clearer example could you have of systemic racism? Elites who were on the boards of governors for Dalhousie and Kings College, including one who co-founded the Bank of Nova Scotia, had made their wealth investing in the enslaved labour of Black bodies, and now they would receive compensation for the abolition of slavery.
This all scrambles my brain and turns my stomach.
Consider this: Our congregation was founded in 1842 by wealthy merchants from England, Ireland and Boston. It’s probable that some among them had profited in some way from the Atlantic slave trade — even if most of them were never slave owners. To track this down would take hundreds of hours of research, going through each founder’s financial records. But maybe it’s a reckoning we have to do.
Emancipation did not go into full effect until 1834. And even though the colonialists designed the Act to serve their own interests, it became a source of celebration for Black Canadian communities. That’s a story for another day, along with the history of what happened to the Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia, and how Canada set a course to be a white nation by limiting Black immigration to only 100 a year (look up Wilfred Laurier to learn more about that) and how Black labourers, especially the railroad porters, fought for all our rights.
There is so much restitution that needs to be made to Black, Indigenous and People of Colour in Canada. I love my adopted country and I know that it is not Canaan. Canada was built on stolen land and stolen bodies. But I am inspired by the stories of resistance, of the courage of those who sought and fought for freedom any way they could, across whatever border or boundaries stood in their way.
I know this is a lot to ingest in one sitting, at least if most of this is new to you. Which it is, in all honesty, to me. Much of what I’ve said today has been informed by Black historians Afua Cooper, Natasha Henry, and Isaac Saney, along with work by Charmaine Nelson, who is currently developing the Institute for the Study of Canadian Slavery at NSCAD University in Halifax. She says that part of the reason we know so little about the history of slavery in Canada is the lack of investment in research — a problem she hopes to help resolve.
So here’s one last question. What year did August 1, Emancipation Day, become officially recognized by the Canadian House of Commons?
2021. From 1834 to 2021…
187 years is a long time to wait for recognition, let alone restitution.
May we do better.