Recalling the Testimony of Freed Slaves in Canada: ‘Liberty I Find to Be Sweet Indeed’

Some are attempting to distort Canada's history for 'political purpose,' professor says

Harriet Tubman (left) poses with family and friends on her porch in Auburn, New York, in the 1880s. Ms. Tubman helped people escape slavery via the Underground Railroad, which terminated in Canada. (MPI/Getty Images)

Canada celebrated Emancipation Day on Aug. 1, marking the day in 1834 that the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 came into effect across the British Empire, and putting the history of slavery in this country in the spotlight once again.

From the late 18th century onward, Canada was viewed by many black American slaves as the light at the end of the Underground Railroad, which was a network of secret routes that led American slaves to their freedom in Canada.

As William Grose, a slave who escaped Virginia in 1851 to what was then called Canada West, put it: “Now I feel like a man, and I wish to God that all my fellow creatures could feel the same freedom that I feel.”

Yet some have been pushing to emphasize Canada’s guilt in slavery.

“Many black and indigenous people still experience intergenerational trauma, racism and discrimination rooted in the system of free slave labour that Canada benefited from for far too long,” Mable Elmore, B.C. Parliamentary Secretary for Anti-Racism Initiatives, said in a statement on Aug. 1.

The Canadian Labour Congress, in its statement marking Emancipation Day, said that it’s “important that all people in Canada recognize and reflect on this country’s history of slavery and the lasting legacy of inequity still facing black workers.”

The National Gallery in Ottawa unveiled a new exhibition on Emancipation Day that is an “examination of discrimination” in Canada’s history.

As with any nation, Canada has reason both to lament and to be proud of parts of its history, but Christopher Dummitt, a professor of Canadian history at Trent University, says that some are trying to distort Canada’s history for “political purpose.”

The British and French colonies that made up what is now Canada did have slaves, though far fewer than many other places in the world at the time, he said.

“But the vastly more important point is to note the selective focus of contemporary activists when they single out only the slavery of Western nations,” Mr. Dummitt told The Epoch Times via email.

“It’s a parochial view, seemingly deliberately so, as it serves the political purpose of driving contemporary political agendas. It tells us very little about the actual history of slavery for all.”

Collecting Accounts

Slaves in Upper Canada and Lower Canada (today’s Ontario and Quebec, also called Canada West and Canada East at one time in the 19th century) were both indigenous and black. Before colonization, indigenous peoples themselves also commonly held slaves, Mr. Dummitt points out in an op-ed for The Hub.

Mr. Grose’s account as one of the slaves who found freedom in Canada is one of more than 100 such accounts American abolitionist Benjamin Drew collected across Canada West and published in 1856. Many speak to the suffering of slavery and the hard-won freedom reached in Canada West.

“When in the United States, if a white man spoke to me, I would feel frightened, whether I were in the right or wrong; but now it is quite a different thing. If a white man speaks to me, I can look him right in the eyes. If he were to insult me, I could give him an answer. I have the rights and privileges of any other man,” Mr. Grose said of his experience after arriving in Canada.

He spoke of being reunited with his wife and children, from whom he had been separated when his owner sold him. He spoke of being able to provide his children with an education, to vote, and to earn money, with many like him having “become wealthy by industry, owning horses and carriages.”

Though many suffered in the south, the former slaves also recalled the help and kindness of many white Americans. “I am not prejudiced against all the white race in the United States,” Mr. Grose said.

A painting titled “The Underground Railroad,” circa 1850, by Charles Webber. The Underground Railroad was a secret route used to liberate enslaved people and take them to Canada. (MPI/Getty Images)

A Timeline

Abolition gradually gained ground in Upper Canada in the 18th century and was fully enacted in all British colonies on Aug. 1, 1834. Many of the slaves came north with British loyalists during or after the American Revolutionary War.

Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe of Upper Canada advocated for abolition in 1793.

The story of a slave woman named Chloe Cooley helped gain support for abolition at the time. Her owner, Loyalist Adam Vrooman, was said to have violently beaten her and loaded her into a boat to be sold in New York.

Vrooman’s neighbour, William Grisley, witnessed the struggle and heard her screams as the boat crossed the river. He told Mr. Simcoe about it.

The Upper Canada legislature passed a law limiting slavery in 1793. It did not free all existing slaves, but it did free the children of slaves once they reached the age of 25. Their owners were still to be responsible for making sure they were provided for and did not fall into poverty thereafter. It also prohibited the sale of slaves within the province and prohibited the import of slaves.

Thus, any slave crossing the border to Upper Canada became free, and the Underground Railroad thrived, bringing some 30,000 to freedom by the end of the American Civil War in 1865.

In the late 1790s, many slaves also legally challenged the legitimacy of their enslavement, and so by the time slavery was officially ended in all colonies by British Parliament in 1834, relatively few slaves were left in Canada.

Canada began officially marking Emancipation Day on Aug. 1 in 2021. Surrounding the celebration has been much of the same activism that has seen statues taken down and institution names changed to effectively erase figures from Canadian history now deemed racist.

In a statement on Emancipation Day this year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, “I encourage everyone to reflect on the history of slavery and anti-black racism in Canada and its intergenerational impacts on people of African descent.”

‘Complexities’ of History

Recent controversy has surrounded efforts to rename Dundas Street in Toronto because Henry Dundas, an influential 18th century politician in the British House of Commons, did not support abolition strongly enough in the view of some activists.

Mr. Dummitt was among several historians who spoke against this view of history at a symposium at the University of Toronto’s Massey College in April, reported on by TVO Today.

What actually happened, he and others at the symposium said, was that Mr. Dundas had the word “gradually” added to legislation abolishing slavery. The legislation seemed about to fail for the third time in Parliament, and he hoped to gain more votes for it with this compromise.

“The critics partly tell the truth, but they eliminate the complexities and rely on a general ignorance of history,” Mr. Dummitt said.

‘Signs of Industry and Thrift’

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe (1801–1876) was appointed by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s administration to go to what was then called Canada West and see how freed slaves were faring.

“There are signs of industry and thrift and comfort, everywhere,” he wrote of the Elgin Settlement in Southwestern Ontario, established in 1849 as a community for former African-American slaves. “Twenty years ago, most of them were slaves who owned nothing, not even their children. Now they own themselves; they own homes and farms, and they have their wives and children about them. They are enfranchised citizens of a government which protects their rights.”

Mr. Howe’s report became part of the Congressional debate on the Fourteenth Amendment that established rights for free slaves in the United States.

Among the accounts of escaped slaves in the same region gathered by Mr. Drew are many who expressed appreciation for their new home.

“I reached Canada about a year ago. Liberty I find to be sweet indeed,” said one such freed man, Henry Atkinson.

Another, James Adams, told Mr. Drew he was ready to buy the home he was renting.

“My family are with me. We live well, and enjoy ourselves,” Mr. Adams said. “I look upon slavery as the most disgusting system a man can live under.”

Mr. Adams was raised in Virginia and fled slavery in August of 1824. “I was young, and they had not treated me very badly; but I had seen older men treated worse than a horse or a hog ought to be treated; so, seeing what I was coming to, I wished to get away,” he said.

He recounted his long and harrowing journey northward. It was with the help of several white friends and white strangers he met along the way that he made it to safety. On his boat to freedom, he met with a white man who knew him from his plantation in Virginia.

This man told Mr. Adams a reward of US$100 was on his head and he had been told to post ads for the reward on his northward journey. “He showed us several handbills to that effect. He said they had been given him to put up along the road, but he had preferred to keep them in his pocket,” Mr. Adams said.

Hardships also awaited many who arrived in Canada with nothing. Famously, black loyalists arriving in Nova Scotia during the American Revolutionary War had been promised land and provisions but were given much less than white loyalists, or even none at all.

“The Black Loyalists were part of a larger wave of Loyalist immigration which numbered around 30,000 people. The sudden influx of so many people placed a strain on the resources of the Nova Scotia government,” says the provincial government-run Nova Scotia Archives on its website.

But the descendant of one such loyalist has expressed gratitude at the opportunity his fifth-great grandfather, William Barton, was given when he settled in Digby, Nova Scotia.

“Here is a man who saw slavery, he saw war, he saw an evacuation of thousands to a new world, a new reality and an opportunity to have a family,” Allister Barton told the CBC in 2017.

“His children’s names are now in the family tree that I have. His four daughters married happily to have their own children without the fear of their children becoming enslaved. His family really established in Digby and that name fortunately lives on today.”