I have spent many happy hours in the Canadian Archives and have read all and copied most of the documents referred to in this book; but I cannot omit to thank the officers at Ottawa for their courtesy in forwarding my labor of love, in furnishing me with copies, photographic and otherwise, and in unearthing interesting facts. It will not be considered invidious if I mention William Smith, Esq., I.S.O. and Miss Smillie, M.A., as specially helpful. My thanks are also due to Messrs. Herrington, K.C., of Napanee, F. Landon, M.A., of London, Mrs. Hallam and Mrs. Seymour Corley of Toronto, General Cruikshank of Ottawa, the Very Reverend Dean Raymond of Victoria, as well as to many others of whose labors I have taken advantage. This general acknowledgment will, I trust, be accepted in lieu of special and particular acknowledgment from time to time.
The chapter on the Maritime Provinces is almost wholly taken from the Reverend Dr. T. Watson Smith's paper on Slavery in Canada in the Nova Scotia Historical Society's Collections, Vol. X, Halifax, 1899.
CHAPTER I
Before the Conquest
That slavery existed in Canada before its conquest by Britain in 1759-60, there can be no doubt, although curiously enough it has been denied by some historians and essayists.[1] The first Negro slave of which any account is given was brought to Quebec by the English in 1628. He was a young man from Madagascar and was sold in Quebec for 50 half crowns.[2] Sixty years thereafter in 1688, Denonville, the Governor and DeChampigny, the Intendant of New France, wrote to the French Secretary of State, complaining of the dearness and scarcity of labor, agricultural and domestic, and suggesting that the best remedy would be to have Negro slaves. If His Majesty would agree to that course, some of the principal inhabitants would have some bought in the West Indies on the arrival of the Guinea ships. The minister replied in 1689 in a note giving the King's consent but drawing attention to the danger of the slaves coming from so different a climate dying in Canada and thereby rendering the experiment of no avail.[3]
The Indians were accustomed to make use of slaves, generally if not universally of those belonging to other tribes: and the French Canadians frequently bought Indian slaves from the aborigines. These were called "Panis."[4] It would seem that a very few Indians were directly enslaved by the inhabitants: but the chief means of acquiring Panis was purchase from les sauvages.
The property in slaves was well recognized in International Law. We find that in the Treaty of Peace and Neutrality in America signed at London, November 16, 1686,[5] between the Kings of France and England, which James II had arranged shortly after attaining the throne, Article 10 provides that the subjects of neither nation should take away the savage inhabitants, or their slaves or the goods which the savages had taken belonging to the subjects of either nation, and that they should give no assistance or protection to such raids and pillage. In 1705 it was decided that Negroes in America were "moveables," meubles, corresponding in substance to what is called "personal property" in the English law.[6] This decision was on the Coutume de Paris, the law of New France.
The Panis and Negro slaves were not always obedient. Jacques Raudot, the Intendant, April 13, 1709, made an ordinance on "the Subject of Negroes and Savages called Panis." In this he recited the advantage the colony would acquire by certainty of ownership of the savages called Panis "whose nation is far removed from this country" and that certainty could only be brought about through the Indians who capture them in their homes and deal for the most part with the English of Carolina, but who sometimes in fact sell them to the Canadians who are often defrauded of considerable sums through an idea of liberty inspired in the Panis by those who do not buy,[7] so that almost daily they leave their masters under the pretext that there are no slaves in France—that is not wholly true since in the islands of this Continent all the Negroes bought as such are regarded as slaves."