Paul Kane, the celebrated explorer and artist,[12] in a paper read before the Canadian Institute[13] in 1857 said: "Slavery is carried on to a great extent along the North-West Coast and in Vancouver Island and the Chinooks.... The inhabitants still retain a large number of slaves. These are usually procured from the Chastay Tribe who live near the Umqua, a river south of the Columbia emptying into the Pacific. They are sometimes seized by war-parties but are often bought from their own people.... Their slavery is of the most abject description: the Chinook men and women treat them with great severity and exercise the power of life and death at pleasure."
Kane gives shocking instances of this. He tells of a chief who sacrificed five slaves to a colossal wooden idol he had set up and says that the unfortunate slaves were not considered entitled even to burial but their bodies were cast out to the crows and vultures.
Amongst the French such an extreme of barbarity did not obtain. Their law was based upon the civil law, that is, the law of Rome, which in its developed form recognized the slave as a human being. The Roman world was full of slaves. Not only were there slaves born but debtors sometimes sold themselves[14] or their children. The criminal might be enslaved. In early pagan times the slave had no rights. He was a chattel disposable according to the will of his master who had jus vitæ necisque, who could slay, mutilate, scourge at pleasure.[15] In the course of time this extreme power was restrained. Hadrian forbade the killing of slaves, Marius allowed the slave to lay an information against his master. The prefect at Rome and the presidents of the provinces took cognizance of crimes against the slave; and Constantine allowed a master to go free on killing his slave in chastisement only if he used rods or whips, but not if he used sticks, stones or javelins or tortured him to death.[16] Hard as was his lot, the unhappy slave had at least some rights in the later civil law, few and slight as they were, and these he had under the Coutume de Paris, the law of French Canada.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] For example in Garneau's Histoire du Canada (1st Edit) Vol. 2, p. 447 after speaking of correspondence of 1688-9 referred to in the text he says of the answer of the authorities in Paris:
"C'était assez pour faire échouer une enterprise, qui aurait greffé sur notre société la grande et terrible plaie qui paralyse la force d'une portion si considérable de l'Union Américaine, l'esclavage, cette plaie inconnue sous notre ciel du Nord"—"That was effective to strand a scheme which would have engrafted upon our society that great and terrible plague which paralyses the energies of so considerable a part of the American Union, Slavery, that plague unknown under our northern sky."
[2] He was sold by David Kertk or Kirke the first English Conqueror of Quebec. England held her conquest only from 1629 to 1632, if it be permissible to call Kirke's possession that of England when he was repudiated by his country.
Relations des Jesuites, 1632, p. 12: do. do. 1633, p. 25. Much of the information which follows concerning slavery in Quebec is taken from a paper in the Memoirs of the Historical Society of Montreal, 1859, De L'esclavage en Canada, written by M. Jacques Viger and Sir L.H. Lafontaine. I have made an independent investigation and am satisfied that the facts are truly stated. This general acknowledgment will prevent the necessity of particular reference.
In a local history of Montreal Memoirs de la Société Historique de Montreal 1869, p. 200, there is a reference to Panis slaves in Montreal in 1670.
[3] "Mais il est bon de leur faire remarquer qu'il est à craindre que ces nègres, venant d'un climat si différent, no périssent en Canada et le projet serait alors inutile." "Il est à craindre" that the prospect of "le projet" being "inutile" was more alarming than that of "ces nègres" perishing in frozen Canada.