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LEWIS, HENRY, enslaved Black man and freedom-seeker; fl. 1790s in Upper Canada and New York state.

Henry Lewis was enslaved by William Jarvis*, the provincial secretary and registrar of Upper Canada. A loyalist who had left Connecticut for England following the American Revolutionary War, Jarvis moved to Upper Canada in 1792 after receiving his appointment to the colonial government of Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe*. Jarvis, his wife, Hannah [Peters*], and their children settled in Newark (Niagara-on-the-Lake), the capital of Upper Canada. It is not known how Jarvis acquired Lewis and the six other Black people he ultimately enslaved. He most likely purchased them from loyalists in Upper Canada shortly after his arrival. During and after the war, loyalist exiles who relocated to British North America brought with them those they had enslaved in the Thirteen Colonies. Some, such as Matthew Elliott*, also brought enslaved Black people they had confiscated from patriots and claimed for themselves.

As an enslaved labourer, Lewis would have been forced to undertake common chores on the Jarvis homestead. Working with the other enslaved people, he probably tended to livestock, including oxen, pigs, chickens, ducks, and turkeys. In addition to milking cows and cultivating and harvesting crops, Lewis likely performed domestic tasks and duties that improved the Jarvis property, such as clearing trees.

During the summer of 1793, Lewis would have learned about the passage of the Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada [see Chloe Cooley]. Hannah Jarvis, writing to her father, Samuel Andrew Peters, complained bitterly that Simcoe had “by a piece of chicanery … freed all the Negroes.” The truth, however, was quite different. Although the act prohibited the importation of enslaved people into Upper Canada, it confirmed the legality of slavery in the province and stipulated that people held as chattel at that time were condemned to “bounden involuntary service for life.” The Jarvises retained the men, women, and children they held as property and continued to benefit from their forced labour, which elevated the family’s status among the colony’s new gentry.

Sometime before May 1798, Henry Lewis escaped, crossed the Niagara River, and made his way to Schenectady, N.Y. The 1793 Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada, the conditions in the Jarvis household, and his will to be free were impetuses for his escape. From Schenectady, Lewis sent a letter dated 3 May 1798 to Jarvis, likely scribed on his behalf, offering to purchase his own freedom:

My desire to support myself as [a] free man and enjoy all the benefits which may result from being free in a country where a Blackman is defended by the laws as much as a white man is, induces me to make you an offer of purchasing myself. I am a Black man and am not so able to pay you all the money down which you may ask for me but upon these conditions I will purchase myself. Ten pounds this year and every year after sixteen pounds until the whole sum is payed [sic]. I should wish to pay the money to Joseph Yates the Mare [mayor] of this sitty [city] because he is the most proper man that I can think of at present. The reason why I left your house is this: your women vexed me to so high a degree that it was far beyond the power of man to support it, it is true and I will say in all company that I always lived as well in your house as I should wish.

Pleas [sic] write to Joseph Yates what you will take in cash for me and let him be the man to whom I shall pay the money yearly. In a supplicant manner I beg your pardon ten thousand times and beg that you would be so kind as to permit me to purchase myself and at as a low a rate as any other person. My mistress I also wish a long life and good health and pleas [sic] tell her I beg her pardon ten thousand times. My mistress I shall always remember on account of her great kindness to me[.]

I remain your affectionate servant

Henry Lewis

Lewis’s correspondence hints at what he endured during his enslavement to the Jarvis family and how he felt about it. He seems to have tried to balance his true feelings about Hannah Jarvis with compliments about her. The letter also highlights several aspects of his life as a free man. It demonstrates that he connected with anti-slavery activists in Schenectady, including the mayor, who supported his plight. It also raises a question: why would Lewis decide to write to Jarvis and offer to buy himself if he was already free and a safe distance away? He may have done so because he feared being recaptured and returned to bondage.

There is no record of a response by William Jarvis to Lewis’s letter, but it is known that the Jarvises remained unrepentant practitioners of slavery. Later in 1798 the family moved to York (Toronto), where they continued to enslave six Black people, three males and three females: adults Moses, Phoebe, Sussex, and a woman whose name is unknown; and youths Kitty and Prince (Henry). They probably remained in bondage until William Jarvis’s death in 1817.

Henry Lewis was subjugated and had his labour exploited. Living in an era before enslaved Black people began fleeing to Canada via the Underground Railroad [see Harriet Ross*], Lewis had to escape to the United States to become a free man. He then turned the tables, exerting power by proposing the terms of his compensation to William Jarvis. No more is known about Lewis; his letter is the only proof of his existence. It is a rare, powerful articulation of the voice of a Black person enslaved in Upper Canada.

Natasha Henry-Dixon