Slavery in Upper Canada

Between 1760 and 1834 there were more than 600 enslaved Black people under British rule in what was known from 1791 as Upper Canada (previously western Quebec). The names and sexes of about one-third of the enslaved Black people in Upper Canada do not appear in extant documents; for many, this information may never have been recorded. They were held in hereditary bondage in uneven concentrations across the colony, from the Detroit River to the border with Lower Canada. Occasionally, broader documentary records – letters, diaries, petitions, reported incidents, and advertisements – shed light on individual lives, as in the cases of Name Unrecorded (fl. 1802–3), Chloe Cooley, Henry Lewis, Peggy, Peter Martin, George Martin, and John Baker.

Slave-holders were primarily, but not exclusively, members of the elite and the governing classes, such as James Baby, John Butler, Thomas Fraser, Robert Isaac Dey Gray, William Jarvis, Solomon Jones, Koñwatsiˀtsiaiéñni (Mary Brant), John Walden Meyers, John Stuart, and Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant). Matthew Elliott was one of the largest slave-holders in the colony; the average enslaver held one to three Black people in hereditary bondage.

Gradual abolition was introduced by the 1793 Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada, and by the 1810s the number of Black people who were enslaved in Upper Canada had declined. Many of those who gained their freedom entered into wage-labour arrangements with their former enslavers or with other settlers. Only a handful of people were still in bondage when the British parliament abolished slavery in most colonies in 1834.