Enslaved Black people in the Maritimes

Black people were enslaved throughout the Atlantic world, including in Shelburne, N.S., a loyalist settlement briefly known as Port Roseway, which was founded in 1783. Surviving historical documents reveal little about specific experiences of the enslaved. In many cases names were not recorded [see Name Unrecorded]. In others only a name survives, nothing else. Occasionally, a broader documentary record – an unusually detailed burial record, a naval officer’s diary entry, a legal brief, a deposition – sheds light on individual lives, as in the cases of Diana Bestian, Lydia Jackson, Nancy, Statia, and Isaac Willoughby. But these remain the exception. The names, lives, and stories of countless others are lost.

The Atlantic slave trade

Slavery in colonial Canada was part of the much broader Atlantic slave trade. The major European powers and several African kingdoms were enriched by this cruel commerce in human flesh, an economic system that grew exponentially in the 18th century. More than ten million people were brought to the Americas, the vast majority destined for Brazil. About 400,000 arrived in the American colonies, where slave owners exploited their labour to profit from staple crops such as sugar, tobacco, and rice. A minority of North American slaves ended up in the Maritimes.

By the 1770s most of the enslaved in the American colonies had been born there. The Chesapeake region, comprising Maryland and Virginia, developed a self-reproducing slave population, and there were also many native-born enslaved people in New England and New York. Any African-born labourers in the Maritimes were likely brought to the North American northeast via the West Indies, an area that continued to see a more limited African trade.

The end of the American Revolutionary War resulted in an influx of white loyalists, their slaves, and free Black loyalists to the Maritimes. White loyalists greatly expanded slavery in the region, building upon existing systems in Île Royale (Cape Breton)[see Marguerite] and among the New England planters.

Enslavement in the Maritimes

The scope and nature of the region’s form of slavery is difficult to gauge because it is not always clear whether an individual was a slave or an indentured servant. The propensity of white loyalists to re-enslave free Black people and the failure of the colonial governments to conduct a slave census make it particularly difficult to estimate numbers. Even so, it is probable that at least 1,500 individuals (and possibly as many as 2,500) unwillingly accompanied their loyalist owners to the Maritimes. Some may have settled permanently, while others perhaps returned to the United States.

Slavery across the North American northeast occurred in the context of small holdings, with typically only one to three enslaved people per household. Their labour would have included both farm and domestic work, and they would have had close relationships, however fractious, with their owners. A few loyalists, such as James Moody and John Polhemus, kept more than eight slaves, but this was rare and still far below the number of plantation workers in the southern United States. In the Maritimes, master and slave often worked side by side and were always in one another’s space, another significant difference from South Carolina or Virginia, where most Black people rarely saw their owners or overseers.

The intimacy of Maritime slave-to-owner relations did not stop the enslaved from establishing families, friendships, culture, or communities, even though they were a minority within the dominant white society. Despite this imbalance, rising opposition to slavery within the British empire meant that owners could not operate with impunity.

Contesting slavery in colonial Canada

No slave laws existed in the Maritimes, except in St John’s Island (later Prince Edward Island), where a 1781 slave baptism law legalized the institution until its repeal in 1825, yet owners attempted several times to introduce them. Such efforts were frequently challenged by those who did not own slaves, as in Nova Scotia, where masters trying to add slavery to statute law under the guise of gradual emancipation legislation (comparable to that adopted by Upper Canada in 1793) were thwarted in 1787, 1789, 1801, and 1808; a similar effort in New Brunswick failed in 1801.

The legal fight to end slavery progressed unevenly across the Maritimes. Enslaved people such as Nancy tried to secure their freedom through the courts, and in Nova Scotia the chief justices Sampson Salter Blowers and Sir Thomas Andrew Lumisden Strange were among those who ruled against slavery. Both men avoided direct judgements, preferring to strip white people of their human property gradually. When the enslaved escaped, their owners usually attempted to recover them through the courts. But without an established legal right to own slaves, proving ownership was difficult; Blowers’s rulings, especially, made it nearly impossible to justify the legality of owning another human being. Hard-line masters in Digby complained in an 1808 petition that the Nova Scotia courts had undermined slavery and allowed their slaves to treat them with “defiance.” Yet these petitioners seem to have eventually concluded that it was better to retain their workers as freed servants and hire them for pay.

The New Brunswick courts ruled differently. Justices there were either evenly split on the issue or, as was the case in 1806, found in favour of enslavement. Yet the practice began to die out and slave advertisements became rarer, replaced by notices for servants. As had been determined in Nova Scotia, it made sense to retain individuals as servants for what were likely very low wages.

One of the last documented references to enslaved people in colonial Canada is an 1828 entry in a Montserrat slave register from the West Indies, six years before emancipation in most of the British empire. The recorder noted that a Mr Ormsby had three enslaved people living with him in Prince Edward Island – three years after the legalization of slavery had been repealed there.

Timeline of enslavement in the Maritimes

1752: Merchant Joshua Mauger places an advertisement in the Halifax Gazette (30 May) announcing the sale of six “Negro slaves.”

1765–83: During the American revolution at least 30,000 people migrate to the Maritimes from the United States.

1766–1812: In Liverpool, N.S., the planter, businessman, militia leader, and legislator Simeon Perkins keeps a diary of daily events, an important source for information about the sale of slaves, which included young children, and the names of owners.

1772: In England the case Somerset v. Stuart is decided, in which a slave-holder is barred from forcibly removing an enslaved person to be sold in Jamaica. The outcome strengthens the arguments of those in British North America who are opposed to slavery.

1778: In Scotland’s highest court, Knight v. Wedderburn establishes that the rights of an enslaver over an enslaved person “could not be supported in this country to any extent.” The legal team successfully representing escaped slave Joseph Knight (who had been purchased in Jamaica and taken to Scotland) is led by lord advocate Henry Dundas (later 1st Viscount Melville) and includes academic jurist Allan Maconochie [Lord Meadowbank] and prominent members of the Scottish Enlightenment. The landmark decision, along with Somerset v. Stuart, is influential in the British colonies.

1781: Walter Patterson, governor of St John’s Island (later Prince Edward Island), transmits to the secretary of state for the colonies, in London, the recent passing of An act, declaring that baptism of slaves shall not exempt them from bondage. It is the first law to give statutory recognition to the institution of slavery in British North America.

1783: The Port Roseway Associates is formed in Nova Scotia. An organization of loyalist New York families, it promotes the settlement of Americans in Shelburne (as Port Roseway is renamed later that year). Its minute books remain an important source for information about servitude and slavery in the Maritimes.

Also that year, British forces in New York, under the overall command of Sir Guy Carleton, document the evacuation of 3,000 Black loyalists, including Boston King, in a document known as the “Book of Negroes.”

1784: In February John Wentworth, governor of Nova Scotia, sends 19 of his slaves to Surinam (Suriname) in South America.

1787: The Bill for regulating negroes, &c. is put forward in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly. The first of four similar attempts over the next two decades, it is designed to enshrine slavery in the colony’s law but is deferred by Richard John Uniacke, the colony’s solicitor general, and eventually fails to pass.

1788: James Drummond MacGregor begins publishing anti-slavery literature in Nova Scotia.

1789: An act for the regulation and relief of the free negroes within the province of Nova Scotia – a bill designed to protect Black people from kidnapping, enslavement, and export – fails to pass in the colony’s legislature.

1790: John Burbidge of Cornwallis, N.S., frees his slaves, providing them each with two sets of clothes (including one for Sunday) and ordering that they be taught to read. The same year, Thomas Peters petitions the British secretary of state, outlining the general grievances of Black people in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

1791: In Shelburne, N.S., Mary Postell takes Jesse Gray to court over his enslavement and treatment of her and her children. Judgement is rendered in Gray’s favour when the court is unconvinced that Postell was born free.

1792: Freetown, Sierra Leone, is founded by Black loyalists from Nova Scotia, including Thomas Peters (see 1790) and David George, and British abolitionists. Diana Bestian, enslaved by Abraham Cornelius Cuyler in Cape Breton, dies in September.

1793: The parliament of Upper Canada passes the Act to limit slavery. While not abolishing enslavement, it bans the importing of slaves and provides for the emancipation of children of female slaves upon reaching the age of 25.

1800: R v. Nancy is heard at the New Brunswick Supreme Court after Caleb Jones, a prominent landowner near what is now Fredericton, is issued a writ of habeas corpus regarding an enslaved Black woman named Nancy. The best legal counsel in the province is employed by both sides. Nancy is defended by Ward Chipman, later chief justice, and Samuel Denny Street. Jones is represented by Jonathan Bliss, John Murray Bliss, Thomas Wetmore, Charles Jeffery Peters, and William Botsford. The judges hearing the case are George Duncan Ludlow, Joshua Upham, Isaac Allan, and John Saunders. The first three are slave owners or supporters of enslavement; Saunders is the only opponent of slavery on the bench, but he formerly owned slaves in Virginia. Allan sides with Saunders and the bench is equally divided, resulting in Nancy’s continued enslavement.

1801: Following the Nancy case (see above), Stair Agnew, a Virginia-born slave-holding member of New Brunswick’s House of Assembly, introduces A bill relating to negroes, a sweeping legislative act that would recognize slavery while initiating gradual emancipation, provide for compensation to slave-holders when emancipation occurred, and punish abolitionists who might help the enslaved escape. Agnew withdraws the bill in the face of strong opposition.

1802: DeLancey v. Woodin is heard by the Annapolis, N.S., circuit court after one of James DeLancey’s slaves escapes. The outcome is interpreted by many as indicative of the court’s antagonism towards slave-holding in Nova Scotia. In response a pro-slavery pamphlet is published in Saint John that year, titled Opinions of several gentlemen of the law, on the subject of negro servitude, in the province of Nova-Scotia.

1805: In New Brunswick Richard Hopefield v. Stair Agnew [see Stair Agnew] upholds slavery in the province in the face of advancing abolition elsewhere in the Maritimes and New England.

1807: After receiving royal assent in May, the Act on the abolition of the slave trade becomes law throughout British North America. In the face of challenges to the institution of slavery, in December a group of elites from Digby, N.S., including the recently retired legislator James Moody, submit a petition for legal recognition of their enslavement of Africans.

1812–15: During the War of 1812 many thousands of Black Americans come to the Maritimes.

1825: Prince Edward Island repeals its law recognizing slavery (see 1781).

1833: Britain passes An act for the abolition of slavery throughout the British colonies; for promoting the industry of the manumitted slaves; and for compensating the persons hitherto entitled to the service of such slaves (also known as the Slavery Abolition Act).

1834: To block the immigration of free Blacks from the West Indies, Nova Scotia’s House of Assembly passes An act to prevent the clandestine landing of liberated slaves.