1. Profiting from Slavery
Ask Canadians what they know about the era of African slavery and most would mention the horrors of slave ships or the Underground Railway that brought American slaves to freedom. Far fewer would know that the colonies of present-day Canada played a role in the transatlantic slave trade. Almost none would understand the effects that slavery had on generations of Africans and the economic development of that continent.
The truth is that for over 200 years, New France and the British North America colonies held Africans in bondage. The first known African slave set foot in New France in 1605. The first recorded slave sale took place in 1628.1 There were at least 3,000 African slaves in present-day Québec, Ontario and the Maritimes.2 Leading historical figures such as René Bourassa, James McGill, Colin McNabb, Joseph Papineau and Peter Russell all owned slaves and some were strident advocates of the practice.3
Slavery was legal in New France. The 1709 Raudot Bill noted: “Negroes who have been purchased and who will be purchased, shall be property of those who have purchased them and will be their slaves.”4 Similarly, when the governor general of New France surrendered to the British in 1763 the treaty included a passage asserting that slaveholders “shall be at liberty to keep them in their service in the colony or sell them.”5
The French needn’t have worried about Britain ending slavery. In the 1760s and 1770s Nova Scotia offered extra land to prospective New England immigrants who brought slaves. Additionally, after conquering Quebec, Britain strengthened the laws that enabled slavery.6 In The Blacks in Canada, Robin Winks explains: “On three occasions explicit guarantees were given to slave owners that their property would be respected, and between 1763 and 1790 the British government added to the legal structures so that a once vaguely defined system of slavery took on clearer outlines.”7 It wasn’t until 1833 that slavery was abolished in today’s Canada and across the rest of the British Empire.
With no large-scale plantations, European settlers mainly employed slaves as house servants and farmworkers. Though not as brutal as plantation life in Haiti or Alabama, there was still significant resistance. In The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal, Afua Cooper writes of a Montreal slave who set fire to her owner’s home upon learning she would be sold and separated from her lover. In the end, the fire destroyed forty-six buildings. After two months on the run, Marie-Joseph Angelique was captured, paraded through the city, tortured until she confessed and then hung.
It is little known that in the late 1700s, many Canadian slaves took an “underground railroad” southbound to Vermont and other Northern US states that had abolished slavery.8 Even more slaves journeyed to freedom in Michigan and New England after the war of 1812.9
“Canadians” propped up the transatlantic slave trade in a number of other ways. Canada helped the British quell Caribbean slave rebellions, most notably at the end of the 1700s. In 1791 the largely African-born slaves of Haiti (then called Saint-Domingue) revolted en masse in the world’s first and only successful large-scale slave revolution. Their uprising rippled through the region and compelled the post-French Revolution government in Paris to abolish slavery in its Caribbean colonies.
In a bid to crush the ex-slaves before their example spread to the English colonies, British forces invaded Haiti in 1793. For five years, London struggled to capture one of the world’s richest colonies, which had 450,000 slaves before the revolt.10
Halifax, which housed Britain’s primary naval base in North America, played its part in London’s efforts in the Caribbean. Much of the Halifax-based squadron arrived on the shores of the West Indies in 1793, and many of the ships that set sail to the Caribbean at this time were assembled in the town’s naval yard.11 Additionally, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick provided “sticks for the furnishing of a variety of naval stores, especially masts and spars, to the West Indies squadron at Jamaica, Antigua, and Barbados.”12
A number of prominent Canadian-born (or based) individuals fought to capture and re-establish slavery in the French colonies. Dubbed the “Father of the Canadian Crown”, Prince Edward Duke of Kent departed for the West Indies aboard a Halifax gunboat in 1793.13 As a Major General, he led forces that captured Guadalupe, St. Lucia and Martinique.14 Today, many streets and monuments across the country honour a man understood to have first applied the term “Canadian” to both the English and French inhabitants of Upper and Lower Canada.15
Other “Canadians” played a part in Britain’s effort to corner the lucrative Caribbean slave plantations. Born into a prominent Québec military family, Charles Michel Salaberry “was part of successful invasions of Saint-Dominique [Haiti], Guadeloupe and Martinique.”16 A few years after these conquests, Sir Gordon Drummond was dispatched to Jamaica and made second in command of British forces there from 1806 and 1808. Afterwards the Québec City born general returned to Montréal and became commander of British forces in North America.17 Many monuments still commemorate Drummond and Salaberry, including the city names of Drummondville and Salaberry-de-Valleyfield in Québec.
In the aftermath of the Haitian uprising the Maritimes was also used as a venue to release pressure on slaveholders. Jamaican plantation owners, increasingly fearful of slave resistance, sought to eradicate isolated settlements of Africans who escaped plantation life. After an uprising, 600 maroons and their families were expelled to Halifax in June 1796.18
In what may be “Canada’s” most significant contribution to the British war effort in the Caribbean, a dozen Nova Scotia privateers captured at least 57 enemy vessels in the West Indies between 1793 and 1805.19 Licensed by the state to seize enemy boats during wartime, “privateers were essential tools of war until the rise of large steam navies in the mid-nineteenth century.”20 But Nova Scotia privateers weren’t solely motivated by reasons of state. They sought to protect a market decimated by French privateers. In “A Private War in the Caribbean: Nova Scotia Privateering, 1793-1805”, Dan Conlin writes that “in a broader sense privateering was an armed defence of the [Maritimes’] West Indies market.”21
Outside of its role in suppressing Caribbean slave rebellions, the Maritimes literally fed the slave system for decades. In Emancipation Day, Natasha Henry explains: “Very few Canadians are aware that at one time their nation’s economy was firmly linked to African slavery through the building and sale of slave ships, the sale and purchase of slaves to and from the Caribbean, and the exchange of timber, cod, and other food items from the Maritimes for West-Indian slave-produced goods.”22
A central component of the economy revolved around providing the resources that enabled slavery. Nova Scotia and Newfoundland generated great wealth selling cheap, high-protein food to keep millions of “enslaved people working 16 hours a day.”23 In Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky explains: “In the 17th century, the strategy for sugar production, a labor-intensive agro-industry, was to keep the manpower cost down through slavery. At harvest time, a sugar plantation was a factory with slaves working 16 hours or more a day — chopping cane by hand as close to the soil as possible, burning fields, hauling cane to a mill, crushing, boiling. To keep working under the tropical sun the slaves needed salt and protein. But plantation owners did not want to waste any valuable sugar planting space on growing food for the hundreds of thousands of Africans who were being brought to each small Caribbean island. The Caribbean produced almost no food. At first slaves were fed salted beef from England, but New England colonies [as well as Newfoundland and Nova Scotia] soon saw the opportunity for salt cod as cheap, salted nutrition.”24
In Capitalism and Slavery, post-independence Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Eric Williams highlights the role of cod in the Caribbean plantations: “The Newfoundland fishery depended to a considerable extent on the annual export of dried fish to the West Indies, the refuse or ‘poor John’ fish, ‘fit for no other consumption’.”25
High quality cod from today’s Atlantic Canada was sent to the Mediterranean while the reject fish was sold to Caribbean slave-owners. In time “West India cure” became the commercial name for the lowest quality salt cod, which “represented a steadily increasing percentage of the output of New England, Nova Scotia, and to a lesser degree, Newfoundland.” Kurlansky further explains that Nova Scotia had a specialized role in providing the Caribbean with low-quality dried cod.26
The fish was often of such poor quality it induced illness. In The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy, famed Canadian economist Harold Innis quotes a politician’s 1832 speech: “These slave owners talk of high feeding and low feeding their slaves … Those who low feed them will purchase for them any cheap article of food, no matter how stale or unpalatable it may be so that it will support nature and prolong their miserable existence.”27
From 1770-1773 Newfoundland and Nova Scotia sent 60,620 quintals (one quintal equals 100 pounds) and 6,280 barrels of cod to the West Indies, which comprised 40% of all imports.28 These numbers increased significantly after the American Revolution resulted in a ban on US trade to the British Caribbean colonies.29 In 1789 alone 58 vessels carried 61,862 quintals of fish from Newfoundland to the Caribbean Islands.30
(A century later Newfoundland’s cod industry once again shaped West African history. In 1904 France renounced fishing privileges in Newfoundland, which included the right to dry cod on land, for British territorial concessions in West and Central Africa. The 1904 Anglo-French Newfoundland Fisheries Convention notes: “France gained favourable adjustments of both the Nigerian and Gambian boundaries, a right of transit on the River Gambia, and the Iles de Los off French Guinea.”31)
The cod industry suffered after the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies.32 Between 1833 and 1834 the price of Nova Scotia cod dropped from fifteen shillings per quintal to ten shillings and six pence.33 In Halifax: Warden of the North, Thomas Raddall recalls the impact of slavery’s end on the Atlantic provinces: “It is strange to reflect that the abolition of Negro slavery in parts of the Caribbes had changed the lives of a province of free whites two thousand miles to the north. Abolition in the British West Indies in 1833 ruined the old system of vast sugar plantations with their ever busy distilleries, and dried up the Gulf Stream of cheap rum which for nearly a century had flowed to Nova Scotia in the holds of the fish and lumber traders.”34
Halifax capitalists exporting fish, lumber and flour to the slave colonies during the latter half of the 18th century and early part of the 19th made great fortunes.35 Arguably the wealthiest and most powerful businessman operating in mid-1700s Halifax, Joshua Mauger, made his fortune trading in the Caribbean. He shipped fish and lumber to the West Indies obtaining molasses and sugar in exchange.
Mauger imported slave-made products as well as human cargo. Raddall notes, “another settler well supplied with Negro labour was Joshua Mauger, a diligent and artful schemer who had laid the foundation of a fortune in the West Indian slave trade and still manned his ships with faithful blacks.”36 In May 1752 alone, Mauger advertised six slaves for sale.37 In Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia, John Brebner notes: “The early [Halifax] newspapers reveal a constant business in Negro slaves, either by an importer like Mauger or by individuals.”38 To this day, Mauger remains honoured. There is a beach named after him on McNab Island in Nova Scotia and the small New Brunswick town of Maugerville keeps his memory alive.39
As could be expected in a country with such a large financial sector, Canadian banks also had a connection to African slavery. Much of the capital used to establish the current incarnation of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce came from supplying the Caribbean slave colonies. The Halifax Banking Company was the first bank in Nova Scotia and the founding unit of today’s CIBC. Still one of Canada’s five largest banks, this institution held a grand open house in 2010 to celebrate its 185th anniversary at the Barrington and Duke branch, which they proudly described as “the very first opened by the Halifax Banking Company on September 3, 1825.”40
The Halifax Banking Company’s leading shareholder and initial president, Enos Collins, was a ship owner and privateer. Considered one of the richest men in North America by the end of his life, a biography notes how Collins recalled, “there were many things that happened [during his time in the West Indies] that we don’t care to talk about.”41 The book speculates that as a privateer in the Caribbean during the early 1800s he likely captured and resold slaves.42
Uninterested or unaware of his ties to slavery, in February 2013 Stephen Harper’s Conservative government renamed a federal government office in Amherst, Nova Scotia, the Enos Collins Building. “I am delighted that this building is being named in honour of Enos Collins, who played a crucial role in the War of 1812,” said Minister of Public Works and Government Services Rona Ambrose.43
Another one of the eight founding shareholders of the Halifax Banking Company was steamship pioneer Samuel Cunard. In the early 1800s, Cunard’s vessels brought cod and lumber to the West Indies and returned with rum, molasses and sugar.44 He made great sums of money off this trade and set up one of the most important transatlantic steamship lines, which continues to operate as part of the multinational Cunard Cruise Line.
As a reflection of the business communities’ ties to the Caribbean trade, the Halifax Banking Company set up operations in the West Indies before establishing itself in Montréal or Toronto. In 1837, the Halifax Banking Company developed formal ties with the Colonial Bank — now Barclays — in the Caribbean.45 A History of the Canadian Bank of Commerce, which spends a hundred pages on the Halifax Banking Company, explains: “It may well be imagined that this agreement gave great satisfaction to Enos Collins, the old seafarer, who had traded in all these ports, and who now saw the bank which he had been instrumental in founding, equipped with a network of connections extending all over the scene of his early exploits.”46
But the CIBC is not the only Canadian bank with a connection to the slave trade. According to Canadian Banks and Global Competitiveness, the first President of Scotia Bank, William Lawson, “had extensive dealings in the West Indies” when the bank opened in 1832.
And, of course, the shipbuilding industry, still a pillar of the Halifax economy, owes a great deal of its growth to the late 1700s West Indies carrying trade. In Maritime Capital, Eric W. Sager explains, “the West Indies trade was a major stimulus to shipbuilding and ship owning in the Maritimes. Natural advantages by themselves did not create this stimulus.”47
While capitalists in the colonies that became Canada grew rich off the slave economy, the people of Africa were profoundly scarred. And that’s not even counting those who were directly enslaved.
As John Charles Hatch, writing in The History of Britain in Africa, describes it: “The slave trade retarded orderly progress and development in West Africa. Concentration on the profitable nature of the trade discouraged the development of agriculture and industry. Tools, clothing and manufactures were more easily obtainable by selling men and women to the Europeans than by producing them in Africa itself. The art of ironworking, pottery, textiles, the production of brass and copper wares, all deteriorated in the face of this cheap competition. Slave raiding and slave warfare destroyed political progress and created such uncertain conditions as to make any constructive future planning impossible. Life was for the moment; society itself had no stability or continuity.”
The trans-Atlantic slave trade was incredibly destructive for Africa. Over ten million Africans were taken from the continent between 1600 and 1850.48 Some two million more were killed before leaving the continent and another two million Africans died during the Atlantic crossing.49
Very few slaves (or their descendants) returned. In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney writes, “on every other continent from the fifteenth century onwards, the population showed constant and sometimes spectacular natural increase; while it is striking that the same did not apply to Africa.”50 Between 1650 and 1850 sub-Saharan Africa’s population remained constant while Europe’s rose fourfold and Asia’s three and a half times.51 In Slavery and African Life Patrick Manning calculates that Africa’s population in 1850 was half of what it would have been without the slave trade.52 But, the population loss, of mostly young, able-bodied individuals explains only a small part of this stagnation. The slave trade undermined agricultural and industrial development. It drove communities to exchange human beings for tools, weapons and other goods rather than produce them. Fear of enslavement also exacerbated ethnic fractionalization on the continent. In The Archaeology of Slavery C. M. Kusimba writes “insecurity confined people within ethnic boundaries, thus constricting spheres of interaction.”53
European demand for human chattel abetted violence across Africa. With most of those sold into bondage captured in warfare, the transatlantic slave trade spurred war. Some African wars were fought, Rodney notes, “for the sole purpose of getting prisoners for sale to Europeans.”54
A good number of human beings were captured to acquire the weaponry to wage future wars. African bodies served as a main currency for which Europeans would exchange their guns in what’s been dubbed the “gun-slave cycle”. Eric Williams writes, “It was a common saying that the price of a Negro was one Birmingham gun.”55
To acquire weapons, numerous African nations and chiefs were compelled to capture others to protect their communities. Enslaving people, in other words, gave African kingdoms access to the weaponry that could deter others from enslaving them.
While the colonies that became Canada played but a small part in the transatlantic slave trade, it is important to confront the reality of our history and not simply pretend that we were the “good guys” compared to our southern neighbours. Canadians took part in an economy that maimed, tortured and killed millions. It also sowed instability, division and underdevelopment in much of Africa while spurring commerce and generating wealth here.