INTRODUCTION
Jarett Henderson
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In 1858, just months before his death, Jacques Viger, a former Patriot and Mayor of
Montreal, was again practising his habit of collecting matters of history.1 This time,
and in connection with the Historical Society of Montreal, Viger was cataloguing whatever documents he could that archived the long history of unfreedom in Canada. De
L’esclavage en Canada / The Slave in Canada, published just months after Viger’s death,
contained the documents of colonial and imperial administrators, both French and
British: government ordinances, court transcripts, and notorial records.2 These are the
sources that archive the purchase, regulation, and manumission of Panis (Aboriginal)
and Black slaves in early Canada. For Viger’s contemporaries, his work was noteworthy
because it contradicted the nationalist argument made by François-Xavier Garneau in
his Histoire du Canada. Canada, Garneau wrote in 1860, “happily escaped the terrible
curse of Negro slavery.”3 Rather L’esclavage en Canada illustrates that both Black and
Indigenous people lived lives of unfreedom in, and along, the empire of the St. Lawrence. This module introduces you to the varied and often ignored history of slavery in
northeastern North America. In what follows you will interrogate the social and political
complexities of race, slavery, and empire on the Indigenous lands that were becoming
early Canada.
Generations before white French colonizers arrived in the “New World,” Indigenous
people across the continent, through a diverse system of knowing, ordered their societies
by ascribing various meanings to different human bodies. On the northwestern coast of
North America, for example, Leland Donald has explored the nuanced social and economic histories of Indigenous slavery.4 Closer to the St. Lawrence, and throughout the
region that French colonizers termed the Pays d’en Haut, Brett Rushforth explores the
complicated ways that the Huron, Ottawa, Iroquois, Sioux, Illinois, and Fox nations understood human bondage. Through a methodology that draws from archeology, history, ritual,
and linguistics, Rushforth traces how central Algonquian and Siouan peoples spoke about
slavery. His chapter reproduced here draws upon the French dictionaries created and used
by Jesuit missionaries to learn Indigenous languages. These sources reveal that Indigenous
people often used metaphors of domestication and mastery and compared their captives
to dogs and other domesticated animals. Anishinaabe-speakers, for example, called their
slaves awakaan, which meant captive, dog, or animals kept as pets. Rushforth has found
that Indigenous slavery—often a diplomatic act of exchanging “a little flesh”—was central
to the maintenance of Indigenous and Indigenous–French alliances in the fledgling outposts that constituted New France.5
As New France sputtered into existence, Indigenous understandings of human
unfreedom encountered French imperial understandings of enslavement. The images of
an Indigenous slave halter and French iron shackles reproduced here vividly expose the
similarities and differences between unfreedom in these cultures. As Robin Winks illustrates, over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, missionaries, merchants, and government officials increasingly worked to ensure that French imperial understandings of slavery
took hold in a colony marked by settler–Aboriginal violence, an exhaustingly slow rate of
population growth, and a frigid reputation.6 Missionaries struggled to remedy this situation by instructing the sauvage in the teachings of Christianity. In 1698, Father Hennepin
published, for European audiences, accounts of his travels through the Pays d’en Haut, his
mission work, and his capture; these were tales that would have simultaneously intrigued
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and worried his contemporaries. A New Discovery of a Vast Country in North America
recounted how Hennepin and his two French servants were captured by Sioux warriors
on 20 April 1680. Hennepin’s vivid account appears to have been insufficient at capturing
the exigency of Indigenous slavery, for he also included a horrific image that fused all that
he knew, and likely had heard about Indigenous slavery, into an image that depicted “The
Cruelty of the Savage Iroquois.”7
As missionaries like Hennepin worked and travelled among Indigenous nations, white
French colonizers from fur traders to merchants through to government and church officials increasingly purchased both Black and Indigenous peoples, fusing Indigenous and
French imperial understandings of slavery.8 In 1685, the French Empire established, for the
first time, the legal and social distinctions between masters and slaves through the Code
Noir. Though historians continue to debate the extent to which the Code applied to the
unfree peoples of northeastern North America, it nonetheless marked a significant shift in
how ideas of race and freedom were mobilized in the French Empire to order its peoples.9
Regardless of the Code’s application in New France, it nonetheless regulated nearly every
aspect of the master–slave relationship and would come to have important repercussions
for Panis and Black slaves, free Indigenes and Blacks, and white colonizers in early
Canada. So much so that 50 years later it had become necessary for French imperial
administrators to sanction an ordnance for the local colonial context of New France. In
April 1709, Jacques Radout rendered an ordinance on the subject of “the Negroes and the
Indians called Panis.” Radout’s ordinance, reproduced here, established that Indigenous
slaves in New France were to be treated and regulated “like Negros in the Islands.”10 It is
yet a further indication of the wider imperial context that shaped the institution of slavery
as it struggled to take hold in early Canada.
As was true of the Indigenous peoples who practised forms of human unfreedom
prior to, and after, contact, no two sites of France’s Empire in northern North American
yielded the same experience of slavery. Exciting projects such as the Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History—Torture and the Truth: Angelique and the Burning of Montreal
and Afu Cooper’s The Hanging of Angelique have brought to light the history of Angelique,
a Black domestic slave whose act of resistance led to not only the burning of significant
portions of eighteenth-century Montreal, but also a trial that culminated with the burning
of her body.11 Kenneth Donovan explores the interactions that slaves had with the families for whom they worked in Louisbourg, on Île Royale. As a central node in the French
Empire’s expansive trade network that included both sugar and slaves, this case study
illustrates the differing conditions of domestic enslavement that Panis and Black slaves
experienced in this cosmopolitan imperial outpost.12
Though slaves were often vulnerable, sometimes abused, and purchased for a
variety of social and sexual purposes, the mixing of Indigenous and French systems
of enslavement did offer pathways to freedom. Long before the abolitionist campaigns
of the late-eighteenth century, female slaves who lived in the Pays d’en Haut and married French settlers were often freed by their new husbands. Other slaves could be
manumitted by verbal agreement or by purchasing their own freedom. Running away,
of course, was also an option and a tactic slaves frequently employed.13 As the rising
number of manumitted slaves increased in the first decades of the eighteenth century,
it became necessary for French colonial administrators to establish a uniform system
to distinguish free from slave. On 1 September 1736, Giles Hocquart issued the ordinance, reproduced here, which made it necessary that for a slave to be freed, by either
gift or purchase, a notary must record his or her manumission and register it with the
royal registry office. This decision indicates, Winks argues, that slavery had grown to
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such an extent that it required both records and regulation.14 When the Indigenous territories that constituted New France were transferred to the British in 1763, the Articles
of Capitulation that Viger chose to archive in 1858 indicate that both white French and
British imperial administrators were careful to make concessions for slave owners.15 The
institution of slavery would continue in Quebec, Britain’s newest imperial territory to
the century’s end, as the notorial records documenting the purchase and subsequent
manumission of “a certain Negro boy or lad called Rubin” indicate.16 Early Canada
remained a place where contrasting and competing ideas of human unfreedom, both
Indigenous and European operated, creating a colonial order that revolved around the
complex intersection of empire, race, and slavery.
QUESTIONS
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1. How did Indigenous societies in the Great Lakes region speak of unfreedom/captivity? What role did Indigenous captives have in Indigenous societies?
2. How do the two tools of enslavement pictured here differ? How are they similar? Can
you speculate as to the effect of the confluence of French and Indigenous slavery in
early Canada?
3. How does Hennepin represent Indigenous enslavement and captivity? Why do you
think he depicted this history in such a fashion? In what ways is Hennepin helpful
for understanding the history of unfreedom in early Canada? Can you identify any
problems with his depictions of Indigenous enslavement and captivity?
4. What did the Code Noir regulate? Do you think this had any effect on how colonists in
early Canada understood the connection between race and freedom? Why or why not?
5. Why do you think imperial administrators felt they needed to regulate slavery in
New France in 1709? How can we gauge the success of their efforts? What types of
information do the records of notaries teach us about unfreedom in early Canada?
How can we use these documents to make historical inferences about the institution
of slavery in eighteenth-century northeastern North America?
6. What types of work did slaves perform in early Canada? How convinced were you
by Donovan’s argument? Would you characterize slavery in New France as a “benign”
form of slavery as some historians have? Why or why not?
FURTHER READINGS
Cooper, Afua. “Acts of Resistance: Black Men and Women Engage Slavery in Upper Canada,
1793–1803.” Ontario History 99, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 5–17.
Donovan, Kenneth. “Slaves in Île Royale,” French Colonial History 5 (2004): 25–42.
Harris, Jennifer. “Black Life in a Nineteenth Century New Brunswick Town,” Journal of
Canadian Studies 46, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 138–66.
Lee, Maureen Elgersman. Unyielding Spirits: Black Women and Slavery in Early Canada
and Jamaica. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999.
Rushforth, Brett. Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France.
Chapel Hill, NC, University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Sapoznik, Karlee. “Where the Historiography Falls Short: La Vérendrye through the Lens
of Gender, Race and Slavery in Early French Canada, 1731–1749.” Manitoba History,
no. 62 (Winter 2009): 22–32.
Vidal, Cécile, and Emily Clark. “Famille et Esclavage à la nouvelle-orléans sous le régime
français, 1699–1769.” Annales De Demographie Historique, no. 2 (Novembre 2011):
99–126.
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Whitfield, Harvey Amani. “The Struggle Over Slavery in the Maritime Colonies,” Acadiensis
XLI, no. 2 (Summer/Autumn 2012): 17–44.
Winks, Robin W. The Blacks in Canada: A History. Second Edition. Montreal-Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s Press, 1997.
NOTES
1. Bettina Bradbury, Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-­Century Montreal,
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011).
2. Jacques Viger, Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine, Eds., De l’esclavage en Canada, (Montréal:
Société historique de Montréal, 1859).
3. François–Xavier Garneau, History of Canada: From the Time of Its Discovery to Till the
Union Year, Trans, Andrew Bell, (Montreal: John Lovel, 1860), 95.
4. Leland Donald, Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America, (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1997).
5. Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France,
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
6. Allan Greer, The People of New France, (Toronto: UTP, 1997).
7. Father Louis Hennepin, A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America, Edited by Reuben
Gold Thwaites, (Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Company, 1903).
8. Karlee Sapoznik, “Where the Historiography Falls Short: La Vérendrye through the Lens of
Gender, Race and Slavery in Early French Canada, 1731–1749,” Manitoba History 62 (Winter
2009) and Marcel Trudel avec Micheline D’Allaire, Deux siècles d’esclavage au Québec,
(Montreal: Éditions Hurtubise, 2004). See also the recent exhibitition on Slavery in New
France at the Grand Bibliothèque in Montreal, Canada. Unfortunatley, as of yet, no publication has resulted from this exhibit.
9.Le code noir, ou Recueil des règlements rendus jusqu’à présent: Concernant le gouvernement, l’administration de la justice, la police, la discipline & le commerce des Négres dans
les colonies françaises, (Paris: Chez L.F. Prault, imprimeur du Roi, quai des Augustins, à
l’Immortalité, 1788).
10. “Ordinance Rendered on the Subject of the Negroes and the Indians Called Panis,” Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Centre de Québec, Ordonnance des Intendants,
E1, S1, P509, Raudot, Jacques, Ordinance Relative to Slavery in Canada, April, 13, 1709.
11. Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History: Torture and the Truth, www.canadian
mysteries.ca and Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angelique, (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2006).
12. Kenneth Donovan, “Slaves in Île Royale, 1713–1758,” French Colonial History, Volume 5
(2004): 25–42.
13. Maureen G. Elgersmanm, “Slavery in Early Canada,” in Unyielding Spirits: Black Women and
Slavery in Early Canada and Jamaica, (New York, Garland Pub: 1999).
14. Robin Winks, Blacks in Canada: A History, Second Edition (Montreal-Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2000).
15. Viger, De l’esclavage en Canada, (1859).
16. Rapport de L’Archiviste de la Province de Québec pour 1921–22, (Quebec: Louis-Amable
Proulx, Imprimeur de Sa Majesté Le Roi, 1922).
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