Gender, family, and gradual abolition in Upper Canada and northern slavery, 1760-1833

Abstract

While both Indigenous and Transatlantic slaveries existed in British North America and New France, Loyalist expansion after the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), entrenched slavery in Upper Canada. This site remained underexamined in Canadian slavery studies with most recent scholarship on Quebec and the Maritimes. My project unpacks the uniqueness of northern slavery and resistance in Upper Canada by examining the impact of expanding Loyalist slavery on enslaved family life through a gendered and feminist perspective. Combining art historical and historical approaches, I explore Upper Canada slavery through archives alongside visual art and material culture. Through a focus on reproduction, family, childhood, and defiance, I extend the study of slave resistance to northern slavery where bondspeople engaged in unique forms of resistance in quotidian ways. My analysis of Upper Canada slavery is complimented by other northern, slave-minority demographic sites like New York, Pennsylvania, New France, the Canadian Maritimes, and Britain. In debunking the myth that northern slavery was benevolent, I examine how gender, reproduction, and family were exploited in northern slavery during the age of abolition via gradual emancipation laws, like Upper Canada’s passed in 1793. The burden to gradually eradicate slavery was passed onto enslaved women’s reproduction, while access to exploitable Black labour was continued.

Enslavers in Upper Canada historiography allegedly “hedged their losses” by selling their enslaved property to American buyers after the law passed. This assumptive thesis was mostly unchallenged given the limited archival data for the region and administrative turbulence. The narrative that enslavers immediately sold their property after 1793 displaced slavery from Canadian history and negated the very real and continued impact of slavery during the age of abolition as it was experienced and resisted by enslaved women and families. This dissertation disputes generations of scholars of northern slavery who have dismissively characterized children and pregnancy as a “hindrance” on the economic viability of relatively smaller, northern slave estates. Yet enslaved women’s reproductive potential in gradual abolition laws was the mechanism of transition from bondage to freedom. Instead, flashes of enslaved peoples’ everyday bravery exist in an unfinished and partial archive complimented by interdisciplinary sources.