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Done with slavery : the Black fact in Montreal, 1760-1840
\"Through close examination of archival and contemporary sources, Mackey uncovers largely unknown aspects of the black transition from slavery to freedom. While he considers the changing legal status of slavery, much of the book provides a detailed and nuanced reconstruction of the circumstances of black Montrealers and their lived experience. The resulting picture is remarkably complex, showing the variety of occupations held by blacks, the relationships they had with those they served, their encounters with the judicial and political systems, and the racial mingling that came with intermarriage and apprenticeships. Done with Slavery casts the categories of blackness and slavery in a new light, showing that broad histories of the phenomenon must begin to take into account the specifics of the lives of \"marginal\" black populations.\"--pub. desc.
Book
Done with Slavery
Did slavery exist in Montreal, and if so what did it look like? Frank Mackey grapples with this question in Done with Slavery, a study of black Montrealers in the eighty years between the British Conquest and the union of Lower and Upper Canada.Through close examination of archival and contemporary sources, Mackey uncovers largely unknown aspects of the black transition from slavery to freedom. While he considers the changing legal status of slavery, much of the book provides a detailed and nuanced reconstruction of the circumstances of black Montrealers and their lived experience. The resulting picture is remarkably complex, showing the variety of occupations held by blacks, the relationships they had with those they served, their encounters with the judicial and political systems, and the racial mingling that came with intermarriage and apprenticeships. Done with Slavery casts the categories of blackness and slavery in a new light, showing that broad histories of the phenomenon must begin to take into account the specifics of the lives of \"marginal\" black populations.Done with Slavery is an invitation to look at a colonial society through the prism of documented black experience, revealing that the roots of the present are neither as wholesome as some would hope nor as bitter as others might suppose.
eBook
One Thousand Characters in Search of an Author or Two
Various elements of Montreal’s population affirmed their collective identities and bonds in the mid-1830s by founding national societies. In 1834–35, the English, French, Germans, Irish, and Scots did so, as did thenation canadiennewith the launching of the Société St-Jean-Baptiste. These were white clubs: no blacks identified with any of these groups or joined them. Each was a combination cultural association, social club, political forum, and mutual-aid society, the importance of these roles varying from group to group according to their interests, social status, and present needs. Blacks, as a group, were in no position to launch their
Book Chapter
The Colour of Justice
Even though the political institutions of the day took virtually no notice of them, blacks exercised their right to vote. When it came to judicial institutions, whose proceedings had a much more immediate impact on their lives, unwritten rules kept blacks from serving on juries – at a time when juries sat on all but the most minor criminal trials. Thus property owners John Fleming, “a Negro Servant,” of the Ste-Anne Suburb, carter Alexander Valentine of St-Charles-Borromée Street in the St-Laurent Suburb, John Trim ofMcGill Street, “labourer” Thomas Cockburn, tenant of a house on St Nicholas Tolentine Street in the Quebec
Book Chapter
Shoulder to Shoulder , Arm in Arm
Blacks and whites could be partners in crime, as we saw in the case of Warren Glossen and his band of burglars. The criminal underworld was thus a place where the wall of prejudice was sometimes breached, and where ability, reliability and determination to get the job done were qualifications that trumped considerations of skin colour. In licit enterprises, too, blacks and whites worked together – on steamboats, on timber rafts, in the fur trade, in hotels and restaurants, in domestic service, etc. – but mostly at arm’s length, with blacks routinely excluded from positions of power and trust. In two areas,
Book Chapter
There Ought to be a Law
Aplaque donated in 2004 by the Quebec government to the City of Montreal honouring the memory of Marie Josèphe Angélique, the black slave of New France who was hanged for arson atMontreal in 1734, reminded us that black slavery had endured in Quebec until 1833.¹ Few might quarrel with the tribute, but the reminder was misguided. Twelve black Montrealers of 1833, and the experience of many others before them, tell us as much.
The mention of 1833 in the text of the plaque referred to the legislation adopted that year by the British parliament to abolish colonial slavery. In late
Book Chapter
Political Colours
JusticeWilliam Badgley gave it as his opinion in 1859 that, since the institution of British rule a century before, blacks had “enjoyed the same Civil rights as other…subjects of the Crown in the Colony, without any disqualification whatever by reason of their complexion.”¹ The fact that black slavery endured for about forty years after the Conquest jars with this assertion. To be sure, blacks did not labour under legal disabilities of the sort that barred Roman Catholics from election to the British House of Commons before the passage of the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829. Nor were they held
Book Chapter
Jacks of All Trades
The enormity of slavery and the shadow that it cast can make it difficult to look back on the blacks of the early nineteenth century as other than icons of constant sorrow. Seeing them exclusively in that poor light does them as great an historical injustice as erasing them from our collective memory. They become flat projections of present-day sympathies rather than the humans that they were – part of the action, so to speak, obeying the same impulses that drove everyone else. Like whites in search of work, they would go where the jobs were, nearby or off in fur-trade
Book Chapter