On Wednesday March 21, 1793, Peter Martin and William Grisley appeared before the Executive Council of the Province of Upper Canada to relate Chloe Cooley’s story and her exertions in trying to avoid being sold by her Canadian master to a stranger in New York State.  They were an unlikely pair.  Martin was a free black in the employ of Colonel John Butler, an American Loyalist who had fought (at the head of a famous regiment known as Butler’s Rangers) against the revolutionary forces in the War of Independence, and subsequently immigrated to Upper Canada.  Martin’s testimony was spurred by his own revulsion over witnessing the treatment Chloe had received.  The official account suggests that he was subsequently haunted by her screams of defiance.  Grisley was an employee of Vrooman, Chloe’s Canadian owner, and he testified that the latter had told him of his intention to sell the slave girl in Lewiston the night before the transaction took place.  The next day he had been present when Vrooman and two others bound Chloe and forced her into the boat that would carry her to the American side of the gorge.  Although he said he assisted with the boat while Vrooman loaded his unwilling passenger, he was emphatic that he had done nothing else to further the transaction.  Grisley also remarked on being affected by Chloe’s screams.

The three men who comprised the Executive Council and listened to this testimony held a range of views on slavery as an institution, but all were agreed that the immediate case and its evidence did not touch upon moral issues, much less any alteration to slavery’s legal status in the colony, per se.  For Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe, Chief Justice William Osgoode and Receiver-General Peter Russell (himself a slave owner), Vrooman was within his legal rights to sell his property.  Where they could act immediately, however, was against the disturbance to the public peace that had been created by Chloe Cooley’s plaintive screams.  Similar complaints had been made over bruits created when Canadian masters attempted to transport their slaves for sale in the United States.  Accordingly, they passed a resolution stating:

That it is necessary to take immediate steps to prevent the continuance of such violent breaches of the Public Peace, and that for that purpose, His Majesty’s Attorney-General be forthwith directed to prosecute the said Fromond [Vrooman].

For Simcoe especially, the whole incident sparked a wider opportunity to strike a blow against something he abhorred (slavery) and in the process, accelerate his dream of turning Upper Canada into a model colony; one governed by enlightened paternalism and England’s ancient constitution.  To understand this, we must juxtapose Simcoe’s life and career against contemporary abolitionist efforts in Great Britain and the legal realities that he encountered upon assuming his position as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada in 1792.  We begin with abolitionist efforts in Britain that helped to frame Simcoe’s own views on the subject.

Even though select individuals, and protestant non-conformist sects such as the Quakers and Methodists, had long decried the institution of slavery, abolitionism as a popular cause really began to build in the later decades of the 18th century, spurred by a combination of Enlightenment thought and growing evangelism—both of which emphasized the basic equality of all human beings.  The British movement would eventually come to focus on the elimination of the Slave Trade in the belief that if the transport of Africans to the New World was stopped, slavery as an institution would soon die out too.

Meanwhile, two 1770s court cases in the British Isles began to give legal definition to the rights of slaves.  In 1772, England’s Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, ruled that James Somerset, a slave who had been purchased in Virginia and subsequently escaped from his master in London, was free in the eyes of the law because England did not permit someone “…to take a slave by force to be sold abroad.” Then, in 1777, Lord Kames of Scotland’s Court of Session freed Joseph Knight, a Jamaican slave who attempted to obtain his freedom when his master took him to Scotland.  Kames denied Knight’s owner’s claim of proprietary rights to his slave based on Jamaican law, because he deemed it to be in contravention of the law of Scotland, which did not sanction slavery.  More tellingly in terms of asserting universal arguments against slavery, he said:  “The law of Jamaica in this case, will not be supported by the Court:  because it is repugnant to the first principles of morality and justice.”

Kames’ words struck a timely and ironic coincidence with other declarations related to life and liberty that were then being used in the American colonies to defend rebellion against the British crown.  Dr. Samuel Johnson had certainly seen the inconsistencies in American claims to be fighting for freedom and independence while maintaining slavery.  “How is it,” he had written in Taxation, No Tyranny in 1776, “we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?”  Such questions were doubtless on the mind of 23-year-old Ensign John Graves Simcoe when his regiment, the 35th Foot, arrived in Boston, June 19, 1775, two days after the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Over the next six years, he would fight for his king and country up and down the eastern seaboard, develop a reputation as a brave soldier and intelligent officer in the Queen’s Rangers, suffer capture and six months imprisonment in 1779, but also rise to the rank of lieutenant colonel and regimental command.  Through it all, his antipathy to American republicanism grew and deepened.

Invalided back to England in 1781, Lieutenant Colonel Simcoe busied himself with writing an account of his regiment’s service in the late war, family life, management of his properties and efforts to gain an appointment in colonial service.  In 1790, he was elected to the House of Commons for the constituency of St. Mawes in Cornwall.  Although his parliamentary career was brief, it featured two incidents that are important to this story.  The first was his speech in support of the legislation that, in 1791, would be passed as the Constitutional Act, which divided the former Quebec territory into the Provinces of Lower and Upper Canada.  Equally important was his support in the Commons for William Wilberforce’s motion to abolish the Slave Trade, the first, albeit unsuccessful, legislative step toward eventual abolition under the terms of the Slave Trade Act of 1807.  Simcoe would not participate in that fight in parliament beyond this point, however, because in 1791 he received his formal appointment as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada.

When he assumed his new post in the spring of 1792, he did so as a committed abolitionist and with strong views about what his colony should become.  In his mind, it must in no way mirror the republican, slaveholding “mobocracy” he perceived in the United States and ought instead to feature the stability and benefits of aristocratic rule.  Nowhere was this sentiment expressed more clearly than in a May 1792 letter to Phineas Bond, the British consul in Philadelphia, who had apprised Simcoe of the desire of a group of Quakers resident in Pennsylvania, to emigrate to Upper Canada.  Knowing that this sect shared his abolitionist sentiments, and were likely to be exactly the sort of peaceful, dutiful immigrants he desired, he wrote in reply:

Here, Sir, I am happy in believing that my ardent and undeviating attachment to the American Loyalists is not unknown in Pennsylvania, and will therefore readily obtain credit to my affirmation that the hopes of serving my King, my country and mankind, by giving every protection and encouragement that the Station I fill can admit of to those who have preferred the British Constitution, is a principal motive of my accepting the Government of Upper Canada.  The principles of the British Constitution do not admit of that slavery which Christianity Condemns.  From the moment that I assume the Government of Upper Canada, under no modification will I ever assent to a law that discriminates by dishonest policy, between the natives of Africa, America, or Europe.

Simcoe’s aspirations notwithstanding, the law in the provinces of British North America was unambiguous where slavery was concerned.  Although limited, the institution’s existence dated back to both French and English slaveholding that had started more than a century before, and that had been affirmed in several ways.  Both Indigenous Peoples and blacks had been held as slaves, and although estimates vary, there were probably fewer than 300 slaves out of a total population of approximately 14,000 in Upper Canada when Simcoe arrived in 1792.  The institution enjoyed legal protection on several levels, however. 

Roman Civil Law, which formed the basis of the Civil Code that was retained in Lower Canada, gave slaves status in the eyes of the law, something that contrasted with English Common Law, which did not recognize slavery at all.  One of the first acts of the new Parliament of Upper Canada was to revert to English law for that province in the autumn of 1792, but this had the ironic effect of removing all legal status for slaves as people, treating them only as property.  Of further recent and pragmatic note was a 1790 act of the British Parliament that authorized would-be American immigrants to obtain licenses from colonial authorities to bring slaves into the British North American colonies, duty-free.  Many colonial administrators (Simcoe excepted) viewed this as an inducement for immigration.  Finally, of greatest immediate importance to Simcoe, was the fact that not all of the people he encountered in the colony shared his abhorrence to slave holding.

Peter Russell, the aforementioned Receiver-General who had heard Martin and Grisely’s testimony regarding the Chloe Cooley story alongside Simcoe, was himself a slave owner.  Various other members of the colonial elite had slaves as domestics while many more farmers who held slaves were opposed to manumission because labor was scarce in Upper Canada.  Although these slaveholders were a minority, most were recent arrivals from the United States who believed that without their slaves they could not clear their new fields and work their farms.  Still others, who did not own slaves but wished to purchase them, demanded a two-year opportunity before any ban on slavery should be introduced.  Against all of this, Simcoe nonetheless prioritized abolishing slavery in Upper Canada when the colony’s legislature met for its second session in the spring of 1793.  He would soon discover that achieving anything in this direction would require compromises.

As we have seen, Simcoe’s aspirations for his colony rested on his core belief in the value of the British political system.  This meant that in nearly all matters, vice-regal authority, coupled with the advice of colonial elites, should take precedence over more popular views expressed in the elected Legislative Assembly.  However, with property easy to attain and a rapidly expanding electoral roll, democratic impulses were also on the rise in Upper Canada.  To Simcoe’s great consternation, the new session of the legislature saw his desires for rapid abolition of slavery rebuffed, with the focus shifting to popular calls for New England-style town meetings in the municipalities of the colony where local people would be able to select their own officials (“Parish & Town Officers…Magistrates…Fence Viewers, Pound Keepers, and other Petty Officers to regulate matters of local policy…”—a further sop to democratic power sharing.)  It was clear that if Simcoe were to gain any momentum surrounding the former issue, he would have to offer the legislature some concessions on the latter.  Accordingly, he informed his superiors that he had agreed to limited town meetings and the local selection of certain officials, since:  “It was therefore thought advisable not to withhold such a gratification to which they had been accustomed, it being in itself, not unreasonable, and only to take place one day of the year.”

Simcoe’s compromise on this issue seems to have opened the door for the consideration in the legislature of an abolition bill.  Thus, it was that on June 19, 1793, Attorney General John White introduced the government’s initial attempt to abolish slavery in the colony.  Once again, fierce opposition based on the aforementioned claims surrounding property rights and rural labor shortages were raised against the measure. Further compromises were considered.  In the end, two weeks of negotiations were required before the bicameral legislature (the lower house was the Legislative Assembly, the upper, the Legislative Council) passed (1793) 33 Geo. III, c. 7, (U.C.).  While no slaves were actually freed by the legislation, it did repeal the 1790 law that permitted slaves to be brought into and kept in Upper Canada (this also reflected Lord Mansfield’s 1772 decision in the James Somerset case) and stated that all children of slaves then held in the colony would be freed upon reaching the age of 25.  It further stated that all children of such freed slaves would be considered free from birth.  It was not the outright abolition of slavery in the colony that Simcoe had desired, but it was nevertheless, an extremely important first step.  As both proponents and opponents of outright abolition realized, by virtue of this legislation, the institution of slavery would be dead in Upper Canada within a generation.

The immediate and long-term legacies of Simcoe’s 1793 achievement require some final consideration.  In his September report on the recent legislative session to Secretary of State Henry Dundas in London, Simcoe was matter-of-fact regarding the compromises that had been necessary to pass the act:  

Some possessed of Negroes knowing that it was very questionable whether any subsisting Law did Authorize Slavery, and having purchased several taken in War by the Indians at small prices wished to reject the Bill entirely, others were desirous to supply themselves by allowing importation for two years.  The matter was finally settled by undertaking to secure the property already obtained upon condition that any immediate stop be put to the importation and that slavery should be gradually abolished.

For her part, Lady Simcoe, who was also an ardent abolitionist, did not even see fit to mention the new legislation in her diary.  By contrast, a visiting French nobleman, the Duke of La Rochefoucalt-Liancourt, was no less certain that the legislation marked an important watershed.  As he noted a year later: “This should be Simcoe’s greatest title to fame; the Act could not have been passed but for his influence.”

It is curious, however, that this first step toward the abolition of slavery within the British Empire appears to have had no impact where it might have been most expected—within the Abolitionist Movement in Britain.  Neither William Wilberforce, nor any of his cohorts within the Committee for the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, appears to have noticed or celebrated their old comrade’s efforts in the distant colony.  Their silence on the Canadian precedent is often repeated in modern histories of abolitionism, where the Upper Canadian case is simply ignored.

And yet, word that the British colony did offer a safe haven for fugitive slaves eventually made its way to the places where it served its greatest inspirational purpose—the slaveholding states to the south.  As one former slave related in the early 1850s of his own escape: “She said there was a free country, called Canada:  she gave me a few dollars, and told me to follow the north star.  If it was too dark to see the north star, to feel of the trees, and on that side where the moss was longest was my way.”  Although he would not have known it, the call of Canada as a land of freedom was in part the echo of the cries of a frightened young woman who was not free, from many years before.