Upper Canada in the Forefront

U pon being appointed lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada in 1791, John Graves Simcoe planned to establish a province where slavery was illegal, on the grounds that the practice is inconsistent with a free nation.
      Although the anti-slavery movement was growing throughout the European world, Simcoe was certainly among the world leaders. The first country in Europe to abolish slavery was Denmark, in 1792. The first state in the U.S.A was Massachusetts, in 1793.

Slavery in Upper Canada

      However, Simcoe's antislavery program met resistance from some of the people who already held slaves. Most of the slaves in York in 1793 were owned by senior civil servants, such as Jarvis. However, owners also included large landowners, merchants, even some farmers.
      Of the sixteen members of the legislative Assembly, at least six held slaves. Slave holders among early Upper Canada's elite include William Jarvis, Peter Russell and Colonel James Gray, Upper Canada's first solicitor general.
      (When Gray died in a boat accident in 1803, his will freed his slaves and left them money and land. Russell, on the other hand, had once owned a plantation in Virginia and had longed to enter the slave trade.)
      At the same time, other owners were freeing slaves voluntarily, even, as in the case of James Gray, granting them money and land to go with their freedom.

T here were probably about 100 slaves in Upper Canada in 1793, when Simcoe brought forward his legislation.
      Slaves were brought to Canada from the earliest days by all the major groups of settlers. The French brought them first, taking them from the West Indies to help in the fur trade. The British continued the slave trade after winning control of North America from the French. Americans fleeing after the War of Independence, known as Loyalists, brought slaves with them, especially to Nova Scotia.

Simcoe's Anti-Slavery Law

      Simcoe managed to pass only a somewhat watered-down version of his anti-slavery law. Abolition would be accomplished "so far as [it] may gradually be done without violating private property." Nevertheless, the law, passed in 1794, was the first of its kind in the British Empire.

The Anti-Slavery Act of 1793 (Archives of Ontario)

      It allowed slave-owners to keep the slaves who had been born into slavery until death. But children of slaves born after July 9, 1793 were freed upon reaching the age of 25. New slaves could not be brought into the province. All slaves brought in by owners and all reaching the province under their own effort became free.
      The bill was passed "with much opposition but little argument."

The Effect of the Anti-Slavery Law

      These measures ensured the end of slavery in Upper Canada. By 1810, sixteen years after the law was enacted, only about two dozen slaves remained in the province.
      By 1800 slave-owning was no longer socially respectable. The last slave in the province was probably freed before 1820. In 1834, when Britain abolished slavery in all its possessions, there remained none to be set free in Upper Canada.

William Jarvis and His Slaves

W illiam Jarvis was probably one of those trying to put pressure on Simcoe in 1793 not to outlaw slavery entirely.
      Writers often refer to the three servants William Jarvis brought with him from England, but rarely do they mention his slaves. One of the few references is from a book published in 1894, John Ross Robertson's Landmarks of Toronto, which describes an incident in which Jarvis went to court about two escaped slaves:

"Following the custom of the time he was a slaveholder, and in the early part of March, 1811, he complained to the court that a negro boy and girl, his slaves, had stolen silver and gold from a desk at his house and escaped from their master, and that they had been aided and advised by one Coachly, a free negro. The accused having been caught, the court ordered that the boy, named Henry, but commonly known as Prince, be committed to prison; that the girl be returned to her master, and Coachly be discharged."