By Heather Escoffery
Canadians have a habit of making connections to the United States when describing our own history. One of the most insidious uses of this kind of comparison is apparent when exploring the institution of slavery in the Americas. Most Canadians’ knowledge of the history of slavery relates to Canada’s role as the “North Star” for Black people escaping slavery through the Underground Railroad. Focusing on Canada as sanctuary for enslaved Black people results in Canada’s own history of slavery is often undermined or downplayed. Queen’s Bush resident Sophia Burthen Pooley, and her first-person slave narrative, helps sheds light on the violent reality many Black people faced as enslaved subjects in early Canada.
Originally from New York, Sophia Pooley (née Burthen) “was stolen from [her] parents when [she] was seven years old” (Drew 192). She was brought to Canada and sold to the Mohawk chieftain Joseph Brant, whom she lived with for five years until she was again sold to a white man named Samuel Hatt. She lived another seven years in slavery to Hatt until some “white [neighbours] said [she] was free, and put [her] up to running away” (194). After escaping bondage, she married Robert Pooley, but he eventually left, and by the time she was in her 90s, Sophia was living in Queen’s Bush where “plenty of people [… helped her] a good deal” (195). Sophia’s story challenges a lot of preconceived notions regarding Canada’s relationship with slavery, and by investigating the ways in which her narrative undoes the separation that Canada tries to achieve by positioning itself in comparison to the United States, it is easy to see how we often minimize our unpleasant and prejudice past to maintain a virtuous reputation.
Canadian history tend to gloss over our treatment of Black people, especially when discussing Canada’s involvement with the institution of slavery. Published in 1869 (just 13 years after Sophia’s testimony and 35 years after slavery was abolished in the British colonies), W. M. Canniff’s History of the Settlement of Upper Canada commends early Canada for its restraint and good treatment of the people enslaved. He states that “the record of our country is so honorable upon the question of slavery, that the fact that slaves did once breathe among us, cast no stigma upon the maple leaf” (570). He goes on to say that “Canadians are almost ignorant of the fact that the “institution” of slavery existed in Canada” and that the “principles which guided the settlers of the country were of too noble a nature to accept the monstrous system of human bondage” (570).
This historical revision of Canadian slavery diminishes the pain and hardship faced by Black people subjected to Canadian slavery and minimizes Canadian responsibility in its practice and so dismisses the historical Black experience of our country. In her 2004 book on the Queen’s Bush settlement, Linda Brown-Kubisch describes slavery in New France as “less abusive” than the United States: slaves received “relatively humane treatment, frequently adopting their owner’s surname and remaining with the family until their death” (2). While she does touch on the changes that stripped slaves of personhood when the British legal system overtook the French, Brown-Kubisch classifies Canada’s practices as the “relatively less brutal system of slavery” (4). This diminishing of the (violent) realities of slavery in early Canada, through comparisons with the peculiar institution in the “colonies further south,” in Canadian history is a long-established tradition (2).
Sophia’s story helps to combat this minimization, especially when reading about the evidence of violence presented in her testimony. When discussing her experience in slavery, Sophia mentions “a scar on [her] head from a wound [her master’s wife] gave [her] with a hatchet” and another “where she cut [her] with a knife” (Drew 149). Benjamin Drew (the biographer who recorded Sophia’s story) feels the need to add that “the scars spoken of were quite perceptible, but [he] saw many worse looking cicatrices” that were inflicted during the time she was enslaved (149). These undeniable indications of brutality and violence help combat the perception of Canadian slavery being humane and less abusive (which is often claimed in comparison to the U.S.’s history). Katherine McKittrick also notes that “black women were often purchased for sexual violence (113), which although is not noted in Sophia’s story, is another worrying possibility of her enslavement that demonstrates the atrocities done to Black women held in bondage in early Canada.
Examining Sophia Pooley’s story, and how her documented existence contradicts many common perceptions about Canadian history, helps to illuminate the experiences faced by Black people in Canada’s slave past; consequently, it also helps us recognize this continued minimization of the Black Canadian experience in our present through identifying how scholars continue to perpetuate a false narrative of Canadian tolerance.
Works Cited
Brown-Kubisch, Linda. The Queen’s Bush Settlement Black Pioneers, 1839-1865. Dundurn, 2004.
Canniff, W M. History of the Settlement of Upper Canada (Ontario,) with Special Reference to The Bay Quinte. Dudley & Burns, 1869.
Drew, Benjamin. A North-side View of Slavery: The Refugee: Or, The Narratives of Fugitive. J.P. Jewett and Company, 1856.
McRae, Matthew. “An Announcement of the Sale of Enslaved People. It Appeared in the Quebec Gazette in May 1785.” Canadian Museum of Human Rights, 2020.
McKittrick, Katherine. “Nothing’s Shocking: Black Canada.” Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, U of Minnesota P, 2006, pp. 91–119.