Note 15 — Chapter VII
Reading edition
It is said that August 1797 was the date of the last public slave sale at Montreal, that of Emmanuel Allen for £36.
The last advertisement for sale by auction of a slave in the Maritime Provinces seems to be that in The Royal Gazette and Nova Scotia Advertiser of September 7, 1790, where William Millet of Halifax offers for sale by auction September 9 "A stout likely negro man and sundry other articles."
In 1802 the census showed that there were 451 Blacks in Halifax; in 1791 there were 422.
Dr. T. Watson Smith says in a paper "Slavery in Canada" republished in "Canadian History," No. 12, December, 1900, at p. 321.
"About 1806, so Judge Marshall has stated, a master and his slave were taken before Chief Justice Blowers on a writ of habeas corpus. When the case and the question of slavery in general had been pretty well argued on each side, the Chief Justice decided that slavery had no legal place in Nova Scotia."
I have not been able to trace such a decision and cannot think that it has been correctly reported. Dr. Smith is wholly justified in his statement "there is good ground for the opinion that this baneful system was never actually abolished in the present Canadian Provinces until the vote of the British Parliament and the signature of King William IV in 1833 rendered it illegal throughout the British Empire."