Volume 5 — CHAPTER I
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Before the Conquest
That slavery existed in Canada before its conquest by Britain in 1759-60, there can be no doubt, although curiously enough it has been denied by some historians and essayists.[1] The first Negro slave of which any account is given was brought to Quebec by the English in 1628. He was a young man from Madagascar and was sold in Quebec for 50 half crowns.[2] Sixty years thereafter in 1688, Denonville, the Governor and DeChampigny, the Intendant of New France, wrote to the French Secretary of State, complaining of the dearness and scarcity of labor, agricultural and domestic, and suggesting that the best remedy would be to have Negro slaves. If His Majesty would agree to that course, some of the principal inhabitants would have some bought in the West Indies on the arrival of the Guinea ships. The minister replied in 1689 in a note giving the King's consent but drawing attention to the danger of the slaves coming from so different a climate dying in Canada and thereby rendering the experiment of no avail.[3]
The Indians were accustomed to make use of slaves, generally if not universally of those belonging to other tribes: and the French Canadians frequently bought Indian slaves from the aborigines. These were called "Panis."[4] It would seem that a very few Indians were directly enslaved by the inhabitants: but the chief means of acquiring Panis was purchase from les sauvages.
The property in slaves was well recognized in International Law. We find that in the Treaty of Peace and Neutrality in America signed at London, November 16, 1686,[5] between the Kings of France and England, which James II had arranged shortly after attaining the throne, Article 10 provides that the subjects of neither nation should take away the savage inhabitants, or their slaves or the goods which the savages had taken belonging to the subjects of either nation, and that they should give no assistance or protection to such raids and pillage. In 1705 it was decided that Negroes in America were "moveables," meubles, corresponding in substance to what is called "personal property" in the English law.[6] This decision was on the Coutume de Paris, the law of New France.
The Panis and Negro slaves were not always obedient. Jacques Raudot, the Intendant, April 13, 1709, made an ordinance on "the Subject of Negroes and Savages called Panis." In this he recited the advantage the colony would acquire by certainty of ownership of the savages called Panis "whose nation is far removed from this country" and that certainty could only be brought about through the Indians who capture them in their homes and deal for the most part with the English of Carolina, but who sometimes in fact sell them to the Canadians who are often defrauded of considerable sums through an idea of liberty inspired in the Panis by those who do not buy,[7] so that almost daily they leave their masters under the pretext that there are no slaves in France—that is not wholly true since in the islands of this Continent all the Negroes bought as such are regarded as slaves."
The further recital says that all the colonies should be on the same footing, and that the Panis were as necessary for the Canadians for the cultivation of the land and other work as the Negroes were for the islands, that it was necessary to assure the property in their purchases those who have bought and those who should buy in the future. Then comes the enactment "Nous sous le bon plaisir de Sa Majesté ordonnons, que tous les Panis et Nègres qui ont été achetés et qui le seront dans la suite, appartiendront en pleine proprieté à ceux qui les ont achetés comme étant leurs esclaves." "We with the consent of His Majesty enact that all the Panis and Negroes who heretofore have been or who hereafter shall be bought shall be the absolute property as their slaves of those who bought them."[8]
This ordinance was not a dead letter. On February 8, 1734, Gilles Hocquart, the Intendant at Quebec issued an ordinance in which he recited that in 1732 Captain Joanne of the Navy brought a Carib slave of his to Canada and employed him as a sailor; that he had deserted when Captain Joanne was ready to embark for the West Indies; and that the master had seen and recognized him a short time theretofore in the Parish of St. Augustine but on reclaiming him certain evil-disposed persons had facilitated his escape. The ordinance directed all captains and officers of the militia to give their assistance to the master in recovering the Carib slave and forbade all persons to conceal him or facilitate his escape on pain of fine or worse.[9]
Slavery thereafter tended to expand. The Edict of October 1727 concerning the American islands and colonies and therefore including Canada in the preamble spoke of the islands and colonies being in a condition to support a considerable navigation and commerce by the consumption and trade of Negroes, goods and merchandise, and the measures taken to furnish the necessary Negroes, goods and merchandise. It was decreed that only such Negroes, goods, and merchandise should be received by the islands and colonies as should be brought in French bottoms. Very explicit and rigid regulations were made to that end.
Some of these slaves were too vindictive to be good servants. There is given by Abbé Gosselin in a paper in the Transactions, Royal Society of Canada for 1900, an account of a mutiny of part of the garrison at Niagara incited by a Panis probably in the service of an officer at the post. Some of the mutineers were sentenced to death but made their escape while the Panis, Charles, was sent to Martinique with a request to the authorities to make him a slave and to take every precaution that he should not escape to Canada or even to the English colonies. A female slave of color belonging to Mme. de Francheville who had been bought in the English Colonies set fire to her mistress' home the night of the 10-11 April 1734, thus causing a conflagration which destroyed a part of the city of Montreal. The unfortunate slave was apprehended and tried for the crime then and for long after a capital felony. Being found guilty, she was hanged June, 1734.
The increase in the number of slaves made necessary some regulation concerning their liberation. September 1, 1736, Gilles Hocquart, the Intendant already mentioned, made an ordinance concerning the formalities requisite in the enfranchisement of slaves. Reciting that he had been informed that certain persons in Canada had freed their slaves without any other formality than verbally giving them their liberty, and the necessity of fixing in an invariable manner the status of slaves who should be enfranchised, he ordered that for the future all enfranchisements should be by notarial act and that all other attempted enfranchisements should be null and void.
Slaves unable to secure their freedom by legal means, however, undertook sometimes to effect the same by flight. A royal decree of July 23, 1745, recited the escape of three male and one female Negro slaves from the English West India Island of Antigua to the French Island of Guadeloupe and there sold. There followed a decision of the Superior Council of Guadeloupe that the proceeds of the sale belonged to the King of France and Negro slaves belonging to the enemy when they came into a French colony became at once the property of His Majesty. To make clear the course to pursue for the future, the decree declared that Negro slaves who escape from enemy colonies into French colonies and all they bring with them belong to His Majesty alone in the same way as enemy ships and goods wrecked on his coasts.
With all of this security the ownership of slaves became common. In the Registers of the Parish of La Longue Pointe is found the certificate of the burial, March 13, 1755, of the body of Louise, a female Negro slave, aged 27 days, the property of M. Deschambault. In the same Parish is found the certificate of baptism of Marie Judith, a Panis, about 12 years of age belonging to Sieur Preville of the same Parish, November 4, 1756. On January 22, 1757, one Constant a Panis slave of Sieur de Saint Blain, officer of Infantry, is sentenced by de Monrepos, Lieutenant-Governor civil and criminal in the Jurisdiction of Montreal,[10] to the pillory in a public place on a market day and then to perpetual banishment from the jurisdiction.
The conquest of Canada begun at Quebec in 1759 and completed by the surrender to Amherst of Montreal by de Vaudreuil in 1760 had some bearing on slavery. One of the Articles of Capitulation, the 47th, provided that "the Negroes and Panis of both Sexes shall remain in the possession of the French and Canadians to whom they belong; they shall be at liberty to keep them in their service in the Colony or to sell them: and they may also continue to bring them up in the Roman religion."[11]
Having now reached the end of the French period, it will be well to say a word as to the rights of the slaves. There is nowhere any intimation that there was any difference in that regard between the Negro and the Panis. The treatment of the latter by their fellow Indians depended upon the individual master. The Panis had no rights which his Indian master was bound to respect. Remembering the persistence of customs among uncivilized peoples, one may conclude that the description given of slavery among the Chinook Indians about a century later will probably not be far from the mark concerning the Indians of the earlier time and their slaves.
Paul Kane, the celebrated explorer and artist,[12] in a paper read before the Canadian Institute[13] in 1857 said: "Slavery is carried on to a great extent along the North-West Coast and in Vancouver Island and the Chinooks.... The inhabitants still retain a large number of slaves. These are usually procured from the Chastay Tribe who live near the Umqua, a river south of the Columbia emptying into the Pacific. They are sometimes seized by war-parties but are often bought from their own people.... Their slavery is of the most abject description: the Chinook men and women treat them with great severity and exercise the power of life and death at pleasure."
Kane gives shocking instances of this. He tells of a chief who sacrificed five slaves to a colossal wooden idol he had set up and says that the unfortunate slaves were not considered entitled even to burial but their bodies were cast out to the crows and vultures.
Amongst the French such an extreme of barbarity did not obtain. Their law was based upon the civil law, that is, the law of Rome, which in its developed form recognized the slave as a human being. The Roman world was full of slaves. Not only were there slaves born but debtors sometimes sold themselves[14] or their children. The criminal might be enslaved. In early pagan times the slave had no rights. He was a chattel disposable according to the will of his master who had jus vitæ necisque, who could slay, mutilate, scourge at pleasure.[15] In the course of time this extreme power was restrained. Hadrian forbade the killing of slaves, Marius allowed the slave to lay an information against his master. The prefect at Rome and the presidents of the provinces took cognizance of crimes against the slave; and Constantine allowed a master to go free on killing his slave in chastisement only if he used rods or whips, but not if he used sticks, stones or javelins or tortured him to death.[16] Hard as was his lot, the unhappy slave had at least some rights in the later civil law, few and slight as they were, and these he had under the Coutume de Paris, the law of French Canada.