Memories of Haldimand Township

by: Haldimand History Committee

(Stoddardt Publishing Co. Ltd, Toronto, Ont: 1997)

p. 94-96 - IX Slavery (Tom by Karen Walker)

In the spring of the year 1824, when Eliakim Barnum's fine frame house was new, a Haldimand Twp boy was sold for $ 75 in what was one of the very last slave sales in Canada.

This child, a 14 year old named Tom, stood at the end of the 200 year history of slavery in Canada. The first African slave in the colony was probably a man from Madagascar who was sold at Quebec City in 1628. For more than 150 years after him, slaves remained relatively rare. Demand for slaves began in earnest only after the British conquest of New France. Slaves accompanied the forces of General James Wolfe to Quebec in 1759 and many more were later imported from the human markets of Boston and Newport by British soldiers stationed in Lower Canada.

Slavery arrived in Upper Canada in the 1780's with the United Empire Loyalists. Finding themselves on the wrong end of the American Revolution, thousands who had remained loyal to the Crown throughout the war immigrated to Canada once all was lost. Among the valuables that they brought were their slaves. Some slaves kept by Loyalists in the United States had escaped or been confiscated during the rebellion. Others were lost to the American army and to the British forces, both of which promised freedom to any slave who joined. Those wishing to import the slaves that they had managed to keep paid a tax of 40 shillings per person at the border because, like furniture or china, slaves were classified as household goods.

Those who did not arrive in Canada with slaves often acquired them here once the family had settled and prospered. After the end of the American Revolution in 1783, drovers came north with cattle, horses and slaves to sell and trade to homesteaders.

The slave trade grew freely in Upper Canada until 1793. In July of that year, the Legislative Assembly in Newark (present day Niagara-on-the-Lake) enacted legislation that was the first official step towards abolition in this province. John Graves Simcoe, Upper Canada's first Lieutenant-Governor spearheaded a strong anti-slavery bill, but in the face of stiff opposition from prominent slaveholders, this legislation soon became compromised. Among those slave masters present in parliament that term was Hazelton Spencer. He represented Lennox, Hastings, and Northumberland Counties and kept at his home near Kingston a slave and her daughter.

The law that Spencer and fellow legislators passed did not emancipate the slaves of Upper Canada but it did prohibit their further importation. It also directed that all slave children born in this country be freed upon their 25^th birthday. For the guarantee of their eventual freedom, Canadian slaves now had to give to the master their most productive working years and the many children likely to be born to women under the age of 25.

Some masters were unhappy with these limitations. In 1798 legislator Christopher Robinson spoke for them when he proposed that settlers be allowed once again to freely import slaves. Robinson’s bill was, in the end, easily defeated. Leading the vote against it was Northumberland’s representative David McGregor Rogers of Haldimand Township.

Although the compromise of 1793 assured them of the right, most sons and daughters of Loyalists proved to have little interest in slavery. Over the next two decades society came to disapprove of the old institution. By 1820 slavery had become rare in Canada.

Young Tom’s place in this long history is known from a document, one of only a very few of its kind in existence. To record the sale of Tom in March 1824, his master in Haldimand Township drew up an agreement known as an “assignment.” The seller kept one copy and gave a second to the boy’s new owner. It was this purchaser’s copy that survived. Placed among family papers, the assignment passed in 1859 into the possession of Dr. William Canniff of Belleville, a noted early Canadian historian. Canniff briefly mentioned the document in his 1869 landmark book The Settlement of Upper Canada. The agreement of sale was then forgotten for 40 years until it was willed to the Lennox and Addington Historical Society in Napanee in 1909 and published for posterity in the Society’s journal the following year.

The assignment of Tom tells that he was born in Upper Canada in 1809. His exact birthplace was not recorded, but it may well have been in the Quinte-Kingston area where the largest number of slaves were found during the 19^th century.

Tom likely belonged to a wealthy household. In early Canada, slaves were status symbols kept mainly for housework and personal service. The earliest slaves to arrive in this rough new land may have helped to build the master’s cabin or clear his first few acres, but, in general, they were considered too valuable for farm labour.

To work the relatively short planting and harvesting seasons of the north, Canadian slaveholders found it more economical to hire immigrants. Indentured servants from Europe were also available in growing numbers. Somewhere between the hired hand and the slave, indentured servants could be secured for a known period of time before being released from their contracts.

Tom’s mother, her name unknown, was a slave who arrived in Upper Canada before Simcoe’s 1793 law declared that no more could enter. She may have been one of the more than 50,000 people kidnapped from West Africa and sent across the Atlantic in chains every year or she may have been born in the United States into a slave population that was approaching 1 million in the late 18^th century. Under American and British law, it was her status as a slave that determined the fate of her son. Tom’s mother probably lived as a cook, a nanny or as a lady’s maid.

According to the assignment, the boy was a mulatto. Tom was one of the many sons and daughters of a slave woman and her master. Despite their paternity, mulatto children generally had as hard a life as any slave, if not harder. They were rarely acknowledged by the master as his own children and often resented by the mistress who saw them as painful, embarrassing reminders of a husband’s infidelity.

Tom’s first master was Eli Keeler of Haldimand. Even less can be gathered about him than about his young slave.

As a Keeler, Eli belonged to a large and prosperous Loyalist clan scattered throughout New York and New England. Their patriarch in Canada was Joseph Keeler of the town of Rutland in south central Vermont. In the late 1780’s, Joseph made several journeys to Upper Canada before leading a group of forty settlers north in 1793 to the woods where Haldimand and Cramahe Townships would grow. Among this party were many of the region’s founding families, names like Burnham, Greeley, Lovekin and Merriman. There was also Joseph Keeler’s own wife and young children as well as two of his brothers or cousins, Martin and Eli. Together, they began farms and mills and established the villages of Lakeport and Colborne.

Eli himself appears in township assessment rolls in 1814. At this time, when Tom was five years old, Eli Keeler’s very modest Haldimand farm consisted of two oxen, three milk cows, and two horned cows on 50 cleared acres and 50 more uncleared. He later acquired more land to bring his total to 160 acres. Unfortunately, no lot or concession numbers nor any details about the household were recorded for the Keeler farm.

Tom was probably the last slave in the Keeler family. Joseph Keeler had once kept servants in Vermont and lost them when slavery was abolished in that state during the American Revolution. He apparently acquired others in New York State while passing through on one of his treks to Canada. Keeler is said to have emancipated some of these people soon after arrival.

In 1824 as local Baptists began a new church at Wicklow, and Haldimand mourned the passing of the distinguished David McGregor Rogers, Tom passed from Eli Keeler to a distinguished old gentleman in Hastings County. He was William Bell. Bell was born in County Tyrone, Ireland in 1758. As a young man, he immigrated to New York State where he remained loyal and fought for the Crown during the rebellion. In 1789 Bell left the now United States, settling first in Kingston and then in the Belleville area. He opened a store in Quinte, taught school and later held several municipal offices.

William Bell was 66 in 1824. His wife Rachel Hare was 52. Growing older and with other children married and gone, they may have sought a young slave to work around the home. The Bells in Belleville may have learned that there was a servant for sale in Haldimand through their daughter Amelia who, with her husband John Hogaboom, was keeping an inn in Grafton.

The price paid for Tom was $ 75. At a time when a modest log house could be built for $ 40 and the fare for the three day bone-rattling stagecoach trip from Kingston to York (Toronto) was $ 18, Tom was indeed expensive.

Slaves were of such value because so few remained. Apart from Tom, there were in the 1820’s only a few aging servants on Thomas Dorland’s farm near Picton and one or two slave children just born at Niagara-on-the-Lake. They were the last.

The Bells likely regarded Tom as an investment as he had been learning a trade under Keeler. His new masters may have planned to rent out he skills that Tom had acquired to supplement their income through the ten years that he would remain their possession.

If history and circumstance had not intervened, Tom would have been emancipated in 1834 when he reached 25 years of age. However, slavery did not last even that long. It was abolished throughout the British Empire on August 1, 1833. During that same year, William Bell died. His death would likely have entitled Tom to freedom if the law had not already.

Although some chose to remain with their masters, most former slaves took their liberty to towns and counties far away from where they had been held. Tom would have plied his trade for himself, founded his own home and started a family and contributed to the building of this country.

The original 1824 assignment document survived for about a century after Tom was emancipated. Sometime between 1910, when the historic document was published in the Lennox and Addington Historical Society Papers and Records, and 1959, when the William Bell Papers were deposited in the Archives of Ontario in Toronto, the assignment disappeared from the Bell collection. It may have been lost, traded away or simply discarded. It has never been found.