When Canadian historians talk about Africans coming here after the American Revolution, they generally focus on the Black Loyalists; freed slaves escaped from American masters who were emancipated by the British and settled in Nova Scotia. But not every African brought to Canada after the Revolutionary War was free.
In the official Act of Parliament that welcomed white Loyalist refugees to British North America, they were permitted to bring along “any negroes” in their possession without paying duty to the Crown. As many as 2,500 Black slaves were brought to Nova Scotia, instantly making it the most slaveholding territory in both the Maritime colonies and New England. During the late 18th century practically every county in mainland Nova Scotia had slaves.
In historical accounts of North American chattel slavery, Canada usually appears only as an enlightened Eden. We were the final stop of the Underground Railroad, and the place that legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass called “the real Canaan of the American bondmen,” a reference to the biblical Promised Land.
But if Canada came off as the good guy during the United States’ great reckoning with slavery, it’s only because British North America had undergone its own nightmare of human bondage. Only a generation before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Canada had been a place where human beings were listed for sale in newspapers, where enslaved children were given as gifts, where authorities hunted down fugitive slaves and where the murder and rape of enslaved Africans was endorsed by the Crown.
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