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Slavery and transatlantic anti-slave-trade sentiment in Quebec’s newspapers, 1789–1793

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Journal of Transatlantic Studies Aims and scope

Abstract

There has been an emphasis on runaway slave advertisements in Quebec’s eighteenth-century newspapers as part of the recovery of Canada’s marginalised slaveholding past. However, as a close and holistic reading of the newspapers shows, the advertisements circulated alongside a higher number of texts relating to slavery in the wider Americas. The editors of the Quebec Gazette and the Montreal Gazette reprinted texts first published in Britain and France during the international slave-trade debates and from these they constructed a coherent local anti-slave-trade sentiment. Editors placed runaway slave advertisements alongside a general anti-slave-trade sentiment, and these contradictory texts circulated alongside one another. Canadian newspapers, their editors and readers were far more engaged with transatlantic slave-trade debates than has previously been understood.

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Notes

  1. For two recent examples, see: Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

  2. On the slave-trade abolition movement as ‘international,’ see J. R. Oldfield, Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2.

  3. Oldfield, Transatlantic Abolitionism, 2–3, 7, especially Chapter Two.

  4. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers: Volume II: Canada, 1830–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1865). Allen P. Stouffer, The Light of Nature and the Law of God: Antislavery in Ontario 1833–1877 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992). On the African Abolition Society formed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, see Harvey Amani Whitfield, Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2006), 108–15.

  5. Thomas Clarkson, History, vol. 2, quoted in J.R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilization of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 133. On the American print context, see Oldfield, Transatlantic Abolitionism, 58.

  6. Dorothy Couchman, ‘‘Mungo Everywhere’: How Anglophones Heard Chattel Slavery,’ Slavery & Abolition 36, no. 4 (2015): 716, https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2014.969581. For the reprinting of the ‘Epilogue’ in the American newspapers, see, for example, ‘From the Gentleman’s Magazine…Epilogue to ‘‘The Padlock,’’’ Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, 3 March 1788, 3.

  7. For simplicity, this article uses the term ‘Quebec’ throughout to refer to the province of Quebec, although after 1791, when the colony of Quebec was divided into the two colonies of Upper Canada and Lower Canada, the newspapers under discussion here were published in what became the colony of Lower Canada.

  8. David Copeland, ‘America, 1750–1820,’ in Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America 1760–1820, ed. by Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 149. Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 95, 97.

  9. On this point, see Jared Gardner, The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 3–4, and Benjamin Fagan, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2016), 15, 3.

  10. Jean-Francis Gervais, ‘William Brown,’ Dictionary of Canadian Biography, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/brown_william_4E.html.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Ibid.

  14. B. Franklin, Rich. Chapman and Mary D. Turnbull, ‘William Dunlap, Colonial Printer, Journalist, and Minister,’ The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 103, no. 2 (1979): 151–52, JSTOR.

  15. For a contemporary notice regarding William Brown’s death and Samuel Neilson’s commencement as editor, see QG, 26 March 1789, 3, British Library, reel BL.M.C.271.B. All subsequent references to the QG in this article will refer to this microfilm reel.

  16. John E. Hare, ‘Samuel Neilson’, DCB, http://www.biographi.ca.en/bio/neilson_samuel_1771_93_4E.html.

  17. James H. Lambert ‘Alexander Spark’, DCB, http://biographi.ca/en/bio/spark_alexander_5E.html.

  18. James N. Green, ‘The British Book in North America’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume V: 1695–1830, ed. by Michael F. Suarez, S. J., and Michael L. Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 594.

  19. For the biographical information that forms the basis of this paragraph, see Claude Galarneau, ‘Fleury Mesplet,’ DCB, http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mesplet_fleury_4E.html.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Marcel Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten Slaves: Two Hundred Years of Bondage, trans. George Tombs (Montreal: Véhicule Press, 2013), 110.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Ibid.

  24. For example, see the advertisements: 22 November 1777, 3 and 29 January 1788, 2.

  25. Therese P. Lemay, ‘Joe,’ DCB http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/joe_4E.html.

  26. Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History, 2nd edn (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 100.

  27. Frank Mackey, Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal 1760–1840 (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 534–35, n. 28.

  28. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten Slaves, 110.

  29. Lemay, ‘Joe,’ DCB.

  30. Mackey, Done with Slavery, 534–35, n. 28.

  31. Hare, ‘Samuel Neilson,’ DCB.

  32. ‘Proposal for the Establishment of a New Gazette’, MG, British Library, reel BL M.C.270. All subsequent references to the MG in this article are from this microfilm reel.

  33. MG, 6 Oct 1785, 4.

  34. Marie Tremaine, ‘Newspapers,’ in A Bibliography of Canadian Imprints, 1751–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952), 594–659.

  35. The popularity and longevity of these newspapers is evident when compared to other newspapers in Quebec in the eighteenth century, see Tremaine’s survey in ‘Newspapers,’ 594–659.

  36. Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

  37. On the lack of newspapers in New France, see John Dickinson and Brian Young, A Short History of Quebec, 4th edn (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 92. For the point that slavery in New France is not represented in newspapers, see Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 291.

  38. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 100.

  39. See Frank Mackey, ‘Appendix I: Newspaper Notices,’ Done with Slavery, 307.

  40. Mackey, ‘Appendix 1,’ 313.

  41. Classic critical collections of runaway slave advertisements are: Billy G. Smith and Richard Wojtowicz, comps., Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements for Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728–1790 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989),Graham Russell Hodges and Alan Edward Brown comps., ‘‘Pretends to be Free’’: Runaway Slave Advertisements from Colonial and Revolutionary New York and New Jersey (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), Lathan A. Windley comp., Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790 Vol. 3. South Carolina, 4 vols (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983).

  42. David Waldstreicher, ‘Reading the Runaways: Self-fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,’ William and Mary Quarterly 56, no. 2 (1999): 244, 247–48, https://doi.org/10.2307/2674119.

  43. Waldstreicher, ‘Reading the Runaways,’ 253.

  44. Runaway Slave Advertisements, comp. Windley, 532.

  45. QG, 3 June 1788, 5 and 26 June 1788, 2.

  46. For a substantial discussion of the runaway slave advertisements, see: Charmaine A. Nelson, Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). Charmaine A. Nelson, ‘‘‘Ran Away from her Master… a Negroe Girl named Thursday:’’ Examining Evidence of Punishment, Isolation, and Trauma in Nova Scotia and Quebec Fugitive Slave Advertisements,’ Legal Violence and the Limits of the Law, eds., Joshua Nichols and Amy Swiffen (NYC: Routledge, 2017). Harvey Amani Whitfield, Black Slavery in the Maritimes: A History in Documents (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2018).

  47. George Elliott Clarke, ‘‘This is no hearsay’’: Reading the Canadian Slave Narratives’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada, 43, no. 1 (2005), 8, 18, 19.

  48. Winfried Siemerling, The Black Atlantic Reconsidered: Black Canadian Writing, Cultural History and the Presence of the Past (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 33–37.

  49. Maureen G. Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits: Black Women and Slavery in Early Canada and Jamaica (London: Routledge, 1999) and Harvey Amani Whitfield, North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016).

  50. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten Slaves, 235.

  51. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 100.

  52. St James’s Chronicle, 27–29 August 1789, 2, Burney Newspaper Collection.

  53. QG, 13 August 1789, 2–4. The speech was originally printed in the Diary or Woodfall’s Register, 13 May 1789, 2–4, Burney Newspaper Collection.

  54. John Wolffe, ‘William Wilberforce,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29386.

  55. For the twelve Prepositions, see Woodfall’s Register, 14 May 1789, 2 and QG, 20 August 1789, 3.

  56. ‘To the Printer of The Diary: Slave Trade: Letter I’, Woodfall’s Register, 16 May 1789, 2.

  57. ‘Slave Trade, A Card’, Woodfall’s Register, 18 May 1789, 3.

  58. ‘Slave Trade: The Following Petition has been Presented to the House of Commons on Behalf of the Planters and Owners of Property in the Island of St. Christopher’, Woodfall’s Register, 18 May 1789, 3–4.

  59. Mackey, ‘Appendix I,’ 325–37.

  60. Mackey, ‘Appendix I,’ 325–37.

  61. For 1789–1793 as the peak moment in sentimental rhetoric in the British slave-trade debates, see for example Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 196.

  62. Seymour Drescher, ‘The Shocking Birth of British Abolitionism,’ Slavery & Abolition, 33.4 (2012), 576, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2011.644070.

  63. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 35.

  64. QG, 19 April 1792, 2.

  65. Srividhya Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759–1815 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 3–4.

  66. Ibid, 4.

  67. Ibid, 215–16.

  68. QG, 3 September 1789, 1, 3.

  69. David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 91, 218.

  70. Ibid, 82.

  71. QG, 24 November 1791, 2.

  72. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten Slaves, 234.

  73. Examples of American slavery and anti-slavery texts in Nova Scotia newspapers include a poem titled, ‘From a Late New York Paper Advertisement,’ The Royal Gazette and the Nova Scotia Advertiser, 26 January 1790, 4, and a report of a court trial of an enslaved man in Virginia, ‘Alexandria,’ 27 January, 3, both Nova Scotia Archives, reel 8163.

  74. MG, 27 Aug 1789, 1.

  75. MG, 27 Aug 1789, 1. MG, 3 Sep 1789, 1–2. MG, 10 Sep 1789, 1. MG, 1 Oct 1789, 1–2.

  76. MG, 20 Aug 1789, 1.

  77. MG, 27 Aug 1789, 1.

  78. William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 86.

  79. Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, 101.

  80. MG, 3 Sep 1789, 1.

  81. ‘The Negro’s Complaint,’ MG, 11 June 1789, 4. QG, 21 January 1791, 3. For ‘The Dying African’, see ‘Song: The Dying Negro’, QG, 21 June 1792. For the ‘Epilogue’, see ‘The Negro’s Recital,’ QG, 16 December 1790, 4. For a modern reproduction of Sayers’s poem, see James G. Basker, ed. Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 401.

  82. Brycchan Carey, ‘To Force a Tear: British Abolitionism and the Eighteenth-Century London Stage,’ in Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic: 1770–1830, ed. Stephen Ahern (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 122.

  83. Ibid, 120, 122.

  84. Ibid, 128.

  85. ‘Epilogue to ‘The Padlock’’, Brycchan Carey <http://www.brycchancarey.com/slavery/padlock1.htm> [accessed 1 Nov 2018].

  86. ‘The Negro’s Recital’, QG, 16 Dec 1790, 4.

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Bird, E. Slavery and transatlantic anti-slave-trade sentiment in Quebec’s newspapers, 1789–1793. J Transatl Stud 19, 387–407 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s42738-021-00080-3

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