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135 chapter three lIke negroes In the IslAnds Rumor spread quickly in the French Atlantic. Hundreds of people circulated regularly between the Caribbean and the Saint Lawrence in the early eighteenth century, and sharing news was among the first things merchants, officers, and sailors did when they arrived at port. No document survives to show the route the information took, but by 1708 word reached Canada that Caribbean officials had both freed an African slave and executed French traders for selling enslaved Indians. Canadians seem also to have learned of the king’s 1707 declaration making free soil the French kingdom’s official policy. These reports prompted considerable disagreement over the legality of slavery in Canada and its hinterlands, where a small but growing number of colonists had begun investing in slave labor over the previous generation. Unlike the Caribbean, where Indian slavery had been declared illegal and slave raiding made a capital offense, most of the slaves in New France were Indians. According to the colony’s intendant, Jacques Raudot, many began to wonder whether Indians—or anyone—could be legally held as slaves in greater France. Some went so far as to encourage slaves to leave their masters “under the pretext that there are no slaves in France.” Others harbored fugitives. This legal ambiguity had a chilling effect on the value of colonists’ investment in slaves, as it rendered their claim to ownership insecure and frustrated plans to expand the slave trade.1 1. “Soub pretexte quen france il ny a point desclaves”: Jacques Raudot, “Ord[onan]ce rendüe au sujet des neigres et des Sauvages nommez Panis,” Apr. 13, 1709, BANQ-Q, E1, S1, P509. For a full transcription and translation of this ordinance, see Appendix B. For the fullest discussion of intercolonial communications in the French Atlantic, see Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713–1763 (Montreal, 2002). For oral or informal news and information networks, see Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History, XXXI (2006), 1–14. For the modest trade between Martinique and 136 Like Negroes in the Islands The nervous chatter of New France’s slaveholders reached Raudot and other colonial officials with added force because many of the colony’s elite, including the governor and members of the Superior Council, had recently bought Indian slaves themselves. Merchants in Quebec’s and Montreal’s commercial districts had also entered the market, buying and selling a small number of Indian slaves in the first decade of the eighteenth century. But those who bought slaves complained that they were continually “cheated out of the considerable sums paid for them because of the notions of liberty inspired in them by those who have not bought them, which means that they almost always desert their masters.” Whether informally or by petition, slaveholders’ concerns forced Raudot and the Superior Council to address the standing of slavery in New France. On April 13, 1709, Raudot issued an ordinance confirming slavery’s legality in the colony, declaring, “All the Panis [Indians] and Negroes who have been bought, and who shall be bought hereafter, shall be fully owned as property by those who have purchased them as their slaves.”2 There is no record that Raudot himself owned a slave, but he had a stake in slavery's protection. Charged with managing New France’s legal and economic affairs, Raudot would have felt doubly frustrated by the colony’s ambivalent approach to the subject. Not only did it undermine what he considered a legal form of commerce, challenging the authority of local law, but it also foreclosed a potential avenue for economic diversification and development . In economic terms, Raudot had inherited his post at the worst possible time. A spectacular collapse in the European market for North American furs had eviscerated the colony’s primary export, leaving colonial officials scrambling for new prospects. He obsessed over ways to develop new enterprises, looking to the Caribbean as both a model of economic success and a potential consumer of Canadian goods. In a series of memoQuebec in the first decade of the eighteenth century, see Jacques Mathieu, Le commerce entre la Nouvelle-France et les Antilles au XVIIIe siècle (Montreal, 1981), 22–31; and Jacques Raudot to the minister, Nov. 1, 1709, ANOM, Colonies, C11A, XXX, 229–258v. For the 1707 royal decree on French free soil, see “Lettre du Ministre sur les...

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