Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal, 1760–1840 (review)

Frank Mackey’s 600-page tome, boasting magnifying-glass-necessary print, should exercise clout commensurate with its heft. Certainly, Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal, 1760–1840 ought to provoke controversy. Mackey attacks previous historians’ accounts of black slavery in la belle province, their very numbering of blacks, the question of when black slavery ended in New France, and even whether the racism that blacks faced – over the eighty-year span of this study – was racist, per se, or just occasional discourtesy on the part of regrettably uncouth whites, unfortunately ensconced in positions where they could make life (more) difficult if they felt like it.

Despite his formidable scholarship – the exhausting marshalling of seemingly exhaustless sources – Mackey still must surmise, infer, and make educated guesses about what ought to be données. The reason is that race is complex in Canada. Whereas America loves to broadcast the vivid black-and-white contrasts in its red-white-and-blue, Canadians prefer pastels and greys. What is clarity in America – slavery, a civil war to end it, segregation, the civil rights movement – is foggy here.

Mackey knows that a ‘Eurocentric’ bias has skewed Canadian historiography. (Thus, I have argued myself that every African Canadian writer is forced to act as a historian.) We owe a debt, then, to historian Jim Hornby, who, in Black Islanders (1991), showed that it was possible to reconstruct black history (in his case, that of Prince Edward Island) by examining newspapers and, above all, courthouse documents.

Mackey follows suit, digging through trial files, but also newspapers, diaries, legislative records, and the like (even employing a little literary analysis), to unearth blacks whose documented experiences illustrate the facts of slave and ex-slave and free-black life in old Montreal.

Given that it is mainly court records that Mackey consults, he recovers blacks prosperous enough to own property and sue others or those who were so unlucky as to be charged with crimes (many minor) and then convicted or discharged.

This research succeeds; we get to follow, up close, roughly a couple dozen black Montrealers and their families over this eighty-year period. They work or slave, marry and bury each other, win manumission or just walk away from slavery.

But Canada is always shifty. For instance, when did slavery end? Mackey is pretty sure that it was ‘done,’ in colonial Quebec, by about 1800, and he resents the idea that it may not have ‘really’ ended until the British Parliament abolished it throughout the Empire, beginning in 1834.

He traces, neatly, lines of judicial and political sentiment that, if not quite abolitionist in practice, were surely so in theory and, likely, in effect. He treats this context as unique to old Quebec. But it wasn’t.

In the colonial Maritimes, slavery was also a ‘dead letter,’ if not ‘dead-dead,’ decades before it was officially abolished by the British Empire’s governors. But it was also still legal until then, and we have as exhibit ‘A,’ so to speak, Judge Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who told prospective colonists, in 1829, do bring your slaves with you, but investment capital is a better option.

True: New France was not Nova Scotia – or New Brunswick – but Mackey’s own evidence suggests that the waning of slavery in colonial Quebec followed the pattern that unfolded in the Maritimes: a quiet, judicial nullification that pleased slaves and frustrated masters.

Mackey also casts doubt on previous counts that peg black slaves in New France at a couple of thousand. He is right; it is likely lower, once one notes that neither ‘black’ nor ‘slave’ had fixed meanings back then and once one notes how easily names were confused. Still, his own count of ‘at most about 400 black slaves’ over forty years, in Montreal alone, is only his best guess.

As with his previous volume, Black Then: Blacks and Montreal, 1780s– 1880s (2004), Mackey merits kudos for his...