North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes by Harvey Amani Whitfield (review)

North to Bondage examines Loyalist slavery in the part of Atlantic Canada comprised of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island after the American Revolution. From 1783 to 1785 30,000 Loyalists, including free black Loyalists, travelled to these Atlantic Canadian provinces. It is a lesser known history that they were also accompanied by 1,500 to 2,500 enslaved people. Harvey Amani Whitfield argues that the history of slavery in Canada, including Loyalist slavery in Atlantic Canada, 'has not become part of the Canadian national narrative' (p. 4). The dominant national narrative is still that Canada was a place of freedom for enslaved people from the United States in the nineteenth century. Whitfield argues that the 'essential contours' of slavery in Atlantic Canada have yet to be firmly established by the existing scholarship (p. 5). He notes the need to identify who the slaveholding classes were and their occupations, establish patterns in the work of enslaved people, examine enslaved culture and the relationships between enslaved people and their owners. North to Bondage is the first book-length study about Loyalist slavery in Atlantic Canada and Whitfield draws on original archive work and from existing scholarship to address these neglected areas.

Slavery was established in Atlantic Canada prior to the arrival of the Loyalists, existing under the French and British regimes in the eighteenth century and developed with the earlier arrival of the New England Planters. Whitfield sees the period following the Loyalist arrival as a key moment in the 'expansion of slavery' in Atlantic Canada (p. 16). Enslaved people owned by Loyalists in Atlantic Canada largely came from New England and the Middle Colonies. Whitfield argues that the experience of these enslaved people after their arrival had strong continuities with their prior experiences of slavery in its prior American contexts. Loyalist slavery was a continuation 'of a variegated constellation of American slaveries' but it also developed uniquely and was shaped by 'new realities of climate, soil, economy, and population' (p. 8). He explores how patterns of slaveholding developed differently in the various economies in Atlantic Canada. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick owners of enslaved persons broadly came from a range of classes in white society including small farmers, but in Prince Edward Island it was largely the elite that owned slaves, in a context in which tenants experienced exploitation and land was usually controlled by absentee landlords.

Whitfield's book places the experiences of enslaved persons at the centre of this history. This is skilfully done given that there are few sources that contain the unmediated voices of enslaved people in Atlantic Canada (there are no slave narratives by slaves in Atlantic Canada for example). He achieves this by combining archival material and histories of slavery in what became the United States and Canada. He demonstrates that enslaved persons negotiated their experiences of enslavement and he shows that they were integral to bringing about the demise of slavery in the early nineteenth century. Perhaps the central contribution of this book is that it demonstrates, in terms of its slavery, Atlantic Canada was part of the 'African diaspora and the Atlantic world' (p. 7) and that Atlantic Canada and New England can be seen as a 'connected and integrated region or borderland' (p. 49).