Exhuming the Archive: Black Slavery and Freedom in the Maritimes and Beyond

THROUGHOUT THE ATLANTIC WORLD, THE SLAVE TRADE was the engine of modernity – the foundation of European colonial enterprises that created the wealth upon which empire and capitalism were able to shape the contours of the modern world. Part and parcel of this emerging Atlantic World, was the Black Atlantic, an incubator and conduit of a "counterculture of modernity" as Paul Gilroy put it in his seminal work The Black Atlantic.¹ This pivotal book charted a new analytical framework for thinking about the histories and the creation of black vernacular cultures that created black modernity in the slavery and post-slavery days. As cultural critic Winfried Siemerling and the late David Sealy, philosopher and critical criminologist have written, Canada has traditionally been glaringly absent from conceptual mappings of the Black Atlantic.² The Maritimes was one of the most important theatres of the narrative of black slavery to freedom (or, as we will see below, slavery to slavery). Black history in the Maritimes is a crucial site for shaping our understanding of how black history unfolded in Canada and how the black experience of slavery and freedom shaped modern Canadian history.

Three important books simultaneously open up new, and revisit some older, ways of thinking about the Maritime node in the history of the Black Atlantic World: Harvey Amani Whitfield's North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes, Ruth Holmes Whitehead's Black Loyalists: Southern Settlers of Nova Scotia's First Free Black Communities, and Graham Reynolds's Viola Desmond's Canada: A History of Racial Segregation in the Promised Land.³ All of these works plumb the depths of the rich and still underutilized black Canadian archive to explore the histories of slavery and freedom in Black Canada and the broader Atlantic World. Taken together, these works highlight the experiences of blacks in the Maritimes while at the same time there are key empirical, analytical, and stylistic differences amongst them that point to the variety of approaches, strengths, and weaknesses that characterize these key works of black Canadian history.

At the centre of all three works is the importance of the historical archive. The history of blacks in Canada dates back to the earliest days of non-Indigenous contact. And yet, the black presence on the Canadian landscape has perpetually been constituted as a recent (and frequently post-Second World War) incursion on a pristine white landscape. When the long historical presence of blacks in Canada is acknowledged in the historical record, it is often to draw favourable comparisons to the United States' history of slavery and Jim Crow. In the tradition of the very best works in black Canadian history – some of which were penned as early as the mid-19th century – all of these books address the enduring myth of Canada as a haven from slavery and the pernicious forms of racial discrimination.⁴ They also straddle the middle ground between a reprise of an old project of debunking cherished Canadian myths and earnestly expanding our corpus of knowledge of histories that have been systematically purged from mainstream narratives of Canadian history.

Harvey Amani Whitfield's North to Bondage is the first comprehensive study of slavery in the Maritime Provinces. Over the course of six chapters, Whitfield highlights the lives of slaves and slaveholders. Beginning with an introduction that places the work in historical, geographical, and interpretive context, Whitfield makes his case for the importance of understanding Maritime slavery's antecedent in British America, the Loyalist influx into the Maritimes and patterns of enslavement, the working lives of the slaves, the worlds that were made by the slaves and their owners, and, lastly, the end of slavery in the Maritimes. His work also charts a future direction for the study of slavery in Canada.

Whitehead's Black Loyalists is similarly rooted in black Maritime history and like much of Whitfield's analysis is focused on the post-Revolutionary Maritime region and Nova Scotia in particular. This is also a timely work because it seems that at this moment the Black Loyalist story has permeated the popular consciousness and...