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From Slaves to Subjects From Slaves to Subjects: Forging Freedom in the Canadian Legal System by Nina Halty A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL August 2017 Copyright by Nina Halty 2017 ii iii Acknowledgments I would first like to express my sincere gratitude to the faculty of the History department for providing me consistent support, guidance, and advice throughout the entire thesis writing process. Without Dr. Shannon’s class on American foreign relations I never would have found my topic, and since that semester Dr. Shannon has always been so helpful and willing to provide research tips, organizational suggestions, and useful feedback. In his class on freedom and unfreedom in early America, Dr. Sharples helped me hone my topic and uncover the questions that truly motivated my research. I am particularly grateful for his willingness to help me wade through my sometimes conflicting thoughts on this subject and find my argument. I also thank Dr. Sharples for his incredibly thorough and thoughtful comments on my writing, which helped me sharpen my prose and always write with the reader in mind. And, of course, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Engle, who first encouraged me to consider writing a thesis and who has provided steady support throughout this entire process and has always encouraged me to focus on the narrative and not get bogged down. Finally, I wish to thank my parents who have always been patient and supportive throughout the past year. They always provided a listening ear when I needed to vent to someone about the bizarre structure of Canadian archival finding aids. They always provided a pair of extra eyes when I needed help deciphering some muddled handwriting on a nineteenth letter. And they always provided a helping hand when I started questioning my argument or doubting my ability. I am forever indebted to my mom iv especially for driving over four thousand miles with me to visit seven different archives across the continent. I am eternally grateful to her for being willing to spend countless hours in dark reading rooms hunched over hastily written letters, squinting at newspapers on microfilm, and flipping through crumbling scrapbooks. It was an incredible trip that I will never forget. This project would not be possible without her. v Abstract Author: Nina Halty Title: From Slaves to Subjects: Forging Freedom in the Canadian Legal System Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Stephen D. Engle Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2017 This thesis clarifies recent debates on the problems of territorialized freedom in the Atlantic world by examining several extradition cases involving runaway slaves in Canada, where southern slaveholders attempted to retrieve their lost property by relabeling fugitive slaves as fugitive criminals. In order to combat these efforts and receive the full protections of British subjecthood, self-emancipated people realized that they needed to prove themselves worthy of this status. To achieve this, black refugees formulated their own language of subjecthood predicated upon economic productivity, social respectability, and political loyalty. By actively working to incorporate themselves into the British Empire, Afro-Canadians redefined subjecthood from a status largely seen as a passively received birthright to a deliberate choice. Therefore, this thesis demonstrates that ways in which formerly enslaved people laid out their own terms for vi imperial inclusion and defined the contours of black social and legal belonging in a partially free Atlantic world. vii From Slaves to Subjects: Forging Freedom in the Canadian Legal System Introduction…….....……………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter One: Confronting the “great apostle of Emancipation:” Fugitive Slaves and Anglo-American Diplomacy…………….…………………………………..30 Chapter Two: “I thought we were safe here:” Cultivating Subjecthood in the British Empire………………………………….………………………………...58 Chapter Three: Back in the “prison house of bondage:” Nelson Hackett and the Question of Slave Criminality………………………………………………….. 94 Chapter Four: “Can goods and chattels transgress moral law?” The Creole Case and the Webster-Ashburton Treaty……………………………………………..121 Chapter Five: “Like an ominous black cloud:” Black Canadian Society and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850……………………………………………………..153 Chapter Six: “Not a murderer but a Hero:” The John Anderson Case……….…………………………………………………………………….188 Conclusion…...…………………………………………………………………………234 viii Introduction: James Smith could feel the cool water lap up against his feet and he could hear the dull roar of tumbling water as the Niagara River rushed by him. He lay face down with his stomach pressed against the river bank and his legs stretched out behind him. As he slowly came back to awareness, James squinted up at the dusky blue sky. It was a crisp April morning and the sun had not yet climbed above the horizon, but the birds had already started chirping. After a few moments, Smith sat up and wiped the sand off of himself before he began to recount the events of the night before, trying to recall how he landed here. The night before he had been laying in his bed in his Chatham home, fast asleep, when suddenly two pairs of hands seized him and dragged him out of the house. When the initial feelings of shock wore off, Smith felt a sense of dread in the pit of his stomach. Without any indication from the men, Smith knew that they were slave catchers who had crossed the Canadian border to retrieve him. Smith, a fugitive slave from Kentucky, had always known that he could be captured at any point, but in the past couple of years he had settled into a false sense of security and began building a new life for himself after he reached Canadian soil.1 After bounding and gagging him, the slave catchers carried him across the Niagara River. Fortunately, Smith managed to escape his bondage and swim back across 1 For a description of Smith’s attempted kidnapping, see “Petition of the Canadian people of Colour to the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada,” Ancaster Gazette, June 18, 1828, reprinted in William Renwick Riddell, “Interesting Notes on Great Britain and Canada with Respect to the Negro,” Journal of Negro History 13, no. 2 (1928): 194-5. 1 the river to safety, but the two kidnappings left an indelible mark on Canada’s black population. Smith’s kidnapping highlighted a fundamental, but often overlooked, reality of the Underground Railroad. Despite its evocative name, the Railroad was not an efficient system of connections and switches with reliable stations and trustworthy conductors. Frequently, Southern slave catchers infiltrated its ranks and federal marshals prowled the countryside, checking ships and railway cars for stowaways. Instead of the elaborate railway of popular legend, the Underground Railroad was a loose association of white abolitionists and free blacks who assisted thousands of slaves to freedom through sheer determination, improvisation, and cunning. For self-emancipated people, the road from slavery to freedom was rarely a linear path from South to North. Instead of straight lines, runaway slaves left overlapping paths that formed a rich latticework across the Atlantic world. Even when runaway slaves did reach Canadian soil, their freedom was not guaranteed and re-enslavement was always a possibility looming on the horizon.2 Previous scholarship on this topic has primarily dealt with the human drama of escape. Highlighting the romantic image of slaves following the North Star, these accounts trace the physical journey of individual slaves as they slipped past the Canadian 2 Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2015), 5-6; For more on the development, and sometimes exaggeration, of the story of the Underground Railroad, see Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1961) as well as his articles, “Propaganda Uses of the Underground Railway,” Mid-America 34, no. 1 (1952): 155-71; and “The Underground Railway: Legend or Reality?” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 105, no. 1 (1961): 334-39; For more on how the drama of the Underground Railroad was purposefully heightened for abolitionist propaganda see Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971):178-181, 233-246, 292; Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012), 180-198; Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2005): 3-8; Daniel O. Sayers, “The Underground Railroad Reconsidered,” The Western Journal of Black Studies 28, no. 3 (2004): 435-443. 2 border.3 While these accounts are certainly worthy of scholarly attention, they do not fully illuminate the role of Canada in this stirring narrative. In these tales, Canada is typically cast as a modern day Canaan, a far off symbol of liberty and safety. Canadian scholars have largely celebrated this image of their nation as a haven from slavery. Nationalist Canadian historians, like William Canniff, applauded Canada’s honorable record on slavery as evidence of their nation’s progressive character. These authors typically avoided discussions of the geographic and economic reasons that led to slavery’s inevitable demise in Canada and instead claimed that, “The leading principles which guided the settlers of this country were too noble a nature to accept the monstrous system of human bondage as an appendage of the Colony.”4 By reducing Canada to a destination, however, these accounts fail to address the international ramifications of flight. In fleeing Southern plantations for the Promised Land of Canada, fugitive slaves not only transmuted their resistance into action, they became leading actors in the contentious politics of slavery in the Atlantic world.
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