Slavery in Canada includes both that practiced by First Nations from earliest times and that under European colonization. While Britain did not ban slavery in present-day Canada (and the rest of colonies) until 1833, the practice of slavery was ended through case law; and it died out in the early 19th century through judicial actions litigated on behalf of slaves seeking manumission.
(Britain was the first country in the world to abolish the slave trade in 1807. It was abolished in the U.S. in 1808, the first allowable date under the United States Constitution.) The courts, to varying degrees, rendered slavery unenforceable in both Lower Canada and Nova Scotia.
In Lower Canada, for example, after court decisions in the late 1790’s, the “slave could not be compelled to serve longer than he would, and … might leave his master at will A significant number of blacks (free and slaves) came to Canada from the United States after the American Revolution and again after the War of 1812.
Some slaves were of African descent, but many were Aboriginal (typically called panis, from the French term for Pawnee). Slavery within what is now Canada was practiced by Aboriginal groups and European settlers.
People of African descent were forcibly brought as chattel slaves to New France, Acadia and the later British North America during the 17th century. Those in Canada typically came from the American colonies, as no shiploads of human chattel went to Canada directly from Africa. The number of slaves in New France is believed to have been in the hundreds. They were house servants and farmworkers. There were no large plantations in Canada, and therefore no large slave workforces of the sort that existed in most European colonies in the southerly Americas, from Virginia to the West Indies to Brazil.
Because early Canada’s role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade was minor, the history of slavery in Canada is often overshadowed by the more tumultuous slavery practiced elsewhere in the Americas, particularly in the southern United States and the colonial Caribbean. Some Black Canadians today are descended from these slaves.
Slave-owning people of what became Canada were, for example, the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, that lived along the Pacific coast from Alaska to California on what is sometimes described as the Northwest Coast. Many of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, such as the Haida and Tlingit, were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave-traders, raiding as far as California.
Slavery was hereditary, the slaves being prisoners of war and their descendants were slaves. Some tribes in British Columbia continued to segregate and ostracize the descendants of slaves as late as the 1970s.
Among some Pacific Northwest tribes about a quarter of the population were slaves. One slave narrative was composed by an Englishman, John R. Jewitt, who had been taken alive when his ship was captured in 1802; his memoir provides a detailed look at life as a slave and asserts that a large number were held.
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