Chapter One

Oh, Freedom!

Freedom, freedom.
Wanna thank you, freedom.
There’s nothing in the world like freedom.

— “Freedom (Intro),” Angie Stone, Black Diamond, 1999

The idea of freedom has both moral and legal aspects. All human beings have natural rights, and these rights are considered to be universal in progressive societies. Some examples of inherent rights include the rights to life, freedom, and citizenship, including the rights to vote, live, and work in a particular place. Then there are legal rights, which are granted and enforced by a government as specified by the laws it passes. A couple of examples include the right to be treated fairly when arrested or detained, and the right to a safe workplace.

To be free means to have the ability to do what you would like within legal limits, to enjoy political and civil rights, to go where you want, to meet with who you want, and to have some measure of control over your life. A free person can also exercise the right to an education, the right to vote, the right to live where one chooses, and the right to practise his or her religion of choice.

When African men and women were kidnapped from Africa, beginning in 1441, first by the Portuguese and then France and Britain, they were denied their natural and legal rights by the kidnappers, merchants, and masters that enslaved them. Enslaved Africans were deemed to be movable property, meaning they were not considered to be human, but instead as commodities like furniture, cows, horses, and tools. Africans were bought, sold, bartered, given as gifts, and bequeathed in wills. Further, as property they had very few, if any, legal rights in the new lands they were forcibly taken to. Of course, they resisted their captivity as best they could, whether during the raids on their villages in Africa, in the holding pens at the ports of West Africa, on slave ships at sea, or in the New World.

Enslaved peoples of African descent challenged their status as slaves through various levels of resistance, from breaking work tools to more dangerous acts, like running away or organizing armed rebellions. The Haitian Revolution, which lasted from 1791 to 1804, was a successful major slave revolt. It resulted in the abolition of slavery on that island and independence from French rule, making The Republic of Haiti the first Black republic in the Western hemisphere.

Other slave rebellions include the 1570 revolt led by Gabon native Gaspar Yanga in Mexico. The enslaved Africans escaped and built a small Maroon community that survived for almost thirty years. Maroons were Africans taken to the Caribbean who resisted slavery by running away. They established settlements in the mountains of various islands and protected themselves from recapture by fighting either British, Portuguese, or Spanish colonists. The First Maroon War with the British lasted from 1720 to 1739, and was led by Cudjoe, his sister Nanny, and an Asante woman, as well as other brave women and men. The conflict continued to the end of the eighteenth century. Approximately six hundred Maroons agreed to relocate to Nova Scotia as one of the terms of peace after the Second Maroon War (1795–1796). Today, the only surviving Maroon community is in Accompong, St. Elizabeth, in western Jamaica. They continue to live separately from the wider Jamaican society and are still governed symbolically by the peace treaty signed with the British in 1739, which officially ended in 1962.

There were also many slave uprisings in the United States, including the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, in September 1739, where about one hundred enslaved African Americans walked down the road, carrying a banner that read, liberty!, and shouted the word as they marched along. The group stole guns, and by the end of that morning, many White slave owners and their families had lost their lives, totalling twenty-five deaths. They were confronted by a large group of armed White men, who killed one-third of the rebels. Within the next month, most of the other fugitives were found and executed.

The largest American slave rebellion was the January 1811 German Coast Uprising in the Territory of Orleans. A band of over one hundred enslaved men and women marched towards New Orleans, with more men joining as they walked. The group grew to almost five hundred. Armed with hand tools, they burned down five plantation homes, as well as sugarhouses and several acres of crops, on their way to New Orleans. A militia of White men formed to suppress the rebels, and by the end of the two-day insurrection, two Whites and almost one hundred Blacks were killed. Forty-four more escapees were tried and executed over the next two weeks. These revolts give an indication of just how far Blacks worldwide were willing to go to be free, even giving their lives for the cause.

At the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, males who were strong labourers made up more than half of the human cargo. Later, more females were enslaved because they could reproduce and increase the labour force. Approximately twenty million Africans, most of them young men and women, were permanently removed from their homes and taken across the Atlantic Ocean — a horrendous trip called the Middle Passage. This voyage, from the west coast of Africa to the New World, took between two to three long months. The captives were chained up below deck and occasionally given time for stretching and exercise, but overall the conditions were wretched. During the over three hundred years that the Middle Passage was in operation, between five to eight million enslaved Africans died because of malnutrition, poor sanitation, and the spread of disease aboard the overcrowded slave ships.

Africans were enslaved in European colonies throughout the Atlantic World, including Canada, where the earliest recorded African slave was Olivier LeJeune. He came from the African island of Madagascar, located in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of the African continent. In 1628 the six-year-old LeJeune was sold by an English merchant to a government official in New France, now Quebec. While this is certainly an early instance, the practice of slavery in Canada first began with the enslavement of Aboriginals by the French. The French also enslaved some Africans in Quebec and the Maritime provinces. However, when the British gained control of both Upper and Lower Canada in 1763, after the Seven Years’ War, the number of enslaved Africans increased.

Slaves were used as free labour for the development of the colonies. Their jobs included cutting trees to clear the land, building homes and roads, farming, and working in European homes as domestic servants. Many slaves worked in skilled occupations as blacksmiths, wainwrights, coopers, and wheelwrights.

How slaves were treated depended on the owner. Some of the harsher treatments endured by Canadian slaves included whippings, being jailed for petty offenses, and being sentenced to death by hanging. Loyalist Matthew Elliot, who settled on his land grant in Fort Malden (now Amherstburg), brought over sixty slaves with him after the American Revolutionary War. In the front of his estate, he had an iron whipping-post on a tree, where his slaves were tied and beaten as punishment — remember, slaves in Canada were considered property, a fact so taken for granted that they were even sold privately through local newspapers. Some, however, received fairer treatment. Their owners allowed to them to learn how to read and write. Some slaves were manumitted, or released from slavery, when their owner died, and some were compensated with money, land, or heirlooms for their years of service.

An advertisement for a young Black enslaved woman for sale in Newark in the Niagara area. Newark was the capital of Upper Canada (Ontario) until 1797, when Simcoe moved his administrative centre to York (Toronto).
From theUpper Canada Gazette, August 19, 1795.

The enslaved Africans in the Atlantic world were determined to be free, and by the early nineteenth century they were receiving a lot of support from people known as abolitionists, who wanted to end of the barbaric system of slavery. There was growing pressure from these abolitionist groups, both Black and White, in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean to demand an end to slavery. In order for the trade and enslavement of Africans to end, it first had to be made illegal. The first anti-slavery law in the British colonies was the 1793 Act to Limit Slavery, which was passed in Upper Canada, now called Ontario. This law was introduced by Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe, himself an abolitionist. But this law did not free any slaves, because of strong opposition from several government officials who owned slaves. Instead, the Act to Limit Slavery would gradually abolish the practice over a twenty-five year period.

Abolitionists were finally successful, when, in August of 1833, the British Parliament enacted the Slavery Abolition Act, which freed over 800,000 enslaved Africans. This act owed its existence to the persistence of African people in working toward their freedom — efforts that eventually gained support from White British abolitionists. The act declared that, under the British flag, Blacks were human beings under the law and that one person did not have the right to own another person. It stated, “Whereas divers Persons are holden in Slavery, within divers of His Majesty’s Colonies, and it is just and expedient that all such Persons should be manumitted and set free ...”[1] The enslavement of Africans in other regions continued, with slavery being abolished in Danish and French colonies in 1848, including the Virgin Islands, Martinique, and Guadeloupe; Dutch colonies such as Suriname and Saint Maarten in 1863; and the United States of America in 1865. The latest abolitions in the Atlantic World took place in Cuba in 1886 and Brazil in 1888.

Wordplay

An indentured servant was someone who agreed to contract their labour for a set time to an employer, usually between three to seven years. In exchange for their labour, indentured servants received shelter, food, and clothing. The idea behind the introduction of indentured servitude was to allow former slave owners to continue to have access to a cheap pool of labour.

August 1, 1834, was a significant day throughout the English-speaking Caribbean. Soon-to-be freed slaves attended churches the night before and waited eagerly for the dawning of the new day, when they could celebrate their first day of freedom. Services that included sermons and singing were held. Then thousands took to the streets, joining with fellow freepersons in festivities such as parading, dancing, listening to music, singing, watching plays, and enjoying a variety of food.

However, on islands such as Jamaica and Barbados, and in Guyana and South Africa, the formerly enslaved were not fully free, and instead became indentured servants to their former owners. They would have to wait until August 1, 1838, to be completely free. Since then, on every August First, the liberation of enslaved Africans and the idea of freedom has been celebrated in the West Indies, parts of the United States, and Canada. A new tradition was born.