Canada and Slavery in Lower Canada Newspapers, 1789-1793

The dominant narrative is that Canada has a positive record when it comes to slavery, and that it was an antislavery haven for African American slaves in the antebellum period who were fleeing from slavery in the United States. However, there were enslaved people in the colonies that would later become Canada, under both French and British rule. This paper explores how newspapers in colonial Canada represent enslaved people in Canada and slavery in the wider Americas, focusing on two newspapers published in Lower Canada between 1789-1793. It argues that advertisements about runaway slaves and selling enslaved people show that Canada was part of a wider print culture of slavery in the Americas. Newspaper editors simultaneously created an anti-slave-trade sentiment in their newspapers by reprinting texts from the abolition debate raging in Britain, France and the United States: colonial Canada was part of an international abolition network. By recovering these two aspects of Canada’s printed response to slavery in the Atlantic world, this paper suggests one way in which Canadians were able to read about the history of slavery in Canada and to supress this history.