John Graves Simcoe was a British Army general and the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada from 1791 until 1796 in southern Ontario and the watersheds of Georgian Bay and Lake Superior. He founded York, which is now known as Toronto, and was instrumental in introducing institutions such as courts of law, trial by jury, English common law, and freehold land tenure, and also in the abolition of slavery in Upper Canada.
Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery and liberate enslaved people around the world.
The Province of Upper Canada was a part of British Canada established in 1791 by the Kingdom of Great Britain, to govern the central third of the lands in British North America, formerly part of the Province of Quebec since 1763. Upper Canada included all of modern-day Southern Ontario and all those areas of Northern Ontario in the Pays d'en Haut which had formed part of New France, essentially the watersheds of the Ottawa River or Lakes Huron and Superior, excluding any lands within the watershed of Hudson Bay. The "upper" prefix in the name reflects its geographic position along the Great Lakes, mostly above the headwaters of the Saint Lawrence River, contrasted with Lower Canada to the northeast.
United Empire Loyalist is an honorific title which was first given by the 1st Lord Dorchester, the Governor of Quebec and Governor General of the Canadas, to American Loyalists who resettled in British North America during or after the American Revolution. At that time, the demonym Canadian or Canadien was used to refer to the indigenous First Nations groups and the descendants of New France settlers inhabiting the Province of Quebec.
Slavery in Canada includes historical practices of enslavement practiced by both the First Nations until the 19th century, and by colonists during the period of European colonization.
Black Canadians, also known as Afro-Canadians, are people of full or partial sub-Saharan African descent who are citizens or permanent residents of Canada. The majority of Black Canadians are of Caribbean and African immigrant origin, though the Black Canadian population also consists of African American immigrants and their descendants. Black Canadian migration from Africa has risen substantially since 2011.
The Slave Trade Act 1807, officially An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom prohibiting the slave trade in the British Empire. Although it did not abolish the practice of slavery, it encouraged British action to press other nation states to abolish their own slave trades. It took effect on 1 May 1807, after 18 years of trying to pass an abolition bill.
In the United States before 1865, a slave state was a state in which slavery and the internal or domestic slave trade were legal, while a free state was one in which they were prohibited. Between 1812 and 1850, it was considered by the slave states to be politically imperative that the number of free states not exceed the number of slave states, so new states were admitted in slave–free pairs. There were, nonetheless, some slaves in most free states up to the 1840 census, and the Fugitive Slave Clause of the U.S. Constitution, as implemented by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, provided that a slave did not become free by entering a free state and must be returned to his or her owner.
Peter Russell was an Anglo-Irish military officer in the American War of Independence and a government official, politician and judge in Upper Canada.
In the United States, fugitive slaves or runaway slaves were terms used in the 18th and 19th centuries to describe people who fled slavery. The term also refers to the federal Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. Such people are also called freedom seekers to avoid implying that the enslaved person had committed a crime and that the slaveholder was the injured party.
Emancipation Day is observed in many former European colonies in the Caribbean and areas of the United States on various dates to commemorate the emancipation of slaves of African descent.
The coastwise slave trade existed along the southern and eastern coastal areas of the United States in the antebellum years prior to 1861. Hundreds of vessels of various capacities domestically traded loads of slaves along waterways, generally from the Upper South which had a surplus of slaves to the Deep South where new cotton plantations created high demand for labor.
The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which provided for the gradual abolition of slavery in most parts of the British Empire. It was passed by Earl Grey's reforming administration and expanded the jurisdiction of the Slave Trade Act 1807 and made the purchase or ownership of slaves illegal within the British Empire, with the exception of "the Territories in the Possession of the East India Company", Ceylon, and Saint Helena. The Act came into force on 1 August 1834, and was repealed in 1998 as a part of wider rationalisation of English statute law; however, later anti-slavery legislation remains in force.
Christopher Robinson was an American-born soldier, lawyer and political figure in Upper Canada.
Sir John Beverley Robinson, 1st Baronet, was a lawyer, judge and political figure in Upper Canada. He was considered the leader of the Family Compact, a group of families which effectively controlled the early government of Upper Canada.
John Scoble was a Congregational minister, British abolitionist and political figure in Canada West.
By the arrangements of the Canadian federation, Canada's monarchy operates in Ontario as the core of the province's Westminster-style parliamentary democracy. As such, the Crown within Ontario's jurisdiction may be referred to as the Crown in Right of Ontario, His Majesty in Right of Ontario, the King in Right of Ontario, or His Majesty the King in Right of Ontario. The Constitution Act, 1867, leaves many functions in Ontario specifically assigned to the sovereign's viceroy, the lieutenant governor of Ontario, whose direct participation in governance is limited by the constitutional conventions of constitutional monarchy.
When the Dutch and Swedes established colonies in the Delaware Valley of what is now Pennsylvania, in North America, they quickly imported enslaved Africans for labor; the Dutch also transported them south from their colony of New Netherland. Enslavement was documented in this area as early as 1639. William Penn and the colonists who settled in Pennsylvania tolerated slavery. Still, the English Quakers and later German immigrants were among the first to speak out against it. Many colonial Methodists and Baptists also opposed it on religious grounds. During the Great Awakening of the late 18th century, their preachers urged slaveholders to free their slaves. High British tariffs in the 18th century discouraged the importation of additional slaves, and encouraged the use of white indentured servants and free labor.
An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, passed by the Fifth Pennsylvania General Assembly on 1 March 1780, prescribed an end for slavery in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States. It was the first slavery abolition act in the course of human history to be adopted by an elected body.
Chloe Cooley was a young black woman held as a slave in Fort Erie and Queenston, Upper Canada in the late 1700s, as the area was being settled by Loyalists from the United States. Her owner forced her into a boat to sell her in 1793 across the Niagara River in the United States.
