Читать книгу Benjamin Drew. The Refugee. Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada онлайн

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Indeed, slavery soon became a common and extended practice in New France, and, out of its wealth and influence, the Church became the largest slave owner. When the first farmers and land gentry arrived in New France and were faced with the task of clearing the wilderness and building their farms in these hostile territories, they resorted to the easiest and most controllable labor at hand and thus demanded slaves, despite the fact that this practice was only legalized around 1689 by an edict of Louis XIV, and later on validated in New France in 1709. In sum, as Marcel Trudel reported, there were more than 4.000 slaves between 1628 and 1834, of which approximately 1.400 were Blacks who, in truth, were the favorites of English settlers and were owned by a significant amount of 1.400 masters. Yet, Canadians with, the aid of British policies, have historically considered slavery through the lens of the Underground Railroad, the clandestine network of surrogate homes by which Quakers, black freedmen and abolitionists smuggled runaway slaves towards the North in search of freedom. This episode of North American history has clouded other sides of the reality simply to turn a blind eye to the fact that there also existed slaves owned, exploited, bought, and sold by Canadians themselves. Trudel’s aforesaid work demonstrated that “men and women at every level of French and English Canadian society owned slaves, from farmers, bakers, printers, merchants, seigneurs, baronesses, judges and government officials to priests, nuns, and bishops” (7). This means that slavery in Canada was widely practiced and got eventually spread, to the extent that slaves “were not only an accepted feature of society but were also acknowledged both in law and by notarized contract” (Trudel 8).