Vocabularies of Slavery and Anti-Slavery: The North American Fur-Trade and the Imperial World

Abstract

This article examines the particular work that languages of slavery and abolition did in British North American fur-trade territories with an eye to comparing these histories with those of slavery and anti-slavery in Australia. Temporally, it focuses on the two decades following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, and geographically it examines the parts of northwestern North America claimed by Britain and administered by the Hudson's Bay Company. Here traders, missionaries and critics wrote of slavery and anti-slavery in the fur-trade in ways that repeated metropolitan patterns but were also arguably distinct, and certainly merit our attention. In British fur-trade space, vocabularies of slavery and anti-slavery provided language for the particular unfreedom of Indigenous people, the experience of indentured migrant labourers, and the political arrangements of colonial space. Seeing how the vocabularies of slavery and anti-slavery tracked through different colonial spaces reminds us of the uneven and intertwined histories that cut across and through the nineteenth-century world.

Thanks are due to Fiona Paisley, the participants in the 2012 Anti-Slavery Workshop at Griffiths University, and the two anonymous readers for their input. This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs programme.

Notes

¹ See Penelope Edmonds, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010); Angela Wanhalla, ‘Women “Living across the Line”: Intermarriage on the Canadian Prairies and in Southern New Zealand, 1870–1900’, Ethnohistory 55, no. 1 (2008): 29–49; Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in Australia and the United States, 1887–1937 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Philips and Shurlee Swain, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous People in British Settler Colonies, 1830–1910 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2003); Anne Keary, ‘Colonial Constructs and Cross-Cultural Interaction: Comparing Missionary/Indigenous Encounters in Northwestern America and Eastern Australia’, in Beyond Conversion and Syncretism: Indigenous Encounters with Missionary Christianity, 1800–2000, ed. David Lindenfeld and Miles Richardson (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011).

² James Epstein, ‘Taking Class Notes’, in At Home in the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 258.

³ Angela Wanhalla, In/visible Sight: The Mixed Descent Families of Southern New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams, 2009); Lynette Russell, Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790–1870 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012).

⁴ On the social history of the fur-trade, see, among others: Arthur J. Ray, Indians in the Fur-Trade: Their Role as Trappers, Hunters, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson Bay, 1660–1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974); Sylvia Van Kirk, ‘Many Tender Ties’: Women and Fur Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Winnipeg: Watson and Dwyer, 1980); Brenda Macdougall, One of the Family: Metis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).

⁵ Edward Cavanagh, ‘A Company with Sovereignty and Subjects of Its Own: The Case of the Hudson's Bay Company, 1670–1763’, Canadian Journal of Law and Society 26, no. 1 (2011): 24.

⁶ See, here, A. A. den Otter, Civilizing the Wilderness: Culture and Nature in Pre-Confederation Canada and Ruperts Land (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2012); Richard Mackie, ‘The Colonization of Vancouver Island, 1849–1858’, BC Studies 96 (Winter 1992–3): 3–40; Jeremy Mouat, ‘Situating Vancouver Island in the British World, 1846–49’, BC Studies 145 (Spring 2005): 5–30.

⁷ Narcissa Whitman to Brother and Sister Whitman, 27 June 1836, ‘Diaries and Journals of Narcissa Whitman, 1836’, http://www.isu.edu/∼trinmich/00.ar.whitman1.html (accessed 9 December 2009).

⁸ John Bell to Donald Ross, September and 25 November 1846, transcript, Donald Ross Fonds, Hudson's Bay Company Archives, MG 1, D 20, mflm 309.

⁹ See Edith I. Burley, Servants of the Honourable Company: Work, Discipline, and Conflict in the Hudson's Bay Company, 1770–1879 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997); Carolyn Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006); Carol M. Judd, ‘Native Labour and Social Stratification in the Hudson's Bay Company's Northern Department, 1770–1870’, Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 17, no. 4 (November 1980): 305–14.

¹⁰ Herbert Beaver to the Aborigines' Protection Society, 8 November 1842, in Nellie B. Pipes, ‘Indian Conditions in 1836–39’, Oregon Historical Quarterly 32 (December 1931): 333.

¹¹ Herbert Beaver, Church of England Protestant Magazine, March 1841, in R. C. Clarke, ed., ‘Experiences of a Chaplain at Fort Vancouver, 1836–1838’, Oregon Historical Quarterly 39 (March 1938): 32.

¹² Andrew Muir, ‘Private Diary, 9 November 1848–5 August 1850’, transcript, British Columbia Archives [hereafter BCA]. Add Mss E/B/M91A, 102–3.

¹³ Brett Rushford, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Allan Greer, The People of New France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 85–9; Karlee Sapoznik, ‘La Vérendrye through the Lens of Gender, Race and Slavery in Early French Canada, 1731–1749’, Manitoba History 62, no. 3 (Winter 2009): 22–32; Kenneth Donovan, ‘Slaves and Their Owners in Ile Royale, 1713–1760’, Acadiensis 25, no. 1 (Autumn 1995): 29.

¹⁴ Philip Girard, ‘British Justice, English Law, and Canadian Legal Culture’, in Canada and the British Empire, ed. Philip Buckner (London: Oxford University Press, 2007), 262.

¹⁵ Barrington Walker, Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario's Criminal Courts, 1858–1958 (Toronto: Osgoode Society and University of Toronto Press, 2010), 30. See also Maureen G. Elgersman Lee, Unyielding Spirits: Black Women and Slavery in Early Canada and Jamaica (New York: Garland, 1999); Barrington Walker, ed., The African Canadian Legal Odyssey: Historical Essays (Toronto: Osgoode Society, 2012).

¹⁶ E. A. S. Demers, ‘Native-American Slavery and Territoriality in the Colonial Upper Great Lakes Region’, Michigan Historical Review 28, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 163–72; Jacqueline Peterson, ‘Many Roads to Red River: Métis Genesis in the Great Lakes Region, 1680–1815’, in The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America, ed. Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S. H. Brown (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1985); Kenneth W. Porter, ‘Negroes and the Fur Trade’, Minnesota History 15 (1934): 421–33; Rushford, Bonds of Alliance.

¹⁷ E. A. S. Demers, ‘John Askin and Indian Slavery at Michilimackinac’, in Indian Slavery in Colonial America, ed. Alan Gallay (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 391–416, Bonds of Alliance.

¹⁸ ‘George Simpson's Journal, Entitled Remarks Connected with the Fur Trade in the Course of a Voyage from York Factory to Fort George and Back to York Factory 1824–25’, in Fur Trade and Empire, ed. Frederick Merk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 101.

¹⁹ Richard Somerset Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains: The British Fur-Trade on the Pacific (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997), ch. 12. Also on fur-trade slavery in the Columbia District, see Leland Donald, Aboriginal Slavery and the Northwest Coast of North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), especially ch. 11; Yvonne P. Hajda, ‘Slavery in the Greater Lower Columbia Region’, Ethnohistory 52, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 564–88.

²⁰ Demers, ‘John Askin and Indian Slavery at Michilimackinac’, 406.

²¹ Peter Skene Ogden, Traits of American Indian Life and Character, by a fur trader (1933; reprint, New York: Cosimo, 2009), 67.

²² Herbert Beaver to Benjamin Harrison, 15 November 1836, in Reports and Letters of Herbert Beaver, 1836–1838, Chaplain to the Hudson's Bay Company and Missionary to the Indians of Fort Vancouver, ed. Thomas E. Jesset (Portland, OR: Champoeg Press, 1959), 21.

²³ James Douglas to Governor, Deputy Governor, and Committee, 18 October 1838, in The Letters of John McLoughlin, From Fort Vancouver to the Governor and Committee, First Series, 1825–38, ed. E. E. Rich (London: Hudson's Bay Record Society, 1941), 237–8.

²⁴ John McLoughlin to William Miller, 24 March 1845, in The Letters of John McLoughlin From Fort Vancouver to the Governor and Committee, Third Series, 1844–46, ed. E. E. Rich (London: Hudson's Bay Record Society, 1944), 271–5.

²⁵ Herbert Beaver to Governor and Committee, 2 October 1838, in Jesset, 132.

²⁶ Herbert Beaver to the Aborigines' Protection Society, in Pipes, 333; Further Information Respecting the Aborigines: Containing Reports of the Committee on Indian Affairs at Philadelphia, Extracts from the Proceedings of the Yearly Meeting of Philadelphia, New York, New England, Maryland, Virginia, and Ohio, Together with Some Particulars Relative to the Natives of New Zealand, New Holland, and Van Dieman's Land, Published by Direction of the Aborigines' Committee of the Meeting for Sufferings (London: Edward Marsh, 1842), 18.

²⁷ Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention, Called by the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, and Held in London, from Friday, June 12th, to Tuesday, June 23rd, 1840 (London: British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1841), 333.

²⁸ General Anti-Slavery Convention, Called by the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society Held in London on the 12th of June, 1840, and Continued by Adjournments to the 23rd of the Same Month (London: Johnston & Barrett, 1840), 22.

²⁹ Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention, 333.

³⁰ John Forsyth and W. A. Slacum, ‘Slacum's Report on Oregon, 1836–7’, Quarterly of the Oregon Historical Society 13, no. 2 (June 1912): 188.

³¹ Gray Whaley, Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), ch. 6.

³² See, for instance, Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Heathens, Slaves, and Aborigines: Thomas Hodgkin's Critique of Missions and Anti-Slavery’, History Workshop Journal 64, no. 1 (2007): 133–61; Richard Huzzey, ‘Free Trade, Free Labour, and Slave Sugar in Victorian Britain’, The Historical Journal 52, no. 2 (June 2010): 359–79.

³³ See Stephen Royle, Company, Crown, and Colony: The Hudson's Bay Company and Territorial Endeavour (London: I. B. Taurus, 2012); A. A. den Otter, Civilizing the Wilderness: Culture and Nature in Pre-Confederation Canada (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2012).

³⁴ Barry Cooper, Alexander Kennedy Isbister: A Respectable Critic of the Honourable Company (Ottawa: Carleton, 1988), 49; James Heartfield, The Aborigines Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1837–1909 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

³⁵ Testimony of A. K. Isbister, in Great Britain, Report from The Select Committee on The Hudson's Bay Company; Together With the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index (Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons, 1857), 120.

³⁶ Alexander Kennedy Isbister, A Few Words on the Hudson's Bay Company; with a Statement of the Grievances of the Native and Half-Caste Indians, Addressed to the British Government through Their Delegates in London (London: C. Gilpin, [1846?]), 1, 24.

³⁷ British and Foreign Aborigines' Protection Society, Report on the Indians of Upper Canada (London: J. Haddon, [1839]), 29.

³⁸ Aborigines' Protection Society, The Red River Settlement and the Hudson's Bay Company (London: Aborigines' Protection Society, 1848), 40.

³⁹ Aborigines' Protection Society, Canada West and the Hudson's-Bay Company: A Political and Humane Question of Vital Importance to the Honour of Great Britain; to the Prosperity of Canada, and to the Existence of the Native Tribes; Being an Address to the Right Honourable Henry Labouchere Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for the Colonies (London: William Tweedie, 1856), 46.

⁴⁰ Appendix 16, R. N. Fowler and F. W. Chesson to Henry Labouchere, 18 May 1857, in Great Britain, Report from the Select Committee, 440.

⁴¹ Christopher Tomlinson, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 11.