John Graves Simcoe's Weird Relationship With Slavery

Meet John Graves Simcoe. Founder of Toronto. British veteran of the American Revolution. And an avowed abolitionist with a very weird and complicated relationship to slavery.

Simcoe hated it. Back home in England as a Member of Parliament, he gave anti-slavery speeches in the House of Commons. And when he was picked to be the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, he made it clear: he saw no place for the practice in his new province. "The principles of the British Constitution do not admit of that slavery which Christianity condemns," he wrote before he officially took his post. "The moment I assume the Government of Upper Canada, under no modification will I assent to a law that discriminates by dishonest policy between natives of Africa, America or Europe." 

And indeed, one of the very first things Simcoe did when he got to Upper Canada was to introduce a bill to end slavery in the province forever. In July 1793, his "Act Against Slavery" became the very first slavery-abolishing law ever passed anywhere in the British Empire. To this day he's celebrated as the man who ended slavery in Upper Canada — more than 40 years before it was abolished across the Empire and 70 years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States.

But things weren't quite as simple as that makes it seem.

For one thing, Simcoe's law wasn't nearly as groundbreaking as it sounds. By the time he came to Canada, there were no slaves in England — a court decision had freed them all fifteen years earlier. Compared to the Mother Country, the Canadian colonies were behind the times. Hundreds of slaves were "owned" by the colonists in Upper Canada, many of them brought north to the new province by Loyalist refugees as they fled the revolution in the United States. The British government had actually encouraged the practice, passing a law in Westminster that promised new Canadian settlers they would get to keep their slaves.

So while slavery in England was already over, if Simcoe wanted to get rid of slavery in Upper Canada, he was going to have to pass a new law to actively abolish it. And that wasn't going to be easy.

Simcoe would need support. The bill would have to pass through the Legislative Assembly and then through the Legislative Council. Both of those bodies were full of slave owners. And that, in part, was thanks to none other than John Graves Simcoe.

Peter Russell tries to sell
Peggy & Jupiter Pompadour

The Legislative Assembly was an elected body. But the members of the Legislative Council were hand-picked by Simcoe himself — it worked a bit like the Senate does today. And Simcoe packed his Council full of slave-owners. At least five of the nine members were either slave-owners or from slave-owning families. They formed a majority. Simcoe, determined to abolish slavery in Upper Canada, had made it almost impossible to do.

But he was still going to try. It was the resistance of Chloe Cooley that gave him the opportunity he needed. Cooley was a Black woman living in slavery at Niagara. When her "master" sold her to someone on the American side of the river, he tied her up with rope and forced her into a boat to be taken across the border. Cooley, like many slaves, had long resisted her captivity: refusing work, stealing, disappearing for periods of time, generally trying to disrupt the life of her "master" and ensure her enslavement was as much of an inconvenience as possible. Now, she resisted again. As she was unloaded and handed over to her new "owner," Cooley screamed and put up a fight.

When Simcoe heard the tale, he was appalled — and he saw his chance. During the next session of the legislature, he pushed a bill to abolish slavery.

 
But with his government full of slave-owners, he was forced into a compromise — the exact thing he had promised never to do. The new law didn't abolish slavery immediately; instead, it would be gradually phased out. No new slaves could be brought into Upper Canada, but any who were already here would spend the rest of their lives in slavery. Their children would be born into captivity, too; they wouldn't be free until they turned twenty-five. Finally, anyone who wanted to free a slave was discouraged from doing so: they would be forced to provide financial security to ensure the newly freed slave wouldn't be a drain on the resources of the state.

The bill was passed just a few weeks before Simcoe founded Toronto. And so, the foundations of our city were laid with the help of slave labour. During the early years of the new town, there were fifteen Black slaves within its borders — and another ten just across the Don Valley.

Some of Toronto's slave owners are still familiar names today. William Jarvis is remembered by Jarvis Street; James Baby's old estate on the Humber River is still called Baby Point. Peter Russell — a gambling-addict ex-con who Simcoe trusted as Receiver- and Auditor-General — enslaved a woman named Peggy Pompadour and her three children: Jupiter, Amy and Milly. Their acts of resistance were brutally punished by Russell: Jupiter was once bound and strung up in the window of a storehouse as a painful public humiliation. But Peter Russell is still remembered in the names of Peter Street and Russell Hill Road.

Simcoe's relationship with slavery only got weirder and more conflicted after he left Toronto. In 1796, ill-health forced him to sail home to England. Just a few months later — while still officially serving as Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada — John Graves Simcoe was sent to Haiti. There, the avowed abolitionist was asked to put down the biggest slave uprising since Spartacus.

Haiti was a French colony back then; they called it Saint Domingue. The leaders of the French Revolution had abolished slavery, but French royalists still controlled Haiti — and they had no intention of giving up their half a million slaves.

Toussaint L'Ouverture

When the slaves rose up in a revolution led by François Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, the French royalists asked the British for help. Thousands of British troops were sent to the island, hoping to crush the uprising, restore slavery, and secure the island's sugar riches for themselves. By the time Simcoe arrived, they'd been fighting for years without making any real progress. His job was to turn things around. He was appointed as commander of the British forces in Haiti — a man who hated slavery fighting a bloody war to preserve it.

The Haitian Revolution was a long and brutal struggle. It raged for thirteen years and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Countless atrocities were committed. Simcoe's attempt to keep his own men in check — an order to halt all "cruelties and outrages" — was ignored. His army pushed Toussaint's forces back, but were stalled by a counterattack. His men were dying by the thousands: some in bloody battles, still more of yellow fever.

Simcoe only lasted a few months before he got sick of fighting for a cause he didn't believe in. He was sick of the war, sick of a lack of support from his superiors, sick of literally being sick. He left Haiti and sailed home to England, where he tried to convince the government to withdraw from the war; he was nearly arrested for desertion. The British kept fighting for a year after Simcoe left Haiti, and the French kept fighting long after that. In the end, the Haitian Revolution was successful — it led to the establishment of a new, independent, slave-free country in 1804.

But while slavery was now over in Haiti, it was still part of life in Toronto. It would take many years before it gradually dwindled out: one by one the city's slaves died or were freed by their "masters." There's no record of when the practice finally ended in Toronto, but there were no slaves left in the city by the time the British abolished slavery across the Empire on August 1, 1834.

By then, Toronto was beginning to gain a very different reputation. Black families like the Abbotts, the Blackburns and the Augustas — some of them former slaves themselves — worked with White allies like George Brown to make Toronto a relatively safe haven for those fleeing slavery in the United States. They organized anti-slavery societies, secured lodging for refugees, and raised funds to help the new arrivals get started in their new home. They struggled every day to make Toronto a more welcoming place for those fleeing racial persecution.

Half a century after Simcoe's chilling compromise, Toronto had become an important stop at the end of the Underground Railroad.

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A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

This post was based in part on a Twitter essay I tweeted out on Simcoe day last year, which you can find here.

You can learn more about John Graves Simcoe from "John Graves Simcoe, 1752–1806: A Biography" by Mary Beacock Fryer and Christopher Dracott (which is available from Amazon here or the Toronto Public Library here), from his entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography here, and from his entry entry in the Canadian Encyclopedia here. And you can read his letters in "The Correspondence of Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe" which you can find at the Toronto Public Library here.

Learn more about slavery and resistance in Upper Canada from Natasha Henry's "Talking About Freedom: Celebrating Emancipation Day in Canada" (Amazon here, Toronto Public Library here), from Robin Winks' "The Blacks in Canada: A History" (Amazon here, Toronto Public Library here), from "The Underground Railroad: Next Stop, Toronto!" by Adrienna Shadd, Afua Cooper and Karolyn Smardz Frost (Amazon here, Toronto Public Library here), from William Renwick Riddell's 1923 article in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology here (that's a PDF), or from the Canadian Encyclopedia here. The Encyclopedia also has an entry about Chloe Cooley and Simcoe's law here. 

You'll find the Wikipedia entry for the Haitian Revolution here. And a timeline of the history of Haiti here.

Read some my previous posts about the Simcoes:
The story of John Graves Simcoe's vision for Toronto (a city so awesome it would undo the American Revolution)
The story of Elizabeth Simcoe's 1794 nightmare 
The story of their dog, Jack Sharp 
The story of their cat 
The story of how they fell in love and the magical hills where it happened 
The story of their summer home in Budleigh Salterton 
The story of their connection to Samuel Coleridge and his family 
The story of the Simcoe family and Exeter and death

This post is related to dream 01 Metropolitan York John Graves Simcoe, 1793

This post is related to dream 18 Russell Creek Peter Russell, 1799

Simcoe's Weird & Complicated Relationship With Slavery — A Tweetstorm

August 1 was both Simcoe Day and Emancipation Day in the City of Toronto. One is meant to remember the British soldier who founded our city; the other marks the day slavery was abolished across the entire British Empire. It's an interesting overlap: Simcoe was responsible for abolishing slavery in Toronto; he passed the first law to end the practice ever passed anywhere in the Empire. But his relationship to slavery wasn't anywhere near as clear-cut and simple as that might make it sound. And so, to mark this year's Simcoe and Emancipation Days, I thought I'd do some tweeting.

You'll find the Twitter essay embedded below. And if you can't see it for any reason, you can read it all on Storify here.

Simcoe's Vision for Toronto: A City So Awesome It Would Undo the American Revolution

1791. Just ten years earlier, John Graves Simcoe had been fighting on the British side of the American Revolution. He made a name for himself in that bloody war: the unit he commanded never lost a battle, he survived months in an American prison, and he even had a chance to kill George Washington, but ordered his men to stand down rather than shoot the future President as he fled. He had his dark moments too — he was an ardent supporter of the death penalty for desertion and he once ordered the massacre of American rebels in their sleep — but it seems he had a reputation for being "brave, humane and honest." By the time the war was over, Simcoe had established himself as one of the rising stars of the British military.

So when the British decided to create a new province in Canada, they chose John Graves Simcoe to be the first Lieutenant Governor. 

The province of Upper Canada was created in what we now call southern Ontario. While Québec and the Martime provinces were already well-established colonies, the British saw the land to the west as an untamed wilderness. Dismissing the First Nations who already lived here, they figured it would make a perfect new home for those who stayed loyal to the Empire during the war. Many of the Loyalists had been driven from their homes by the American revolutionaries, their lives threatened, their property burned to the ground, forced to flee north to safety. Some of them had been born in the States to families who had lived there for generations. Some had arrived from Europe more recently — about 40% of the earliest Upper Canadians were German. Some were former slaves, promised their freedom in return for fighting against the American rebels. Others were still slaves when they got here.

As Governor, Simcoe would have tremendous power over this new province. He could veto laws, dissolve parliament and hand-pick public servants and an Executive Council. He had ambitious plans to use that power. He didn't just want Upper Canada to be a successful new colony with a thriving new capital: he wanted Upper Canada to undo the American Revolution by the sheer force of its own awesomeness.

He got to work on his plan as soon as he was named Lieutenant Governor in 1791, while he was still back home in England. One of the very first things he did was to write a letter addressed to one of the most famous men in Britain: Sir Joseph Banks.

Banks was a scientist: a renowned and respected naturalist. Twenty years earlier, he had explored the South Pacific with the legendary Captain James Cook, becoming one of the very first Europeans to see Australia and New Zealand. It was Banks who first told Europe about kangaroos, and eucalyptus and acacia trees, along with thousands of other species of plants and animals. After that, he was named President of the Royal Society — a post once held by Sir Isaac Newton — and he was hailed as a national hero.

Simcoe (whose own father had also served with Cook) wanted to bounce his ideas off Banks before setting sail for Canada. So, in his letter, he laid out his vision for the new province and the new city he would build as its capital.

He called this hypothetical future metropolis "Georgina" — in honour of King George III (who had recently recovered from his first bout of mental illness). The city would be built, he hoped, on the banks of the La Tranche River (Simcoe later renamed it the Thames) on the spot where London is now. But that's not what happened. Instead, the new capital would end up being built here, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario. In the end, Simcoe didn't name the city "Georgina" after the King, but "York" after the King's son, the Duke of York. Decades later, it would be renamed according to an old Indigenous name for this place: Toronto.

His plan, in short, was to make our city and our province so undeniably amazing that Americans couldn't help but realize how terrible America was by comparison. They would voluntarily give up their silly notions of independence and beg to be let back into the Empire.

"I would die by more than Indian torture to restore my King and his family to their just inheritance," Simcoe wrote to Banks. "Though a soldier, it is not by arms that I hope for this result... the method I propose is by establishing a free, honourable British Government, and a pure administration of its laws, which shall hold out to the solitary emigrant, and to the several states, advantages that the present form of Government doth not and cannot permit them to enjoy."

As far as Simcoe was concerned, modern democracy was a dangerous idea. He had already personally witnessed the horrors of the American Revolution committed in its name, and now those ideas had spread to France, where an even bloodier and more horrifying revolution was underway. The U.S. seemed destined for more chaos and war. "I mean to prepare for whatever convulsions may happen in the United States," he told Banks. He might be able to lure them back into the fold, or at the very least provide an attractive destination for those Americans who became disillusioned with their own government. The key would be building a peaceful Canadian province with a glorious new capital home to an enviable culture of arts, science, learning and good government.

"[T]his colony," he continued, "(which I mean to show forth with all the advantages of British protection as a better Government than the United States can possibly obtain) should in its very foundations provide for every assistance that can possibly be procured for the arts and sciences, and for every embellishment that hereafter may decorate and attract notice, and may point it out to the neighbouring States as a superior, more happy, and more polished form of Government. I would not in its infancy have a hut, nor in its maturity, a palace built without this design."

He already had some concrete ideas about how to establish this British utopia. His letter to Banks mentions a publicly-funded library "to be composed of such books as might be useful to the colony." Extracts from encyclopedias could be published in newspapers to further public education. The school-system would be an important institution and "a college of a higher class would be eminently useful." There would be an emphasis on scientific learning, too: "I should be glad," he wrote, "to lay the foundation stone of some society that I trust might hereafter conduce to the extension of science."

But he also wanted to restrict what he once called "tyrannical democracy" in favour of a powerful, British aristocracy. "There are inherent defects in the congressional form of Government, the absolute prohibition of any order of nobility is a glaring one," he wrote. "I hope to have a hereditary council with some mark of nobility." There would also be an official state church: the Church of England.

Those, unsurprisingly, would prove to be among the most problematic parts of Simcoe's vision. Our province was supposed to be a British province, our city a British city. And while Simcoe never did establish an official nobility, he did leave behind the Family Compact: a ruling class of Tory Protestants determined to uphold his ideal of a monolithic Anglican state. Those from other cultures who helped to build the colony faced discrimination, intimidation and violence. So did advocates for real democracy. During our city's first 40 years, Anglican priests were the only priests legally allowed to perform marriage ceremonies. Anti-Catholic riots would eventually become a familiar sight on our streets. The Anglican Orange Order would dominate Toronto for more than a century, well into the 1900s.

Still, many of the positive institutions Simcoe imagined in his letter to Banks have played a vital role in the building of our city. The Toronto Public Library has the highest per-capita use of any public library system in the world. King's College was founded in 1827 and later became the University of Toronto. We do have an enviable culture of arts and science. And in the few years he was here, Simcoe laid the foundation for our court system and established trail-by-jury. We still travel along roads he first imagined.

Simcoe never did manage to undo the American Revolution. But even that dream wasn't a complete failure. Upper Canada did attract many American settlers with the promise of a better life. And Toronto has long provided a new home for immigrants from south of the border — whether they're looking for a clean, peaceful city, a stronger social safety net, or the chance to avoid fighting in American wars.

Simcoe's greatest legacy, however, is something he didn't mention in his letter to Banks. One of the first laws he passed in Upper Canada was legislation he championed himself: the abolition of slavery. He wanted to ban it entirely; slave-owners in the Legislative Assembly forced a compromise that saw it phased out instead. Even so, it was the first law to abolish slavery anywhere in the British Empire. Simcoe's new capital would eventually become a terminal on the Underground Railroad, welcoming former slaves to freedom. He might not have been able to convince every American to rejoin the British Empire, but Simcoe did ensure his new province would be a safe haven for the Americans who needed it most.

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Image: Oil painting of the foot of Bathurst Street ca. 1796 by Elizabeth Simcoe (via the Toronto Public Library) and a portrait of John Graves Simcoe by John Wycliffe Lowes Forster (via Library and Archives Canada). 

The New Heritage Minute & A Bit Of Context

The first new Heritage Minute is out and — surprise! — like just about everything else these days, it's about the War of 1812. The commercial tells the story of Richard Pierpoint (who had the awesome nickname of Captain Dick), a former slave who had "earned" his freedom by fighting for the British during the American Revolution. He was given a bunch of free land near St. Catherines after that — although when the authorities denied his request to have former slaves given land next to each other (since many of them didn't have families and would need help clearing away the forest), he was forced to give it up and work as a labourer instead.

When the Americans invaded in 1812, Pierpoint petitioned Isaac Brock, the British commander: he wanted to be allowed to form a "Corps of Men of Colour" to fight on the Niagara border. (That's what's shown in the Heritage Minute.) Brock actually rejected the petition — but then, when not enough White Canadians were volunteering to fight, he finally allowed a White officer to form the corps and Pierpoint signed up.

"The Company of Coloured Men"

Some other Black Canadians, however, were still living in slavery at this point — including, it seems, in Toronto. Upper Canada's first Lieutenant Governor, John Graves Simcoe, had wanted to abolish it completely at about the same time he founded our city, but some of the slave-owning Tories on his Executive Council forced a compromise: no new slaves would be brought into Upper Canada, and new children born of slaves would be freed when they turned 25... but the rest would live in slavery for the rest of their lives. By the time slavery in the British Empire was finally abolished altogether in 1834, Toronto's slaves had all died, been freed, or sold away.

After the War of 1812, Pierpoint — like all veterans — was entitled to another tract of free land. But instead, he asked to be given passage back to Senegal (then known as Bondu) where he'd been born and raised before being sold away into slavery as a teenager. His request was denied. He died a couple of decades later, more than 90 years old.

A second new Heritage Minute will be released next year.... and will also be about the War of 1812, this time focusing on the contributions of the First Nations.

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You can learn a bit more about Richard Pierpoint at the Toronto Star here, about captain Runchey's Company of Coloured Men on Wikipedia here, and about the poor job we've done remembering the contribution of that Company on OpenFile here. I wrote about one of Toronto's slave owners, Peter Russell, here. And about Canada's first race riot here. I found the image of the uniform on the website for Citizenship and Immigration Canada here.

Canada's First Race Riot

Slavery didn't last very long in Toronto. The man who founded our city, Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe, wanted it banned from the beginning. But since some of the men he'd chosen to help him rule Upper Canada were slave owners, he was forced to compromise.

Slaves who had already been brought into the new province would live the rest of their lives as property. But no new slaves would be allowed on our soil and any new children born into slavery would be freed when they turned 25. They say it was the very first law to limit slavery in the history of the British Empire.

So when the English finally abolished it altogether in the 1830s, Toronto was already slave-free. By then, Canada had become a beacon of hope for Black Americans escaping to freedom along the Underground Railroad. And there are stories of slave hunters – men who came north to capture former slaves and take them back – being violently run out of town.

But there was still a shitload of racism in this city. And some of it came from the most powerful people in Upper Canada. Like, say, the man who the British had chosen to be the new Lieutenant Governor of the province: Sir Francis Bond Head.

Bond Head was one of the crappiest rulers our city has ever known. He was sent to Toronto (the capital of Upper Canada) from England to make progressive reforms, but turned out to be a die-hard conservative whose incompetence and corruption helped push liberals into full-blown rebellion. And just a few months before his army clashed with William Lyon Mackenzie's rebels on Yonge Street, he was behind a particularly shameful moment in the history of Canadian government.

In the spring of 1837, a man by the name of Solomon Moseby escaped from slavery in Kentucky. His "master", David Castleman, was a rich and well-connected horse breeder. (His nephew would one day lose a presidential election to Abraham Lincoln.) That May, Moseby took off on one of his master's horses and rode north. It took him two long, dangerous months to make it to Canada, but he did eventually escape across the border and into Niagara-on-the-Lake. There, it seemed like he was finally free.

But his owner wasn't ready to give up. Back in Kentucky, Castleman had the courts charge Moseby with theft – for having taken the horse. And then he followed him to Canada with an arrest warrant. Our government had already made it perfectly clear that we wouldn't return former slaves back to the United States to live a life of servitude. But we did return criminal fugitives to face American justice. When Castleman showed up in Niagara-on-the-Lake with the warrant, Moseby was immediately arrested and thrown into jail. It would be up to Bond Head to decide whether or not he'd be sent back south, where Castleman promised to make an example out of him.

Niagara-on-the-Lake rose up in protest. The town, so close to the American border, was home to lots of escaped slaves. They say a full tenth of the population was Black. Many of the town's leading citizens, including the mayor, signed a petition demanding that Bond Head release the escaped slave. Hundreds of supporters spent weeks camped outside the court house where Moseby was being held, promising that if the authorities tried to move him, they would be there to stand in the way. They even offered Castleman $1,000 to cover the cost of the horse and his travel expenses. He, of course, refused. This wasn't about the horse; this was about making sure slaves couldn't get away.

Sir Francis Bond Head

It was September by the time Bond Head announced his decision: "this land of liberty," he declared, "cannot be made an Asylum for the guilty of any colour." He ordered that Moseby be extradited back to the United States.

But it wouldn't easy. The crowd of supporters gathered outside the courthouse made sure of that. Moseby was led out of the court house in handcuffs by constables and soldiers with bayonets drawn. They loaded him into a carriage, but before it could move it was surrounded by hundreds of Black Canadians. A throng of women blocked the entrance to the bridge the carriage needed to cross, singing hymns and standing their ground. The local preacher who had been leading the protests, Herbert Holmes, got in front of the horses. Another man, Jacob Green, stuck a fence post in the spokes of the carriage's wheels.

That's when the sheriff ordered his men to open fire. Holmes was shot through the heart. Green was run through with a bayonet. They both died. Others in the crowd were slashed and bloodied. Some threw stones. Dozens were arrested. But it worked. In the confusion, Moseby slipped out of the carriage and out of his handcuffs (at least one witness claimed that his guard had left them loose on purpose; another that the blacksmith had intentionally forged them to be weak). In the days that followed, the government would put a price on his head, but years later, he'd travel to England and successfully win his legal freedom. In the end, he was allowed back to Niagara to live the rest of his life in peace.

Still, the extradition of former slaves would be an issue in Canada for decades to come. The last case wasn't heard until the 1860s, just before slavery was finally abolished in the United States. It seems that even in Canada, an escaped slave couldn't feel entirely safe.

That same autumn Solomon Moseby was fighting for his freedom, an English feminist and writer, Anna Brownwell Jameson, happened to be staying in Toronto. On a trip to Niagara-on-the-Lake, she met Sally Carter, one of the leaders of the protests. And then wrote about it:

"She was a fine creature, apparently about five-and-twenty, with a kindly animated countenance; but the feelings of exasperation and indignation had evidently not yet subsided. She told us, in answer to my close questioning, that she had formerly been a slave in Virginia; that, so far from being ill treated, she had been regarded with especial kindness by the family on whose estate she was born. When she was about sixteen her master died, and it was said that all the slaves on the estate would be sold, and therefore she ran away. 'Were you not attached to your mistress?' I asked. 'Yes,' said she, 'I liked my mistress, but I did not like to be sold.' I asked her if she was happy here in Canada? She hesitated a moment, and then replied, on my repeating the question, 'Yes—that is, I was happy here—but now—I don't know—I thought we were safe here—I thought nothing could touch us here, on your British ground, but it seems I was mistaken, and if so, I won't stay here—I won't—I won't! I'll go and find some country where they cannot reach us! I'll go to the end of the world, I will!' And as she spoke, her black eyes flashing, she extended her arms, and folded them across her bosom, with an attitude and expression of resolute dignity, which a painter might have studied; and truly the fairest white face I ever looked on never beamed with more of soul and high resolve than hers at that moment." 

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The main image is a photo of the court house where the riot happened.

Anna Brownwell Jameson, while progressive for her time, could still be more than a bit condescendingly ethnocentric (as you can tell a bit from that excerpt). Her book, Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada, is full of interesting stuff from her travels here in 1836-37 though, so I'm thinking I'll be posting lots of quotes from it over the next while. You can read a volume of highlights from it in the much more terribly-titled Sketches in Canada, and rambles among the red men here.

The Solomon Moseby riot happened just a few years after the first race riot in Detroit's history, which was a similar story. In that case, it was Thornton Blackburn and his wife who escaped from slavery in Kentucky and ended up settling Toronto, where he founded our city's first cab company. You can read that story here.

I wrote about Bond Head's role in the Rebellions of 1837 in a post called "Bond Head The Bonehead" here.

And you can read more information about Solomon Moseby and the riot in places I've pieced all of this together from: here and here and here and this PDF here. 

The photo of the court house I found here. 

Update: Ooh cool. Mackenzie House tweeted some related William Lyon Mackenzie quotes from his paper, The Constitution, on September 27, 1837:  "Moseby was doomed by law to perpetual slavery in Kentucky – his master might buy and sell and torture him...not because he was a criminal, but because his complexion was dark...they say he mounted his tyrant's horse and sought a home and freedom in Upper Canada. This is his crime with Sir Francis!" Mackenzie, as I briefly mentioned in the post, was in a huge political battle with Sir Francis Bond Head in 1837 that would culminate in outright rebellion that December.

Samuel Jarvis' Deadly Duel

Samuel Jarvis in the 1850s

In 1781, William Jarvis got shot. They say it's probably the best thing that ever happened to him.  Before that he was just an ordinary soldier, one of tens of thousands of Americans who stayed loyal to the British and fought on their side during the American Revolution. But when he got wounded during a battle in Virginia, he caught the attention of his commanding officer. And that commanding officer just so happened to be John Graves Simcoe, the guy who would soon be running all of Upper Canada. When Simcoe decided to build a new town on the banks of Toronto Harbour his first step was to give a bunch of free land to men he knew from his fighting days. Like William Jarvis.

Jarvis got a spot in town—at Sherbourne and Adelaide—plus one of the hundred-acre "park lots" (strips of land running between Queen Street and Bloor). It was, not surprisingly, right where Jarvis Street is now. In return, all he had to do was move here with his family, build a road around his property and totally suck at being a government administrator.

When you read anything about William Jarvis, the same kinds of adjectives keep popping up: "inefficient and careless", "incompetent and corrupt", "incompetent, lazy, selfish and dishonest". Even in early Toronto—a town crawling with incompetent, corrupt officials—he and his wife were hated.  They bitched and moaned about everything; Jarvis once tried to challenge four men to a duel all at the same time, his wife called the other elites "a lot of Pimps, Sycophants and Lyars." And as if that weren't enough, they were one of the few Toronto families ever to have owned slaves.

Jarvis' son, Samuel, followed in his father's sucktastic footsteps. As a young man, he fought with the British against the Americans in the War of 1812, but then relied on his connections to land a cushy government job so he could settle down to a life of corruption, scandal and financial idiocy, just like his dad. And like his dad, he made lots of enemies.

Like, say, John Ridout. The details of their feud are a bit sketchy, but it seems like Jarvis probably owed the young law student money. He owed a lot of people money. What we do know for sure is that one day in the summer of 1817, Ridout came to see Jarvis at work and got thrown out of his office. Soon after that, they were fighting in the street. That's when Jarvis challenged him to a duel.

They met at dawn the next day in a meadow, at what's now the south-east corner of Yonge and College. Once they and their seconds had agreed to the rules, Jarvis and Ridout drew their pistols, turned their backs on each other, took eight steps and waited for the count: one... two...

Ridout fired early. And missed.

At first, there was confusion. No one was quite sure what to do; what the rules and honour dictated. But it was eventually decided that Ridout should return to the spot he'd fired from so that Jarvis could take a free shot. Which he did. The bullet hit Ridout right in the chest.

According to the autopsy, he died pretty much instantly, but by the time the authorities showed up, Jarvis and the seconds were claiming that he had lived just long enough to forgive them all and absolve them completely of any responsibility. The lying didn't work; Jarvis was arrested and charged with murder. Luckily for him, there were still plenty of people in those days who thought that firing guns at each other while standing a few meters away was the proper way to settle disputes, so Jarvis was acquitted.

But the controversy was far from over. The duel haunted him for years, and ended up playing an important role in the politics of Upper Canada. A decade later, his enemies were still using it against him. Worst of them all was a reform-minded newspaperman who had just moved to town: William Lyon Mackenzie. He hated the Jarvises and the rest of the handful of anti-democratic, pro-monarchy conservatives running things, nicknaming them the "Family Compact" and using his paper, The Colonial Advocate, to trash them every chance he got. He called some demons, some jackals, some funguses and Samuel Jarvis a murderer.

Jarvis was incensed. He rounded up a bunch of like-minded Tories, dressed them like indigenous peoples and attacked the newspaper's offices. While his wife and children hid in the basement, Mackenzie's whole operation was destroyed, his printing press broken, and all the typeface throw into Lake Ontario.

But the Type Riot backfired. Mackenzie sued the vandals, won, and used the money to fund an even bigger operation. Meanwhile Jarvis was reduced to defending himself in pamphlets with catchy titles like "A Contradiction of the Libel Under the Signature of 'A Relative,' Published in the Canadian Freeman, of the 28th February, 1828; Together with a Few Remarks, Tracing The Origin of the Unfriendly Feeling Which Ultimately Led to the Unhappy Affair to Which That Libel Refers". Within a  few years, Mackenzie would be elected as the first mayor of Toronto, lead an attempted revolution and play an important in role in bringing true democracy to Canada.

But that's a story for another post...

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A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

You can still see Jean Ridout's grave mounted on the wall inside St. James Cathedral downtown. And you can read Jarvis' pamphlet here. William Jarvis, despite the impression I've been under for months now, is NOT the same person as William Botsford Jarvis, one of our earliest sheriffs, co-founder of the village of Yorkville, and the guy who owned Rosedale back went it was a forested country estate. You can also read lots more about the Jarvis family on the Jarvis Collegiate website, which is quick to point out that the school was named after the street and not directly in honour of those jerks.

This post is related to dream 09 The Ghost of John Ridout Samuel Jarvis, 1826

This post is related to dream 10 The Battle of Montgomery's Tavern William Lyon Mackenzie, 1837

And We Think Rob Ford's An Asshole; Meet Peter Russell

Peter Russell, asshole

Here's how they tell his story: In 1796, Lieutenant Governor John Simcoe, the man who had founded Toronto just three years earlier, was sick. So sick, in fact, that he headed back home to England with his family, never to return. In his absence, he left Peter Russell in charge, one of the city's most illustrious douchebags.

Russell had been born in Ireland, moved to England, and went to school at Cambridge for all of six months before he'd lost so much money playing poker that he was forced to drop out and join the army. In the army, he kept gambling; his next twenty years or so were mostly spent traveling around the world: sometimes fighting wars and sometimes running away from the people he owed money to. When they finally did catch up with him, he even spent a little time in prison. But none of that seems to have kept him from making a good impression on John Graves Simcoe. They had both fought for the British during the American Revolution and when Simcoe became the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, he invited the desperate, debt-ridden Russell to help run the brand new town of York.

In return, he got a crapload of free land. His first house, Russell Abbey, was built on a spot in town overlooking the lake (near Front and Princess where Abbey Lane is now). His second home was at his farm, Petersfield, a long strip of land running north from Queen to Bloor just west of the Grange. And on top of that, he had hundreds of acres on the hill above Davenport Road around the area where the not-so-coincidentally-named Russell Hill Road runs today.

And he'd get more. Once Simcoe was gone, Russell found new ways to take advantage. He discovered a law that allowed him to seize land from foreigners who hadn't lived in town for at least seven years and he used it.  He appointed himself as a judge, despite the fact that he had no legal experience, so that he could collect the salary. And when it came time to make civic improvements, he was a cheap bastard; on at least one occasion he just plain refused to pay, shocked that in a tiny, isolated town in the middle of a thick forest, with barely any people in it, the cost of labour was rather high.

It seems that even the improvements he did make, he made with a prickish flair. Russell was the one who built the city's first jail, a log hut on King Street where the King Edward Hotel is now, but he didn't bother to include any beds or blankets or stoves to keep it warm during the winter. He extended the town westward out to Peter Street, but couldn't resist naming the street after himself. And when he hired Asa Danforth to spend months in the woods building Kingston Road out toward, um, Kingston, Russell figured he was the hero. "I expect the Gratitude of the People will erect a Statue to my memory for it," he declared.

But all of that is nothing compared to the real reason he stands apart from most of the other corrupt, pompous, self-serving, political assholes this city has seen: this asshole owned slaves.

Simcoe had wanted to abolish slavery right from the very beginning, but slave owners in the legislature—including, it seems, Russell—fought against it, forcing a compromise: they could keep the slaves they already had in town, but it would be illegal to bring in any more, and the children would be freed when they turned 25. They say it was the first legislation to actively limit slavery in the history of the British Empire.

From what I've read, there were 15 slaves in York (though there were ten more just outside of town), and the majority were owned by Russell and his fellow jerkface, William Jarvis. They had six each. Russell enslaved Mr. Pompadour, his wife Peggy and their four children. And he wasn't happy with them. His sister called them "insolent" and "pilfering". And after Peggy tried to run away yet again, Russell decided to split the family up. He placed this ad in the Upper Canada Gazette:

The ad didn't turn up any buyers or win Russell many fans in the anti-slavery crowd. And those folks weren't his only enemies. There was even a new saying in town, poking fun at his corruption: "I, Peter Russell, convey to you, Peter Russell." So when Simcoe officially resigned, Russell was passed over for the promotion and lost most of his power. Once he'd been overlooked for a second time, he was pissed off enough to announce that he intended to move back to England. But by that point, he owned 75,000 acres of Upper Canada and he couldn't find anyone to buy it. He was stuck here. And in 1808, he had a stroke. The cure—a mustard plaster and a quart of wine laced with crushed deer antler—didn't work. He died.

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A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

After Russell's death, the Pompadours were passed down to his sister, Elizabeth, who gave away one of the daughters as a gift. After that, people aren't sure what happened to them. There's some more info about the family here. 

One of the foreigners Russell screwed over was William Berczy, who built Yonge Street, will get his own blogpost eventually, and was also hired to build Russell Abbey. You can see a drawing of the house here. It eventually ended up being owned by another one of the city's most blogpost-worthy citizens, Robert Baldwin, who helped bring responsible government to Canada.

Oh and there's also Russell Creek, one of our buried underground streams, named after him. And Bedford Road is called Bedford Road because he wanted to honour the Duke of Bedford, a man his father dubiously claimed they were related to. 

This post is related to dream 18 Russell Creek Peter Russell, 1799

The Blackburns' Harrowing Escape

King Street in 1846

That's what King Street looked like in 1846, when Toronto was about 50 years old. You can see some of the city's oldest store fronts and, rising above them at the corner of Church, the spire of St. James Cathedral, which would soon burn down and be rebuilt as the church that stands there now. But the reason I Googled around looking for this particular painting is in the middle of the road, painted bright yellow: Toronto's first ever horse-drawn taxi cab. And perched atop it is the man who started the city's first ever cab company, Thornton Blackburn.

Just 15 years earlier, Blackburn had been living in Kentucky as a slave. He and his wife Lucie (or Ruth; there seems to be some confusion) were "owned" by an American judge who planned on selling Lucie down the river into the even-more-brutally-racist Deep South. But before he could, the couple escaped, fleeing up the Ohio River on a steamboat and eventually settling in Detroit.

They lived there in peace for a couple of years, but it didn't last. In 1833, they were tracked down and arrested by slave hunters who planned on shipping them back to their "owner" in Kentucky. Thankfully, that enraged Detroit's African-American community and white Abolitionists. They worked quickly and before long Lucie was free: a woman came to visit her in jail and they switched clothes so that the visitor could take her place while Lucie escaped.

Thornton, however, was shackled, bound and held under heavy guard. It took 400 men storming the prison to break him out and smuggle the couple across the river into Windsor. When Detroit's white bigots retaliated, attacking blacks in the streets, it kicked off Detroit's first ever race riot, which raged for three days and ended with the sheriff being shot and state troopers being called in.

In the aftermath, the governor of Michigan demanded that the Blackburns be extradited from Upper Canada and returned to slavery in the U.S., but the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada refused. "A man," he's said to have said, "can't steal himself."

Soon, the Blackburns had settled in Toronto, living in a house on Eastern Avenue at Sackville Street. Our city, of course, had plenty of its own bigots, but it promised to be a much safer place to live: while slave hunters were known to cross the border in search of their targets, there were already stories of Torontonians driving them out of the city once they'd been discovered. 

Thornton Blackburn got a job as a waiter at Osgoode Hall for a while, but soon came up with an idea for his own business. Getting a copy of the plans for Montreal's first horse-drawn taxi, he had another one made for himself. He called it "The City", painted it yellow and red, and used it to start Toronto's first ever cab company. It was a huge success. "The City" would roam our streets for nearly 60 years, from 1834 until Blackburn's death in the 1890s. The cab became such an important icon for the city that the TTC ended up adopting the same red and yellow colour scheme, which they still sort of use to this day. Before long the Blackburns had managed to buy a few other properties around town and used them to help make Toronto a hub for the Underground Railroad, renting their houses out cheaply to other escaped slaves.

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After the Blackburns' death, their story was forgotten for nearly 100 years. It wasn't until 1985, when an archeological dig accidentally stumbled across the remains of their house on Eastern, that people started poking around looking for more information. Karolyn Smardz Frost was one of those people, and she wrote a book about the Blackburns called I've Got A Home In Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad, which I'm thinking I may very well go out and buy as soon as I get off work today. The Star published excerpts from it here and here and somewhere else I can't find. You can also go visit Thornton Blackburn's grave, which rests in the Necropolis cemetery in Cabbagetown.

This post is related to dream 14 The Great Fire Lucie Blackburn, 1849