In Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal, journalist and historian Frank Mackey has written an important book on the city’s early black community. He consults an impressive range of historical sources — from civil and criminal court documents, parish records, and census returns, to newspapers, government documents, employee records, and institutional accounts — and runs into an equally vigorous set of ethodological problems. Altogether, Mackey has succeeded laudably in reconstituting this community.
Covering an eighty-year period from 1760 to 1840, Done with Slavery contains over one hundred pages of appendices and has an index that allows readers to follow the lives of individual black men and women. In Mackey’s telling of the community’s fascinating history, we learn about individuals and families, their aspirations, successes, failures, and everyday encounters with other Montrealers.
His book reveals much about the complex relations between different ethnic and racial communities in Montreal, in other urban centres, and in the countryside of Lower Canada. Mackey aptly demonstrates the convoluted legal demise of slavery in Lower Canada and shows that its practice had stopped decades before its legislative end in 1834.
Similarly, his approach to racism is nuanced. He shows how “the wall of prejudice” was exercised by diverse social classes and took different forms, and he reminds us that there was tolerance as well, including many interracial marriages, friendships, and even master-servant relations where black craftsmen engaged white apprentices. Mackey also argues that the small black community cannot be treated as monolithic — it was divided by social class and ethnic origin, as well as along other fault lines.
That said, this book is not without its weaknesses. The author’s writing style is at times awkward, disorganized, and repetitive. He uses far too many examples to prove his arguments, thereby making it difficult for readers to keep track of the men and women he mentions.
His arguments are diminished because he does not explicitly engage the historiography of critical topics such as race and gender, usually assigning them to endnotes. Comparing evidence regarding Montreal to the findings of other scholars would have strengthened his interpretations.
Mackey is less timid about situating his study with respect to those he wants to refute. Done with Slavery is so ambitious that he has difficulty containing the narrative, whether geographically to
Montreal, or to understanding subtleties such as how the black community experienced and encountered daily life with respect to work, politics, culture, religion, and criminal justice.
It’s a Herculean task to read the historiography of each of these subjects. But failing to do this undermines the great efforts Mackey has made to present the historical actors who come under his gaze as complex, rather than one-dimensional. Gender issues need to be more fully developed, especially with respect to women’s critical role in the household economy. Doing so would give black women a more central place — at home and in the community.
Finally, Mackey treats Montreal as a unique case, separate from other places in British North America. Thus, we have no idea how the experiences of slavery and of freedom in Montreal were similar to and different from those elsewhere.
Done with Slavery makes a significant contribution to the history of blacks in Montreal and in Lower Canada, as well as regarding race relations. It is an important resource containing the individual and family histories of members of the black community as well as an extensive list of black slaves, in the book’s lengthy appendices, that historians will be able to use for years to come.
We all benefit from Frank Mackey’s impressive research. He contends, and rightly so, that the black community in Montreal has too often been ignored, its history marginalized. His work challenges all of us to do better.
— Mary Anne Poutanen (Read bio)
Mary Anne Poutanen is an adjunct professor and part-time faculty in the department of history at Concordia University.