No one knows what became of Chloe Cooley after she was forcibly taken by boat across the Niagara River from Upper Canada to upstate New York on March 14, 1793. The enslaved Black woman was bound with rope by her enslaver Adam Vrooman and brought, screaming and struggling, across the Niagara River to be sold.
However, two witnesses — one of whom was a Black Loyalist — reported the incident to the Executive Council, which unsuccessfully attempted to prosecute Vrooman. Soon after, Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe and Attorney General John White introduced a law to end slavery in the province. Facing strong resistance in the House of Assembly, they compromised with the Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada — an act that failed to abolish slavery, but which made it illegal to import enslaved people into the province and laid the foundations for gradual abolition. In 2022 the Canadian government designated Chloe Cooley a person of national historic significance.
Cooley’s story is one of seven new entries being added to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography this month. The series began with the story of someone known only as “Name Unrecorded” owing to the scarcity of documents available from that time. The stories help to shed light on the lives of enslaved people in what would eventually become Canada.
“While the story of the Underground Railroad is well established in Canadian and American history, the presence of some 600 enslaved people in the colonial era of present-day Ontario is less known,” says David Wilson, a professor in the Department of History in the Faculty of Arts & Science and general editor of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
The stories are drawn from the scholarly doctoral research of African Canadian historian Natasha Henry-Dixon, whose dissertation “One Too Many: The Enslavement of Africans in Early Ontario, 1760–1834" was informed by research into the history of enslaved people in Upper Canada, drawing on such sources as government records, church registers, newspaper reports and private letters.
Other individuals featured in the series include:
- A man who escaped to New York and wrote a letter back to his enslaver with an offer to buy back his own freedom.
- A father and son who obtained their freedom following the American Revolutionary War.
- A soldier who fought with the British army in the War of 1812 and was later considered to be the last surviving previously enslaved Canadian before his death in 1871.
- A woman known only as “Peggy,” one of the hundreds of Black people enslaved in Upper Canada.
Photo: Baldwin Collection, Toronto Public Library.
“Some of the enslavers had large numbers of enslaved people working for them,” says Wilson. “The Irish-born Matthew Elliott had around sixty — some of whom were Indigenous, but the vast majority of whom were Black — but most enslaved people worked in small households.”
Wilson adds that the smaller scale did not necessarily make the system less oppressive, noting that enslaved people in small households experienced all kinds of cruelties — from physical violence to the enforced separation of families — but made it less apparent.
“Our task, through the groundbreaking work of Natasha Henry-Dixon, was to make their experiences better known, shedding light on this largely forgotten aspect of Ontario’s history,” says Wilson. “Our aim was to document instances of resilience among the enslaved, and resistance to a system that treated them as property rather than as human beings.”
The online series continues with a new biography every Wednesday until March 19.