A “tone of voice peculiar to new-England”: Fugitive slave advertisements and the heterogeneity of enslaved people of African descent in eighteenth-century Quebec

Abstract

Found throughout the transatlantic world, fugitive slave advertisements demonstrate the ubiquity of African resistance to slavery. Besides noting things like names, accents, languages, and skills, they also recounted details that disclosed the regional origins and ethnicities of the runaways. Although detailed analysis of fugitive slave advertisements have been produced since the 1970s, Canadian slavery has been conspicuously absent from such studies. This article exposes and challenges Canada’s overwhelming absence from slavery studies more generally, recognizing the ways that the Underground Railroad has been enshrined in national curriculum and popular imagination to erase the colonial violence of Euro-Canadian settler histories. Challenging the erasure of Canadian slavery, fugitive slave advertisement will be analyzed to reveal the complex heterogeneity of the enslaved population of African descent. Focusing on Quebec from the moment of British conquest (1760), this article argues that this heterogeneity was a hallmark of the enslaved population of Quebec, which was composed of African Canadian, African American, African Caribbean, African-born, and indigenous enslaved peoples. The article then poses directions for future research that can further explore the cultural, linguistic, spiritual, and social implications of this extraordinary diversity.