The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal , and: Crossing the Border: A Free Black Community in Canada (review)

Reviewed by: The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal, and: Crossing the Border: A Free Black Community in Canada Gregory Wigmore The Hanging of Angelique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montreal. Afua Cooper. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Pp. 360, $59.95 cloth, $19.95 paper Crossing the Border: A Free Black Community in Canada. Sharon Hepburn. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Pp. 272, $40.00 cloth A survey conducted by the Dominion Institute a few years ago revealed that 51 per cent of Canadians correctly identified the Underground Railroad as the route American slaves used to escape to Canada – the same percentage who could name John A. Macdonald as the first prime minister and more than double the number who could list the country’s four original provinces. In a nation often faulted for forgetting its past, the Underground Railroad remains central in Canadians’ historical memory. Yet, despite that act of remembrance, a great deal remains forgotten or shrouded in myth. While several historians have explored the subject of Canadian slavery, it still seems quite possible, as James W. St G. Walker observed three decades ago, for Canadian students to complete high school (and even university) believing that ‘Canada’s only relationship with slavery was as a haven for American runaways.’ For many in a nation that has long defined itself in opposition to the United States, America’s ‘original sin’ and Canada’s welcoming embrace of Black refugees seem to present a clear-cut contrast between the two nations’ histories. Recent books by Afua Cooper and Sharon Hepburn help expose such a comparison as a false contrast, and reveal a more complicated picture. Cooper’s The Hanging of Angelique explores the life and death of an enslaved Black woman convicted of arson in Montreal in 1734. Reminding readers that Canada’s connection to slavery began long before it became a haven for American refugees, Cooper reveals part of what she calls ‘Canada’s best-kept secret’: the period of state-sanctioned slavery in Canada between 1628 (when the first slave arrived in New France) and 1833 (when the British Parliament abolished slavery throughout the empire). Hepburn’s Crossing the Border focuses on the subsequent experience of African-American refugees who settled the all-Black community of Buxton in Canada West. Her study investigates just what kind of a haven freed Blacks truly found at the end of the Underground Railroad. Surviving documentary evidence on individual slaves held in Canada is fragmentary. Marie-Joseph Angelique appears prominently in the [End Page 544] historical record solely because she stood trial for a notorious crime. The fire allegedly set by the young woman in her owner’s home also consumed another forty-five buildings, leaving much of Montreal in smouldering ruins. Determined to learn all they could about the accused and the cause of the blaze, alarmed authorities spent days interrogating her. The surviving transcripts furnished Cooper with the means to accomplish a commendable feat: the production of a book-length study of an enslaved individual in Canada. Apart from the transcripts of her brutal interrogation and trial, documentary evidence of Angelique’s life remains scarce. In telling the life story of the Portuguese-born bondswoman, Cooper relies on informed speculation, frequently weighing the available evidence against the wealth of American and Atlantic world scholarship on slavery. For example, she wonders whether Angelique engaged in sexual relations with her owner, Sieur de Francheville, noting that this might account for both the violent relationship between Angelique and Francheville’s wife, Therese, and Angelique’s expectation that she would eventually be freed. (Several historians have explored the traumatic consequences of such liaisons in the households of American slaveholders, as well as the preferential treatment sometimes accorded to enslaved women who slept with their masters.) Cooper’s speculation is often compelling, sometimes convincing, but rarely conclusive. At any rate, by January 1734, the newly widowed Therese arranged to sell Angelique to a new owner in Quebec as soon as the ice thawed, prompting Angelique and her lover, a white engagé named Claude Thibault, to attempt an unsuccessful...

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