“Peggy, Not Having His Permission to Absent Herself from His Service”: Enslaved Families and Black Women’s Defiance in Upper Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the archive of slavery and enslaved women is commodifying and disfiguring, there exists flashes of enslaved people’s tenacity, spirit, and attempts at family preservation across the Americas. Yet, enslaved people in northern spaces like Canada faced distinct and unique challenges as “slave minority populations,” such as isolation and loneliness. Enslaved women, such as Peggy, did not usually have their acts of resistance freely recorded by the enslavers who “governed” them. Their actions are, therefore, difficult to recuperate from current archival structures. Instead, scholars must theorize creative and informed ways that the enslaved defied the institution of slavery, prioritizing time with family, stealing moments of pleasure or repose, and finding privacy within or outside the enslaver’s home. Inspired by material culture studies of chattel slavery, we can consider how Peggy, her family, and other enslaved women in Upper Canada negotiated power through slander, maintained family connections, and created sustaining foodways for themselves. Peggy is an incredible micro history from Canadian slavery which demonstrates negotiations of power, an assertion of her personhood, and a protection of her status as a mother and romantic partner within a context of northern slavery. This work follows Peggy through a fugitive slave advertisement, a slave sale advertisement, enslaver correspondence, architectural blueprints, settlement geography, and post-humanist theories to hypothesize the various refusals available to her and her family while in bondage to Peter Russell in York, now modern-day Toronto.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".