Sophia Burthen Pooley – a second look

Vincent J. Curtis

20 Feb 23

I’m going to continue from yesterday’s analysis of Sophia Burthen Pooley’s account by examining an alternative timeline.

The story is that Sophia Burthen Pooley was enslaved by Samuel Hatt in Canada, but she escaped and gained her freedom.  Pooley’ story represents the “annals of slavery in Canada.”

Samuel Hatt arrived in the Niagara area in 1799, became a respectable and wealthy member of the community, and married Margaret Thompson in 1807.  Pooley claims that she was a slave of Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant and “hung around Six Nations for about twenty years.”  This time, let’s say that she meant the Haldimand Tract, from 1785 to 1805, and that she spent all this time with Brant and his brethren.

I claim that Samuel Hatt, if anything, bought Pooley out of slavery from Brant, and the question is when?  If Hatt had purchased Pooley out of slavery before he was married, it would have set tongues wagging about this prominent, unmarried member of the community having bought himself a Black concubine.  In 1805, Hatt was twenty-nine years old, and Pooley thirty-three.  If Hatt waited until after he married Margaret Thompson in 1807 before he freed Pooley and employed her as a domestic servant, Pooley would be thirty five, having spent her years from the age of seven living with Joseph Brant and his circle.

Slavery was abolished by statute in Upper Canada in 1793.  By 1807 that law and custom was well established and understood; and Hatt was a prominent and respected member of the community.  The applicability of British law as it pertained to Indians was not then clear, and Joseph Brant was known to have kept slaves well into the 19^th century.  Pooley claims to have been one of them.

It would be illegal for Samuel and Margaret Hatt to have owned a slave in 1807.  If Pooley did indeed come to work for the Hatts, it would have to be because Samuel Hatt had bought her out of slavery from Chief Joseph Brant, and her employment with them would have served as an indentured repayment of her debt to the Hatts.

After she had lived among the Mohawk Indians for perhaps twenty-eight years, suddenly to become a domestic servant in the household of a British worthy must have come as a rude shock to Pooley.  She was in her later thirties by then, and she would be completely at sea as to the manners and expectations of the Hatt family and household.  No wonder she ran away from them, and she had the maturity and experience to do so.

Perhaps Pooley justified her actions to herself by claiming that she was escaping slavery, a believable charge at the time, 1855, when she related her account to author and abolitionist Benjamin Drew.  Nevertheless, Pooley’s uncorroborated account of her experiences are not sufficient to sustain a charge of enslavement by Samuel and Margaret Hatt, or to besmirch Canada’s reputation as a refuge for escaped slaves.

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