Vincent J. Curtis
19 Feb 23
RE: Author says City of Hamilton aggressively removing his signs honouring former slave. · CBC News ·
All we know about Sophia Burthen Pooley comes from her own mouth. In 1855, she was interviewed by American abolitionist Benjamin Drew for his book The Refugee: or, the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. This is the story she related of herself.
Pooley was born into slavery in Fishkill, NY, in 1772. When she was seven years old, (i.e. in 1779) she was taken to the Canadian border and sold to Chief Joseph Brant of the Mohawks. She lived near Six Nations for about twenty years before being sold to Samuel Hatt, (i.e. sometime between 1799 to 1805), co-founder of Dundas. She ran away from Hatt and died in Peel Township in 1860. (at the age of 88. She would have been 83 in 1855.)
Needless to say, Black historians and guilt-smearing White people love the Pooley story. “Her story is unique in the annals of slavery in Canada and in the United States,” said Toronto historian Adrienne Shadd, who is Black, incidentally. “She provides us with a different take on this whole situation of slavery, because of the fact that she had been enslaved in Upper Canada and by a person of Mohawk background.”
This is what we know about Samuel Hatt. He was born in England in 1776. In 1796, he came to the Niagara region in then Upper Canada to join his brother Richard Hatt, who had built the “Red Mill” near Ancaster. (This would be within the area known as the “Land between the lakes,” purchased from the Mississaugas of the Credit in 1792.). In 1807, Samuel Hatt married Margaret Thompson (1784-1825), with whom he had ten children. In 1812, he fought as a Captain in the 5th Lincoln Militia (“Hatt’s Volunteers”) that accompanied General Sir Isaac Brock on his expedition to Detroit. Richard and Samuel Hatt made their fortune in land speculation and the building of flour mills. In 1816, Samuel Hatt moved to Lower Canada and purchased the Seigneury of Chambly-Ouest. Samuel Hatt died in 1842.
Here are some very obvious problems with the story related by Pooley to Drew. Fishkill is close to New York City. New York was not a slave state, and New York City not then noted for slave ownership. I’m not saying it’s impossible that Pooley was “born into slavery” but even if so there would be no need for her to be taken, at the age of sever, to “the Canadian border” to escape slavery, or to be sold as a slave. What would a child of seven know about being enslaved anyway? And why, if the purpose was to sell her as a slave, would she be taken to Indian Territory when she could be sold in New York City? And if slavery wasn’t then tolerated in New York City, maybe she wasn’t ‘born into slavery’ after all.
The American Revolution, in 1779, was then at its height, and there was no such thing as a “border” with “Canada” in those days. There was Quebec, as created by the Quebec Act of 1774, and a strip of land on the west side of the Niagara River wasn’t purchased from the Mississaugas by British authorities until 1781. A border between the Province of New York (as the State of New York was styled prior to the outbreak of the Revolution) and Quebec was nebulous, and to get to the Niagara River from New York City would require passing through the territory of the Iroquois Indians, of which the Mohawks were the most fierce. This is where Pooley might have encountered Brant, but “Six Nations” or the Haldimand Tract was not purchased until 1785, when Pooley was thirteen.
Another problem with Pooley’s account is that Upper Canada abolished slavery by statute in 1793, and Pooley’s alleged enslavement by Samuel Hatt would have to have occurred after that date, since Hatt didn’t arrive until 1796, when he was twenty. Never mind that the British attitude towards slavery was hostile even before then.(Lt-Gov Sir John Graves Simcoe was an abolitionist, and he was appointed Upper Canada’s first Lt-Gov by Henry Dundas, 1st Lord Melville, precisely because he was. Dundas was another abolishist.)
All of Samuel Hatt’s children, except Thompson Clark Hatt (1822-1878) had died before Drew published his book and could dispute Pooley’s account. Thompson would have had no knowledge of Pooley.
Pooley’s account of herself is uncorroborated, and facts that she alleged are impugned by other facts that we know well, particularly that slavery was illegal when she was allegedly enslaved by Hatt. Hatt, a leading member of the growing community, was not known as a scofflaw. And what, exactly, did this enslavement consist of – being a household domestic? What else was Pooley, likely illiterate, qualified to do as a single woman in her mid-twenties, except being a domestic? Agriculture in Upper Canada was all subsistence farming in those days, and cotton picking or other harvesting of cash crops didn’t then exist in Upper Canada.
If Pooley, four years Hatt’s senior, was ever associated with Samuel Hatt it would have to be as a household domestic, but not as his slave. Hatt might well have bought her out of slavery from Joseph Brant. Her “enslavement” with Hatt might well have amounted to her working off as a domestic servant what Hatt had paid to Brant to acquire her freedom. White people, known as indentured serfs, had to work the same deal. They worked off the cost of their passage.
Pooley’s numbers don’t add up.
It was awfully convenient then, and still
so today, to pretend that slavery once existed in Canada, and that some leading
historical figures are tainted by slavery.
This account of Sophia Burthen Pooley is not strong enough to sustain
smearing Samuel Hatt as a slave-owner, or Canada (the legacy of slavery in Canada!)
as having been a place where slavery existed.
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If hope you sent this to The Spectator.
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