Chloe Cooley’s 1793 ordeal led to a law that freed no one

Chloe Cooley, an enslaved Black woman, was bound with rope and taken across the Niagara River from Queenston, Upper Canada, on March 14, 1793, to be sold in New York State, an episode that led to the colony’s first law limiting slavery but freed no one who was enslaved at the time.

Parks Canada, which has designated Cooley a national historic person, says she screamed and resisted but could not break free from her enslaver, Adam Vrooman, his brother Isaac and a son of Loyalist McGregory Van Every, who forced her into a small boat.

The episode is documented because two people spoke up. Peter Martin, a Black Loyalist who had been enslaved by John Butler and later served in Butler’s Rangers, and William Grisley, a white labourer who worked for Vrooman, gave testimony on March 21 before Lt.-Gov. John Graves Simcoe and two members of the Executive Council at Newark, according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. Grisley testified that Vrooman had told him he meant to sell Cooley in the United States.

The council directed Attorney General John White to prosecute, but the sources differ on what followed. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography says charges were filed at the Court of Quarter Sessions in Newark and later dropped. Parks Canada says none were laid. Both say Vrooman was within his legal rights as property law stood.

In an April 18 petition, Vrooman said he knew of no law against what he had done and described Cooley as unruly. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography notes that those claims are uncorroborated and come from the man who enslaved her.

Because the sale was legal, a prosecution could not settle the matter. Parks Canada says the incident led Simcoe to direct the attorney general to draft legislation. White introduced the bill on June 19, and it received royal assent on July 9 as An Act to Prevent the further Introduction of Slaves and to limit the Term of Contracts for Servitude, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia. It is known today as the Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada.

The law banned bringing new enslaved people into the province. It did not free anyone already enslaved, who remained in bondage for life unless their enslavers released them. Children born to enslaved women after 1793 were to be freed at age 25.

The Canadian Encyclopedia says the act also required enslavers who freed people to place them in trust with a church or town warden so they would not become a public charge, and that the arrangement encouraged employing freed people under indenture contracts that could run up to nine years and be renewed.

The limits were stark. The act did not stop sales within the province or across the border. The Canadian Encyclopedia says Upper Canadian enslavers kept selling people into New York until that state passed its own gradual abolition law in 1799, and that one of the last recorded sales in the province came in March 1824, when Eli Keeler sold 15-year-old Tom to William Bell.

The same source says the act remained the only law of its kind in the British Empire until the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which took effect on Aug. 1, 1834.

The record of the woman at the centre of it is thin. Her birth and death are undocumented, and the Dictionary of Canadian Biography says her fate after March 1793 is unknown. The only description of her as a person comes from Vrooman’s petition.

Cooley’s case sits within a longer history of slavery in what is now Canada. Canada News Media has reported on Olivier Le Jeune and the archive’s silence on slavery, on the 1734 hanging of Marie-Joseph Angélique, and on why 1,196 Black Loyalists left Nova Scotia in 1792, a year before Martin and Grisley testified at Newark.

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Sources: Parks Canada, Chloe Cooley National Historic Person; Dictionary of Canadian Biography, “Cooley, Chloe”; The Canadian Encyclopedia, “1793 Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada.”