“Peggy, Not Having His Permission to Absent Herself from His Service”: Enslaved Families and Black Women’s Defiance in Upper Canada

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.