Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Refugees From Slavery in Canada West: Report to the Freedmen's Inquiry Commission
Nothing in this Act affected the status of any negro slave born previous to the date of it. On the contrary, the 2d section provides that nothing in it shall disturb existing relations. The legislation was prospective merely; and there has been none subsequently. There fore a slave born before July 1, 1798, would have been legally a slave until the general abolition of slavery in all the British colonies by act of Parliament in 1833. Thus slavery had a legal existence in Canada many years after it had been abolished in several States of the United States.
Massachusetts abolished it by her Bill of Rights in i780; New Hampshire in 1792; New York in 1799 New Jersey in 1820; and it was virtually abolished in the other Northern States before 1880.
But though the Canadian Parliament, with the usual veneration of legislators for things hallowed by age, merely scotched slavery, public Opinion (and the cold) would not let it drag out its legal life, but killed it before the beginning of this century.
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