Murphy Browne © March 8-2021
On March 14, 1793, Chloe Cooley an enslaved African woman in Ontario, made history when she fought for her freedom. Cooley was being sold and she vigorously resisted. Being tied up and sold was just one more incident in a lifetime of indignities. Cooley’s struggle for her freedom gave the lie to the myth of the happily enslaved African and led to an unsuccessful effort to end slavery in Upper Canada (Ontario.) During the four hundred years enslavement of Africans by Europeans there was a concerted effort to portray the enslaved Africans as being happy with their lot. The image of the fat, perpetually grinning desexualized mammy who loved the White family more than she loved her own life was used by White people to rationalize the inhumanity of slavery. To deal with the cognitive dissonance of holding other humans in captivity and exploiting their labour, White people had to convince themselves that enslaved Africans enjoyed being enslaved and loved the people who enslaved them. Members of White families would brutalize enslaved Africans daily and then on Sunday attend church, so they had to convince themselves that as good Christians their brutal treatment of the Africans they enslaved was justified.
In the 1982 published book “The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World In The Old South” White American history professor Catherine Clinton wrote : “The Mammy was created by white Southerners to redeem the relationship between black women and white men within slave society in response to the antislavery attack from the North during the ante-bellum period. The Mammy was the positive emblem of familial relations between black and white. She existed as a counterpoint to the octoroon concubine the light skinned product of a ‘white man’s lust’ who was habitually victimized by slaveowners’ sexual appetites.”
There is no evidence that Cooley was sexually exploited by her owner or his friends and relatives, but it is hardly likely that this would have been documented unlike the infamous slaveholder of the Jamaican plantation Egypt. In 1989 African Jamaican history professor Douglas Gordon Hall published the diary of British slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood where Thistlewood documented his rape of enslaved African women on his plantation. Thistlewood had the time to document those rapes because he did no work since he was the owner of a plantation and had enslaved Africans who were forced to do the work. In his 2007 published book “The Trader, The Owner, The Slave: Parallel Lives in the Age of Slavery” White British historian James Walvin comments on the diary of Thistlewood: “Thomas Thistlewood left a 14,000 page diary. He details the daily life of a slave owner and the quite extraordinary levels of brutality he meters out to his slaves; the sexual brutality to the women, and the physical brutality to all of them.” Walvin also muses on the reasons given for the continued enslavement of Africans and the hypocritical reality: "One of the justifications for slavery put forward by the planters was that you could treat slaves like this because they were not like us: they were sub-human. But against that of course was the fact that all the planters had sex with their slaves, so if they're sub-human what were they doing have sex with them, and having children with them?” Enslaved African women in the Caribbean, Central, North or South America and Europe, suffered the same fate.
Cooley’s documented struggle in Ontario, Canada also helps to explode the myth that there was no slavery in Canada. The popular stories of enslaved Africans fleeing slavery in the USA to find freedom in Canada continue into the 21st century. Documentation of slavery in Canada is not popular and the few books that have been published are not particularly popular even during February, African History Month. When Toronto celebrated 180 years since it was incorporated as the capital of Ontario on March 6, 1834, there was no mention of slavery. Yet the enslavement of Africans in this city and throughout this country ended on August 1, 1834. Coincidentally the same year (1793) that Cooley made a valiant effort to resist being sold is the same year Toronto (the home of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation) was occupied by the British. In an article published on March 6, 2014 commemorating Toronto’s 180th birthday this information was provided: “The British settlement formally began with John Simcoe, who renamed Toronto in 1793, proclaiming the town of York and centring around Fort York, which was located in the area around the present-day St. Lawrence Market. It would be 41 years and one five-day American invasion later that York would revert to its native name, Toronto, on March 6, 1834.”
There was no mention of Chloe Cooley even though her struggle happened in 1793 and led to Simcoe passing the first legislation in the British colonies to restrict the slave trade and slavery ended in 1834. Apparently, Chloe Cooley’s Black life did not matter in 1793 nor did it matter during the celebration of Toronto’s history.
Murphy Browne © March 8-2021
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