s
manumitted and the statute rather discouraged manumission, as it
provided that the master on liberating a slave must give good and
sufficient security that the freed man would not become a public
charge. But, defective as it was, it was not long without attack. In
1798, Simcoe had left the province never to return, and while the
government was being administered by the timeserving Peter
Russell,[10] a bill was introduced into the Lower House to enable
persons "migrating into the province to bring their negro slaves with
them." The bill was contested at every stage but finally passed on a
vote of eight to four. In the Legislative Council it received the
three months' hoist and was never heard of again.[11] The argument in
favor of the bill was based on the scarcity of labor which all
contemporary writers speak of, the inducement to intending settlers to
come to Upper Canada where they would have the same privileges in
respect of slavery as in New York and elsewhere; in other words the
inevitable appeal to greed.

After this bill became law, slavery gradually disappeared. Public
opinion favored manumission and while there were not many manumissions
_inter vivos_[12] in some measure owing to the provisions of the act
requiring security to be given in such case against the free man
becoming a public charge, there were not a few emancipated by
will.[13]

The number of slaves in Upper Canada was also diminished by what seems
at first sight paradoxical, that is, their flight across the Detroit
River into American territory. So long as Detroit and its vicinity
were British in fact and even for some years later, Section 6 of the
Ordinance of 1787 "that there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude in the said territory otherwise than as punishment of crime"
was a dead letter: but when Michigan was incorporated as a territory
in 1805, the Ordinance of 1787 became legally and at least in form
effective. Many slaves made their way from Canada to Detroit, then a
real land of the free; so many, indeed, that we find that a company of
Negro militia composed entirely of escaped slaves from Canada was
formed in Detroit in 1806 to assist in the general defence of the
territory.[14]

The number of slaves in Upper Canada cannot be ascertained with
anything approaching accuracy. The returns of the census of 1784 show
that very many of the 212 slaves in the District of Montreal, which
then extended from the Rivers St. Mauric