her credit good." She was
one of Mr. James Girty's three Negroes and "known to be saucy."[40]

Another report nearly a score of years later may be of interest. It
can be best understood in its historical setting. During the war of
1812, as soon as the American invasion of Canada began, prices of all
commodities began to soar.[41] There was a great demand for beef for
the troops regular and militia and the commissariat was not too
scrupulously particular to inquire the source whence it might come.
The result was that a crime which had been almost unknown suddenly
increased to alarmingly large proportions. Cattle roaming in the woods
were killed and the meat sold to the army. Prosecutions were
instituted in many cases. It was found that the perpetrators were
generally, but by no means always, landless men, not infrequently
refugee slaves, who had come to the province from the United States.
The offence was punishable with death:[42] and convictions were not
hard to obtain. But the punishment of death was not in practice
actually inflicted.

Whatever the cause, the crime continued until normal conditions were
reestablished when it became as rare as it had been before the war. At
the Fall Assizes, 1819, at York before Mr. Justice Campbell and a
jury, a man of color, Philip Turner, was convicted of stealing and
killing a heifer and sentenced to death: Mr. Justice Powell who had
been in the Commission of Oyer and Terminer with Campbell reported to
the Lieutenant-Governor[43] that there had as yet been no execution
for this offence in the province and recommended that the sentence
should be committed to banishment for life from His Majesty's
dominions.[44] Tradition has it that Turner was a refugee from the
United States and begged to be hanged rather than sent back where he
would be again enslaved.[45]

When the fugitive slave reached the soil of Upper Canada he became and
was free with all the rights and privileges of any other freeman: but
sometimes the former condition of servitude had unhappy results. One
case will suffice. John Harris was a slave in Virginia. He rented a
house in Richmond and lived in it with his wife Sarah Holloway. Harris
was a painter and gave the greater part of his earnings to his master.
The wife earned money by washing and gave to her mistress part of her
scanty earnings. The wife's second name was that of her master Major
Halloway in whose house she had been married in 1825 to Harris by the