CHRIS J. GISMONDI
5 min
This paper examines the life of Peggy, an enslaved woman in Upper Canada (modern-day Toronto) during the early 19th century, to challenge the erasure of slavery from Canadian history. The author argues that while the archival record is inherently biased—constructed by white, propertied enslavers who sought to commodify and dehumanize Black people—it still contains 'flashes' of resistance. By analyzing fugitive slave advertisements, enslaver correspondence, and architectural blueprints, the study reconstructs how Peggy and her family navigated the unique challenges of 'temperate' slavery, characterized by isolation and the absence of large-scale slave communities.
The paper highlights that resistance was not limited to grand insurrections. Instead, it manifested in quotidian acts of refusal. Peggy, for instance, was described by her enslaver, Peter Russell, as 'troublesome' and prone to 'folly and violence.' The author interprets these descriptions as evidence of Peggy’s active resistance: she likely worked slowly, slandered her enslavers, and prioritized time with her children and partner, Pompadour, over her labor duties. Her 1803 escape, documented in a fugitive slave advertisement, is framed not merely as a flight to freedom but as an act of petit marronage—a temporary, strategic withdrawal to reclaim her body and family life from the control of her enslaver.
By examining architectural blueprints of the Russell estate, the author explores how the physical space of the home functioned as a tool of surveillance and control. The study posits that enslaved people likely repurposed these spaces—such as kitchens, cellars, and outbuildings—to find privacy, share information, or cultivate foodways that sustained their humanity. This approach shifts the focus from the enslaver’s intended use of the property to the ways enslaved individuals negotiated their environment to maintain personal agency and kinship connections.
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.
Sam: So the "corruption" Russell complained about was partly her spatial mobility. Every time she stepped off the property, she undercut the order he was trying to impose.
Alex: That's how Gismondi frames it. Russell read her movement as a breach of his patriarchal order. It also bears on the euphemism of "family slavery." Calling the household a family masks the structural violence of the living arrangements. Gismondi suggests that labeling these sites domestic has led historians to overlook the power dynamics built into the architecture.
Sam: So the contribution is partly synthesis. The letters, the space, the labor, and the resistance are read as one system, not as separate sources.
Alex: Yes, and it shifts the history from what was done to her toward what she did under those conditions. But the limitation constrains everything here. We are still working with fragments, and still reading through the enslaver's lens, even when we read against the grain. The authors acknowledge that.
Sam: That raises the referee's question. Does the "complaint as proof of refusal" logic generalize? If any record of "troublesome" behavior counts, how do you avoid filling the gaps with our own assumptions about what resistance should look like?
Alex: That is the main methodological constraint. The inference runs from the enslaver's frustration to the subject's refusal, and it can overreach. Critical fabulation is a tool for possibility, not a substitute for missing documentation. It lets us ask better questions of the record, but it can't recover her internal life. It may well carry over to other fragmentary records, since it depends on friction between the enslaver's expectations and the subject's conduct. But the paper doesn't test that.
Sam: So the value is in making room for Peggy in the narrative without pretending we can fully know her.
Alex: If you want the figures, the archival citations, and the method choices we skipped, you can generate a deep dive of this paper. The paper has the rest either way.
Sam: Thanks for listening.