Legacies of Slavery

In 1778, Alexander Henry “the Elder,” a rich merchant in Montreal, found himself inconvenienced by a non-paying debtor. So, he found a way to pay himself. The man who owed him money was the American land baron William Gilliland, builder of an outsized wood-land empire he was piecing together on the Adirondack flank of Lake Champlain. In 1771, one of Gilliland’s enslaved Black laborers had made a break for Canada. The outraged Gilliland flagged “my man Ireland’s” escape in northern papers, but in Montreal, Ireland would know his freedom for seven years. Then Henry learned Ireland was living in his city. He tracked him down, had him put under arrest. Got a court order that backed his own legal claim on Gilliland’s errant property, and won permission from the Quebec governor to sell his newly seized asset to high-paying bidders from Ontario. And that’s where the trail cools, just before a sale that likely went without a hitch.

It was Ireland’s fourth enslavement. The first one was his kidnapping in Guinea, followed by months of lightless, rank, immobilized captivity below-decks, at roiling sea. After this would be a spell of hard labor on a plantation in the West Indies, where captured Africans were “seasoned” for new lives as human chattel. Gilliland, Ireland’s third enslaver, likely bought the man at auction and gave him his new name. Ireland, of course, already had a name, and a culture, language, history and home, but all of that was scrubbed. Ireland’s fourth owners were the Ontarians. Other buyers may have followed.

Ireland’s saga is a reminder.

In Adirondack historical accounts he is a bit player in the biography of a swashbuckling pioneer—the slave who got away from Gilliland along with everything else this land baron eventually lost: the favor he hoped to curry with the new government, his fortune and, eventually, his mind. In these