To Stand and Fight Together: Richard Pierpoint and the Coloured Corps of Upper Canada

By Steve Pitt

In 1812, a 67-year-old black United Empire Loyalist named Richard Pierpoint helped raise "a corps of Coloured Men to stand and fight together" against the Americans who were threatening to invade the tiny British colony of Upper Canada.

Pierpoint’s unique fighting unit would not only see service throughout the War of 1812, it would also be the first colonial military unit reactiviated to quash the Rebellion of 1837. It would go on to serve as a police force, keeping the peace among the competing Irish immigrant gangs during the construction of the Welland Canal.

Pierpoint and the Coloured Corps are the central focus, but the sidebars featuring fascinating facts about the rise and fall of slavery in North America and the state of African-Canadians in early Canada provide an entertaining and informative supplement. Among other tidbits, readers will find out why "Good Queen Bess" launched the British slave industry and how Scottish pineapples are connected to the American Declaration of Independence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dundurn
• Release date: Feb 8, 2008
• ISBN: 9781459721012

Steve Pitt

Stevie Pitt's first children's book, Rain Tonight: A Tale of Hurricane Hazel,was nominated for the Silver Birch, Red Cedar, and Rocky Mountain awards. He has been published in many magazines and newspapers, including Toronto Life, Canadian Family, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. Currently he lives in Toronto.

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1 Fort James: West Africa, 1760

The hot African sun shone down upon a huge unnatural-looking structure that squatted like a bulldog stranded on a sandbar in the middle of the Gambia River. It was a fort made of stone and bricks, completely unlike the elegant tiny wood-and-wattle houses used by the local Africans. The fort sat on a small, triangular island barely large enough to support the main building and its two massive stone walls. Cannons glowered from gun ports on the walls, and armed men patrolled the tiny island twenty-four hours a day. The fort often seemed more in danger from nature than from human beings. High water threatened to wash away the tiny island during the rainy season. In the dry season the water ran so low people sometimes walked to the island from the nearby shore without getting their feet wet. A few scraggly trees provided almost no relief from the sun to the island’s residents.

Yet, unbelievably, this island was one of the most valuable pieces of land in West Africa. In fact, so valuable was this island that it had violently changed ownership many times over the past 300 years. The walls and the cannons weren’t there to defend the fort against Africans. They were there to fight off other Europeans who were constantly trying to snatch this miserable little sandspit and claim it as their own. The French, the Dutch, and the Portuguese had invaded the Gambia River island many times. In 1719 even a company of Welsh pirates from the British Isles had briefly taken over the island before they were forced by heat and disease to go home.

Slaves being transported overland in Africa in the 1860s.

It was all about money. The fort was known as Fort James, named after James Stuart, Duke of York, in England. James was the leader of a group of British businessmen who, in 1660, were given a charter by James’s brother, King Charles II, to found a company called the Royal Adventurers of England Trading into Africa (RAE for short). Despite their dashing name, the company made its fortune on human misery.

Fort James on the Gambia River was a trading post. From there the RAE traded British goods for African raw materials. The British wanted African gold, exotic animal hides, beeswax, gum arabic, ivory, and rare wood. But, most of all, they wanted human beings. An African could be sold at many times his or her purchase price as a slave in the British colonies of America.

For their part the Africans wanted British iron goods such as nails, cooking pots, and farm tools; glass beads for jewellery; and fine cloth, alcoholic drinks, and firearms. But gold required hard digging in the ground and a lot of luck. Beeswax and gum arabic involved days of back-breaking work and getting stung by thorns or insects. Wood had to be chopped down, hauled along the ground, and then floated down the crocodile-infested Gambia to get it to the fort. Wild beast hides required hunting and the danger of being bitten by fangs or gored by horns. By far the easiest and most profitable commodity to trade to the Europeans was other human beings.

Slavery wasn’t new to Africa or anywhere else in the world. In Asia slaves had built the Great Wall of China and worked the salt mines that made the Chinese emperors wealthy and powerful. In Greece great philosophers debated the nature of reality and the universe while slaves toiled to feed and clothe them. In Rome slaves farmed the fields, erected the buildings, and produced most of the valuable metals that allowed the well-armed Roman legions to conquer most of Europe and North Africa. In Mexico and Central America slaves built huge pyramids and then were sacrificed to the gods of their owners, the Aztecs and Mayans.

FASCINATING FACT

Sticky Gold

After slaves, gum arabic was the most valuable commodity taken out of Africa from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. In the eighteenth century, the French, English, and Dutch even fought a series of bloody battles called the Gum Wars to try to wrest control of this sticky stuff from one another.

Gum arabic is produced from two species of the acacia plant, a thorny shrub native to West Africa. The gum is a natural substance produced to seal cuts in the plant’s bark, and it is harvested in a process similar to making maple syrup and natural rubber. The tree’s bark is slashed, and the gum drips into pails where it is collected, boiled, and then transported to market in a condensed state.

Although harmless as a product and very useful to humanity, gum arabic is still linked to the misery of slavery. In the days of slavery, harvesting the gum was hard work. Often newly captured prisoners had heavy packs of gum strapped to their backs as they were marched toward European slave-trading posts. The value of the gum is demonstrated in a French trader’s balance book for 1786 where it is recorded that profit for slaves at this one single port was 4.56 million francs and the profit on the gum they brought with them was another 3 million francs.

Gum arabic was in high demand in Europe because garment manufacturers discovered that it was excellent for stabilizing dyes in new cloth so that colours didn’t rinse out when the cloth was washed. This fact prompted a fashion revolution in Europe where high-quality cloths flowed from linen, silk, and wool mills. These textiles were sold at great profit around the world, a bounty that was earned at the expense of the sweat, blood, and toil of the unfortunate slaves who had to collect and carry the gum.

Gum arabic is still used in great quantities today. Modern chemistry has replaced most gum in the clothing industry, but it is still in high demand in modern processed food, cosmetics, and shoe polish. If you have ever consumed marshmallows, gum drops, or soft drinks, or licked the gummy backs of some stamps, you have probably tasted gum arabic.

It was a hard fact of life that, until the invention of machines, nearly every thing a human ate, wore, or used had to be created by human labour. Unless people could force someone else to do the work for them, they had to do it themselves. Almost everywhere in the world slavery was accepted as a normal practice. No one questioned whether slavery was right or wrong. The question was: Who was going to be the slave and who was going to be the master?

In the eighteenth century West Africa was divided into dozens of small nations. Most were populated by three or four related clans, each controlled by a powerful local ruler. Like everywhere else, slaves were part of society.

FRIGHTENING FACT

Crime Means Slavery

Some of the crimes that could get a person sold into slavery were witchcraft, adultery, theft, and murder. Another way someone could end up as a slave was by gambling. Free men with nothing to bet could offer pieces of themselves to their opponents as a bet. They might bet one leg, and if they lost, they could bet the other leg, then an arm, and so on until they were completely under the power of another. From there they could be sold to anyone else.

The West Africans didn’t own big plantations or big mines, and therefore most kingdoms didn’t need many slaves to maintain their economy. Most members of a kingdom were also in one way or another related to the ruling family, and so slavery was more like a social station. Slaves formed the bottom layer of society, but they were often considered part of a household and were treated with a basic level of kindness and respect.

Occasionally, however, someone in a kingdom was convicted of a serious crime, or a few prisoners were captured in a local border war with a neighbouring kingdom. When that happened, the local ruler might decide to rid the community of these undesirables by selling them as slaves to a slave caravan. North African merchants made a regular habit of travelling through West Africa, hoping to trade Arab goods and Asian spices for the same products the Europeans wanted.

African slaves provided a cheap workforce for wealthy Arabs or soldiers for Muslim warlords. For hundreds of years the traditional slave routes were overland from the north and east of the African continent. Slave caravans marched hundreds of miles through the African interior. They carried silk cloth, spices, metal tools, and fine jewellery, which were traded for African goods or slaves. But Arabs travelling overland in caravans mostly on foot, on camels, and in dugout canoes couldn’t carry a fraction of the trade goods of even one huge European trading ship.

From the middle of the fifteenth century, European ships began arriving regularly on African shores — and that was as far as they went. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that people learned about germs, but Europeans quickly discovered that for some reason when they went inland they became sick very quickly and even died. Restricted to the African coast, the Europeans built forts and waited for their customers to come to them.

The English occupied Fort James on the Gambia River. North of the English the French established a slave station called St. Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River. Next to the French the Dutch built their own slave station on the nearby island of Goree. South of Fort James the Portuguese established a slave fort on a river mouth in what is now known as Guinea-Bissau. Farther south the Swedes had a slave fort called Carolsburg on the Gold Coast. Nearby, the Danish/Norwegians built Fort Fredensborg, their own slave post.

At first the arrival of the occasional European ship had little effect on the local African community. A ship arrived, a few dozen slaves were traded along with ivory, wood, wax and gum, guns, and alcohol, and then the ship departed with both sides thinking they had gotten the best part of the bargain. But events were unfolding in three faraway continents that would change Africa forever.

Across the Atlantic Ocean the Europeans had just discovered two new continents — North and South America. In Europe the Renaissance was giving way to the earliest stages of the Industrial Revolution. In Africa the local bacteria had proved deadly to the Europeans. In the Americas the reverse was true. European bacteria was lethal to Native Americans. The Europeans were able to march as far inland as they wished and remain healthy while thousands of Native Americans fell ill and died after brief contact with Europeans. Most of North America was also relatively unpopulated by European and African standards. Although the Americas lacked the spices, fine silks, and Asian-manufactured goods the Old World originally desired, Europeans discovered there were abundant precious metals, new foods, fish, tobacco, and fur-bearing animals, as well as seemingly limitless land that could be turned into colonies.

The Europeans began clearing away the native vegetation, replacing it with huge plantation farms that produced tobacco, sugar, and spices that could be sent to Europe for a fraction of the cost of their Asian counterparts. However, there was one very serious problem for the Europeans. The New World plantations required huge numbers of workers to plant, tend, and harvest these valuable crops, and they didn’t want to do the hard work themselves. Also, the plantations wouldn’t be as profitable for the owners if the workers had to be paid, so it was obvious that this workforce would have to be slaves. At first the Europeans attempted to enslave the local inhabitants, but this failed. Many Natives simply became sick and died from the European diseases. The Natives who did survive found that it was easy to escape from large plantations and disappear into the countryside where friends and relations would hide and even defend them.

Next, the Europeans attempted to use European slaves. Numerous wars in Europe gave governments an excuse to ship thousands of prisoners of war to the colonies to be put to work on the plantations. For example, the English Civil War from 1642 to 1651 enabled Oliver Cromwell’s victorious government to send thousands of Irish, Scottish, and Catholic English prisoners to the Caribbean.

There were also indentured servants. From the sixteenth century onward, fabulous stories about the wonders of the New World were published, giving hope to people looking for a way out of poverty. One method was to sign on as an indentured servant. An indentured servant signed a contract promising to work for someone else for a set number of years (usually seven but sometimes longer) to pay for the cost of transportation to America. At the end of that contract the servant was set free and was given enough money, clothes, and land to make a living as a free person.

To people who were homeless and starving in Europe, this situation sounded very tempting, but once they got over to the plantations they discovered that conditions were quite bad. They were housed and fed like livestock. They were considered their master’s property. They could be bought or sold by their master. They were forbidden to marry without their master’s permission, and if they tried to leave, they were hunted down, arrested, and brought back to face cruel punishments. Many indentured servants didn’t live long enough to see freedom, and if they did, their masters often failed to provide them with the land or money they were promised. Stranded and destitute, they often signed on as indentured servants again. White servants in the Caribbean became known as redlegs because of the way the hot tropical sun burned their bare legs as they worked.

At first the plantation owners thought they had the answer. The Europeans were much more resistant to European diseases, and if they escaped, they had nowhere to run because the Natives wouldn’t hide or help them. Unfortunately, this experiment also proved to be a disaster. Many European indentured servants were already weak from mistreatment at home, and many didn’t survive the long, unhealthy ocean voyage chained up in the holds of ships. If they survived the voyage, even healthy Europeans had a hard time adapting to the tropical climate. They, too, died by the hundreds, leaving the wealthy plantation owners looking for yet another source of cheap human labour.

It didn’t take them long to figure out that Africa was the answer to their labour problem. Africans were used to the hot climate found in equatorial America, and they were more resistant to European diseases than Native Americans. If they ran away, they could be easily identified because they didn’t resemble the indigenous inhabitants.

FASCINATING FACT

The O’Bogey Man

Not all Europeans were affected by African diseases. Some had natural immunity just like native Africans. One notable example