This former Toronto mayor once owned slaves

As Toronto takes up the issue of renaming Dundas Street, the case of Samuel Bickerton Harman is another reminder of the dark facts to be found in our history.

Thestar.com
July 11, 2022
Mark Maloney

Thank God the City of Toronto has never named anything after him!

This week, a staff report will reach the city’s executive committee with details on how Toronto might rename Dundas Street. The idea gained momentum last year after Henry Dundas, the British politician from two centuries ago whose name adorns places across the province, came to be seen as a figure who slowed the end of the slave trade.

The timeline of picking a new name for the city artery now looks to extend into 2023, city staff say, in part to conduct more research on potential choices. Doing some homework now might pay off in avoiding future embarrassments, lest we choose to honour someone with an unsavoury past -- for example, Toronto’s 18th mayor, Samuel Bickerton Harman.

Few in the city now know that Harman was a plantation and slave owner and part of a slave-owning family legacy that spanned five generations, from the 1690s to the 1840s, on the small Caribbean island of Antigua. However, the Griot Institute for Africana Studies, in collaboration with the Museum of Antigua and Barbuda, has publicly documented 14 decades of Harman slave-ownership on their online database.

Though he was born in 1819 in Brompton (London) England, Toronto’s future municipal leader had spent his youth in the West Indies where his father, the Hon. Samuel Harman IV, served as chief baron of the Court of the Exchequer, and owned Harman’s, a 118-acre family plantation in northeast Antigua’s St. Philip’s Parish.

In 1832, just two years prior to the creation of the new City of Toronto, records show that 142 slaves were forced into hot, grinding, and back-breaking manual labour at Harman’s, and all to do with the production of sugar cane.

In the book “Plantations of Antigua,” renowned slavery historian Agnes Meeker has written about “the enormous economic, social, political, even military upheaval” caused by sugar production. Particularly impacted, as a result of its enriched planting soil, unlimited sunshine, and excellent harbours was the island of Antigua, first colonized by the British in the 1600s.

As Meeker notes, Antigua became a major source of the world’s sugar cane, “a preeminent crop upon which economies succeeded or failed, societies grew, and money flowed.” As demand for sugar soared, Harmans, and the other white plantation owners who ruled the island, became some of the wealthiest merchants of their time.

Bucknell University, a small liberal arts college in central Pennsylvania, details in its Antigua Sugar Mills Project the legacy of “enslavement, oppression, exploitation, and murder of Africans and people of African descent” in Antigua. According to the project, the plantation and the sugar mill were “the primary symbols of slavery, of the machinery that created and sustained European colonization, empire, and economic prosperity for generations.”

This was not reflected in the conditions for those toiling there. Slaves, including those on the Harman plantation, worked under the whip of a master and under the tropical sun, for 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week.

Plantation existence was one of overwork, unsanitary conditions, malnutrition, brutality, disease, searing heat, and hard, grinding, back-breaking labour. Slaves worked even when sick and were punished for not working fast enough, or hard enough, or for defying authority. Punishment could include imprisonment, whippings, even torture and mutilation.

In 1833, the British Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British West Indies, Canada and the Cape of Good Hope (southern Africa), meaning that it was now illegal to buy or own a person. As the Centre at University College notes, “the slave trade had been abolished in 1807 but it took another 26 years to effect the emancipation of the enslaved.” Even then, that emancipation would then become an apprenticeship system that tied newly freed slaves to yet another form of unfree labour, albeit for a fixed term.

With the legislation of 1833 also came a fund that compensated plantation owners for the slaves who were to be freed. Official records kept by University College in London show that in February 1837 Harman’s plantation was unsuccessful in its claim for 2,038 pounds to compensate for the 146 who were enslaved on the family estate.

Having grown up in Antigua, Toronto’s future mayor returned to Britain as a young man to attend King’s College School in London. In 1840 he travelled back to the Caribbean, to begin his career as a clerk with the Colonial Bank in Barbados. That same year, his father made a will that bequeathed Harman’s, the family’s plantation estate, to his son, subject to him paying 1,000 pounds to each of his brothers.

Harman arrived in Toronto with his wife and family in 1848 to look after a family investment in Canada. Though by now living in Toronto, The Antigua Almanac of 1851 showed Samuel Bickerton Harman as the owner of Harman’s, the 118-acre plantation where from 146 to 148 slaves had been forced to work.

Meanwhile, first elected to Toronto council in 1866, Harman became the city’s mayor in 1869 and 1870, serving two one-year terms. Today, a Harman family cemetery still exists in St. Philip’s Parish, Antigua, along with the ruins of the now-abandoned Harman sugar mill.