Allen Stouffer's analysis of Ontario's response to the freedmen reveals a virulent strain of racism that helps to explain why British North Americans were slow to join their British and American counterparts in the North Atlantic antislavery triangle. After exploring the Canadian churches' mixed reaction to antislavery, he applies cliometrics to draw a socio-economic profile of Canadian antislavery's leaders and followers. Employing British, American, and Canadian primary sources, Stouffer has written this study the first book-length examination of Canadian antislavery from a British North American perspective. Earlier studies concluded that Canadian anti-slavery was largely the result of Canada's proximity to the United States, a proximity which precluded Canada's ignoring the situation. While Stouffer recognizes the importance of the American influence, he shows that the leaders of Canadian anti-slavery were immigrants from Britain who had been deeply involved in antislavery in their homeland.
This book looks at how that oft-maligned institution, the Anglican Church, coped with mass migration from Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. The book details the great array of institutions, voluntary societies and inter-colonial networks that furnished the Church with the men and money that enabled it to sustain a common institutional structure and a common set of beliefs across a rapidly-expanding ‘British world’. It also sheds light on how this institutional context contributed to the formation of colonial Churches with distinctive features and identities. One of the book’s key aims is to show how the colonial Church should be of interest to more than just scholars and students of religious and Church history. The colonial Church was an institution that played a vital role in the formation of political publics and ethnic communities in a settler empire that was being remoulded by the advent of mass migration, democracy and the separation of Church and State.