[content warning for racist language]

“The most important act of his life, James McGill wrote his will.”

-Hugh MacLennan

James McGill (1744-1813) was a prominent Scottish merchant who made a fortune trading furs and other goods in the colonial New World. McGill’s will bequeathed £10 000 and his 46-acre Burnside estate to the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning (RIAL), on the condition that they establish a college in his name within ten years of his death. In 1821, a royal charter from King George IV established McGill College as an institution with the authority to confer degrees. Mainstream historical narratives represent James McGill as working hard to accumulate the capital that would eventually be used to create the University. These narratives overlook the exploitation attendant to McGill’s accumulation of wealth.

McGill spent his first decade on the continent earning a fortune in the fur trade. He and other fur traders were active mostly during the winter (as winter pelts were more valuable), trading with multiple Indigenous communities who awaited their annual arrival. As McGill became a more established businessman, he petitioned for “free trade in Indian lands.” He eventually founded the Beaver Club – a dining club for “men highly respectable in society who had passed their best days in a savage country and had encountered the difficulties and dangers incident to a pursuit of the fur trade of Canada.” This racist romanticism is characteristic of McGill’s demographic—the Anglo-European elite who were empowered to shape early British North American society. This group of men saw relations with Indigenous people as a conflict between civilization and savagery, to which they sacrificed themselves and emerged victorious.

McGill has been characterized as “ a businessman who was ready to undertake pretty well ‘any commission for a commission.’ Wine, tobacco, guns and ammunition, ropes and ships’ riggings, linen breeches and men’s shirts, ladies’ dresses and shoes, were fairly regular additions to the usual run of trade goods.” One might also add ‘humans’ to this list since on at least two separate occasions, McGill participated in the slave trade. In the strategically positioned trading center of Michilimackinac, McGill’s friend John Askin owned a store which sold enslaved Black and Indigenous people. In 1784, McGill sold Caesar and Flora, two enslaved Black people, to merchant Levy Solomon on behalf of distiller Thomas Corry. In 1787, he sold four enslaved Indigenous people to Jacques Lefrenier on behalf of the Department of Indian Affairs which had promised to replace any enslaved soldiers who were killed while fighting for the British. James McGill had signed a report advocating for the abolition of slavery in this same year. However, when the House of Assembly of Lower Canada introduced an abolition bill in 1793, McGill – a member of the House – voted in favour of maintaining slavery.

James McGill was also a slave owner himself. In the same year he signed the abolitionist document, he owned at least one enslaved woman named Louise. The following year, he purchased a Black woman, Sarah, from merchant Jean Louis Cavilhe for £56. Unsurprisingly, it is difficult to recover enslaved peoples’ stories from official historical records. For instance, historian Frank Mackey has surmised that Sarah is listed as Marie-Charles McGill in the Dictionnaire des esclaves et de leurs propriétaires au Canada français; as ‘Charle Marie… de chez madame mcgille’ in a 1798 hospital record; as Charlotte Cavilhe when in 1802 she married Jamaican widower Joseph Frank as a free woman; as Marie Charles Caville at her son’s baptism in 1803; as Marie Charles MacGill when the same son died two years later; as Charlotte M’ghil when her second son was born in 1805; and simply as Charlotte when she died in hospital on April 23 or 24, 1809. Additionally, historians studying James McGill have made limited efforts to find the stories of those he enslaved. For instance, in Stanley Frost’s 186-page biography on him, only two passing comments are made about slavery. Both are designed to morally redeem him. Frost writes:

“With regard to the institution of slavery, McGill must have been very familiar with it during his Indian trading years, and if he spent some years in the Carolinas, he lived in a society where slavery was very much part of the social fabric. So when we hear that in 1788 he purchased from Jean Cavilhe at a cost of fifty pounds a negress named Sarah, aged about twenty-five, to be a servant in his household, it must be remembered that McGill was conforming to the mores of his time… No doubt Sarah was well treated in the McGill household, but the fact remains that she was purchased and owned as a slave. James McGill was a man of the eighteenth century, not the twentieth.”

Ignoring for a moment Frost’s alarming use of the archaic term ‘negress’ in 1995, we must intervene in the narrative that he is fashioning here. Of course, it is important to historicize McGill and recognize that slavery in the eighteenth century was regarded according to different moral standards than it is today. However, to brush this horror aside is to ignore the fact that James McGill’s wealth—and the consequent establishment of the university—was enabled by dispossession. By using words like ‘conforming,’ Frost absurdly implies that McGill was the one victimized by these transactions. Such historical power structures must be recuperated not as the casual racial prejudice and economic pragmatism that Frost describes, but as a tyrannical labour relation inextricable from the profits with which McGill University was founded.

“With regard to the institution of slavery, McGill must have been very familiar with it during his Indian trading years, and if he spent some years in the Carolinas, he lived in a society where slavery was very much part of the social fabric. So when we hear that in 1788 he purchased from Jean Cavilhe at a cost of fifty pounds a negress named Sarah, aged about twenty-five, to be a servant in his household, it must be remembered that McGill was conforming to the mores of his time… No doubt Sarah was well treated in the McGill household, but the fact remains that she was purchased and owned as a slave. James McGill was a man of the eighteenth century, not the twentieth” (64).

Ignoring for a moment Frost’s alarming use of the archaic term ‘negress’ in 1995, we must intervene in the narrative that he is fashioning here. Of course, it is important to historicize McGill and recognize that slavery in the eighteenth century was regarded according to different moral standards than it is today. However, to brush this horror aside is to ignore the fact that James McGill’s wealth—and the consequent establishment of the university—were partially enabled by this deprival of people’s freedom. By using words like ‘conforming,’ Frost absurdly implies that McGill was the one victimized by these transactions. Such historical power structures must be recuperated not as the casual racial prejudice and economic pragmatism that Frost describes, but as a tyrannical labour relation inextricable from the profits with which McGill University was founded.

Additionally, 18th century slavery in Montreal was very different from antebellum slavery in the American South. The Southern economy was dependent on slavery and there were few free Black people. In Montreal, race was not conclusively tied to full citizenship. The American Revolution led to an influx of both free and enslaved Black people in Lower Canada. For example, Caesar Johonnot was a former slave from Boston who came to Montreal around 1785 and was literate during a time when most whites in the city were not. In 1789, he was hired by James McGill and others to manage their Montreal Distillery Company, “a well-paid position that he held until the company folded in 1794.” Johonnot’s wife, usually called Margaret Campbell, is also an interesting figure. It is presumed, though uncertain, that she was Black. She was involved in her husband’s financial affairs, leasing the distillery on their property, and worked as a seamstress for James McGill’s widow, who left her £10 in her will. Several other free Black people were employed in the McGill’s home. In other words, slavery was not as big a part of the economic and social fabric of Montreal as it was in the antebellum South. To enslave a person in 18th century Montreal was arguably a more deliberate act: the denial of a freedom that, though obviously limited, was exercised by free racialized peoples throughout the society. McGill observed and respected the freedom of Black individuals such as Caesar Johonnot and Margaret Campbell, while choosing to enslave others.

Into the 19th century, as slavery became less common and eventually abolished, the status of formerly enslaved peoples’ freedom grew increasingly ambiguous. For instance, Jacques remained with the McGill family until 1838—25 years after James McGill’s death and five years after the Slavery Abolition Act was passed. He was not listed as property in McGill’s will. In McGill’s widow Charlotte Guillimin’s will, she requested that her son (McGill’s stepson) Francois Desriviers keep ‘Jack’ until his death and she left Jacques some money. Initially a slave, it seems that Jacques became somewhat free, though not explicitly so, and had no means to actualize this freedom. The very definition of slavery is thus debatable and introduces another set of historiographic challenges into its study. What remains clear is that the establishment of McGill University was facilitated at the expense of Caesar, Flora, Sarah, Jacques, and other enslaved people’s freedom. Rather than rushing to defend such violence as ‘conforming’ to social norms, historians should take on the responsibility of illuminating historical power relations, so we might better discern their persistence today, as well as our indebtedness to those subjugated in the past.

Further Reading
James McGill of Montreal, Stanley Frost
James McGill’s Will

“Hochelaga stands in the bright light of history for only one day.”

– Bruce Trigger, McGill anthropologist, in Cartier’s Hochelaga and the Dawson Site

“The mystery of what happened to these people has puzzled historians, archaeologists, linguists, and anthropologists for generations.”

– Darren Bonaparte, Mohawk historian, in Kaniatarowanenneh River of the Iroquois: The Aboriginal History of the St. Lawrence River

Long before the founding of McGill or the confederation of Canada, Indigenous peoples resided in the territories on which the university has been constructed. The most famous documentation of Indigenous life on these lands was written in 1535 by French explorer Jacques Cartier, who initiated the colonial project of New France at the behest of King Francis I. On his first voyage in 1534, Cartier kidnapped Dom Agaya and Taignoagny, sons of the chief of Stadacona, a St. Lawrence Iroquoian village located near present day Quebec City. After being ‘exhibited’ in France, Dom Agaya and Taignoagny told Cartier of a river that would lead him to the continent’s interior and the Iroquois settlement of Hochelaga. During his second voyage, Cartier took their guidance and became the first European to explore the St Lawrence River, a “discovery” regarded as his most significant.

After crossing the Atlantic for the second time, Cartier returned to Stadacona with Dom Agaya and Taignoagny. In his logbook, Cartier writes of their attempt to foil his journey to Hochelaga: “They dressed up three men as devils, arraying them in black and white dog-skins, with horns as long as one’s arm and their faces coloured black as coal, and unknown to us put them into a canoe.” According to Cartier’s account, Dom Agaya and Taignoagny warned that their god Cudouagny, as well as three apparent Christian deities had announced at Hochelaga that “there would be so much ice and snow that all would perish.” It seems likely that after a year in France, Dom Agaya and Taignoagny had started to recognize the nation’s imperialist agenda. It is possible that their warning was a ruse meant to deter Cartier from further exploration. Regardless, their predictions did indeed prove accurate that coming winter.

Before facing the harshness of winter however, Cartier explored the St. Lawrence river and arrived in Hochelaga on October 2, 1535. While the exact location of Hochelaga is unclear, Cartier writes of a village surrounded by expansive cornfields at the base of a large mountain (Mount Royal). As such, many suspect that Hochelaga was situated near where McGill currently stands. The fortified village was surrounded by three rows of palisades and contained at least fifty bark-covered longhouses – historians estimate that its population was around 1500 to 3000 residents. In other words, Hochelaga was not a small settlement but a major center and capital of sorts.

Cartier and his men were met by Hochelaga’s residents at a fire near the wood’s edge where they exchanged gifts, before proceeding to a welcome ceremony inside the village itself. This custom of twice meeting a distinguished guest resembles an Iroquois ceremony that is still celebrated today on the Six Nations reserve near Brantford, Ontario. During the welcome ceremony, Cartier was introduced to the chief of Hochelaga. Cartier gave Hochelaga’s inhabitants axes, knives, rings, and rosaries, while the Hochelagan Iroquois offered the Europeans fish, soup, beans, corn bread, and, during the ceremony, tobacco. Cartier’s logbook, likely written by a companion rather than Cartier himself, describes this encounter with Hochelaga’s inhabitants as such:

“During this interval, we came across on the way many of the people of the country, who brought us fish and other provisions, at the same time dancing and showing great joy at our coming. And in order to win and keep their friendship, the Captain [Cartier] made them a present of some knives, beads, and other small trifles, whereat they were greatly pleased. And on reaching Hochelaga, there came to meet us more than a thousand persons, men, women, and children, who gave us as good a welcome as ever father gave to his son, making great signs of joy…”

The following day, Cartier ascended the mountain, which he named Mount Royal in honour of his patron. Cartier realized the top of the mountain to be an ideal location for settlement, as its panoramic view provided a strategic advantage. The view from the top of Mount Royal also alerted Cartier to the Lachine Rapids and the impossibility of proceeding down the St. Lawrence. The following day, on October 4th, Cartier and his men began the journey back to Stadacona.

In line with Dom Agaya and Taignoagny’s warning, ice obstructed their access to the Atlantic forcing these Frenchmen to spend their first winter on Turtle Island. Donnacona, Chief of the Stadacona, helped Cartier and his crew overcome the threat of scurvy and starvation that winter. However, he was kidnapped by Cartier and died in France the following year.

Hochelaga was likely destroyed soon after Cartier’s visit. It is not mentioned in any account of Cartier’s return to the region in 1541 nor does Samuel de Champlain find the village when he attempts to seek it out in 1603. No other known account of Hochelaga exists and no material remains have been discovered.

Cartier’s visit to Hochelaga is critical to the establishment of settler colonialism in what is now called Canada. It is important to recognize that the widespread acknowledgement of Hochelaga’s existence is based on Cartier’s notes. Because his logbooks adhere to settler society’s methods of recording history and because he is a celebrated figure in Western history, Cartier’s account of Hochelaga is generally accepted to be reliable. Meanwhile, Indigenous histories not recorded by settlers are often dismissed as unverifiable. Furthermore, many early accounts of Hochelaga are adulterated by colonial fantasies.

For many centuries, many historians have sought look beyond nationalist mythology to uncover Hochelaga’s history and mysterious disappearance. Some of the main theories are that Hochelaga’s population was killed by diseases transmitted by Europeans, that they relocated to rebuild a new village surrounded by more fertile soil, or they were driven out by other Indigenous nations. With regard to the latter, the general consensus among historians is that European colonization up the St. Lawrence River through the 17th century gave rise to greater conflict between and among various Indigenous nations and rivalling European colonies for control of the lucrative fur trade. Evidence from the oral tradition suggests that Hochelaga was inhabited by St. Lawrence Iroquoians before the Haudenosaunee confederacy– formed in response to colonialism– became the primary occupant of the territory.