of slavery with him when he returned to Canada in the fall of 1791 to assume his post of Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada (now the province of Ontario.)

Partly, no doubt, because the climate militated against the labour-intensive planter economy of the American Deep South, slavery never really gained a foothold in what would become Canada, and by 1810 Simcoe had engineered passage of a law outlawing slavery outright throughout the colony.

Let me repeat that: Simcoe ensured the illegality of slavery here in 1810. The entire British Commonwealth would not follow suit until 1833, when “the peculiar institution” was outlawed in England and in all her overseas possessions. In the much-lauded movie Lincoln we saw the Americans grappling to do the same thirty years later, and even thenonly when in the throes of a bloody Civil War.

These dates, these years, matter. The young people hurling bricks at the police in the streets of Ferguson are likely the great-grandchildren of slaves. The older folk beside them almost certainly are. The memories, the deep scars, left by the fact your granddaddy flat-out owned my great-granddaddy, owned my great-grandmomma, was entitled to have his way with her, that legacy dies hard. Hard. It engenders lasting mistrust, fear, hatred. Officer Wilson’s vivid grand jury narrative of Michael Brown charging his police cruiser even through a hail of bullets is the South’s worst nightmare, conjuring memories of slave rebellions that saw white planters and their wives slaughtered in their beds, their babies butchered in their cradles. It happened. It didn’t