Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe of Upper Canada, anti-slavery advocate

On this date in 1793, the Act Against Slavery was passed in Upper Canada (present day Ontario), also prohibiting the importation of slaves into Lower Canada (present day Quebec).  This was a full fourteen years before the British Empire outlawed the slave trade, forty years before it outlawed slavery altogether, and sixty-nine years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.