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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #60166 Easy History of anti-slavery movements

Read the following passage.

A. In Britain, abolitionists had argued against the transatlantic slave trade since the 1770s. Their ideas influenced John Graves Simcoe, the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada. On 14 March 1793, Sergeant Adam Vrooman tied up Chloe Cooley, a Black woman he enslaved, and with the help of two other men took her by boat across the Niagara River to sell her in New York. Two witnesses reported the violent sale to Simcoe and the Executive Council. Simcoe and Attorney General John White used the incident to introduce a bill, and an amended compromise became law on 9 July 1793.

B. Farther east, bills to end slavery failed in Lower Canada in 1793 and 1801, but court cases undermined it. In February 1798, James Monk, a judge with abolitionist sympathies, released an enslaved woman named Charlotte on a technicality. Britain banned the trade in enslaved people throughout its empire in 1807. In 1833 alone, abolitionist petitions in Britain gathered 1.3 million signatures. The Slavery Abolition Act became law on 28 August 1833 and came into force on 1 August 1834, freeing more than 800,000 enslaved Africans in most British colonies.

C. In 1850 the United States passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed people who had escaped enslavement in the North to be captured and returned to the South. In the next decade, between 15,000 and 20,000 African American refugees moved to Canada. On 26 February 1851, the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada was formed in Toronto to promote abolition and to help these refugees. Its leaders came from both Black and White communities. In April 1851, Frederick Douglass, who had himself escaped enslavement, spoke in Toronto in a lecture series the society sponsored. A Toronto women's association collected almost 14,000 signatures for a petition in 1853.

D. Historians stress what these laws did not do. The 1793 Act did not free any enslaved person in Upper Canada, and it still allowed sales inside the colony and across the border. The 1833 Act gave most enslaved people in British North America only partial freedom, because it freed children under six while others had to serve four to six more years as apprentices. Those formerly enslaved received no compensation. Historians also question the persistent myth that enslaved people in Canada were treated better than those in the United States and the Caribbean, since the same belief that Black people were less than human justified slavery in all three places.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

- 1.
The Upper Canada law of 1793 left people who were already held as slaves in bondage.

- 2.
Two people who saw a woman being taken away by boat told the leaders what happened.

- 3.
A judge let a woman in bondage go free because of a small point in the rules.

- 4.
Campaigners in Britain helped to shape how Simcoe thought about slavery.

- 5.
A man who had got away from slavery himself gave a talk in Toronto.

- 6.
Over one million people signed calls against slavery within a single year.

- 7.
The Toronto society against slavery signed up several thousand paying members in its first year.

- 8.
The British law of 1833 that ended slavery came into force the following year.

- 9.
After their bondage ended, people who had been enslaved were not paid anything for their losses.

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