Career
Influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment, MacGregor published Letter to a Clergyman Urging him to set free a Black Girl he held in Slavery in Halifax, Nova Scotia (1788). According to historian Barry Cahill, this document "is the earliest and most outstanding production of white antislavery literature in Canada." Historian Alan Wilson describes the document as "a landmark on the road to personal freedom in province and country." Finally, historian Robin Winks writes it is "the sharpest attack to come from a Canadian pen even into the 1840s. He had also brought about a public debate which soon reached the courts."
Are they not one spirit with the Lord, of his flesh and his bones?" He also purchased slaves" freedom.
He arrived in Nova Scotia at age 27 (1786) and lived the rest of his life there, dying in Pictou, Nova Scotia, at age 71.
