Читать книгу Benjamin Drew. The Refugee. Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada онлайн

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One of these well-received Black Nova Scotian narratives was A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black by Methodist minister John Marrant, which was published in 1785. Among the circumstances that fostered the drive of British abolitionism, Siemerling includes “Mansfield’s 1772 decision against slavery on English soil, the 1775 Dunmore Proclamation promising freedom for black support in the American war, and the need, after the humbling British defeat against slaveholding colonies, to consolidate a battered national self-image through moral superiority” (64-65). Certainly, the weight on morality and religious conscience played an important part in rethinking the political image and attitude of England and the British Empire. Cassandra Pybus argues that “material benefit might be sacrificed for moral satisfaction” and this, beyond a doubt, signals a “significant shift in British thinking” (105). A fact of utmost importance was that British intellectuals had come “to an intensified selfscrutiny about the imperial enterprise, in which complicity in slavery was seen to have sullied the moral character of the nation” (Pybus 105).