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

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Under these new perspectives, Granville Sharp took part in the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, which was founded in 1786 in response to the noticeable poverty and suffering of those Black former partners in the war who found themselves rising in numbers in London. It is precisely in this very context that a plan to find a settlement in Sierra Leone to alleviate their situation originated (Pybus 2006, 105–19). Indeed, “important chapters like the evacuation of blacks to Nova Scotia, as well as their subsequent part in the story of the ‘Province of Freedom’ of Sierra Leone, can be understood in the light of genuine British support for black subjects and humanitarian philanthropy” (Siemerling 66). These movements were also a reaction to a pressing need for moral capital after the lost war and the humiliating 1783 Treaty of Paris. All these developments helped to prepare the ground for the ensuing Underground Railroad, and they also informed the course of Canada during the nineteenth century, making the country an important site of Black experience and cultural expression. Despite the frequent racist realities that Black people had to endure in eighteenth-century Nova Scotia and nineteenth-century Upper Canada alike, this new context of a more nuanced humanitarian stance paved the way for the emergence of Canada’s boastful selfimage as a compassionate Black Canaan.