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

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The Fugitive Slave Act, passed in 1850, was a definite turning point in the history of Blacks in North America since it efficiently threatened former slaves and free Blacks alike. It also imposed firm penalties to those who aided fugitives and facilitated the means to turn in Blacks to slavery. It is no wonder that it fostered “the greatest impetus to African American migration to Canada during the antebellum period, effectively doubling the black population of what is now Ontario within a decade” (Frost 281). Certainly, from 1850 to 1860 the number of Blacks in Canada tripled to the extent that by 1852 there were 30.000 Black people in the country (Simerling 94). Despite the aforementioned suspicions and the way in which these new Blacks had to fight to be respected, they made their way through Canada and managed to establish there in search of the freedom they were denied in the United States.

This forced migration led to an enhancement of abolitionist and Black activities and encounters that also flourished and materialized in publications. Winfried Siemerling calls this precise moment the “Black Canadian Renaissance”, that is a “nineteenth-century effervescence of black writing and testimony that was transnational but written and rooted in Canada” (98). Definitely, the textual and cultural production cultivated by these freedom-seekers despite their vulnerable position as Black people was by all means driven by a desire for liberty and human rights that had been withheld by slavery and racial discrimination. This is the context in which Benjamin Drew composed and published his book of interviews and testimonies of fugitive slaves who has escaped to Canada. Moreover, the body of Victorian Canada cultural production comprises a vast array of texts and oral accounts of former slaves and free Blacks. Other than Drew’s A North-Side View of Slavery, there were published slave narratives like those of “Thomas Smallwood, the ministers Samuel Ringgold Ward and Jermaine Wesley Loguen, Austin Steward, Mahommah Bardo Maquaqua […] the two newspapers, Voice of the Fugitive, edited by the Bibbs, and the Provincial Freeman, co-founded and edited by Mary Ann Shadd; Shadd’s A Plea for Immigration and Other Writings” (Siemerling 98), among others.