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

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Consequently, the cross-border Black communities of Canada West reveal themselves as the locale where the crystallizing debates about abolitionism were taking place. They also showcase the importance of getting their voices heard and their attempt to include themselves in the slave narratives literary trend, a genre that was galvanizing the attention of both abolitionists and North American citizens alike. This is the historical, cultural and intellectual context in which Benjamin Drew tried to include his oral interviews into the abolitionist agenda and, in so doing, participated in reshaping the testimonies of fugitive slaves within the literary imprint of transnational slave narratives.

In defense of Continental Abolitionism through Canadian Narratives of Fugitive Slaves: Benjamin Drew’s The Refugee: Or The Narratives of Fugitives Slaves in Canada

In the mid-1850s and sponsored by the Canadian Anti-Slavery Society, Boston abolitionist Benjamin Drew embarked on a tour throughout Canada West aiming to counter and contest the pro-slavery viewpoint that had been put forth in Nehemiah Adam’s 1854 A South-Side View of Slavery. Adams’s work was propelled by his disgust at the national and international impact of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and in it he intended to respond to Stowe’s novel by offering his own observations of the “true” state of southern slavery. Adams was a pastor of the Essex Street Congregational Church in Boston, who had previously – and publicly – denounced slavery and its consequences. Yet, shortly after its publication and circulation the book earned the reputation of being a proslavery text, or, to a certain extent, a succinct defense of slavery. Indeed, A South-Side View was duly criticized because it avoided advocating for Black emancipation on U.S. soil and for refusing to call for an end to slavery. Rather, it only went as far as to promote reforms and to call for the cessation of what the author partially perceived to be northern meddling in southern matters.