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

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Benjamin Drew appraised that there could be around thirty thousand fugitive slaves in Canada when he got there in 1855. Most of them had settled in Upper Canada (West) and on the east by New York. Although the vast majority of slaves fled to Canada to escape from the hardships of southern slavery, they also admitted that they had left the north because legal or extra-legal discrimination against free of fugitive Blacks was very much practiced. Drew left for Canada with the idea of finding fugitive slaves enjoying freedom and who had become proper citizens of British North America, and who had left behind the suffocating reality of oppression and heightening discrimination. Since the largest wave of African American slaves that slipped away toward Canada followed the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, it meant that the difference between the reality lived in the United States and that in its northern neighbor should be shown.

To prepare his trip and gather information for his book, Drew bore with him letters of introduction by the well-known abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker, and some other Massachusetts abolitionist leaders. But, as Edelstein affirms, “perhaps his most valuable Canadian contact was a white man, the reverend Hiram Wilson, formerly one of the group of students and teachers at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati who had withdrawn from school when antislavery preaching was forbidden” (xviii). Wilson himself, the reverend Theodore Weld and other colleagues had become an important group of early religious leaders of the antislavery movement. In fact, the religious nature of this group of abolitionists, among which Benjamin Drew can also be counted, was considerably influential. In his attempt, Drew also found encouragement in the Reverend William King, who, in 1849, founded the most successful Black community in Canada called Buxton, in Elgin settlement. All these sources of inspiration illuminated Drew and served as an example to nurture a steadfast determination bathed in Christian values to denounce slavery and to expose the fugitive slaves’ free life in Canada as a direct message to the U.S.