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

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Indeed, central to Drew’s intellectual plan to counteract slavery was to show how fugitives were performing as free people in Canada. Cognizant that for some American leaders the representatives of fugitive slaves who had started to write their personal accounts, were simply a minor representation of the ex-fugitive slaves who had been granted freedom, Drew started to muse about his own project. He was driven to overcome the suspicions that revolved around prominent exslaves like Frederick Douglass or Josiah Hensen. The mistrust came from the exceptional lives that slave narratives narrated and “the polemical quality of abolitionists and their literature,” since it could mean that “any account published under their auspices could be judged untrustworthy” and “necessarily reflecting their strong biases and projecting their propaganda” (Edelstein xx).

In view of this, Drew opted to change the perception of the slave narratives by recording the testimony of more than one hundred fugitive slaves, who, with the exception of Harriet Tubman, were totally unknown to the public. A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada includes the testimonies, in a first-person narrative style, of Black men and women from fourteen Canadian communities who had been previously free or enslaved in the U.S. south. Drew transcribed their statements after visiting their communities in St Catharines, Toronto, London, Chatham, Buxton, Dresden/Dawn, Windsor, Sandwich, and Amherstburg. These Black fugitives that peopled the collection had had a vast range of occupations, and they had worked as house slaves, coopers, field hands, blacksmiths or storekeppers among others.