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

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The morality attached to these new African Canadian subjects is also divulged when they value, and nurture, the exclusion of alcohol in Black communities. Definitely, temperance was a much-valued political issue for these ex-slaves as part of their own nineteenth-century political plan. Both before and after the American Civil War, whites associated alcohol and drugs with Blackness and enslavement. The white supremacist fear of African American freedom manifested itself in the circulation of stereotypes of Blacks as drunkards or violent individuals. As Carole Lynn Stewart expounds, “[w]hile that association is a product of the transatlantic slave trade and the creation of a ‘black Atlantic,’ the revolutionary and antebellum periods in the United States were formative in conflating inebriety with enslaved Africans” (7). Hence, during slavery, “theories of ‘black savagery’ and the predisposition to lust and intemperance were commonly associated with African people” (Stewart 7). The association of Black skin with disease as well as the link between alcohol and poverty bears similarities, as does chattel slavery and the metaphors of slavery with the bottle. Both chattel slavery and alcoholism were states of defeat and humiliation for a society that was at the outset of developing highly individualist and white supremacist ideologies. The traffic of slaves and the beginning of the rum and distilled alcohol trade bore a direct and ideological connection. The intertwined nature of African bodies as commodities and materials like sugar and rum “also undergirds the meaning of freedom for numerous American temperance reformers who understood temperance as coeval with actual political and social freedom” (Stewart 10).