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

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The relationship between the fugitive slaves, and later African Canadian citizens, and the temperance movement became intrinsically attached since it was a legitimate way toward achieving a personhood. In this respect, Bridgen confirms that, “although Canadian Blacks were legally free after 1834, Whites still saw them as economically and socially inferior. Black leaders believed that remaining temperate would prove to Whites that they were a moral people, who deserved their freedom” (64). Put briefly, under the influence of the temperance movement, the vast majority of “African Canadians hoped that temperance would lead to respectability” (Bridgen 67). It is only logical then that the practice of temperance appears throughout Benjamin Drew’s collection. As a proper abolitionist-driven narrative, Black reverends as well as Black men and women who were fugitive slaves recount and muse about the unwholesome consequences of alcohol. Rev. R.S.W. Sorrick recalls his time under slavery in the U.S. and feels horrifed for the consumption of alohol and the moral corruption it brought to enslaved people: “I never saw so much spirit consumed by the colored people as at that time, but most of those who were among the vicious, are dead and gone. Now the evil of drinking is comparatively slight, pretty much done away, and those who have come in within a few years, are generally well behaved and industrious”. This denunciation of the pernicious nature of spirits is also addressed to masters and overseers. For instance, in John Holmes’ recollection the overseers appear as ill-mannered and doomed due to drinking: “Another brother was very hard toward his wife, his slaves, and everybody else. His name was B–J–. He was so bad he could n’t live any longer – he killed himself by drinking a quart of brandy from a case-bottle – a case-bottle full. Next morning he was dead”. Holmes’s image of the evil U.S. slaveholders is contraposed to the Canadian benevolences: “The colored people are mostly given to hard work: for the time we have been here, we have made great progress in this country”.