Benjamin Drew

Benjamin Drew’s "North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada" (1856) is a collection of his interviews with former slaves living in Canada who had escaped from the United States, and an invaluable example of the transnational abolitionist movement’s political agenda. These edited oral accounts show how these runaways turned into African Canadians and reconfigured new meanings of Blackness in Canada, set out the foundations of a Black Canadian sense of attachment, and eventually helped to reshape North America by contributing to the birth of the Canadian nation-state.

A soul-stirring account of the abuses suffered by refugees from Southern slave states as well as fresh insights into the workings of the plantation system.

In the early 1850s, white American abolitionist Benjamin Drew was commissioned to travel to Canada West (now Ontario) to interview escaped slaves from the United States. At the time the population of Canada West was just short of a million and about 30,000 black people lived in the colony, most of whom were escaped slaves from south of the border. One of the people Drew interviewed was Harriet Tubman, who was then based in St. Catharines but made several trips to the U.S. South to lead slaves to freedom in Canada. In the course of his journeys in Canada, Drew visited Chatham, Toronto, Galt, Hamilton, London, Dresden, Windsor, and a number of other communities. Originally published in 1856, Drews book is the only collection of first-hand interviews of fugitive slaves in Canada ever done. It is an invaluable record of early black Canadian experience.

A North-Side View of Slavery. The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by Themselves, with an Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada By Drew, Benjamin