Benjamin Drew and Samuel Gridley Howe on Race Relations in Early Ontario: Mythologizing and Debunking Canada West’s “Moral Superiority”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines the respective mythologizing and debunking of Canada’s “moral superiority” over the United States on matters of white-Black race relations in Benjamin Drew’s 1856 The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada and Samuel Gridley Howe’s 1864 The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West. Their accounts of the impact of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and American Civil War on Canadian and American political reputations are instructive. The historical presence of Black people in the making of Ontario’s history and its relationship to American ante-bellum history helps to understand in part from where the superiority myth originates. The impact of the American Civil War on the making of Canada as a political entity has been studied by historians but its cultural force is less studied, particularly in literary studies. The relative absence of such knowledge seems part and parcel of the negative definition of Canada as not-American, indeed anti-American, and has helped to continue the mythology of Canada’s moral superiority over the US on matters of white-Black relations. Drew’s and Howe’s work on the substantial presence of Black settlers in early Ontario has been invaluable for the study of both the diaspora and settlement of Black freedom seekers in Upper Canada/Canada West in the antebellum period. Analysis of the rhetoric of national differences on racism in Drew’s The Refugee (1856) and Howe’s The Refugees (1864), particularly on education and law, counters, as does a wealth of scholarship by Black scholars, the myth of Canada’s racial benevolence.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".