Benjamin Drew and Samuel Gridley Howe on Race\nRelations in Early Ontario: Mythologizing and\nDebunking 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 <i>The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada</i> and Samuel Gridley Howe's 1864 <i>The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West</i>. 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 antebellum 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 <i>The Refugee</i> (1856) and Howe's <i>The Refugees</i> (1864), particularly on education and law, counters, as does a wealth of scholarship by Black scholars, the myth of Canada's racial benevolence. Résumé: L'article étudie la mythologisation et la démystification de la « supériorité morale » du Canada sur les États-Unis au chapitre des relations raciales entre Blancs et Noirs dans The Refugee: or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada (1856) de Benjamin Drew et The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West (1864) de Samuel Gridley Howe. Leurs récits exposant les effets de la loi de 1850 sur les esclaves fugitifs et ceux de la guerre de Sécession sur la réputation du Canada et des États-Unis sur le plan politique sont instructifs. La présence des Noirs dans l'histoire de l'Ontario et les rapports de cette présence avec l'histoire des États-Unis d'avant la guerre de Sécession aident en partie à comprendre l'origine du mythe de la supériorité. Le rôle de la guerre civile aux États-Unis dans la création du Canada en tant qu'entité politique a retenu l'attention des historiens, mais son incidence culturelle a été peu étudiée, notamment dans le domaine des études littéraires. Le manque de connaissances en la matière semble consubstantiel au fait que le Canada se soit défini de façon négative, en tant qu'entité non américaine, voire anti-américaine. Ce manque de connaissances a en outre contribué à entretenir le mythe de la supériorité morale du Canada sur les États-Unis quant aux relations entre Blancs et Noirs. Les travaux de Drew et de Howe sur l'importante présence de colons noirs dans les débuts de l'Ontario ont été d'une valeur inestimable pour l'étude de la diaspora noire et de l'établissement des chercheurs de liberté noirs dans le Haut-Canada ou le Canada-Ouest avant la guerre. L'analyse du discours sur le racisme de chacun des pays dans The Refugee (1856) de Drew et The Refugees (1864) de Howe, notamment en ce qui concerne l'éducation et la loi, met à mal le mythe de la bienveillance du Canada sur le plan racial, comme en font foi de nombreuses études de chercheurs noirs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".