Benjamin Drew

Born in 1812, he was an American abolitionist from Boston and a Methodist minister. He is chiefly known for The Refugee; or the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, a mid-19th-century book built from interviews with people who had escaped slavery and rebuilt their lives across the border.

His work was tied closely to the antislavery movement. Accounts of his book note that it was supported by the Canadian Anti-Slavery Society, and it stands out for letting formerly enslaved people speak in their own words about escape, danger, family separation, and freedom.

For listeners today, his importance is less as a literary celebrity than as a careful collector of testimony. The stories he preserved remain valuable historical records of resistance, survival, and the lived reality of slavery in North America.