author
Benjamin Drew
1812–1903
Best known for gathering firsthand accounts from people who escaped slavery, he left behind one of the most powerful documentary records of Black refugee life in Canada. His work brings many individual voices together with unusual immediacy and care.
1 Audiobook
About the author
An American abolitionist and writer from Massachusetts, he is best remembered for A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee, published in 1856. The book grew out of interviews he conducted with formerly enslaved people who had fled to Upper Canada, preserving personal testimony at a crucial moment in the struggle over slavery.
His writing stands out because it centers the words and experiences of freedom seekers themselves. That makes his work valuable not only as antislavery literature, but also as a vivid historical source on Black life, migration, and resistance in the nineteenth century.
Although he is not as widely known today as some other abolitionist figures, his book remains an important window into the era and the people who lived through it.