Former Toronto Mayor John Tory questioned the quality of the city’s research on Henry Dundas
Before he resigned in February 2022, Toronto Mayor John Tory questioned the facts behind the decision to rename Dundas Street, and hinted that he was prepared to revisit the decision.
The reason? The research conducted by city staff. Tory had doubts about the quality of their research into the legacy of Henry Dundas:
…I wouldn’t know what to believe, frankly, in terms of the history. I mean, there’s been so many different accounts of history from a lot of people who have a lot of letters after their name, that you don’t really know what has gone on. And that’s part of the difficulty in all of this, is to judge what actually was the case with respect to Mr. Dundas. And I still don’t know. I’m still kind of confused about that… There’s evidence on all sides of this and I think somehow we have to do a better job of sorting it out than we have done so far.
The former mayor made his comments following submissions to the city by numerous historians of British and Scottish history who disputed the city’s version of the facts (see excerpts below). They were virtually unanimous is saying that city staff erred when they blamed Henry Dundas for the continuation of the slave trade between 1792 and 1807. Britain was plunged into the revolutionary wars with France in 1793, and in the view of these historians, no resolution for abolition could have succeeded in the face of the entrenched opposition of the House of Lords and King George III.
Professor Angela McCarthy, scholar of Scottish and Irish history and the author of two recent peer-reviewed articles in Scottish Affairs that address the controversy over Henry Dundas, stated the following in her letter to the City of Toronto:
…the scholarship on Henry Dundas, to date, is insufficient to form a basis on which to conclude that his actions prolonged Britain’s slave trade. I understand that much of the City’s current steer on renaming Dundas Street is a result of input from Dr Stephen Mullen. However, Dr Mullen’s efforts cannot be considered authoritative, or even reliable, for the reasons I outline in my article ‘Bad History: The Controversy over Henry Dundas and the Historiography of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.’
Professor Emeritus Nick Rogers, York University, author of Murder on the Middle Passage, which examined slavery and the British Empire, wrote:
The decision to erase the name of Dundas from the streets, squares and subway of Toronto is disappointing and based on erroneous historical evidence.
[..I]t is incorrect to scapegoat Dundas for the half a million Africans who were sent into slavery until 1807. Such an interpretation is simple, reductive and contextless.
[…]
Dundas tried to strike a middle ground between the abolition idealists and the slave traders; tilted towards the abolitionists in that abolition was recognized as a principle to be adopted and that slavery should come soon after. It is quite erroneous to suggest that Dundas was a rampant racist by the standards of the day. As Lord Advocate, he had played a major part in banning of slavery in Scotland [Knight v Wedderburn, 1778]; this was a more capacious ban that the better-known Somerset case [1772] in England. In 1792, Dundas served notice on the slave merchants and planters that their time was almost up.
Professor Emeritus Sir Thomas Devine, Kt OBE DLitt HonDLitt HonDUniv FRHistS FRSA FSAScot HonMRIA FRSE FBA, University of Edinburgh, Scotland’s most eminent historian and author of Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past, stated the following to the Executive Committee:
I can assure the Committee that the current academic consensus in the UK is that since this research was carried out and published Dundas has been exonerated by scholars in the field as the prime mover on delay. Instead, explanations now focus on a range of military, political and economic factors which rendered delay in abolition inevitable whether Dundas was involved in the process or not. For the sake of the international reputation of your great city you need to be made aware of these new findings and judge them for yourselves before coming to any final decisions on these matters.
Professor Emeritus Joseph Martin, scholar of Canadian history at the University of Toronto, stated the following in a Financial Post op-ed that was provided to councillors:
Martin Luther King said the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice; he didn’t say it takes a right turn toward justice — because it seldom does. History needs to understand the difficulties faced by reformers who must confront political and social realities as they persist toward their ends, albeit, in the terms of Dundas’ amendment, gradually. Given our uncertainty surrounding what went on 230 years ago and the humility and respect we should always have for our forebears, who faced challenges easily the equal of our own, the status quo for Dundas St. has a lot to recommend itself.
Professor Patrice Dutil, Professor of Politics and Public Administration, Toronto Metropolitan University, author of L’Affaire Dundas in Toronto: Falling for a Hoax, wrote:
The potted history does not give any overview of Dundas’s life and times. Instead it focuses entirely on one position he took at one moment in time, based on select and biased readings, presented without context, and egregiously illogical.
That the 1792 motion had absolutely no hope of passing has been acknowledged by the most severe critics. Even Dr. Stephen Mullen, the historian most relied upon by the City of Toronto staff, has admitted that the “1792 bill had no prospect of passing the Lords.” The hope survives only in the heart of city staff.
[…] The resolution of 1792 showed Dundas’s courage in a hostile political environment. He … knew that Scottish merchants were disproportionately profiting from the trade and that it would take time to persuade them that there was a more enlightened and perhaps profitable way to run their affairs without slaves.
Professor Ron Stagg, Canadian historian, Toronto Metropolitan University, made this submission to Executive Committee:
The question for us all is, do we want a city built on myth, or a city based on reality? Do we want to strip the city of its character in order to satisfy misinformed beliefs? To simply give in the uninformed opinion, or to consider only part of the evidence, does a disservice to the people of this great city, and to our heritage.
…there is no doubt in my mind that Henry Dundas was an opponent of the slave trade and slavery, not a supporter.
Professor Jonathan Hearn, Political and Historical Sociologist, University of Edinburgh, author of “What Edinburgh’s Slavery Review Gets Wrong”, wrote the following, in background materials that the Henry Dundas Committee of Ontario provided to the mayor and councillors:
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Dundas’s gradualist approach to abolition — however unsatisfactory it may seem to us in the present day — was the only approach which would be politically successful at the time, and as a skilled political operator, Dundas was very aware of this. Ironically, it was the abolitionist revisions to his bill that led to it being killed it and delayed any progress to abolition.20
Professor Hearn explains how misinformation came to dominate public discussion of Henry Dundas and is now found on the controversial plaque about Henry Dundas in Edinburgh:
The tortured logic of the revised plaque does not work up from the complex events and actions of his actual life. Rather, there is a view from above that ‘Edinburgh’, and probably more generally white Europeans, need to ‘atone’ for their sins, and therefore he must be cast as the emblem of those sins. This would help explain the rather cavalier approach to historical facts.
Professor Guy Rowlands, 18th Century Military Historian, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and author of “Injustice & The Casting of Blame in History: The Melville Monument and Edinburgh’s Confrontation with Its Imperial Past”, wrote:
As we examine Dundas, empire and slavery we need to bear his pre-1792 track record firmly in mind, as even Mullen’s recent work does not do. We should not be judging Dundas on the basis of a couple of letters, a few parliamentary manoeuvres, the views of often-deluded and self-interested West Indies lobbyists, and one intractable situation he tried to unjam.
[…]
So, what did Henry Dundas stand for? In matters of religion — a key concern of the era — Dundas sought to break the bigoted confessionalism of Scotland and Ireland: he failed in his efforts to ease discrimination of Catholics and Episcopalians at the end of the 1770s, but he did get it through for Scotland by 1792–93, even if he was defeated in his efforts to do the same for Irish Catholics, for whom he had deep sympathy to the point of supporting Catholic emancipation. He also eased the severe post-’45 restrictions on highland dress and on proscribed Jacobite families in the early 1780s. Furthermore, Dundas was no supporter of the clearances, and in the 1790s was concerned just as much with keeping a lid on populist conservative disorder as on squelching homegrown revolutionaries.
[…]
On judicial and political reform, on religion and on the slave trade, Dundas supported change but was scarred by witnessing or personally feeling repeated defeats at the hands of unenlightened, diehard, change-blocking, vested interests who needed to be persuaded to give way over time. This obduracy came too often from within the ranks of the royal family.
[…]
It is ironic that the hardline abolitionists, Wilberforce and his ilk, inspired a very different 19th-century sense of empire: a view that heathen (and yes, slaving) nations elsewhere in the world required “civilising” through a moral crusade and, if necessary, rule by superior Britons. Dundas, however, did not think this should be British policy.
Who, here, is the real progressive?