Open Letter to the Councillors and Mayor of the City of Toronto
June 30, 2021
Open letter to the Mayor and Council of the City of Toronto from the Henry Dundas Committee for Public Education on Historic Scotland
Dear councillors and Your Worship,
We write to express our profound disappointment in the findings and recommendations of Toronto city staff, who have asked you to embark on a process of removing the name “Dundas” from Toronto’s public spaces.
We have identified serious errors and omissions your staff’s description of the relevant facts. It is apparent that they have provided you with a distorted view of history that overlooks or unreasonably rejects critically important evidence.
Our committee was invited last year to participate in the process that was created to generate the report and recommendations released this week. We engaged in regular consultations with city staff, and devoted countless hours to preparing research and discussing it with them. It is now apparent that we were co-opted and misled. Staff acted as if we had a voice, and then completely disregarded our input into the fact-finding process.
However, our biggest disappointment concerns the findings and recommendations of staff.
The report and recommendations made public this week make one thing starkly apparent: City of Toronto staff neglected their duty to develop an accurate account of history. They have deprived you of the opportunity to move forward on the basis of a reliable and fair appraisal of the legacy of Henry Dundas.
We wish to draw your attention to the following:
*** The facts staff cite most prominently concern a petition signed by 14,000 people from around the world in the immediate aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. The facts they cite distort the historical record. They imply that without Henry Dundas’s motion for gradual abolition in 1792, the slave trade would have been abolished immediately, and the enslavement of more than 500,000 Africans over the next 15 years would have been avoided. While activists frequently make this claim, it is founded on serious errors in logic. Even the most committed anti-Dundas scholars admit that abolition had no chance of success in 1792.
*** Staff noted that Henry Dundas was “one of the lawyers” who represented Joseph Knight, a Jamaican slave who was taken to Scotland, and went on to fight for his freedom in Scotland’s courts. Their description unfairly diminishes Dundas’s role. Dundas was not just “one of the lawyers.” He led the entire legal team, pro bono, and persuaded Scotland’s highest court to declare that no man could be a slave on Scottish soil. When the court rendered its decision, it was Henry Dundas whose arguments they cited.
*** Staff overwhelmingly relied only on the scholarly publications that supported their preferred conclusions. They state that they relied on publications in academic peer-reviewed journals, in which the authors conclude that Henry Dundas was instrumental in delaying the abolition of the slave trade. They offer no meaningful analysis of the writings of scholars who offer a contrary view — including Professor Sir Tom Devine, Scotland’s most eminent and celebrated historian. Only one sentence in their background material even acknowledges an opposing scholarly view.
*** They failed to grapple with the single most important argument that is contrary to their position, which is that immediate abolition was not achievable in the 1790’s given the powerful opposing forces that had lined up against abolition, and the fact that Britain could not risk triggering a national crisis when it was fighting for its very survival in a war with France.
*** They ignored evidence that 25 years after the crucial debates in Parliament, abolitionists regretted not following the advice that Dundas had given them privately. The historical record shows that by the 1820’s, leading abolitionists including William Wilberforce admitted that Dundas had been right all along — that in the late 18th century, powerful opposing forces would have to be appeased before the government could abolish the slave trade. They also wished that they had taken Dundas’s advice to seek the abolition of slavery and the slave trade together, rather than focusing solely on the slave trade.
Dundas’s influence on Canada is another important area that staff disregarded. We brought the following facts to their attention, which they ignored:
*** Henry Dundas commissioned John Graves Simcoe, an avowed abolitionist, to be the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada. He subsequently oversaw Simcoe’s most famous achievement — the passage of the first anti-slavery bill anywhere in the British Empire.
*** Dundas showed support for indigenous peoples in Canada, whom he respectfully referred to in correspondence as “nations.” When Simcoe was fortifying Upper Canada against American marauders, Dundas ordered him to ensure that sufficient land was set aside for indigenous nations to sustain themselves comfortably. At that time, the indigenous peoples of the region had only a few geographically isolated and limited treaty rights.
*** Dundas sharply rebuked the governors of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick after learning that they had refused to respect the rights of Black Loyalists — former soldiers who had fought alongside the British during the American Revolution. He ordered them to give the Black Loyalists the land and benefits they had been promised, and to provide compensation for the delay. To the Black Loyalists who wished to leave Canada, he offered free passage to Sierra Leone.
*** Dundas instructed the governor responsible for Lower Canada to ensure that the newly-formed legislative assembly in Quebec City conducted debates and passed legislation in both English and French. English speaking members of the assembly had insisted that English be the only official language. Dundas put a stop to their oppressive tactics, becoming the first senior politician to endorse official bilingualism anywhere in Canada.
We can hardly begin to express our disappointment that none of this evidence, which is easily verified, was given any weight at all. We provided staff with extensive materials that included citations and links to authoritative sources, and are frankly astonished to discover their refusal to take these submissions seriously. (The materials are summarized here:
and here: HD Historic Scotland Committee — Medium
The one-sided account of history that staff presented to you this week ought to be unacceptable even to those who wish to change the name of Dundas Street. Staff had a duty to you and to the citizens of Toronto to get the facts right. They failed to discharge this duty.
Our committee supports the movement to recognize both the oppression and the triumphs of racialized peoples, and to ensure that their experience is recognized in our public spaces. We also believe in the need for truth and reconciliation, which of course must be founded, first and foremost, on the truth.
We believe your staff have let you down by unduly focusing on reconciliation, and failing to give due regard to the importance of the truth.
We therefore ask that you reject the findings and the recommendations of city staff.
Yours truly,
Robert (Bobby) Melville — Committee chair
Jennifer L Dundas — Committee member, lead researcher
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The Committee’ research paper is available here: https://documentcloud.adobe.com/link/track?uri=urn:aaid:scds:US:169bbe5c-d5a9-45aa-860b-7e11cad32c1b
