It’s finally happened.
Henry Dundas, the 1st Viscount Melville, was born in Edinburgh in 1741 and died in 1811. He was active in the highest levels of British politics most of his adult life, notably as Home Secretary in the government of William Pitt the Younger. He was friends with John Graves Simcoe, Lt.-Gov. of Upper Canada from 1791 to 1796, and it was Simcoe who named a long military road after Dundas: the future Dundas St.
The root of the controversy surrounding Dundas and slavery is a considerable misunderstanding of the facts. The great advocate of abolition, William Wilberforce, had introduced a motion in the British House of Commons, aiming at an immediate end to slavery everywhere. But this was defeated resoundingly in 1791.
This might have been the end of the abolitionist cause, but Dundas, who was also an abolitionist, intervened. He held meetings with people on all sides of the issue, modified Wilberforce’s motion, and secured majority support for what was portrayed as a “gradual” end to slavery but was really a set of timelines by which it would be permanently forbidden. This is exactly what ended up happening, despite some political hangups in the House of Lords.
Without Dundas’s ability to win over the undecided and conciliate uncertain moderates, slavery might not have been abolished as quickly as it was. It might not have ended at all, in fact. Many abolitionists, such as Edmund Burke, had lost heart, and had concluded that their cause was hopeless. But it was Dundas who reinvigorated it.
If you want to understand why it took as long as it did, consider how difficult it has been for some consumer goods manufacturers to wean themselves off child labour, forced labour, and East Asian sweatshops. The practices began in the 1970s, became the object of general outrage in the 1990s, were investigated only in the early 2000s, and (despite some improvements) are still going on. This is not to excuse those practices, but only to illustrate that the problem of economic dependence on inhumanity is still with us.
While it may be easier to inveigh against a long-dead man whose good works are forgotten than to tackle contemporary evils, it shouldn’t be done.
Now, “Sankofa”—the new name of Yonge-Dundas Square—is a word from the Twi language spoken in Ghana in West Africa. It means “to recover.” Proponents of the renaming believe that the square should represent recovery, reconciliation, and atonement for Ontario’s disreputable past. And replacing the supposedly pro-slavery name of Dundas with a West-African word is some form of poetic justice, perhaps.
But there’s something fundamentally amiss with this line of thinking. The Twi language is spoken mainly by the Akan people of southern and central Ghana. It was the Akan people who founded the Ashanti Empire throughout what is now Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and Togo. That state had practiced slavery, mainly in connection with captives taken in war, long before contact with Europeans, and in time it became one of the main suppliers of African slaves to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Thus the name-change establishes a much more secure link with slavery than the name of Henry Dundas did.
As the example of modern manufacturers shows, arguing about who is connected with slavery, and who is not, leads to only one conclusion. There is no one who is not connected with, or affected by, the moral evils of the day. But we should rejoice that there are, and have been, people who have not only tried to oppose evil, but who have also succeeded. Henry Dundas was such a person, and we should not forget him, but celebrate his achievement.
