When the American Revolution began, there were about 500,000 slaves in the American colonies, and British officials sought to win their allegiance through suggestions that a Loyalist victory would mean an end to slavery. Thousands of slaves joined the British cause in the remaining years of the revolution and contributed to the Loyalist war effort as soldiers, guides, foragers, cooks, laundresses, teamsters, and construction workers. In fact, very few Loyalist endeavours lacked the presence of at least some Blacks.

British gratitude was not always apparent, and many Black Loyalists were treated as slaves or bartered with rebels for the return of white prisoners. Fortunately, Commander-in-Chief Sir Guy Carleton upheld British honour by insisting that the runaways were not, in fact, American property at the time of the Provincial Peace Agreement (1782) and that they must be allowed to evacuate with other Loyalists. The evacuees were carried to Bermuda, the West Indies, London, and other British territories, but the largest group, all told about 3,500, located in Nova Scotia in 1782-83. They confidently expected a just reward for their loyalty to the Crown.
 

Freetown, Sierra Leone, In 1978, six years after 15 ships arrived from Halifax, Nova Scotia, carrying disgruntled Black Loyalists looking for promised land, independence, and security. The new land in west Africa, as English abolitionist John Carkson wrote, was "most rich and beautiful." [Photo, courtesy the British Museum]

The more than 30,000 Loyalists who entered Nova Scotia following the American Revolution imposed immense demands on the colonial establishment for land grants, provisions, and government services. The Black Loyalists, a mere 10 percent of the total, were frequently overlooked while their “betters” were given priority. Officials, accustomed to regarding Blacks as slaves rarely treated them with respect or equality. Only a minority were given any acreage for farming, most ending up with a single acre town lot. Essentially, there were five Black Loyalist settlements, all but one adjacent to a larger white town: Birchtown near Shelburne; Brindley Town near Digby; Preston near Halifax; Loch Lomond near Saint John (in what became New Brunswick in 1784); and Little Tracadie.

Since their lands were generally inadequate for self-support, most of the Blacks had to offer their skills and labour to the neighbouring white community and consequently became the largest available resource for private employers and the government. Black workers built roads, wharves, bridges, courthouses, homes, and schools, and cleared farms for others. The result was exploitation and low wages, and, since women had worked alongside men in slavery, they continued to do so in Nova Scotia to ensure the basic survival of their families. From the outset of their history in Canada, the free Blacks were locked in poverty and economic dependence that could have been avoided had they received the farms to which they were entitled as Loyalists.

The Black Loyalists’ most urgent desires, after the acquisition of property, were religion and education. In eighteenth century America, slaves had been discouraged, and sometimes prevented, from embracing Christianity, and slave education was typically forbidden by law. The Nova Scotia Blacks flocked to existing churches where they received baptism and other sacraments but were not welcomed into the white congregations. As a result, each of the settlements established separate Black churches with their own preachers and democratically elected elders. These churches, the first and most important Black institutions to be created in Canada, provided a sense of fellowship and commitment that cemented the populations into communities. Preachers usually became the leaders of their respective communities and the liaison with the majority society. With financial support from British Anglicans, schools were established in every Black settlement as well, with literate community members enlisted as teachers. These two institutions, the church and the school, remained in local Black hands and shaped the evolving culture of the Black community, particularly in Nova Scotia, a culture different from that of their white neighbours but different, too, from the American slave culture they had left behind.
 

Portion of map in the British Library showing the Black settlers' lands in 1794 at Freetown, Sierra Leon. [Photo, courtesy the British Museum]

From every Black settlement, petitions seeking land grants were sent repeatedly to Halifax, and repeatedly they were ignored or postponed. In 1790, after having three petitions rejected, one Black Loyalist leader decided to put his case directly before the King in London. Thomas Peters, a sergeant in the Black Pioneers during the American Revolution, collected signatures from over 200 family heads in the Saint John and Annapolis regions on a petition describing the broken promises respecting farmlands and other examples of unequal treatment and declaring the Black Loyalists’ complete faith that His Majesty would correct their situation once he learned of it. Although he never met George III, Peters was introduced in London to a group of white abolitionists who had recently established a colony for freed slaves in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Black British subjects seeking land and a British colony seeking a Black population: the connection seemed providential. The abolitionists convinced the British government to finance the removal of the Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone where they could be given free land and complete equality as British subjects. Peters was sent back to Nova Scotia to publicize the offer, and with him went Lieutenant John Clarkson of the Royal Navy to superintend the recruitment and transportation of any Black Loyalist wishing to make the move.

Whites in Canada’s maritime provinces gave Peters and Clarkson a difficult time. They had no wish to lose their chief supply of cheap labour. Despite aggressive harassment, the Blacks of both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick responded to the Sierra Leone opportunity with enthusiasm. Within a couple of months, 1196 had signed up for what they believed was the fulfilment at last of the promise that had attracted them to the Loyalist cause: freedom, independence, a promised land of their own. Disqualified by the terms of the offer were indentured labourers or anyone in debt. Community members rallied to assist such people, but many were forced to stay behind pending, as Clarkson incorrectly anticipated, a second migration in the near future. On January 15, 1792, a fleet of 15 ships sailed from Halifax, landing at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River in early March.

The original body of settlers had been driven off by local Africans, but the Black Loyalists established a new settlement in 1792, naming it Freetown. Inclement weather, hostile African neighbours, and administrative inefficiency caused lengthy delays in laying out the promised land grants. Instead of the independence they expected, the Black Loyalists found themselves under the control of a white government from London. Though the Black Loyalists gradually established with the Africans good relations that led to an expanding trade connection, they were constantly frustrated that their original expectations were never met. In 1800, after years of peaceful struggle, they launched a rebellion against the white governors. Contrary to appearances, this act was not a repudiation of their loyalty to the Crown but rather another example of their continued commitment to the principles which had originally attracted them to the Loyalists of the American Revolution. The government, of course, interpreted their act quite differently. The rebellion was quashed militarily and its leaders were executed.
 

A political ally of William Wilberforce in England, abolitionist John Clarkson, in 1791, was sent on a mission to Canada's maritime provinces by the Sierra Leone Compnay to recruit disgruntled Black Loyalists for resettlment in West Africa. In March 1792, a fleet of 15 ships from Halifax arrived at Freetown, Sierra Leone, with some 1200 Black settlers aboard. [Photo, courtesy Nova Scotia Archives]

In the nineteenth century, the Black Loyalists became a decreasing proportion of the Sierra Leone population. After the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy liberated cargoes of slaves in Freetown (the “Liberated Africans”) who came to dominate the colony numerically. But culturally, economically, and even politically, the Black Loyalists set the standard for Sierra Leone. Rehabilitated after the 1800 rebellion, they formed a partnership with their governors for the interior expansion of the colonial boundary, for agitation against the slave trade, and for the Christian conversion of the Liberated Africans. The Black Loyalists of Sierra Leone, therefore, became an elite, occupying the highest positions available to Blacks in the British colony and inspiring the emulation of other groups in Sierra Leone. Overwhelmed demographically, the Black Loyalists in a sense assimilated the majority and shaped Sierra Leone culture. Their descendants, still known as Nova Scotians, form a small but honoured segment of independent Sierra Leone’s people, acknowledged for their historic role in the creation of a new society in Africa.

Unlike their cousins in Sierra Leone, the Black Nova Scotians have spent the past 200 years on the margins of the provincial economy and society. Yet they, too, have developed and preserved a distinctive way of life, one that continues to resonate with the values of their Loyalist ancestors. Their endurance has been their victory.

James Walker