a year of their arrival, even while provisions were being supplied, nearly two thousand Loyalists are believed to have left Nova Scotia, almost half from Shelburne, although other districts, like Antigonish and Pictou in the eastern side of the province, actually saw their populations grow.52
These were defeated and demoralized refugees who had come down in the world with a jolt. Some, having left relative comfort back in the United States, faced the daunting and strenuous task of hacking out a farm from the wilderness. They were more fortunate than most settlers in being entitled to free land, food, and clothing allowances, as well as farming and building supplies. Yet, this, too, had its downside.
Resentful and antagonistic neighbours, jealous of their provisioning and other advantages, often made their lives a misery. Greatly disillusioned, thousands of Loyalists simply gave up. Some went to other areas of the Maritimes or other parts of British America, a few returned to Britain, but most of those who left went back to the United States, where they normally received a cordial welcome.53
Map 4. Based on Wynne, “A Region of Scattered Settlements,” 322.
However, despite early disappointments and setbacks, many Loyalists remained and benefited from the region’s improving economic growth. In due course, the 1871 census would go on to reveal a striking predominance of people of English ancestry in the Loyalist strongholds of the Bay of Fundy region. The English were concentrated in western Nova Scotia, the St. John River valley, and Charlotte County in New Brunswick, mirroring exactly the principal areas chosen to accommodate Loyalists (see Map 4). Although their number cannot be quantified, it appears that the English represented a high proportion of the Loyalist intake in these areas. However, while many had English roots, most Loyalists had been born in the United States. The Chignecto Isthmus also acquired large English concentrations, but this stemmed from the large intake of Yorkshire immigrants just before the outbreak of the American Rebellion.
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was always anxious to send Anglican missionaries to areas of the New World where Church of England congregations might be formed. In fact, Anglican churches had been built in Nova Scotia long before the Loyalist influx reached Nova Scotia. St. Paul’s Church had been founded in Halifax in 1749, while churches at Lunenburg, Annapolis, and Windsor followed soon after. Lunenburg is particularly interesting since its congregation was composed of former Lutherans, who were indisputably German. Yet Lunenburg County became strongly Anglican, its German population having adopted the Church of England from the time of their arrival in the town of Lunenburg in the early 1750s.54
Thus, support for the Church of England in itself is not a reliable indicator of the predominance of English settlers. In fact, the Church of England was fairly accommodating in accepting non-Anglicans, being driven strongly by the desire to exert its influence within communities generally. Oozing respectability and conservative values, Anglican missionaries sought to dissuade people from supporting the emotional evangelism that was sweeping the area, but they were no match for the charismatic preachers who spoke the language of ordinary people.
The Anglican bishop Charles Inglis, who arrived in Halifax in 1787 as the first North American bishop of the Church of England, hoped that loyalty to Britain would translate into support for Anglicanism, but he was sadly disappointed. He soon discovered that there were more nonAnglicans than Anglicans among the Loyalists. He also discovered even less support for Anglicanism amongst the pre-Loyalist communities.
There was a small but powerful Anglican presence in Halifax, but beyond this, Nova Scotians had shown only patchy support for the Anglican faith. Over 60 percent of its population was made up of New England Congregationalists who later joined Baptist churches. Apart from the Chignecto Isthmus, where Methodism prevailed, there was little church presence anywhere in New Brunswick before 1784. Consequently, while the Church of England was an important denomination, it did not attract sufficient support from Loyalist immigrants to achieve numerical superiority throughout the region.55
Undaunted, the Church of England persisted in its efforts to promote the Anglican religion in Loyalist areas. Principally through funding received in the form of government grants, new churches suddenly sprouted in 1783 at Cornwallis, Horton (Wolfville), and Parrsboro in Kings County, Digby, and Shelburne. Shortly after, the town of Halifax, Cumberland County, Sydney in Cape Breton,56 and the town of Guysborough acquired their Anglican churches57 (see Map 4). New Brunswick’s Loyalist churches were slightly later. Maugerville’s church appeared in 1784, and it was followed soon after by churches at Fredericton, Saint John, St. Andrews, and Kingston.58 However, according to the Reverend Samuel Cooke, the Anglican missionary who visited St. Andrews in 1785, there were a good many Scottish Loyalists among the St. Andrews congregation. “The majority of settlers profess themselves to be Kirk of Scotland,”59 but in spite of this, fully accepted his ministry.
Loyalists identified principally with the colony in the United States from which they had come rather than the part of England from which they or their forbears may have originated. As a result English Loyalists did not, as a rule, attract followers from England. In any case, most of the British immigration to Atlantic Canada that occurred immediately after the Revolution was dominated by Scots who mainly settled in eastern Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, and Prince Edward Island. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, when emigration soared ahead, the English and Irish gradually overtook the Scots numerically, settling in all three Maritime provinces, although Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick attracted most of the English during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Around 150 English immigrants arrived in Nova Scotia in 1784, but they were Loyalists who, having returned to England the year before and not finding it to their liking, sought a better situation. They were immediately followed by English merchants and fortune seekers, and later by convicts who arrived in a ship from Liverpool. Needless to say, the governor of Nova Scotia put a stop to any further shipments of English convicts!60 Relatively few English followed them. Skilled miners came from England to work in Nova Scotia’s coal mines but most of the growth in its English population was generated by its existing communities. Yet, in a sense Nova Scotia already was English. With its large Planter and Loyalist intake, Nova Scotia had a majority of native Americans with mainly English roots, some traceable over several generations.
British settlement in Nova Scotia was driven far more by power politics and war than by the province’s farming or timber trade potential. The struggles between Britain and France determined that colonization proceeded initially along its militarily strategic coastal areas. People of English descent were in the vanguard of this population movement as it gathered strength in the middle of the eighteenth century.
Nova Scotia’s English Settlers: Two Types of English
There is a continual passing and returning of people from the western shore of this province [Nova Scotia] to New England, from whence these people originally emigrated and still have property and family connections, — but I think the balance of population retained, is in favour of this province. 1
LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR JOHN Wentworth was
