of the New England population that had been acquired forty-five years earlier when around eight thousand Planters came to the province. As the descendents of English immigrants who had settled in New England, they were Americans of English ancestry, although in most cases their Englishness was very distant.
When two Yorkshire farmers, John Robinson and Thomas Rispin, first met Nova Scotia’s New Englanders they deplored their farming methods: “Nothing can be said in favour of the inhabitants as to their management in farming. They neither discover judgment or industry.” To Robinson and Rispin they were “lazy, indolent people.” 2 There was no sense of a shared English kinship here! This is hardly surprising since, although they spoke the same language, the New England and Yorkshire settlers had little in common. They had different backgrounds, values, religions, mannerisms, work ethics, and traditions. Although they and their descendents would both use the label of “English” to describe their ethnic origins, they were effectively two types of English. Those like Robinson and Rispin who came to the province directly from Yorkshire and other parts of England were recent English, while those who came in the large-scale migrations from the United States were Americans with distant English roots.
Immigrants began arriving directly from England, from the mideighteenth century, but their number was dwarfed by the large influx from Scotland that followed. The ongoing wars between Britain and France from the 1790s to 1815 had been obvious disincentives to emigration, although a significant number left the Highlands and Islands of Scotland for various parts of British North America during this time, despite the obvious risks.3 The economic depression that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 stimulated a great rise in emigration from Britain, but, because of gaps and ambiguities in shipping and customs records, it is impossible to state precisely how many British people permanently established themselves in Nova Scotia.4 The recorded data reveals that at least 39,243 British immigrants arrived between 1815 and 1838, of whom only 2,120 (5 percent) were English, the majority being either Scottish or Irish in origin.5 However, the actual number of British arrivals may have been a great deal higher.6
Customs records show that nine hundred English immigrants arrived at Halifax between 1817 and 1819, although few ship crossings were recorded for this period.7 The surviving shipping data reveals that the majority embarked from Plymouth in Devon, indicating that southwest England supplied a goodly share of the immigrants (see Appendix II). A total of ninety-four people arrived from the Cumberland ports of Workington and Whitehaven in 1819 and 1822 respectively, but no further emigrant departures were recorded in later years from either port.8 There were regular passenger arrivals from Liverpool between the mid-1820s and mid-1830s, and some from London and Jersey, but the numbers were generally small. Notable examples were the seventy-nine people who arrived at Pictou from Liverpool in the Penelope in 1828, the fifty people who arrived at Halifax from London in the Minstrel in 1831, the 102 from Liverpool who came in the Mary Ann, Jean Hastie, and Lady Dunmore in 1832, and the sixty-seven people who sailed from Jersey in 1833, 1834, and 1836.9 But at this stage English immigrants were very much in a minority.
With the growing economic opportunities that stemmed from the province’s mining industry the proportion of English immigrants rose between 1839 and 1851. Instead of being a poor third, the English moved into second place, representing 22 percent of the total, but once again they were a mere fraction of the Scots, who accounted for 61 percent of the influx.10 By 1871 the English represented 29 percent of the population, just five percentage points below the Scots. And they were the dominant ethnic group in Kings, Annapolis, Yarmouth, Shelburne, and Queens counties on the west and Cumberland County on the east (see Map 5). With its large influx of settlers from Yorkshire during the eighteenth century, Cumberland’s later classification as an English county was inevitable, but the dramatic improvement in the English ranking in the western counties has a different explanation. This was a mainly American population, with distant English roots, that later classified itself as English.
Looking back to the time when it first became a British possession, Nova Scotia looked set to become a very English colony. Having acquired Acadia (renamed Nova Scotia) from France in 1713, Britain launched a large-scale immigration program thirty-six years later, after establishing Halifax as the capital. The government took the unprecedented step of actually sanctioning public funds to finance the relocation costs of over 2,500 people: such was their desire to place British settlers in Halifax in order to counterbalance the French-speaking Acadian population. The immigrants, recruited in London, included ex-soldiers and sailors, some of whom were of Irish descent, and tradesmen who worked in wide-ranging occupations.11 They were brought out by Governor Edward Cornwallis in 1749 to build the new capital, but the extremely tough conditions prompted many to leave.12 Around 1,500 or so of the hardiest remained and founded the town, as was intended, but they were soon joined by large numbers of merchants and other settlers from New England who had correctly anticipated Halifax’s potential as a future economic hub. Although there was much conflict between the immigrants from England and New England initially, both groups eventually came to live in harmony, as they shared common economic and political aspirations.
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had immediately sent an Anglican minister, together with funding to build St. Paul’s Anglican Church, one of the first Protestant places of worship in British North America. A school and hospital were hastily constructed and a site was chosen for the marketplace. By 1765 the Reverend John Breyton could report that the “Church of England is in a flourishing state. St. Paul’s is furnished in a most elegant manner and harmony prevails.”13 The church’s congregation of 1,300 symbolized the town’s strong English presence, despite growing rivalry from the Congregationalists, of New England origin, who had also built their own church by this time.
St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, erected in 1750. Its architectural plans were based on the design of St. Peter’s Church, Vere Street, in London, which was created by James Gibbs, a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren. With the arrival of Charles Inglis in 1787 as the first Anglican bishop of Nova Scotia, St. Paul’s was made a cathedral and continued as such until 1865.
Halifax attracted many Loyalists and, after the Napoleonic Wars ended, immigrants from Britain. Notable were the West Country arrivals who came in a short-lived influx from 1817 to 1819. Devon ancestry would be claimed later by a number of Halifax residents, including Francis Paulin, whose ancestors came from Jacobstone; Florence Edwards, whose father had been a carpenter in Barnstable; Thomas Maynard, who was descended from “a gentleman born at Tavistock”; and John Bond, whose father was born near Torquay.14 When John MacGregor visited Halifax in 1828, he concluded that “the style of living, the hours of entertainment and the fashions are the same as in England as were their ‘amusements’ — such as picnics, amateur theatricals, riding, shooting and fishing.”15 But eleven years earlier Lord Dalhousie had thought that Halifax was still “in its infancy.” He was shocked to find a town of around ten thousand people in which “there is not a bookseller’s shop.” He immediately authorized funds for a library at the military garrison, having previously “suggested to the officers the great comfort and advantages”16 that might result from it.
Shortly after establishing Halifax’s population in 1749, the British government had sought a second source of settlers.17 Up to 2,700 so-called “Foreign Protestants,” chiefly Germans, Swiss, and French Huguenots, were recruited from Europe between 1750 and 1752 and they, too, received
