Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.”7
The American Revolution, also known as the American War of Independence, was fought between Great Britain and the thirteen British colonies on the North American continent. These colonies, with their different way of life and religious and political beliefs, wanted to be independent from their homeland. When the first shot was fired at Lexington in 1775, the war had begun. In November of that year, Lord John Murray Dunmore (John Murray), the British governor in charge of the New England colonies, promised freedom to those Black people who would fight on the side of the British. General George Washington, in charge of the rebel forces fighting for independence from Britain, had at first refused to recruit Blacks into their troops. However, when Lord Dunmore made his proclamation to indentured servants and Negroes, Washington decided to do the same with those slaves who agreed to fight on the American side.8
The first known free Black Loyalists to arrive in Nova Scotia were a group that became known as the “Company of Negroes.” They had been evacuated from Boston with other British troops in 1776, but there is very little information as to exactly how many came or where they settled. Robert S. Allen, in Loyalist Literature, notes only that a small “Company of Negroes” arrived in Halifax with the British after the evacuation of Boston.9 He does not mention whether they stayed there or were relocated. Although these Black men had fought gallantly, the British, in exchange for postwar reconciliation, began negotiations to return the Blacks to their former slave masters, contrary to their former commitment to providing freedom. Because of this betrayal, hundreds of Blacks were forced into inadequate housing and died of disease in the unsanitary conditions provided for them, or starved.10 This betrayal signalled British intentions, including the colony in Nova Scotia, to maintain slavery in their remaining colonies in North America.
In 1783 a wave of Black Loyalists converged in New York, and, under the supervision of the British commander-in-chief, Sir Guy Carleton, some three thousand people (1,336 men, 914 women, and 750 children) made the long voyage to Nova Scotia, England, and other locations.11 Another source at the Nova Scotia Museum in Halifax states that as many as five thousand Blacks left New York on an unknown number of ships for Nova Scotia, the West Indies, Quebec, England, Germany, and Belgium. According to this reference, three thousand or more of these people came to Nova Scotia.
By the end of 1783, it is recorded that 1,485 free Blacks lived in Birchtown, Shelburne County, and another 1,269 — a combination of servants and free Blacks — lived in the Town of Shelburne.12 According to the Black Loyalist Directory, the planning for the creation of the settlements of Shelburne and Birchtown began in New York City in 1782 and the actual work began when the Black pioneers arrived in Nova Scotia and surveyed land for settlement. This would explain why the majority were sent to Nova Scotia.
Though the Black Loyalists had been promised the same treatment as White Loyalist refugees from the American Revolution, they soon learned that their former problems followed them to their new land. The land grants that some had been given were so small and poor as to be almost worthless. The people who received the grants, as well as those who did not, were often forced to work for the White landowners. Because the necessity of becoming poorly paid labourers so dominated their lives, and because of the prejudice experienced on a daily basis, they felt they were little better off than they had been before — a predicament they thought they had shed in leaving the United States. More than one thousand Black Loyalists (enough to fill fifteen sailing vessels), tired of the hard life that had been thrust upon them, left Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone in Africa, arriving March 9, 1792.13 Those who chose not to make the exodus to Sierra Leone eventually settled in Shelburne, Birchtown, Tusket, and other parts of Yarmouth County. Among them were indentured, enslaved and freed Blacks, as identified in Historic Black Nova Scotians.14
LIBERATION IS ON THE WAY
A 1832 Yarmouth Telegram article, entitled “Slavery in the British Colonies,” reported that measures were proposed by the British Parliament for a new slave code for “bettering the condition of slaves.” The new act proposed the establishment of “Slave Protectors” to receive the complaints of slaves and to enforce the laws established for their protection by directing the abolition of Sunday markets, and the “regulation of punishment and protection from excessive labour.” It encouraged and secured the rite of marriage and permitted the acquisition of property, along with the guarantee of an adequate supply of goods, clothing, and medical attendance. It also established admissibility of slave evidence in a court of law. Perhaps, most importantly to the slaves themselves, it prevented the separation of families. Naturally, this stirred up opposition in the colonies. Canadian slave owners were understandably nervous about commercial losses if this law were enacted. They feared “the inquisitorial power of the Protectors, and the expenses their establishment would entail upon the colonies. They protested against the issuing of general ordinances without reference to the constitution and legal rights of each separate colony.”15
A year later, on August 16, 1833, the Yarmouth Herald and Western Advertiser stated that the House of Commons in Britain agreed “that immediate and effectual measures be taken for the entire abolition of slavery throughout Canada.” The article went on to say that all children born after the passing of the Act of Parliament, or those under the age of six at the time, be declared free; that all persons now slaves be registered “as apprenticed labourers and acquire all rights and privileges of free men.” Their owners were to be compensated with at least £20,000,000 sterling “as Parliament shall direct.”16
It was almost a year to the day (August 22, 1834) that the same newspaper announced the “Abolition of Slavery”:
On Friday the 1st instant [August 1, 1834], the whole system of Slavery within the dominions of Great Britain, was entirely abolished, and every slave under the dominion of British laws, emancipated. Wilberforce, the great advocate for the abolition of Slavery, died on the very night that the measure finally passed the House of Commons.
W.L. Grant of Upper Canada College, Toronto, in his History of Canada, wrote that as early as 1793, a law was passed forbidding the introduction of slaves in Upper Canada [Ontario]17 and making provisions for the gradual liberation of those already introduced. It is interesting to note that he observed “It is not probable that we should ever have had many slaves in a country with so cold a winter.”18
After two centuries of slavery, England finally abolished the practice in the British colonies on August 1, 1834. The actual trading of slaves had ended some twenty-seven years before when, on March 25, 1807, the British Parliament passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. With the end of slavery in the northern colonies of British North America, more slaves tried to escape the American South to find freedom in Canada. An informal network of escape routes known as the Underground Railroad arose in the United States. One of the best known “conductors” of this Underground Railroad was a Black woman named Harriet Tubman.19 For more than a decade, at the risk of her life, she assisted more than three hundred slaves. Many found their way to Canadian towns such as Dresden, North Buxton, St. Catharines, Windsor, and Chatham, Ontario. This clandestine system continued until December 1865, when Abraham Lincoln’s Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution was passed by the House of Representatives and slavery was finally abolished in the United States. Puerto Rico and Cuba abolished slavery in 1873 and 1886, respectively.
This was not the end of slavery, however. As late as September 26, 1926, twenty nations signed the International Slavery Convention, which prohibited the slave trade and the complete abolition of slavery in all forms.20 It was confirmed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948. In 1951, slavery still existed in some parts of the world, though declining.
Once freed, a vast number of the former slaves, now in Yarmouth, were unable to find work. In the end, a few resorted to stealing to
