CHAPTER 2 Early Treatment of Blacks
Andrew Lovitt arrived from Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1765, along with his family and slaves. His wife, Lydia, kept a journal. An entry in this journal reads, “When he was ready to build the ‘big house’ which is still standing, he had slaves to dig the huge foundations, hewn out of the rocky ledges.”1 An article in an undated copy of the the Vanguard (Yarmouth) states that when Lovitt arrived in Yarmouth, he granted the slaves their freedom. They chose, however, to remain with the family.2
In 1766, Colonel Ranald McKinnon came to Yarmouth from the United States and settled in Glenwood (in what is today the Municipality of Argyle), on a narrow point of land that stretched into Argyle Harbour. He is the person who gave Argyle its name, after his home in Scotland. This particular parcel of land, which became known as McKinnon’s Neck, was part of the original land grant of two thousand acres he received for his service in the British Army.3 It is reported that he brought many slaves with him, but the exact number is not known.4 Another document on Ranald McKinnon claims he imported his slaves to work on his farm at Argyle.5
A letter he received from his nephew John in England says, “I have sent you March, who is a black boy and who it cost me some pains to procure for you.”6 One wonders how much March suffered? Nothing has been found, however, to indicate that Ranald was cruel to his slaves. Records indicate that after a time he set his slaves free and established them on a McKinnon land grant at Salmon River, seven miles from the town of Yarmouth.
Colonel McKinnon’s son, Major John McKinnon, also lived on McKinnon’s Neck, about a mile from his father’s homestead. He is reported to have had one of the largest farms in the Argyles. He was a collector of customs for Argyle Township, a justice of the peace, member of the House of Assembly representing Shelburne, a major of the local militia and commissioner of schools. And, like his father, he was a slave owner.
Stone walls built by slaves in Argyle, Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia. Reading about the stone walls was one thing, to see them was moving. The archivist, J. Stuart McLean, and the then director of the Yarmouth County Museum and Archives, Adelè Hemple, as well as an archaeologist and two of her assistants accompanied me to see these walls. When I placed my hands upon the stones, it was almost as if I could feel the energy the slaves expended building those walls. The experience was humbling.
On McKinnon’s Neck, several large stone walls were erected by those very same slaves, gathering stones from the fields to clear the land for ploughing. The walls were five feet (one-and-a-half metres) high and six feet (nearly two metres) wide, and, if placed end to end, would be about one mile (one-and-a-half kilometres) long. These walls served two purposes — to enclose the fields and to serve as a roadway wide enough for a small ox cart. Portions of these walls built on Major John McKinnon’s property and others built on Ranald McKinnon’s property are still visible today. Today, with permission of the owners, it is possible to visit these walls. From the main road, it is quite a distance to the old homestead, but they are there. They are not marked by a sign, and some local residents persist in denying that they were built by slaves. One of today’s owners of the property, Robert Swain, an American architect, was interviewed by Edward Warner of the Boston Globe on March 4, 1990. In the article, Swain says that John McKinnon imported two hundred free slaves to work the land and build a mile-long (one-and-a-half-kilometre) stone wall from his barn to the sea.
According to Jackson Ricker: “Slaves. In my rambles through the old sites and cellars of Argyle I passed an interesting place unnoticed. It is the spot which was Colonel MacKinnon’s [McKinnon’s] ‘Slave farm.’ Colonel MacKinnon owned slaves who laboured on his farm on MacKinnon’s Hill, and on the flat land south of the hill he set off land which the slaves tilled for their own living.”7 The slave farm was in the southwestern corner of the field at the foot of McKinnon’s Hill. For many years the hearths where they cooked their meals could still be seen, but years of abandonment have made the exact location hard to find. It is believed that some traces of these hearths are still there, even if only some fragments of broken dishes, but the difficulty is knowing where to look. It has also been reported that there is a cemetery of coloured people on this land, but no one knows its exact location. It is most likely that some of his slaves who died before they were set free are buried there in unmarked graves. After McKinnon’s slaves were freed, some of them took the McKinnon surname as they had no last name of their own. Their descendants are still living in Yarmouth.
The next set of records to be located pertaining to a family that came to the area with slaves was that of Jesse Gray. A Loyalist fleeing the American Civil War, Gray came to Nova Scotia from Charlestown.8 He was given a large grant of land at Argyle in return for his military service in the South. It seems that Jesse Gray was a cruel, heartless, and vicious man who didn’t think twice about using brutality to keep the Negroes who worked for him in line. It had only to be the smallest complaint for him to drag out the cowskin and use it to tear the flesh off a slave.
In June 1786, Gray was brought before the courts in Shelburne, accused of whipping a Negro servant named Pero Davis. Gray was fined twenty pounds and ordered to keep the peace. But Gray’s problems concerning Davis did not end there. Davis, being a strong man, filed a complaint against Jesse again. Davis’s affidavit stated that he was “in the Imploy of one Jesse Gray, he was by the said Jesse Gray most severly beat with a cowskin to the number of one hundred lashes round his body in the gratest violence.”9 Gray was brought before the courts and charged with assault and battery against Pero Davis. No “True Bill” was found, suggesting that there was not enough physical evidence to convict him, although the jurors declared that Gray was guilty of assault. The jury’s findings in Shelburne Court Records state “Jesse Gray … with force and with arms … did make an assault against him the said Pero Davis then and there [Jesse] did beat wound and ill-treat so that his life was greatly dispaired of …”10
Jesse Gray’s cruelties seem to have escalated against several other Black people, this time against a woman and her two children. The date of this next episode goes back to St. Augustine, Florida, in 1785, although the court case only began in Shelburne County Court in 1791. On March 1, 1785, Gray abducted a freed African woman by the name of Mary Postell, and her two young daughters, Flora and Nelly. They boarded a ship at St. Mary’s River and sailed from St. Augustine to Shelburne.11 The story of Jesse Gray and Mary Postell is rather bizarre and has more than one version.
One telling indicates Mary was born in South Carolina and was the property of Elijah Postell. After Elijah died, she became the property of his son, William, according to his wife Mary’s statement, provided in her testimony before the General Sessions of Shelburne on July 8, 1791. William was a captain in the American army then rebelling against Great Britain.12 Once Charlestown was captured by the British army, Mary escaped by joining the King’s forces and taking refuge within the British lines near Charlestown. When Charlestown was evacuated, she went to St. Augustine, where she worked as a servant for Jesse Gray. Here the story changes, as seemingly Jesse sold her to his brother Samuel, then bought her back and ultimately took her to Nova Scotia when he emigrated.
Upon their arrival in Shelburne, Jesse promised to use her well while she lived with him. According to Mary Postell’s deposition, Jesse did:
despose of her to a certain William Mangham and also sold and desposed of her oldest girl (aged about ten years) to one John Henderson who carried her to South Carolina as she is informed, and thence to sell her youngest child — and this deponent lastly sayeth that said Jesse Gray has no right whatever to her or her children and that she is afraid that said Jesse Gray or William Mangham will seize her & her child and carry them away.13
Mary
