King must have been apprehensive as he stepped out onto the bustling streets of New York for the first time. The prospects were far from certain for the thousands who crammed into New York City after 1782. The British defeat at Yorktown was the beginning of the end of the war, but only the beginning. For month after month, while British and American officials hashed out the terms for peace, loyalists and refugees cooled their heels in New York, agonizing over their post-war fate. At least King could console himself with the fact that, unlike most former slaves, he at least had a trade. Surely skilled carpenters would be in high demand to help rebuild the war-ravaged city. Unfortunately for King, however, he had been forced to leave his tools behind when he fled to the British. It must have been a tremendous blow for King to relinquish his hard-won status as an independent tradesman and enter into domestic service. Even this indignity proved insufficient. With so many refugees, even menial work was scarce and wages so low that King, like many others, was not able “to keep myself in clothes.” A second employer promised better wages, but failed to pay at all, forcing King to find odd jobs throughout wherever he could just to survive the harsh winter.17
King’s struggles were not unusual. As loyalists and refugees flocked to the British held city, its pre-war population of 5,000 swelled to as many as 35,000 by 1783. The press of people, most without money or employment, led to an explosion of poverty and racial tensions. To make ends meet, one entrepreneurial refugee from Virginia, Judea Moore, rented a basement kitchen. But with competition for space fierce, she was soon outbid for the property by a white man named John Harrison. Her landlord was willing to let her stay, but Harrison was determined to drive her out. Moore went to the mayor seeking redress from his harassment, but his acid reply was that “it was a pity that all we black folk who came from Virginia was not sent home to our master’s.”18
Nonetheless, the New York refugee community did its best to carry on. Many found solace in the new social relationships that developed in the new free community of African Americans. The war had forced thousands of former slaves into exile in unfamiliar places, but the shared trauma and common experiences bound the new communities together in novel ways. In this emerging community, Boston King found a wife. Her name was Violet, formerly enslaved in Wilmington, North Carolina, and twelve years his senior. In the context of a time both desperate and hopeful, a partner would have proved a great solace and a constant reminder of the possibility for a brighter future of freedom.
With a wife, and the likelihood of a family on the way, King continued to search for more stable employment. Though he had little experience of the sea, he joined the crew of a pilot boat guiding ships through the confusion of channels and islands into New York harbor. If the job paid better, it was certainly more dangerous. Shortly after joining the crew, King’s boat found itself swept out to sea, adrift for eight days with supplies meant only for five. They were lucky enough to encounter an American whale boat, which gave the bedraggled crew food and water and transported them back to land at New Brunswick, New Jersey. New Jersey, however, was American territory, outside British lines, and to King’s horror, he quickly found himself enslaved once more. He was well fed and generally well-treated—he was even allowed to go to school at night to learn to read—so much so that he marveled at the treatment of slaves in the north, but as he remembered, “all these enjoyments could not satisfy me without liberty . . . I could not find the least desire to content myself in slavery.” Boston King had had a taste of freedom, and was determined not to remain in bondage.
Between enslavement in New Jersey and freedom and family in New York, however, stood mighty obstacles. He would have to cross two rivers, both a mile or more in width while avoiding the guards posted to prevent runaways from escaping. In New Brunswick there was an all too visible reminder of the price of failure, a friend from New York, who had also been captured and re-enslaved, now fasted in stocks day and night after a failed flight attempt. Still, King was undeterred, and so, one night at one o’clock he made his way to a shallow river crossing at Amboy. Finding the usual guards not present, King waded across the Raritain River and traveled for four hours before hiding at daybreak. At nightfall the next day, he bush-wacked his way through the marshes that enveloped the coast, before finding an abandoned boat and rowing across the Arthur Kill to Staten Island and safety.
While King was negotiating his way through the rivers and swamps of New Jersey back to freedom, British and American officials in Paris had begun to hammer out a preliminary peace agreement. It was a complicated process, but for New York’s refugees, the most consequential component of the treaty was Article VII. Article VII had been inserted at the eleventh hour through the last-minute intervention of Henry Laurens. Representing America’s substantial slave-owning lobby, Laurens demanded that the British return all confiscated American property, especially the thousands of former slaves now huddled in Manhattan. Several British commanders had made promises to these refugees, but rather than stand by his country’s commitment, the British representative Richard Oswald accepted Laurens’ proposal without protest. Oswald was a canny advocate for British trade interests, but he was no advocate for the enslaved. He had made much of his fortunes from his ownership of a slave factory on the coast of Sierra Leone, from whence he shipped thousands of slaves to ports across the Americas. In South Carolina, one of the primary destinations for Oswald’s slaves, his partner and factor was none other than Henry Laurens. If that was not enough, Oswald had already discussed with Laurens his plans to establish a plantation in South Carolina once peace arrived. Oswald and Laurens both stood to gain from the return of America’s freed slaves.
News of the faithless betrayal hit New York’s refugee community like a bolt of lightning. “This dreadful rumor,” King recalled:
filled us all with inexpressible anguish and terror, especially when we saw our old masters coming from Virginia, North-Carolina, and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New-York, or even dragging them out of their beds. Many of the slaves had very cruel masters, so that the thoughts of returning home with them embittered life to us. For some days we lost our appetite for food, and sleep departed from our eyes.
Among the many slave-holders champing at the bit to recover their human property was George Washington, now camped at Newburgh outside the city. As he negotiated the surrender of the city with the British commander Sir Guy Carleton, he sent letters to agents in the city instructing them to find and kidnap his former slaves, men like Harry Washington, who had escaped Mt. Vernon and joined the Black Pioneers in the siege at Charleston before retreating to New York. He wanted to prevent, he wrote to his agent Daniel Parker, the British “carrying off any Negroes or other property of the inhabitants of the United States.” And Washington was not alone. One Hessian officer recorded that “almost five thousand persons have come to this city to take possession again of their former property.” Former slaves were seized, bound, and bundled into waiting boats by former masters and their agents. Some were spared this awful fate by the intervention of British authorities, who arrested kidnappers like those who ambushed Frank Griffin and were on the point of forcing him on a ship when Colonel Cuff, a former slave in Ward’s Blacks, arrived to arrest Griffin’s tormentors.19
Carleton and Washington met in person at Tappan on May 6, 1783 to discuss the British evacuation of New York, where Washington reminded his counterpart of his obligation to obey Article VII of the Paris treaty. Carleton, to his immense credit, stoically refused. He considered Article VII to be “a disgrace,” an indelible stain on British honor. The article, he somewhat disingenuously informed Washington, was meant to apply only to slaves who reached British lines after the initial ceasefire in 1782. The refugees who had escaped before that time would be “permitted to go wherever they please . . . to Nova Scotia or elsewhere as they desire.” To do otherwise “would be a disagreeable violation of public faith.” Washington was shocked and furious, but there was little he co
uld do without risking the tenuous peace.20
Even before his meeting with Washington, Carleton had determined that he would do whatever he could to secure the safety and liberty of the former slaves who had sacrificed so much on behalf of the British. He had already begun shipping refugees out of the city on British ships bound for Nova Scotia earlier in the year. After his conference at Tappan, Carleton made his renewed commitment to the refugees more official, announcing that all refugees that had been in British lines for more than a year, or could prove their status as free men, would be granted permission to settle elsewhere within the British Empire when his forces evacuated the city. To placate the Americans, Carleton set up a commission to review the cases of the refugees who came forward for their certificates, including Washington’s agent, and allowed American officials to inspect private ships leaving New York for stowaway slaves. However, few of the refugees had any documentary evidence of their status, and the commission, led by Samuel Birch, readily believed most of the oral accounts presented by the refugees, even though many claims of free status were clearly invented. Much to Washington’s chagrin, few were denied their “Birch certificates,” as they became known. In all, 3,000 former slaves, 1,336 men, 914 women, and 750 children were enrolled in the “Book of Negroes” that recorded the details of all those granted leave to depart New York as free people.21
Boston King and his wife Violet were both granted certificates, and on July 31, 1783 they sailed out of New York harbor with 407 other refugees aboard L’Abondance bound for a new life in Nova Scotia. In all, as many as 100,000 American slaves—out of a pre-war total of 500,000—ended up in British lines when the war ended. Perhaps 9,000 were lucky enough to cast off their shackles and enter the British Empire in freedom. Many more, in the tens of thousands, left American shores still enslaved to the more than 60,000 white loyalist refugees who resettled in the British Empire. For Boston King and many of the 9,000 new freemen, leaving New York was merely the first stage in a life-long quest for liberty.22
Nova Scotia serves as a healthy reminder that the thirteen colonies that became the United States were not the only British possessions in North America, merely the only ones that rebelled. While thirteen colonies in North America asserted their independence, Britain’s colonies in Canada and the Caribbean remained loyal. Loyalty, however, came at a price. St. John, in what is now New Brunswick, was raided by privateers from Maine as early as 1775. In 1777, American militia forces under John Allan briefly occupied St. John as part of a wider expedition against British Canada. By the end of the war, most of the ports of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick had been raided, with Annapolis Royal attacked in 1781, and Lunenburg sacked and plundered by American privateers led by Noah Stoddard in July 1782. Even the remote reaches of northern Canada felt the sting of the American War. In 1782, a French naval expedition under the Comte de la Pérouse launched a series of raids on the trading posts of the British Hudson Bay Company. The seizure of more than 12,000 furs, and the valuable expedition diary of the area’s governor, Samuel Hearne, cost the Company so dearly that it failed to pay a dividend to its investors for almost five years.23
King and his family arrived in Nova Scotia in August 1783, settling at Birchtown with as many as 1,500 other refugees. Another 1,200 former slaves opted for nearby Shelburne, with smaller communities of refugees scattered across the colony. They had suffered much to reach the rocky shores of Canada and the promise of freedom. As a reward for their sacrifice and an encouragement to settle—some British administrators hoped Nova Scotia would soon rival Boston and New York as a North American entrepôt—each head of household had been promised a plot of land. For men and women accustomed to laboring on the land of others, ownership of land was the very source of independence and the bedrock of their future as a free people. As ship after ship arrived with new refugee settlers, they wasted little time transforming their plots into homes and farms. King vividly remembered the esprit de corps that suffused the newly free settlers upon their arrival; “we exerted all our strength,” he later recalled. Most of the settlers came from the balmy southern colonies—more than half from Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas alone—and they had no conception of the chilling vagaries of winter so far north, but as 1783, the year of their liberty, came to an end, Boston King and his fellow refugees were sure that their long exodus was over at last and that their new lives were sure to be better.24
Nova Scotia was not the promised land. Of the roughly 3,000 former slaves who managed to secure passage there, only 500 or so actually received the grants of land promised by the British to every American refugee, black or white. Each head of household had been offered 100 acres of land with an additional 50 acres for each family member, but with a cascade of 30,000 newly arrived loyalists, refugees, and former soldiers all asserting claims, the pressure on land was immense, and the process of distribution slow and complicated. The British administration was committed to keeping its pledge to compensate all who had suffered and sacrificed during the war, including former slaves. To this end, Lord North authorized the distribution of more than half of Nova Scotia’s arable land, almost 14 million acres. Assessing the thousands of claims, surveying the land, and dividing it into plots, however, was a mammoth task, and priority was given to those “such as have suffered most” in the war. Suffering was measured by the amount of property lost, so large landowning loyalists were usually the first to receive their grants, and former slaves, recently property themselves, often the last to be considered. Furthermore, potential grantees were required to officially petition the local government before they were assigned their plots, which proved advantageous to well-connected, literate white loyalists, and often problematic for friendless, often illiterate black refugees. Refugees banded together as communities to petition for their grants of land, but as a small minority within the larger loyalist diaspora they were often overlooked.25
The process of distribution was slow, even for white loyalists, especially after the costs of the American War forced the British authorities to economize and drastically reduce the number of paid surveyors. For black refugees, the process was glacial. Even those who did receive their allotted land had been shortchanged. They were granted smaller plots than white loyalists and were often segregated from white communities, on more marginal, more remote, and less productive land. Even at Shelburne and Birchtown, both of which had been largely built through the labors of the Black Pioneers before the major influx of loyalists and refugees, fewer black claimants received land, having waited on average three years longer when they did receive it, and their land averaged half the acreage of grants to white people. Most were forced to make do with small “town plots” of less than an acre. To make matters worse, the crops they were familiar with from their former lives in the southern colonies did not grow as well in the frozen, rocky soil of Nova Scotia. In 1787, famine ripped through the refugee communities. Even the lucky few who had secured their land grants found survival challenging. They clung to their independence in whatever way they could, desperate to retain their new autonomy. “Many of the poor people,” King lamented, “were compelled to sell their best gowns for five pounds of flour, in order to support life. When they had parted with all their clothes, even to their blankets, several of them fell down dead in the streets, thro’ hunger. Some killed and ate their dogs and cats; and poverty and distress prevailed on every side.”26
In the end, even their independence was stripped from them. Supplies were few and dear, and, as the refugees struggled to scrape out a living, many were forced to abandon the dream of becoming independent cultivators and return to service in the homes and on the farms of their more prosperous white neighbors. As one concerned British observer reported, many former slaves had been “reduced . . . to such a state of indigence, that they have been obliged to sell their property, their clothing, even their very beds,” eventually becoming “obliged to live upon white-men’s property which the Govr has been liberal in distributing—and for c
ultivating it they receive half the produce so that they are in short in a state of Slavery.”27
Boston King had land and a skilled trade, but even he was forced to abandon his hard-won property in Birchtown for a peripatetic life searching for employment. He finally settled at Shelwin, where he found work building boats for the salmon fishery. Others, King remembered, were not so lucky and had been obliged by their “wretched circumstances” to “sell themselves to the merchants” as indentured servants “for two or three; and others for five or six years.” Indentured servants could be bought and sold during their terms of service, often leading to the separation of families. Fully one-third of refugees had arrived as family groups, and many others married upon arrival, but the economic realities of Nova Scotia meant that familiar patterns of employment reemerged. Once more, many black servants and laborers were forced to live away from their spouses and families and with their employers, while others were forced to sell their children into indentured service. The trauma of returning to a life almost akin to slavery—as indentured servants, sharecroppers, farm laborers, and domestic servants living apart from their families—must have been almost too much to bear.28
The parallels with their former lives in the slave-holding south did not end there. Slavery was legal in Lower Canada until 1793, and many white loyalists brought their slaves with them into exile, increasing the enslaved population of Nova Scotia from about 100 to nearly 1,500 and providing the refugees a constant reminder of their former lives and precarious present condition. When Shelburne, facing decline from its post-war peak as the fourth-largest settlement in North America, opened up free trade with the United States, many refugees faced the grim prospect that their former masters would come to kidnap them back into slavery. So great was the concern that in 1789 Nova Scotia’s legislative assembly was forced to pass an ordinance to prevent the smuggling of free refugees “out of the Province, by force and Stratagem, for the scandalous purpose of making property of them.” There was also the very real, and fully legal, prospect that those who had managed to escape New York without a “Birch certificate,” though free for ten years or more, would be legally reclaimed as the property of loyalist or American slave-holders. In one such case, four refugees, all of whom had fought for Britain during the war, were claimed by a North Carolina loyalist and only narrowly managed to avoid re-enslavement. Another refugee, Mary Postell, was claimed by a loyalist named Jesse Gray who sought to re-enslave her despite her possession of a Birch certificate. When two other refugees testified on her behalf, their house was burnt and one of their children killed.29
To Begin the World Over Again Page 48