Rough Crossings

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by Simon Schama


  But this seemed to be what Thomas Peters was saying. That through being made landless and hungry, free blacks had been forced into indentures so punitive that they might as well be in chains. Some had even been made off with and sold in the West Indies, breaking families apart. His people around Annapolis and in New Brunswick, Peters said, “have been already reduced to Slavery without being able to obtain any Redress from the King’s Courts.” Peters spoke feelingly of monstrous things: of a free man he knew, reduced to slavery, who “did actually lose his life by the Beating and Ill Treatment of his Master and another who fled from the like Cruelty was inhumanly shot and maimed by a Stranger allured thereto by the public advertisement of a Reward.” Sharp, as was his wont, had someone write all this down, and was so distressed by it that, as he helped Peters draft a second version of his petition to government, he made sure that the document spoke not just of the deprivation of land but of the deprivation of liberty. As far as Sharp was concerned, Lord Mansfield’s ruling in the Somerset case ought to have changed everything: what held in England should hold in Nova Scotia. A free black in Halifax ought to be as protected from forced transportation as any subject of the king in Britain.

  At the heart of the petition drafted by Peters with Sharp’s help was an appeal to the indivisibility of British freedom. That was what, in both their views, distinguished Britain from the United States where, even though slavery had been abolished in four states (Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania), it had been preserved in many more. On the other hand, could it possibly be the case, they wrote, that

  …the happy influence of his Majesty’s free Government was incapable of being extended so far as America to maintain Justice and Right in affording the Protection of the Laws of the Constitution of England? [Nor since] the oppressive Cruelty and Brutality of their Bondage…in general Shocking to human nature but more particularly shocking, irritating and obnoxious to their Brethren of the same kindred, the free people of Colour [could they] conceive that it is really the Intention of the British Government to favour Injustice or tolerate Slavery.1

  Then Peters related his odyssey. The difficulties had begun early, on the ship that brought them out of New York, the Joseph. Peters, Murphy Steele, their wives Sally and Mary, and a fellowship of Black Pioneers—most of them from Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, men who had dug and shovelled for the king, and cleaned out their officers’ necessaries, together with women who had cooked and laundered for the colonels—had not got aboard at Staten Island until very late in the embarkation season.2 The army had been the last to leave NewYork. That was hard, little John “Born within the British Lines” being only eighteen months old, and all of them cooped up in the hold until the ship finally sailed in the second week of November, just a few weeks before the king’s flag finally came down in New York. In fair weather the voyage to Nova Scotia usually took a week, or at most two. The Joseph had delayed so long that the dirty weather had started in earnest, and a gale, a bad one, had caught the brig, blown it sharply off course and done so much damage that there was nothing for it, so they were told a little suspiciously, but to put into Bermuda and sit out the winter. So there they were, stuck aboard, looking at the breezy island with its skirt of pink sand. When they did get on shore what did they see but gentlemen and ladies with slaves waiting on them by their carriages in the lanes outside the white churches, just as they had in Carolina?

  It was not until May 1784 that the Joseph set sail again for Nova Scotia, where, so they had been led to believe, the Pioneers would finally get their due. Peters carried with him a special passport, signed by Colonel Allen Stewart, intended for “all commanders” and testifying that he had served “faithfully and honestly,” that he was “a good and faithful subject of Great Britain” and that he had earned “the good wishes of officers and his comrades.”3

  The place where the others who had come before them had been set down, Shelburne, and the black village beside it, Birchtown, were so crowded that their ship had been directed instead to make for Annapolis Royal on the north side of the peninsula. When they disembarked they would have seen naval vessels anchored in the neat little harbour; a walled bastion with guns facing the sea; and a few lanes of white houses, inns and trim yards lined up parallel to the water. But from Annapolis the blacks were sent off across the river to another place called Digby, just a straggling row of mean cottages, shingles peeling in the salty damp, with grog shops lurking in muddy corners beside the jetty. Those who had come to Digby were making do in smoky little cabins. But even this was not thought right for blacks, so they were set down still farther off at Little Joggin, some sixty families, with tents, or huts covered in bark and sod, for shelter. And when they had asked again, they had been told yes, they would get land, which after all they knew was their right.

  But in the meantime, how were they to sustain themselves and their children in the wilderness, with precious few axes to go round? Such as could be carpenters and sawyers and the like might make a boat and tar it well, for there was plenty of lumber and pitch from the forest; and such as could sail might make their way around the coves and out into the sea now that the spring had come. Some cast their nets for mackerel and herring from boats at Little Joggin; others, lacking the wherewithal to see their families through the winter, would have to leave them behind and sign up for months aboard the ships fishing for cod or salmon.4

  Peters was one of those who had been continually moved on. He had seen promises set aside so that the free people of colour were having to sell what little they had, even themselves and their children for service, if they wanted to eat. If he was bold in voicing his complaints, it was only because he had been given trust by the local government of the province and so thought he could address it as a free man. The Pioneers ought not to be so slighted for they happened to be skilled in just the work the country needed: the building of roads through the trackless forest, bridges over the salt marshes, the making of havens. Among the thirty thousand loyalists there were few who could, or would, do that!

  So at Brindley Town, which is what their black village near Digby was called, Sergeant Peters, with his resolute manner, became the fixed point, the man on whom government depended. It was to him that the supplies for the blacks were to be delivered: 12,096 pounds of flour and 9,352 pounds of pork, precisely. While the loyalists were getting themselves established, government had pledged to give them free provisions for the first year, two-thirds free for the second and one-third for the third. After that they could rub along on their own. But this pork and flour, as much as it seemed, sufficed for just 80 days for 160 adults and 25 children, a ration that would barely see them through to the end of the summer, much less the winter. Yet as one of the white officers flatly announced, “It is all they are to git.”5 Even this meagre supply, however, did not come to Peters for distribution but was diverted to the Reverend Brudenell at Digby, who stored it in his church until it could be taken to one Richard Hill, who in turn locked the food in his cellar, making himself the judge of just who got what and when. It soon became clear that pork and flour would be doled out only to those who agreed to work on the road from Digby to Annapolis, and this at the fair time of year when they should be clearing their own lots. What had been promised was food for three years; what they got, if they laboured, was food for three months.

  So they were to be a work gang again, were they? To swing a pick and sweat their blood for a little something to stay alive? Was this what they had been promised? It was not, for Peters knew that the government in London had made a point of declaring that they should not have to become wage labourers and so be at the beck and call of others. Sir Guy Carleton, who had thought it a good idea that the Pioneers be kept together for public works, had also insisted that any such labour be strictly voluntary.6 But this was more like the slavery they had thrown off when they had gone and sworn themselves to the king. And perhaps it was what the white loyalists wanted, for from the time they had all gone
on the ships the whites had made it absolutely clear that they took it unkindly to have so many blacks giving themselves airs and forever canting their rights. It came back to the land, always, for without it, and their flour and bacon gone, what choice did they have but to indenture themselves and their wives and children for years at a time? Their families were broken apart, their precious freedom an empty word.

  What made it even harder was that white loyalists seemed to have little trouble in getting settled on their plots. No one had ever said, neither in London nor in Halifax, that there was to be a difference in the property received by blacks and by whites, only in the portions given to officers (one thousand acres) and to privates (one hundred acres). As for “ordinary refugees”—those who had not served in the army—they were to be allotted the same one hundred acres, plus fifty more for each family member. Surely there was enough land to go around for all forty thousand of them, those who had sailed from Boston and Charleston, Savannah and New York? Half of Nova Scotia’s 26 million acres had been set aside for the loyalists, although the government had reserved what it deemed it might need for naval timber. (Spruce and fir made strong yet flexible masts.) But the government had also determined that land would be apportioned according to what had been lost in America. Those suffering the greater losses would receive the greater share, and get it, moreover, before those judged to have lost little. First in line, then, were loyalists who had themselves owned farms, plantations—and slaves; then the townsmen, merchants and lawyers; then the ordinary soldiers—not just English, Scots and Irish, but many Hessians and other Germans who had got on the ships. At the very back of the line, of course, came the blacks, judged to have lost nothing at all but their chains.

  So the same reproof that had been given to the poor blacks in London when they had come seeking their due—that they should be mighty grateful to His Majesty for their freedom and be content with the leavings after his other loyal subjects had been served—was now heard in Halifax, Shelburne and Annapolis. Instead of the one hundred farm acres, they would be fortunate to have between twenty and thirty, plus, if they were lucky, a small plot of “town land” on which to build a cabin. Usually, those meagre acres would be on land too stony or too densely forested to be of much use to whites. Fewer than half of the 3,500 blacks—10 percent of the loyalist population of Nova Scotia—ended up with any land at all.

  In response to Peters’s complaints about how tardy the grants were, it was said that it was indeed regrettable, but he should understand that there was a deplorable want of men to do the surveying and that first the survey had to go to the governor’s office in Halifax and then back to the Surveyor of the King’s Woods, all of which, he must appreciate, took time. But in fact by August 1784 the theodolites had been busy in the woods and on the shore, and twenty thousand white loyalists had somehow managed to be settled on their acres, whilst hardly any of the blacks—nor, for that matter, the demobilized white soldiers—had been accommodated.7 It was at this moment, frustrated by the delays, many of which he suspected were deliberately engineered so that the whites at Digby and Annapolis could exploit the blacks as cheap labour, that Peters and Steele had written directly to Governor John Parr in Halifax. In the name of their fellow Black Pioneers, they asked that the promises made by General Clinton be fulfilled. For “when the war was over we was to be at our own Liberty to do and provide for ourselves which since we came to this place…we have not received…we would be verrey much obliged to Your Excellency if you would be so good as to grant the Articles allowed by Government to us the same as the rest of the Disbanded Soldiers of His Majesty’s Army.”8 As for the provisions due to them, these had been stopped (by the likes of the Reverend Brudenell) and “wee…would be ever bound to pray for Your Excellency if you would be so good as to Order what we was allowed by Government the same as the rest.” Parr, to whom the very existence of black loyalists came as a surprise since Lord North had neglected to inform him, was not, in fact, unsympathetic. He wrote to the surveyor at Digby and Annapolis, Major Thomas Millidge, that the black petitioners should be put “in the most advantageous Situation” and that he should “comply with their wishes as far as lies in your power.”

  Nothing in Nova Scotia was that simple, however. By March 1785 Millidge, who was also concerned about the blacks, had surveyed and assigned house lots of an acre in Brindley Town, as well as the little twenty-acre farm plots approved by Parr. Pending final approval, the blacks had been living at Little Joggin, and after much work had got themselves vegetable gardens on which they grew some corn, turnips and potatoes. “The Negroes have been in a very unsettled state at this place until last summer [1784],” Millidge reported, until “at some expense…several of these people have built themselves comfortable hutts in which they are now in prospect…with industry to make themselves a comfortable living.”9 But in July that year, not long before they were finally supposed to get their farms, Millidge was told by Charles Morris, the Surveyor of the King’s Woods in Halifax, that, regrettable though it was, he seemed to have given the blacks land that had already been reserved for the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel. There was nothing for it but to move the people on. Defending the blacks, Millidge insisted that “as the Negroes are now in the county, the principles of humanity dictating that I make them usefull to themselves as well as to society, is to give them a good chance to live and not to disturb them.”10 His appeal fell on deaf ears. No land was given. The blacks must fend as best they could.

  Thomas Peters thanked Millidge for his solicitude. But he had had enough of Nova Scotia: its martinets, its bitter, hostile, white disbanded soldiery, its sanctimonous churchmen, its procrastinating clerks and its partial magistrates. In the autumn of 1785 he crossed the Bay of Fundy to the newly created province of New Brunswick, where Sir Guy Carleton’s brother Thomas had been made governor. There, perhaps, he would get better treatment, both for himself and for his people.

  IN AND OUT of Halifax, “Cock Robin” Parr had his share of enemies—to begin with, those who had given him his nickname, he being a short, peppery fellow with something of a martial strut to his gait, though of late the gout had hobbled it. Parr could be a little testy but, then, being governor of Nova Scotia in 1783 was an unrewarding post. He was yet another of the Anglo-Irish lieutenant colonels on whom the English had laid the most thankless burdens of empire, such as cleaning up after the American debacle. Serving the Empire had been his whole life: he had been secretary to James Wolfe (through whom he must have met Lord Dunmore), and had been wounded many times in the line of the 20th Foot. It was not, then, in John Parr’s character to shrink from his duty. Besides, for someone who had, as yet, governed only the Tower of London (the office that had made him Henry Laurens’s despised jailer), Nova Scotia was a decided promotion. Lord North had made the appointment in 1782 before the war had officially ended, and had sent Parr to the province to determine its suitability for the reception of the expected tens of thousands of loyalist refugees.

  For those in London who took the decision to make Nova Scotia the main asylum for displaced and dispossessed loyalists, its principal recommendations were proximity to New York and New England and its emptiness. In 1782, on the eve of the loyalist immigration, there were just ten thousand inhabitants of the province. But some saw the rocky, densely forested Atlantic peninsula as much more. Nova Scotia would be the place from which a new British America would be resurrected. Unlike Quebec, there was no large French population obstinately devoted to the Catholic Church to complicate matters. Given the vast area of unoccupied land, half of which would be made available to the incomers, both North and Parr hoped that each loyalist might have, should he so wish, at least five hundred acres with which to start afresh. As for the two commodities without which an American empire could never prosper—timber and codfish—Nova Scotia was abundantly supplied. There was game in the shape of moose and white-tailed deer, and there was a fortune running around on the furry backs of marten and muskrat.
The climate, to be sure, was challenging—deep snow in the winter, blackfly in the summer. But, with much of its shoreline washed by the benevolently tepid Gulf Stream, Nova Scotia was less inhospitable than many supposed. So, at any rate, ran the early reports.

  They were not all wrong. Although the population was scattered thinly over the long, meandering coastline and the low-backed islands, leaving the forest interior to the native Mi’kmaqs and the wolves, Halifax was the sleeping princess waiting for the kiss of Empire. It was the perfect combination of port and fort, lying on a huge natural harbour, a yawning open mouth of a haven, three miles wide. The engineers of the port in the mid-eighteenth century must have been ambitious for its future, since they created a harbour capable of holding a thousand ships at anchor, and then enclosed it with a thick granite wall. From the western end of the harbour a steep hill rose, and on its flank rows of gravelled streets, some of them fifty-five feet wide, were already filled with stores—chandlers, hatters, haberdashers—as well as tall, narrow, timber-frame houses climbing the slope, and painted white or buttercup yellow in cheerful contrast to the slate grey of the sea. On Saturdays, farmers from Dartmouth, Preston and other outlying villages carted in their cabbages and turnips; the streets milled with all sorts, and the Halifax breweries did brisk trade. The accents heard in the dim taverns were, as usual, lowland Scots and Irish, but also the drawl of Maine and the clipped Massachusetts voices of the New Englanders who had brought their seamanship and their keen nose for opportunity north in the 1750s and 1760s. There were other, thicker styles of speech too: the clogged gutturals of German Lutherans and the dipthonged French patois of the Acadians, the fortunate ones who had managed to escape from Maine across the Bay of Fundy in the early 1750s before the British, in a moment of strategic ethnic cleansing, deported the rest all the way south to Louisiana.

 

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