by Simon Schama
The hill overlooking both Halifax town and harbour was crowned by a formidably armed and walled citadel, with heavy cannon pointing out to sea to deter any thought of a presumptuous French (or, now, American) attack. Directly beneath the fort was a clock tower, and around the Anglican diocesan church of St Paul’s (in which blacks were banished to the gallery) a little piazza had shaped itself. In the gentler summer months the quality of the town walked about in the milky evening light, doffing hats, twirling parasols and inclining bonnets, while their children bowled hoops as if, for all the world, they were taking the air in Bath or Lyme Regis. There were coffee-houses, ropeyards, courthouses, warehouses, gambling houses, musical evenings, theatricals, gazettes, quacks and harlots. There was the North British Club, where the Scots could rub their chins, exchange gloomy intelligence about the shocking state of trade and shake their heads at the follies of the world. There was the Salt Fish Club, where the Anglo-Irish could speak their piece about the Scots and pass the decanter. There were prayers and blusters, wagers and seductions. It was like most other eighteenth-century commercial towns in the British Atlantic empire: greedy, gossipy and parochial, with eyes much bigger than its stomach.
But Halifax was nicely scaled for the restive ambitions of someone like Michael Wallace, the Scots-born merchant who shipped in manufactures from Glasgow, and with them bought James River tobacco and Havana muscovado sugar, which he sold in Nova Scotia, along with Cape Breton coal and Irish linen. Wallace was king of the Halifax hill: president of the North British Society; the canniest head on the governor’s Executive Council (without which the said governor could not so much as order the clearing of stray cats); provincial treasurer; Commissioner for Roads (a nice fortune to be made there); and a magistrate in the Court of Common Pleas, judge of the Court of Admiralty. With an eye to rents, Wallace was also a substantial owner of land near Dartmouth across Halifax harbour, all the way east to Preston. But he was not all business. Like his ilk in both Auld Scotland and New Scotland, Wallace was a charitable man. His coin rang heavily in the collection dish on Sundays, and there was nothing he would not do to see that the unfortunate orphans had a Christian upbringing to make them into upstanding Britons for the new American empire—perhaps mariners or even merchants. But within limits, of course; everything orderly needed limits.11
To Michael Wallace’s tidily managed, humming little Halifax with its American trade connections (many of them with the slave-laboured sugar and tobacco states) came, in the spring, summer and autumn of 1783, tens of thousands of the embittered, the distressed and the fearful. These British Americans had lost much, but most of all their confidence that to be British was the most fortunate destiny possible since it meant a share of imperial omnipotence. Is there anything in the world more pitiable and yet more unappealing than obstinate arrogance confounded by defeat? Every day those people salted their soup with rancour. What made their bitterness worse was the fact that they were, for the most part, not really the well-to-do. Those with substantial fortunes had gone back to Britain to try to forget that they had ever been American; or to the West Indies to remake their fortunes with sugar and the slaves they had taken from Georgia, Carolina and East Florida. The majority of the Nova Scotian refugees were middling sorts who had backed the wrong horse—farmers, small merchants, the odd advocate; people accustomed to a decent fashion of life, which usually included black house servants to wait upon them, and hands to help with the cows, the carts or the cooking. Abraham Cunard from Philadelphia was a typical example: he had run a small shipping business down on the Chesapeake, had stayed fiercely loyal and had left with the British army. He hoped, if only with his skills—carpentry, boatbuilding—and with the labour of his children and a government grant, to start a life again. All they needed was a little advance to tide them over.
For some of these middling people, places and land could be found in and around Halifax and Annapolis. But very soon Halifax began to burst at the seams. Parr wrote to Guy Carleton that “there is not any Houses or Cover to put them [the loyalists] under Shelter…And when I add the Scarcity and difficulty of providing fuel and lumber for building which is still greater, the many inconveniences and great distress these people must suffer if any come into this Province this Winter will sufficiently appear.12
It would be even worse for those who were not middling, so another surveyor, the Harvard-educated ex-Massachusetts merchant Benjamin Marston, thought. What he saw coming off the ships was just “a collection of characters very unfit for the business they have undertaken, Barbers, Taylors, Shoemakers and all kinds of mechanics bred and used to live in great towns…inured to habits very unfit for undertakings which require hardiness, resolution, industry and patience.”13 Marston’s territory, and the place where almost half the loyalists, some twelve thousand both black and white, would end up by 1785, was called Port Roseway, and lay 130 miles south and west of Halifax, all the way round the heavily indented coastline. There were no roads to speak of, so the only way to travel was to follow the dangerous shore and, braving the unpredictable winds, put in at the few safe anchorages—Liverpool, Yarmouth or Lunenburg. Here the traveller would be greeted by a few fishing boats and the odd schooner, or even a two-masted brig lying moored in the little harbour; a raucous chorus of herring gulls and cormorants; the simplest of rough-planked docks; a small inn with a sign bearing the face of a king, duke, general or admiral; a huddle of whitewashed cottages; and, invariably, a shingled church or chapel (or both, for the confessional enthusiasms of the fishermen and shipbuilders were most particular). In some places where the congregation and their vicar believed they had the special dispensation of Providence the church boasted a belltower or steeple, its frame sometimes picked out in black in what became the peninsula vernacular.
So it was to be in Port Roseway, the original name of which was something of a mystery to the thousands of incomers. Like so much in Canada, where a thin British veneer had been laid over an older, stronger, deeper presence, the apparently English name concealed a French past. The Acadian mariners, descendants of Breton fisherfolk, had named the two obliquely angled arms of a natural harbour cutting through the sandbars Port-Rasoir for their resemblance to the razor clams that lay all around the beaches and coves. New England fishermen who had supplanted the expelled Acadians had already corrupted “Rasoir” into “Roseway.” But for the port that would swell, in just five years, to become the most populous town in British America (indeed, at twelve thousand inhabitants the fourth biggest town in all of North America) a more emphatically British name was needed. So the decision was taken to call the place after the First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister. On the 20th of July Governor Parr, on an official tour of the loyalist settlements, came to the bay; swore in five Justices of the Peace, including Benjamin Marston, a notary and a coroner; made sure to mark out five hundred acres for his own summer residence; and then, from the porch of one of the grander houses in town, declared officially that the town was henceforth to be known as Shelburne.14
It was not a good start. Lord Shelburne was, after all, the minister whom the loyalists held most responsible for their betrayal, so hasty had he been to evacuate British troops that might yet have exerted pressure for the restitution of confiscated property. But Shelburne it became, and Shelburne it stayed: in the beginning a cramped, unkempt little place that struggled to be ceremonious (the Freemasons were much in evidence) and was, in fact, pretty rough. With ships arriving every week to disgorge their unhappy, insecure and fearful load of exiles, the wharves and streets leading from them were clogged with dumped chests and rows of tents to shelter the newcomers. Others stayed in the berthed ships, on which, at night, fires were lit and rowdiness carried over the water. And in the midst of all this were about a thousand unhappy, impoverished, demobilized soldiers, the hub of the uproar.15 There was a choice of more than twenty taverns in which they might drink themselves senseless: McGragh’s or Mrs Lowrie’s dens of cursing, retching and brawling. Bare-knuc
kle pugilism became a favourite spectacle since the army was a famous nursery of boxers; these were bitter, slugging fights, and only exhaustion and a face reduced to what boxing scriveners, such as Pierce Egan, called a “claret mash” would end the matter so that wagers could be settled. Soon places of ill repute opened for business, where the soldiers could discharge their passions and expose themselves to the usual larceny and infection. Whenever they could, the loyalists of Shelburne danced, though they had precious little to dance about. They danced in the taverns and they danced in the streets between the tree stumps, their evening jigs lit by bonfires. For the moment, then, Shelburne was a Wapping by the sea in which the improvised chapels of the righteous stood cheek by jowl with the grimy resorts of the vicious.16
In this fractious, jostling tent city, muddy when it rained, dusty when it didn’t, it took very little to make for ugliness. There was lumber everywhere, so fires often broke out, flames suddenly leaping from the piles of dry goods stacked in the streets while incoming ships were unloading. Some believed they were set deliberately by the resentful and the covetous.17 The desperate wish of those responsible for governing Shelburne was that its population might be satisfied, as quickly as possible, with the one thing that never failed to calm bad tempers: property.
Benjamin Marston was supposed to get it to them. Although he had no prior experience at surveying, Marston, a loyalist merchant from Massachusetts, worked as quickly as he could to get people “settled” on their lots, aware that lengthy delays would only deepen the (well-founded) suspicions that a small group of loyalist well-to-do were somehow in league with men sent from Halifax, such as himself, to pre-empt the best land. The snobbish Marston grumbled constantly about men with no civility, learning or scruples having been appointed “captains” of loyalist companies in New York (“gentlemen and of course their wives and daughters, ladies whom neither nature or education intended for that rank”) and who were now parading in a most high and mighty manner. Worse, the captains of these “companies” into which the loyalists had been divided—for administrative rather than military purposes—were a touchy lot, much given to shouting challenges and fighting duels. Everything made Marston jumpy. On the 4th of June 1783, in a show of truculent defiance exactly one month before the Americans would be celebrating their independence, Shelburne’s loyalists insisted on marking the king’s birthday, and doing it, moreover, in traditional British-American style, with flags, anthems and the usual show of fireworks. With so much to do, Marston sulked at the idle effrontery of it. But the Nova Scotia weather helped him to be the wet blanket: “Towards evening,” he reported, gloating, “some fine showers which have come very opportunely to prevent the ill effects of a nonsensical feu de joie which was performed just at dark and would have fired the streets in a hundred places but for the rain. A Ball tonight—all our Tent over to it but myself and I am very happy to be absent.”18 The next day, everyone but Marston was sleeping off the effects. “These poor people are like sheep without a shepherd,” he observed with his usual loftiness.
It was as though Marston, running lines in the woods in his waistcoat and shirtsleeves while being mercilessly punctured by blackfly, had been made to relive his worst days in Boston before the revolution. There, before he had fled in 1776, Marston had seen a commonwealth pulled apart by ill will between plebs and patricians, with government getting the blame. Here too in Shelburne the “republican spirit” of which he grumbled was aggravated by the selfishness of the few who somehow managed to acquire the best of the fifty-acre lots. Quite how this happened, given that there was supposed to be random drawing of lots, he was unsure, but he was suspicious. And Marston tried to keep on his guard against Halifax speculators and adventurers purporting to be distressed, or even apparently innocent people who curried favour, such as a Captain Maclean who sent him a large green turtle, a great delicacy. “I am obliged to him. He is to have a house lot, but this must not blind my eyes. He must run the same chance as his neighbours who have no turtle to send.” It was not as if Marston did not have a grander vision of the Shelburne that might be; an elegant town of grace and civility, with wide, tree-lined streets built on a classical grid pattern. But with such unpromising human material to populate this ideal city, he brooded on how this vision would ever reach fruition.
There was one section of the population, however, that Marston thought merited special attention and would, if decently treated, repay it with loyalty and perseverance: the free blacks. Around 15 percent of the incoming loyalists to Nova Scotia were black—perhaps five thousand in all—although only half to two-thirds came as free Britons, emancipated through their war service (some others among the euphemistically designated “servants” were given their freedom on arrival). Parr and the council in Halifax had decided to scatter them about the province, the largest number going to the Shelburne area, where blacks made up almost half of the population. But groups of between fifty and a hundred families, including that of British Freedom, were settled at Preston (mostly on Wallace land), in the Digby area across the Annapolis River, where Peters had tried to settle, a few more in what was about to become New Brunswick, and, most remote of all, out on the rugged Atlantic shore about a hundred miles east of Halifax in ocean-blown Guysborough County.
Five hundred blacks went to Shelburne in the first wave of immigrants in the summer of 1783. Many of them immediately got work, since it was a good time to be a carpenter or sawyer, and camped in town. But white loyalists had mixed feelings about so many unpoliced blacks in their very midst. On the one hand, they depended on their low-paid labour. On the other hand, they fumed over the insolence spread by free blacks among their own slaves and house servants. As for the shockingly indecent “Negro frolicks”—drumming, jumping, dancing and singing—such exuberant entertainments were frowned on and eventually forbidden in Shelburne. Noisy or licentious violations could then result in a spell in the House of Correction. There were also complaints about fighting among the blacks, even between their women. One “Negro Sally” was sent to the House of Correction for fighting with “Diana a Negro woman” whom Sally and her friend Jemimah claimed had struck her with both a stick and a bayonet! Diana, Sally and Jemimah all got spells in the workhouse, and Jemimah ten stripes on her back into the bargain.19 So when another 409 new free black immigrants—including Henry Washington, Boston and Violet King, Cathern Van Sayl and her baby daughter Peter “Born within the British Lines”—arrived in Shelburne in August aboard L’Abondance it was decided that these problems could only be dealt with by creating a separate township, six miles distant from Shelburne proper.
On the 28th of August Marston went to inspect the site out on the northwestern arm of the bay. With him were a number of the free black captains who had been appointed over “companies” on board, among them Nathaniel Snowball, who had belonged to Mrs Shrewsbury in Princess Anne County, Virginia; Caesar Perth, once the property of Hardy Waller at Norfolk; and John Cuthbert from Savannah. But the man on whom Marston most relied was Colonel Stephen Blucke—a colonel only by virtue of the fact that he had succeeded the deceased guerrilla chief of the New York Black Brigade, “Colonel Tye.” But Blucke was cut from a different, fancier cloth than Tye or, for that matter, Snowball and Perth. A free mulatto from Barbados, he was well enough educated to be hired to run a school for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, as well as a fishing smack. As a white officer put it, failing to conceal his astonishment, Blucke carried himself “as a man of surprising address, being perfectly polite,” while his wife, Margaret, also a free mulatto, behaved and dressed similarly and gave herself very much the same airs.20 Whites were vastly amused to discover a black man who took it as a point of self-respect to wear a good coat, a ruffled shirt, cocked hat, wig and hose, an effect of quality completed by his cane. Why, he had even been seen to partake, every so often, of a pinch of snuff!21 That Blucke had ambitions to be thought of as the squire, magistrate and patriarch of the new black town was signalled by his later acq
uiring, with the help of his New Jersey loyalist patron, Stephen Skinner, a lot of some two hundred acres on which he laid out the lines of a house as grand as anything on Shelburne’s King Street.22
Twenty years earlier, a land speculator called Alexander McNutt had tried to establish a fishing and farming settlement populated by Irish immigrants on the western arm of Port Roseway. With the usual booster’s optimism, he had called it New Jerusalem, although it had in fact lasted only a few years.23 And the site set aside for the blacks—who were certainly looking for their Jerusalem—seemed, at best, a challenge. Those who crossed by boat would see the makings of a fair fishing harbour, the water gently shelving to a flat, marshy landing site covered with bright reeds. The odd pair of slender silver birches stood close to the water, almost as if rising from the shallows. Grey herons perched on tall, smooth granite rocks, waiting for opportunities. Two streams, both stained a strange, transparent amber-red from rocks containing iron oxide—yet full of small, lively fish—ran over pebbly beds into the shallows. But at the back of the reedmarsh loomed the usual forbidding curtain of blue spruce, mixed with some stands of oak and maple. In the few places where natural clearings had opened after the fall of old hardwood trees there were granite boulders, elephantine in both colour and size, but fringed with yellow and red lichen. It was a daunting place to think of farming—although not, at first sight, heartbreakingly hopeless. The woods promised moose and caribou, and the blacks were excellent, practised hunters. Most important of all, this would, at last, be a town of free black Britons, the first such free black town in all of America. In honour of the officer who had given them their certificate of liberty it was called Birchtown. And whether or not its founders thought of Birchtown as a haven for runaway slaves inside Nova Scotia, it soon became one. Marston reported that, having inspected the land, Blucke and the captains pronounced themselves “well satisfied with it.”24