by Simon Schama
But once the site of Birchtown was seen to have potential, it immediately attracted the attention of the more powerful white captains who, much to Marston’s disgust, insisted they had already claimed the choice lots. They had sent their own surveyor, “a Mr Sperling,” to the western end of the harbour with a line to mark out fifty-acre properties, and had included the Birchtown site. Sperling had been paid $2 a head to make the claims without “even a shadow of a license.” To the detriment of his already shrinking popularity with the white loyalists, Marston literally stood his ground on behalf of the blacks of Birchtown. He would pay a price for this stand of principle.
The title, though, was but a nominal thing. As families began to move on to the site—the Andersons (Daniel, aged thirty-one; his wife, Deborah; Daniel Jr., aged two; and the baby, Barbara); the Dixons (Charles, pater-familias, forty-eight, his wife, Dolly; Miles, aged seventeen; Luke, fourteen; Richard, thirteen; Sophia, Sally, six; and Polly, just one and a half); Mingo Leslie, who had fought as a Black Dragoon, with his wife, Diana, and their baby, Mary; the entirely female Quacks family (Elizabeth, the grandmother, her daughters, Jenny and Sally, and granddaughters, Katy and Polly)—it became quickly apparent that, to have any chance of a good start, Birchtown was going to need active help from Shelburne, the place least likely to offer it. Daniel Anderson listed his trade as “farmer,” and Charles Dixon said he was a carpenter, and both came with axes, but neither could do much without supplies of saws and teams of horses and oxen to clear the boulders and stumps before the heavy snows made labour impossible and before the vestigial trees could produce spring sports. All this effort would inevitably take money, but the only way to get the money was by labouring for the town, which, in turn, would rob the Birchtowners of the time they needed to transform their wilderness into a garden and a farm. Even supposing that could get under way, they would still need provisions from the government in order to get them over the first winter.
Few of these hopes were realized. By the summer of 1784, Shelburne, now some nine thousand strong, did indeed offer the blacks an incentive to get on with building their own township—but it was not the kind they had been hoping for. On the 26th of July Marston recorded “Great Riot today,” the work of the still unpaid and largely unsettled veterans of the king’s army. Reduced to poverty and humiliation, they had come to see the blacks as robbing them of work by accepting wages far lower than anything whites were prepared to settle for. In fact most of the blacks worked for nothing at all except food and sometimes shelter, for their wages went unpaid for months or even years at a time. The white soldiers blamed the victims, the “blackies.” They came as a gang, waving clubs, roaring that they would drive them from the town. Twenty houses belonging to blacks were torn down, their few possessions looted, the blacks themselves, women as well as men, forced to run for it. Benjamin Marston, accused of showing favour to the “blackies,” was a particular target. Needless to say, none of the leaders of the white loyalists in Shelburne, whom he had antagonized by interfering in their land claims, lifted a finger in his defence. Alone, scared and fearing the worst, Marston fled to the local barracks and ventured out next day only to take the first ship back to Halifax. His hasty exit, he soon discovered, had been prudent. When friends came to see him a week later they told him that, had he not left so speedily, he might not have survived. “I find I have been hunted down to Point Carleton and had I been found should have had a bad time amongst a set of villainous scoundrels. I find I should have been fairly hung.”25 The mayhem went on for ten days, and sporadic episodes of violence and intimidation were reported for at least a month. The situation was serious enough for the govenor himself to come to Shelburne where, having listened to local complaints and exercising his talent for expediency, Parr decided to blame Marston, rather than the offices of the surveyor in Halifax, for the delays in distributing land to the soldiers.
Among those who had lost his house in the riot was the Baptist pastor David George, described by a local merchant, Simeon Perkins, as “Very Loud,” and who had persisted in preaching to his flock in the Shelburne meeting house, even while the mob surrounded it with flaming torches, threatening to burn it to the ground.26 But then David George was not one to abandon his faith, for while the Lord was with him, he feared no evil.
THE WORK WOULD ENDURE; but what tribulations had been sent his way! In Charleston, in October 1782, David George, his wife, Phyllis, and their four children had been swallowed up in the panic that marked the end of British rule in the Carolinas and for a while he had been parted from his family. Ships such as the Free Briton were hastily loading with free blacks, most of whom had got their liberty through serving the king. Now they were free but hated. The white loyalists who scarcely gave them room to board on the gangplank detested them for sowing wicked and ridiculous notions of freedom among their own servants and slaves. The white Americans whose property they had been looked at them as though they would hunt and kill them if they could. And the blacks still in bondage, who boarded with their masters, envied them their freedom.
It was a twenty-two-day sail to Halifax, and David George wrote that he was “used very ill on board.”27 Perhaps wanting so badly to preach and convert made matters worse. In the hilly Nova Scotian port David managed to find his old benefactor, General James Paterson, and was at last reunited with Phyllis and the children. But in that city those of his colour were not permitted to preach to the blacks, much less to baptize (indeed, they were not even allowed to pray in St Paul’s alongside whites). So when General Paterson went to Shelburne David accompanied him, for the moment leaving the family in Halifax. In the tented town he discovered “numbers of my own colour,” but once more met with suspicion and resentment from the white people. This hostility fed his calling and made David George more convinced than ever of what he must do. He shone with its necessity.
I began to sing the first night, in the woods at a camp, for there were no houses built…The Black people came [from] far and near, and it was so new to them: I kept on so every night in the week and appointed a meeting for the first Lord’s day in a valley between two hills, close by the river: and a great number of White and Black people came, and I was so overjoyed with having an opportunity once more of preaching the word of God that after I had given out the hymn, I could not speak for tears. In the afternoon we met again in the same place and I had great liberty from the Lord.28
Liberty from the Lord. It was all he craved. Let his unfailing goodness be sung. Every evening now there were meetings, and the many who were still ignorant of the gospel came to David. Voices were raised on high. There was exultation and witness. But the Shelburne “White people, the justices and all, were in an uproar and said I might go out into the woods for I should not stay there.”29 And he would have been driven out altogether but for one good white man (there was always one good white man), and this one had known him in Savannah and now gave him his own lot on which to stay and build a house. “I then cut down poles, stripped bark and made a smart hut and the people came flocking to the preaching every evening for a month as though they had come for their supper.” When Governor John Parr went to Shelburne he brought Phyllis and the six children, along with six months’ worth of provisions for the Georges, and made it known that he should have a quarter acre on which to grow food. There was running water through his plot, “convenient for baptizing at any time,” and when snow fell David and his helpers built a platform for the flock to stand on, for their feet were often bare—although there was still nothing to cover their heads.
Brothers and sisters came and chanted their experiences before David and Phyllis as before the Great Judge and Father, and there was more praying and preaching and singing, and then, just before Christmas, the first baptism in their little Jordan creek; and the chapel walls rose and there were more baptisms every month even as the water froze. By the next summer there were fifty black Baptists in his flock and the meeting house was roofed and floored, although as yet there we
re still neither chairs nor pulpit. The Georges were now desperately hard up, having used their coppers to buy nails for the meeting house. They were saved only by the intervention of the Taylors, husband and wife Baptist missionaries from London, who gave them seed potatoes. David’s voice was so strong now and his work for God so famous that whites from well beyond Shelburne began to approach him, first from curiosity, then from yearning; and this was both a gift and a trouble. A certain William Holmes, who lived at Jones Harbour, converted to the light but not yet cleansed, came in his schooner to Shelburne, sought David out and asked him to come and preach along the coast at Liverpool, which he did, and, although it was a mixed communion, when David preached the “Christians were alive and we had a little heaven together.”30 So William and Deborah Holmes went back with David to Shelburne, testified in the church and were to be baptized on the Lord’s Day.
Their relations were very angry; raised a mob and endeavoured to hinder their being baptized. Mrs Holmes’s sister especially laid hold of her hair to keep her from going down into the water, but the justices commanded peace and said she should be baptized as she herself desired it. Then they were all quiet. Soon after this the persecution increased and became so great that I thought I must leave Shelburn. Several of the Black people had houses upon my lot; but forty or fifty disbanded soldiers were employed who came with the tackle of ships and turned my dwelling house and every one of their houses quite over and the Meeting house they would have burned down had not the ring-leader of the mob himself prevented it. But I continued preaching in it till they came one night and stood before the pulpit and swore how they would treat me if I preached again. But I stayed a preacher and the next day they came and beat me with sticks and drove me into a swamp. I returned in the evening and took my wife and children over the river to Birch Town where the black people were settled and there seemed a greater prospect of doing good than Shelburn.31
David George’s sense of asylum in Birchtown lasted only a few months, for the Methodists had been busy there. William Black, a Methodist missionary, had arrived in 1784 and found two hundred worshippers listening to the sermons of Blind Moses Wilkinson. Black and Daddy Moses were jealous of their flock, and neither took very kindly to what they thought might be the taking of apostates. When they made this known in no uncertain terms David decided to go back to Shelburne, so made his way across the bay again, cutting through the frozen water with a whipsaw, only to find that his meeting house had been turned into a tavern. “The Old Negro wanted to make a heaven of this place,” the tavern keeper had boasted in David’s absence, “but I’ll make a hell of it.” There were still enough friends in town, however, to see to its restoration, and by the next year, 1785, the revival was under way.
Through the years that followed “Black David” turned itinerant missionary, tramping from one end of Nova Scotia to the other, creating seven “New Light” Baptist churches and appointing deacons when he moved on. Then he travelled north, across the Bay of Fundy to New Brunswick, where he was already so famous for his hosannas, his tear-stained exclamations and his mass baptisms that when he landed at St John “some of the people who intended to be baptized were so full of joy that they ran out from waiting table on their masters with the knives and forks in their hands, to meet me at the waterside.” There was a great baptism of blacks and whites all together in the river, men and women, their clothes unseemly wet, which caused such a scandal that the governor of New Brunswick, Thomas Carleton, announced that henceforth David was licensed to minister only to blacks in the province.32
Yet more waters to cross, some of them cruel even to the true servants of God. After ministering and baptizing at Preston, where British Freedom and his fellow settlers were gathered, David made his way back, first to Halifax and then to Shelburne, on one of the small ships that followed the coast south and west. But there was an ill wind and the vessel, with thirty passengers on board, was blown far out to sea, utterly losing its course. Fog settled and the temperature fell. Without a blanket to warm him, David froze, the frostbite creeping up his feet, ankles and calves all the way to his knees. When they finally docked at Shelburne he tried to walk, but collapsed and lay on the ground until someone from the church was sent for and he could be carried home. “Afterwards, when I could walk a little, I wanted to speak of the Lord’s goodness, and the brethren made a wooden sledge and drew me to Meeting.” In the spring he felt a little better and could totter about here and there, although mostly he still slid to the chapel. The strength had been taken from him—but not the spark, never that.
DAVID GEORGE’S FLOCK needed the comfort of God because too often it was all they had. The winter of 1785–86 was harsh at Birchtown, a taste of what was to come. Some of the settlers had, nominally, received their twenty-acre lots. But without ox teams, most of the lots stayed uncultivable. Dwellings scarcely deserved the name. Even as huts, most were shockingly rudimentary, a pit dug some six feet deep, the lean-to entry serving as the only source of light; the dirt floor was lined with crude planks or sometimes just with leaves, and the pitched roof made of logs and sometimes covered again with sod or bark or both. More like animals’ lairs underground than cabins, for the first few years these dwellings offered shelter to those who slept in them from the worst that the Nova Scotian winter could do—snowfalls three to four feet deep, and drifts at least twice as high.33 Even so, the Birchtowners were often on the edge of famine. Unless there were further food handouts from the government, one report to Halifax succinctly judged, “they must perish.”34 So cornmeal and molasses, occasionally supplemented with a little dried codfish, went on well beyond the first year.
But it was never enough to make liberty something more than a notion. In Shelburne, those blacks who went back to the town after the riots found work as carpenters, sawyers, boatbuilders, fishermen, sailors and general labourers, whilst their wives and daughters were cooks and laundresses. But their plight became worse when the embryonic whaling industry, crippled by tariffs the British government imposed on oil and bone, went under. The once-promising cod fishery also contracted, throwing many more on to the labour market and reducing their bargaining power. Shelburne became the gloomy wreck of John Parr’s failed dream. Thousands of white loyalists, especially the poorer ones, went back to Halifax or returned to the United States. Those with a little more capital either stayed put in their houses on Water Street and King Street or emigrated with their slaves and servants to the West Indies or the Bahamas. The downward slide of the loyalist economy took the occupants of the coastal villages and harbours with it: the boatbuilders and fishermen of Lunenburg and Liverpool and the little satellite hamlets such as Port l’Hébert and Lockeport. Further off, on the shores of the Bay of Fundy the choice for the free blacks and their families was between hiring themselves out on punitive terms of indenture or starvation.
Socially, the mass indenturing of the free blacks may have looked like re-enslavement, and their representative Thomas Peters characterized it thus when he was in London drumming up support from Granville Sharp and like-minded souls. But the distressed and impoverished blacks who signed indentures with white masters and mistresses were adamant that they were not so utterly defeated, nor so forgetful of their status and what had been promised them, as to surrender once more to bondage. The indentures (which bound not just blacks but also many poor whites through the years of Nova Scotian hardship) were drawn up for a specific term. Although board and lodging were to be supplied, they were not in lieu of wages, but in addition to them. The mere fact of those wages, however pitiful, was itself an indicator in law, as many of the recipients pointed out, that they were not enslaved. And this, as much as the pure hardship incurred by their habitual non-receipt, was why, when the blacks complained to the county courts of General Sessions of their treatment (demonstrating awareness of their freedom and rights under the law), or when they defended themselves against being confused with blacks who had come to Nova Scotia as house slaves, they made sure to str
ess that, whilst they might have lived in with employers, they were in fact owed arrears of wages.
Court records document a fierce struggle between two worlds. On the one hand the white loyalist caste, many of them from the American South and accustomed to owning slaves, assumed that the institution would be upheld by the Nova Scotian courts. They were right in that in the 1780s slavery was de facto legal in the province; notices of sales and auctions could be read in Halifax. But the climate of opinion, moral and legal, was changing, just as it was in England and in the United States north of the Potomac. Halifax was becoming more like post-Mansfield London. Indeed, Mansfield’s ruling that blacks could not be coercively transported out of the province was taken as valid for Nova Scotia by at least some justices. Others, like Chief Justice Thomas Strange and Attorney-General Sampson Blowers, were beginning an active campaign to outlaw slavery from the province altogether. So the white slaveholding loyalists and those who wanted to convert the impoverished free black labour force into slaves ran into impressively fierce resistance. However grim their circumstances, however excluded from the vote or refused common places of worship with whites, blacks were still strikingly conscious of their rights—whether they had gained that understanding from the transatlantic awareness of the Mansfield cases, through knowledge of the Dunmore and Clinton proclamations, or whether they had learned it while on active service. This first generation of free British African-Americans put up a fight against re-enslavement and especially against their families being divided.