by Simon Schama
The more unscrupulous white loyalists made a deliberate habit of blurring the critical distinction between free and unfree, and were accustomed to treat indentured blacks as a negotiable commodity, receiving money from prospective hirers when “their” blacks were transferred. Equally, though, there were many others in the white loyalist community, often in official positions, who clearly acknowledged the difference between hired labour and slave. When, for example, William Shaw, the provost marshal of Nova Scotia, was making muster lists around the province in the spring of 1784, he made a particular point of the fact that out on the rugged eastern shore of the peninsula, at Country Harbour, he had discovered (and he italicized his comment for emphasis) that “many of them [the blacks] are not the property of the Persons they live with.”35 Nonetheless, it often came as a shock to the whites, who themselves used the courts to press claims of ownership, that “their” blacks had the gumption as well as the knowledge to do the same. Some of the blacks, indeed, were showing signs of being their own Granville Sharp.
When Captain Thomas Hamilton and Daniel MacNeill abducted four blacks—Moses Reed, Jameson Davis, Phoebe Martin and Molly Sinclair—from Halifax with the intention of taking them in MacNeill’s sloop, the Adventure, and selling them in the Bahamas, they could not have imagined they would be thwarted by the courts.36 The two men, Reed and Davis, had run away to the British at Charleston from their master in Bute County, North Carolina, and had served with Lord Francis Rawdon’s loyalist Volunteers of Ireland. Following the 1782 evacuation, they had served in the Royal North Carolina Regiment in East Florida, one of them probably as servant to its senior officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Hamilton. Like many of the free blacks, they had been reemployed in Nova Scotia by a relative, in this case Captain Thomas Hamilton of Country Harbour. At Hamilton’s house Reed and Davis met Phoebe Martin and Molly Sinclair, both originally from South Carolina, also servants, also working without wages. Yet at no time, as Phoebe Martin would tell the court, did she or any of the others think of themselves as Hamilton’s slaves.
Suspecting Hamilton’s design for them, the four decided to escape and made their way to Halifax in the spring or early summer of 1786. But they were tracked down by a gang of five, including MacNeill and Hamilton himself. Jameson Davis was ferociously beaten; once subdued, he and the rest were chained and thrown into the hold of a ship in the harbour. But this vessel sailed only as far as Shelburne, where the blacks were to be transferred to another ship that would take them south to enslavement. This proved to be a mistake. Somehow MacNeill and his ship were known to the black community in Shelburne and Birchtown, and what they knew they feared and hated. Word was got out to the magistrates that the four blacks were being taken without a hearing, and in the spirit of the post-Mansfield ruling against coercive transportation one was granted. Surprised to be arraigned, MacNeill argued that he had been authorized to take the blacks by none other than Michael Wallace in his capacity as Atlantic trader, and indeed that it was Wallace who had arranged the trans-shipment from Shelburne and the sale. But by five to two the magistrates of the Shelburne General Sessions chose to believe the stories given by the blacks rather than the authority of one of the most powerful men in Halifax, and ordered their liberation. British freedom had not yet perished, then, in Nova Scotia.
Strikingly, many of the successful black plaintiffs were women. Taking a leaf from Granville Sharp’s book, Susannah Connor went to court to prevent John Harris from taking her son, Robert Gemmel, who was indentured to Harris but not enslaved, out of the country “contrary to the laws of the province.” Mary Westcoat and her husband likewise sued James Cox for the release of a “Negro Boy named Stephen,” and succeeded in gaining his liberation when Cox was unable to produce a bill of sale or even articles of indenture.37
Not all cases ended as happily. Joseph Robbins told the court at Shelburne that he had owned two blacks, Pero and Tom, who now lived “under the pretence of being Free Negroes.” In reply Pero said he had in fact been the property of a rebel, not a loyalist; that he had run away, so earning his liberty; that he had agreed to go with Robbins to St Augustine, but as a free man, not a slave; and that he had never been sold. Tom too told a story of escaping from a rebel master to British Charleston. But both men were delivered by the court to Robbins as his property.38
Much more tragic was the case of Mary Postell, who was taken by Jesse Gray for sale and was summoned to the Shelburne court to give evidence to support her statement that she was in fact free. She had been, she told the court, the property of an American rebel officer, Elisha Postell, but had escaped and taken refuge “within the British lines” at Charleston, where she worked on the forts and public works along with other blacks. Since she and her husband, William, were impoverished, he had persuaded her that it would be safe to enter the service of Jesse Gray as a house servant, and even to go with him to East Florida on the evacuation of Charleston. There she had worked for his brother Samuel, and when that territory had been ceded to Spain she had gone to Nova Scotia with Jesse Gray. However, as soon as she had discovered that he meant to sell her, she had “quitted his Familly, taking with her two children, Flora and Nell, and went to live in a house which she hired for that purpose in the north division of the Town.” In April 1786, by some ruse or force, Gray had seized her and her children and taken them to Argyle, where he had sold her to a Mr Mingham for 113 bushels of potatoes. Mary further claimed that Gray had taken her children away from her and sold them elsewhere. With no choice in the matter, she had stayed with Mingham for three years until she had escaped to come to Shelburne and put the whole matter before the justice of the court.
Then it was Gray’s turn to interrogate Mary in court: an unequal battle, one might suppose. But Mary held her own; she spoke what she knew. Was it not true, Gray demanded of the black woman, that in East Florida she had asked “some persons” to buy her daughter Flora back from his brother Samuel—the implication being she understood Nell to be enslaved? No, said Mary, it was not true; she had never said such a thing. Brushing aside the denial, Gray stormed on: and was it not also true that he himself had bought her from one Joseph Rea in St Augustine? No, it was not, repeated Mary; she had never belonged to any such person. Pressed harder—and this may have been fatal to her case—Mary said yes, she did not mind being sold to Mr Mingham for those potatoes, for she would do anything to get away from Jesse Gray since, she said pointedly, “he used her so ill.”
Witnesses were called for both sides. Against Gray’s people, Mary called Scipio Wearing and his wife, Diana. Wearing, who had himself left an American master, had known Mary in Charleston, and as a Pioneer had worked on the defences of Charleston under Colonel James Moncrief. He had lost contact with her when he had gone to New York and she had left for East Florida, but Scipio was in no doubt at all that she had escaped a rebel master and so was, like him, entitled to her full liberty. His testimony was of no avail. Gray, acquitted of illegal abduction, took Mary from her children and, returning to America with her, sold her again to his brother Samuel. Her daughter Nell was delivered into the custody of the court and, with her infant brother John, doubtless ended up in the hands of the Poor Commissioners.
But Scipio Wearing was punished much more painfully for his temerity in casting doubt on the word of such men as Jesse Gray. When he got back from court he found his house in flames and along with it the “whole of his Furniture…Apparel and other property was consumed.” There was worse. One of Scipio and Diana’s children had been in the house and had burned to death. Scipio went back to the court, this time praying “for such relief as this Court may be pleased to grant him.” He was told to apply to the Overseers for the Poor, where he may have received charity along with Nell and John Postell.39 It was an open secret, of course, that the firing of the house and the resultant murder of the child had been an act of vindictive retribution. But nothing could be proved; no one in Shelburne came forward, and no one was charged.
Would Mary Postell and Scipio Wea
ring and their families have been saved this suffering had they been in Birchtown? Possibly, although the village was not altogether safe from slavecatchers.40 At least two of its male inhabitants had been seized while on a purported errand beyond the town limits, imprisoned in the kind of ships owned by Daniel MacNeill and sold in the West Indies.41 But although not watertight against wickedness, Birchtown was nonetheless, by 1787, a true community, around two hundred families strong. By this time the primitive shelters had been replaced by modest cabins, probably similar to the huts the former slaves had known either in Africa or on the plantation: a single chamber barely more than ten feet square, but with a loft and an excavated cellar to store winter provisions, plus a hearth and chimney, and the whole topped with a gabled log roof. Birchtown was still something of a makeshift camp, squeezed between the wooded wilderness, Beaver Lake and the sea. But it was still, as the Methodist patriarch John Wesley noted across the Atlantic, “the only town of negroes that has been built in [the continent of] America.” Recent site excavations have turned up fragments of glass together with ceramic bowls and dishes like English creamware, some decorated with flower patterning, that suggest a milieu more domestic than just a crude encampment of hunters and diggers.42 Birchtown was hardly a Home Counties village, but nor was it a place where, as subsequent myth had it, the settlers were forced to live in “caves.” Although most of the population were still artisans and fishermen, there were at least thirty who described themselves as farmers and took goods to market in Shelburne, much as the Prestonians did in Halifax.43 Blucke and his wife, Margaret, ran their school to ensure that the next generation would be literate, and there was also, of course, the church, the heartbeat of Birchtown, shared contentiously among the Methodists, who dominated worship; Anglican “New Lights” of the Connexion of the Countess of Huntingdon; and, despite David George’s initial frosty reception, eventually (and unstoppably) a group of enthusiastic Baptists. So there was a lot of noise on Sundays, and the fact that the warring sects sometimes shut their doors on each other and to visiting missionaries of the wrong denomination only emphasizes the way in which Birchtown was becoming an independent free black community.
None of this was enough to impress a companion of Prince William Henry (later King William IV), who was then stationed with the Royal Navy in Nova Scotia. Staying at Shelburne barracks, Captain Dyott and some friends (although not the prince) decided to take a look at Birchtown, where they were entertained to dinner by Colonel Blucke and his wife. The visitors were glad to leave what Dyott described as a “place beyond description wretched…their huts miserable to guard against the inclemency of the Nova Scotian winter and their existence almost dependent on what they could lay up in summer. I think I never saw such wretchedness and poverty so strongly perceptible in the garb and countenance of the human species as in these miserable outcasts.”44
But then Dyott came to Birchtown in 1788, at one of the lowest points in its admittedly rocky fortunes. The previous year there had been another wave of the smallpox epidemic, which had never quite relinquished its grip on the escaping blacks and had travelled with them from Virginia and the Carolinas, Boston and New York. The collapse of the Shelburne trading economy after 1786 meant that there was less casual labour required, which had previously enabled them to supplement their meagre subsistence; and the proposed solution of the Shelburne authorities—to make the town into a free port, open to business with the United States—filled the blacks with terror again lest their haven be opened to slavecatchers who, they knew, were still relentless in their quest to recover human “property.” Many of the Birchtown blacks had still not received their land allotments, and those who had were required to offer days of “statute labour” (usually on roads) as a condition of receiving assistance or in discharge of the “quit rents” they were shocked to discover they were supposed to pay. (Quit rents were a fiscally expedient anachronism, a single annual sum to be offered to the government in lieu of ancient demands of goods and services, and a source of bitter provocation to the Americans before the revolution.) Sir Guy Carleton, the new governor of Canada, had promised that the loyalists would not be burdened with quit rents, but the London government obtusely granted only a temporary suspension. To cap the misfortunes, the winters of 1787–88 and 1788–89 were so ferocious, and the springs and summers so cold and wet, that such arable crops as there were, especially of corn and potatoes, failed and famine dug its talons into Birchtown. Boston King, the South Carolinan escaped slave who had already survived smallpox and capture by the Americans, had been converted to Methodism in Birchtown. King who took walks in the snow-covered woods to interrogate himself about his sins, remembered these years as a time of the wolf: “Many of the poor people 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 thro’ hunger. Some killed and eat [sic] their dogs and cats and poverty and distress prevailed on every side.”45 There was nothing for it, he concluded, but “to my great grief” to leave Birchtown and find work where he could.
It was not only the winter that was cruel. On the verge of begging, the threadbare Boston King walked the streets hawking his skills as a carpenter, and eventually found a captain who ordered a chest from him. Back he went to Birchtown, worked day and night, and then carried the chest through snow three feet deep to the captain. He was paid with the coin of contempt. “To my great disappointment he rejected it. However he gave me directions to make another. On my way home, being pinched with hunger and cold I fell down several times, thro weakness and expected to die on the spot. But even in this situation I found my mind resigned to the divine will and rejoiced in the midst of tribulation; for the Lord delivered me from all murmuring and discontent altho I had but one pint of Indian meal left for the support of myself and wife.” Dragging the new chest through the drifts, and fearful that the captain would once more find it unacceptable, King took with him a saw, first to destroy it and spare himself the agony of hauling it back. But this time the captain took the piece and, what was more, paid for it in cornmeal. King then sold the original chest for another half crown and his saw for three shillings and ninepence. The tool had cost him a guinea, five times what he was offered for it now, but he was in no position to haggle.
His luck began to turn. At some point soon King would have needed his saw back, for he was commissioned by two Shelburnians to build three flat-bottomed boats for the next season’s salmon fishing. Paid £1 for each, and supplied with more corn, as well as the tar and nails he needed, King and his wife, Violet, were saved from having to follow many of their Birchtown friends and neighbours into long-term indentures. The next winter he built some more craft, and was evidently a skilled enough carpenter to be asked by a merchant to build a house at Chedabucto Bay. Once he got there after the thaw, the merchant told him he had changed his mind and that he could easily buy a new house for what it would cost to have one built. But he still had work for him He was short of men for his salmon fleet and would rather King served him that way. It was May. In all likelihood King would not get back to Violet and the children until the autumn. And he worried about having to forsake his calling as Methodist missionary and lay preacher. But he need not have worried on that score for, having accepted the work, he discovered that the fishing people of Chedabucto were shockingly profane and steeped in sin: “I endeavoured to exhort them to flee from the wrath to come and to turn to the Lord Jesus.”
They chuckled, and sure enough, in the Gulf of St Lawrence, the fleet ran into a monstrous tempest and the sailors “expected every moment would be our last.” When the storm abated they found themselves on the Grand Banks in a deep, impenetrable fog in which the supply ship carrying all their provisions for the season disappeared. King redoubled his prayers to the God of forgiveness and was heard. Two weeks later the missing ship reappeared, and four days after that so did the glittering salmon. Despite this abundant blessin
g, King still feared that the enterprise had been put in jeopardy by the filthy blasphemies of his employer, who was much given not only to flying into rages, but also to taking the name of the Lord in vain when he did so. Ever since he could remember, as long ago as the age of six when he was put to mind his master’s cattle in South Carolina and been taught the merry joys of a good oath by his comrades, King had suffered from guilt at this particular sin. As a cowherd dozing beneath the shade of a great tree, he had dreamt that the world was on fire. God was descending on a “great white throne,” Judgement was nigh—and he was numbered among the tribe of the cursers! Now, years later, he was trapped in a boat with a man whose terrible language was putting them all at risk while they were drifting on the deep. Summoning up his courage, King reminded the arch-curser that “all profane swearers shall have their portion in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone.” For a brief while the captain was sobered into quietness, but the next morning he was at it again, verbal demons flying from his mouth. Unable to close his ears to the unholy torrent, Boston King, with some temerity, now banned the captain from his own boat, asking for daily orders in advance and at more than arm’s length “for if he persisted in his horrible language I should not able to discharge my duty. From that time on he troubled me no more and I found myself very comfortable having no one to disturb me.”
There were more challenges. Hardly returned to Chedabucto, the fleet set off again, this time for the herring run, and ran into yet another North Atlantic storm. But after King had finally been paid off in late October he was able to go back to Violet and to his lay preaching richer by some £15 and two barrels of fish. With this little fortune, Boston King was able to escape the worst that had befallen other members of his community. “I was enabled to clothe my wife and myself, and my Winter’s store consisted of one barrel of flour, three bushels of corn, nine gallons of treacle, twenty bushels of potatoes which my wife had set in my absence and the two barrels of fish so that this was the best Winter I ever saw in Birchtown.”