by Simon Schama
But it was almost certainly Clarkson’s own exposure to the blacks themselves, particularly at Preston, that had caused him so much perturbation. Another of the worries that came crowding in on him after he had moved from the coffee-house to rented lodgings down by the harbour concerned the procedure by which prospective emigrants were to be allowed to leave Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The company had insisted that all such people should be examined for their “industry, honesty and sobriety.” Only those men and women exhibiting all three qualities would be issued with the “certificates of approbation,” which would, in effect, be their passport to depart for the place that the directors had decided should be called (no more references to the eccentric Mr Sharp) “Freetown.” But Clarkson and Hartshorne deeply mistrusted the agents who had been entrusted to spread the word to the blacks and to issue those certificates of worthiness. The white loyalists were already bitter about the prospective departure of the fittest and ablest blacks. Why would they help them on their way with testimonials? So Clarkson determined that he would personally see as many of the free blacks throughout the peninsula as he possibly could, read them the company’s offer, take the names of those expressing an interest in going, review their fitness and sign their certificates. “The white people now threaten to refuse certificates of character to force the blacks to remain in this province; but if I see a man’s hut in decent order, his land cultivated as well as it can be and if he should be a man of moderate property such as several bushels of Potatoes…I shall not withhold any certificate from him if his general character be good.”27
Hence the ride out to Preston, inland a little from the north, on the Dartmouth side of Halifax harbour, together with Hartshorne and James Putnam, the Halifax barrackmaster, who had a high opinion of the people there.28 For what Clarkson had seen in the village there had evidently made his privately mixed feelings about the enterprise still more mixed.
The hamlet, one of the few to be shared by blacks and whites, was dirt poor, with the farmers struggling to eke something out of the thin, windswept soil. The visitors heard from the Prestonians dismal stories of children fraudulently held in indentures far beyond what had been understood to be their contract; threatened with sale; the usual horrors. And only about half the Prestonians had any land to speak of at all. Those who had little “have so completely worked the land up that it will not yield half crops.”29 But then there were others, such as British Freedom, who had indeed been settled on his forty acres in addition to the “town land” on which he had built a small cabin. Having survived the worst winters and the famine years of 1788–90, those who had endured had made something of their lots, taking potatoes, corn and chickens to the Halifax market, and were successful enough for Clarkson to contract with them to supply the African fleet with laying poultry.
Still more significantly, Clarkson could see that the hundred-odd families of Preston were gathered into what he recognized as a true village; which is to say that they had a school and a church, recently consecrated. The school, supported by a fund in England, was run by Catherine Abernathy, wife of one of the cultivators, Adam Abernathy; she taught some thirty children the rudiments of reading, writing, religion and arithmetic. Some time back there had been complaints about the peculiarity of Mrs Abernathy’s spiritual leanings and the excessive enthusiasm with which she imparted them to her charges.30 But evidently she had moderated somewhat, was abiding by the Anglican catechism, and her log-cabin schoolroom, built by the blacks, was now thought exemplary. The church was shared by the three principal denominations. David George, who had visited Preston before the misadventure that had frozen his legs, had ordained one of his deacons, Hector Peters (no relation to Thomas), to minister to the Baptists and to immerse new converts. There was also room for the considerable following of the Countess of Huntingdon’s “New Lights” Connexion, a more stringently Calvinist form of Anglicanism that had been spread by the missionary John Marrant—the same Marrant who had served in the Royal Navy and been greeted by the loyalist Indian chief during General Clinton’s triumphal entry into Charleston in 1780. And, not least, the Methodist pastor was Boston King, the peripatetic ex-slave, chest-making carpenter and boatbuilder of Birchtown, salmon fisher and scourge of the blasphemers, who had been sent to Preston by his church. There, for a while, he struggled with the embarrassment of his lack of learning when whites came to hear his sermons and to keep his small black congregation of around thirty. When he preached from James 2:19 (‘Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well. The devils also believe and tremble.”) “the divine presence seemed to descend upon the congregation. Some fell flat upon the ground as if they were dead; and others cried aloud for mercy.” After the service a Miss F knocked on the door of the chapel and proclaimed that she had seen the light, after which “all the society were melted into tears of joy when they heard her declarations [and] from this time on the work of the Lord prospered among us in a wonderful manner.”31
The bonds of community at Preston, then, were strong enough to move Clarkson deeply. He noticed how the blacks of the village were true neighbours in that they often cared for each other’s children, even when not related, or brought them into their house when a parent had to go away to work. Idealizing Preston as he did (calling its villagers, on the eve of their departure, “the flower of the black people”), it was not surprising that his worry about uprooting them never quite went away. The fact that so many Prestonians, when they heard about the company’s offer of moving to Sierra Leone, responded with such ardour—seventy-nine came to Halifax to sign up—only made his pangs of queasiness worse; especially as they wanted assurances from him that in Africa they would not be turned into “debt slaves” as in Nova Scotia. What reassured Clarkson that he was doing the right thing was the flow of harrowing stories of outrageous mistreatment that the settlers habitually endured at the hands of the whites—many of them had been reduced to sharecropping, labouring for white landowners for a paltry subsistence. All in all, he was certain he was doing right by them. And he would, after all, be with them every league of the perilous wide sea.
If we should be able to accomplish our wishes in sailing together I shall be very happy as I feel myself so much interested in the welfare of these poor oppressed people; indeed I never viewed the business I have undertaken to perform with that degree of awe as I do at this moment…I have desired all those who say they wish to go with me, to reflect upon the danger they are about to make and if they should make up their mind to attend me for a certainty, that they must from that moment look up to me as their Guardian and Protector and that in return I shall expect their obedience and good behaviour.32
THE THIRTY-TON SCHOONER Dolphin, one of many small vessels plying the coastal waters south and west of Halifax, was making heavy weather of the sailing, for it was late October and stiff adverse winds were blowing in from the North Atlantic. On board were John Clarkson and the young surgeon appointed by the Sierra Leone Company, Dr Charles Taylor, who was to accompany the emigrants to Africa and perhaps stay and practise in Freetown. The two men got on well, and were at one in the importance of their appointment. But they recognized that a critical moment was about to be faced. Clarkson and Taylor were travelling to Shelburne and Birchtown, where more free blacks lived than anywhere else in the province. Already surprised by the enthusiasm with which his proposals had been received in Preston and Halifax, Clarkson wondered what Shelburne would have in store. He had received a letter from Colonel Stephen Blucke, schoolmaster and apparently some sort of magistrate at Birchtown, asking for more information. He would bring it in person.
As happened this time of year in Nova Scotia, a fair morning turned into a foul afternoon when, south of Liverpool, a squall came up from the northeast and pitched the Dolphin about. The swell turned nasty and the master decided to put in at an inlet to wait out the worst of the weather. The haven was no more than a cove where a broad river ran gently into the whipped-up sea. There was a primitive dock and
a few fishing boats, most of them hardly bigger than rowing boats, straining against their moorings; a dull beach where tawny sand, strewn with pebbles and mussel shells picked clean by the gulls, disappeared into the usual marshy reedbed; and straggly, windblown trees protruding from behind tall, glabrous rocks. Somewhere flocks of geese were honking. On the eastern bank of the river were a few scattered huts of generally miserable aspect, much weathered and not looking firm against the blows of the oncoming winter. Yet this mournfully sparse hamlet had a grand name, Port l’Hébert, given to it by some intrepid Acadian imagining a harbour sitting on this broad river that one day would take salt cod to the French Indies and perhaps, along with pelts, even back to Brittany. Clarkson, already a connoisseur of rustic indigence, feared the worst, his picturesque response to the wildness of the scene (“an illimitable wood presenting itelf in every point of view”) competing with his melancholy impression of the tenuousness of survival in Port l’Hébert. Beside the cabins “a few wretched inhabitants” had cleared woebegone patches of garden where bedraggled leaves suggested that had been a corn harvest. The odd sheep and cow wandered through the mud. How could winter possibly be endured in such a place, Clarkson wondered, picturing the inhabitants as they “traverse the woods with their dog and gun properly accoutred with snowshoes in search of wild fowl, moose, deer, caribooes.”33
The wind had grown worse and was now accompanied by driving rain. Out of both curiosity and necessity, Clarkson and Taylor knocked on the door of one of the huts, a log cabin roofed with twigs and caulk, and to their astonishment met “with the most agreeable reception from a young [white] girl of about fifteen years of age, entrusted with the care of the house and two small children, her brothers, during the absence of her parents, who had for several days been gathering in their winter stock of potatoes on the contrary side of the river.” Her name was Jenny Lavendar and she was indeed, to the imagination of John Clarkson, behind her unassuming appearance, sentimental fragrance itself. “Her behaviour and polite attention would have done credit to a person of the first rank and education…her manners so simple, mild and unaffected, her general deportment so modest and respectful, left me at a loss for language, to express the esteem I felt for this amiable little girl.” With the rain beating down outside, Jenny offered the gentlemen what she had: potatoes, buttermilk and a “few salt fish.” It was a feast. Afterwards Taylor and Clarkson struggled to their feet and left the cabin, but realized, in the pitch darkness that the little creek through which they had waded to the hut was now impassably high. With some difficulty they found their way back to Jenny’s hut and were received by the “little hostess with her own peculiar grace”; she then, apologizing for the rudeness of the lodging, made worse, she said, by her parents locking so much up during their absence, offered the gentlemen the bed “which contained a small infant,” one of her brothers. While the two men slept in relative comfort, Jenny sat up all night tending the fire “in order to render us less sensible of the inclemency of the weather. The wind and rain was beating in at every part of the house.”
The next morning, the 2nd of October, the storm had hardly abated at all, but Clarkson and Taylor found their way back to the Dolphin, picked up some provisions and took them back to Jenny Lavendar as a token of their gratitude. With the schooner still stuck in harbour, they decided to try to reach the cabins of the black sharecroppers on the far, eastern side of the river, which meant tramping upstream and then turning inland. The way was so beset with swamps and tangled woods that only Mi’kmaq hunting trails offered any path. Finally they reached a sad clearing where they found two black families, evidently destitute: the Shepherds and the Martins, both escaped slaves from Norfolk, Virginia. Thomas Shepherd’s wife was ill and he complained bitterly to Clarkson about the necessity of sharecropping—of being denied land for so long that he had no alternative but to sharecrop for a white. “It has reduced them to such a state of indigence,” wrote Clarkson, “that in order to satisfy their landlord…they have been obliged to sell all their property, their clothing and even their very beds.” He explained the proposals to them although, in his sixties and with a sickly wife, it was unlikely Shepherd would go to Africa. Clarkson resolved to have medicine sent to the woman once he reached Shelburne. The Martins, however, seemed more promising material for Freetown.
Back at the Lavendars’ Clarkson met Jenny’s mother and father, who begged the gentlemen to stay a further night and then disappeared into the woods again to gather fuel. Before they took their leave, Clarkson reflected on the sad circumstances that had “entombed” so “valuable a mind” as Jenny Lavendar in a wilderness “forever secluded from the social comforts of mankind in a state of society.”34 Resuming the interrupted journey aboard the Dolphin, Clarkson brooded on what the episode at Port l’Hébert had meant: the simple goodness of the poor, whether black or white, at the mercy of distant power and wealth, yet not quite robbed of dignity and generosity.
On the quayside at Shelburne Clarkson literally bumped into a black man of the cloth about to get on a ship bound for Halifax. It was the Baptist David George. He had heard of the Sierra Leone proposal and intended, on behalf of his congregation at Shelburne, to find out more. Now he would hear it from the horse’s mouth. The two men, so utterly different, yet matched in candour and passion, warmed to each other right away. But George seemed nervous, and, once Clarkson was settled in rooms and able to receive him, explained why. Furious at the prospect of losing their source of cheap labour, especially now that the economy of the town was in the doldrums, the whites had launched a campaign of dissuasion. Stephen Skinner, who had been charged with organizing the inquiry and departure was doing precious little to stop it—rather the contrary.
Rumours had been spread that, once landed in Africa, the blacks would be sold as slaves; that hardly anyone who went to Sierra Leone lived out the year; and that they would be subject to an onerous quit rent for their land. (There was, in fact, more than a measure of truth in this last allegation, although Clarkson was as yet unaware of it.) On the other hand, the proposal to try to revive Shelburne by turning it into a free port, thus opening it to American trade, had terrified all the free blacks there and in Birchtown, who could see nothing but the return of their old masters and their slavehunters, and imagined themselves led back to Virginia and the Carolinas in chains. They were, then, George told Clarkson, fearful to stay yet apprehensive to go. Indeed, the Birchtown community was itself divided between a group of about fifty families, led by Stephen Blucke, who were more inclined to remain, and the rest who were eager to leave before it was too late. The mood in Shelburne was so ugly on the subject of the Sierra Leone venture that George (who had personally been victimized by it) felt that violence was in the air again. “He said that…if it were known in the town that he had conversed with us in private, his life would not be safe…he cautioned us from appearing in the town or country after it was dark for as some of the inhabitants were men of the vilest principles, our business in this port might probably induce them to do us an injury.” Clarkson and Taylor had meant to travel, probably on foot, across the neck of the peninsula, north to Digby and Annapolis, a journey of some seventy-odd miles, but now they took George’s friendly warnings seriously enough to change their plans, since “it appeared probable that we might be waylaid by some of these violent people.”
The next day, the 26th of October, accompanied by Taylor, Clarkson crossed the bay to Birchtown, where he was to put the company and government proposals directly to the free blacks at a general meeting. So many were interested, George had warned, that it was assumed there would be an open-air assembly, but that morning a grim, drenching rain was falling and the meeting was held instead in Moses Wilkinson’s Methodist chapel. Through the downpour, the blacks of Birchtown—among them Henry Washington, Caesar and Mary Perth, and Cato Perkins and their families—converged on the chapel. Daddy Moses arrived, borne high on his litter followed by his faithful, and then the New Lighters and the Baptist
s all trooped in until the chapel was overflowing with men, women and children; latecomers huddled in the porch outside, straining to hear against the downpour. Never in his whole life had John Clarkson faced such a moment; no battle at sea had flooded him with such “awful sensations.” As he mounted the pulpit, he was simultaneously exhilarated, borne aloft by the indisputable nobility of his mission, and close to feeling crushed by the weight of his responsibility. He cleared his throat but, almost at a loss for words, took refuge in an official reading and extracted a well-thumbed document from his coat: “Considering that the future happiness, welfare and perhaps the life of these poor creatures depended in a great measure upon the discourse I was about to deliver,” he wrote later, “and seeing the eyes and attention of every person fixed upon me, I thought it best to state to them the intentions of Government from Mr Dundas’s letter to Governors Parr and Carleton.”
Then he parsed the dry formulae for the upturned faces. “In consideration of their services” during the war, and seeing that some—many—of them had not received the land to which they were entitled, His Majesty’s government had directed the governors to act swiftly in amends “and in a situation so advantageous that it might make some atonement for the delay.” This was incredible coming from a white British gentleman. He went on. Should there be any (and as yet there were scant few) who wished to take up the offer to serve in the army in the West Indies, they should understand that they too would have their liberty guaranteed by His Majesty and on discharge be entitled to the same land grant. Should any of them prefer to go to Sierra Leone, the government would supply free transport for them, but once there, they would be in the charge of the company, which offered them land. Rumours notwithstanding, Clarkson assured the crowd, they would not be subject to a quit rent but would pay a general tax for the support of common defence and public institutions, such as the school and hospital. Should this last option attract them, he desired them most earnestly to “weigh it well in their minds and not to suffer themselves to be led away on the one hand by exaggerated accounts of the fertility of the soil or on the other by representations of the badness of the climate.” If they wished to survive, to thrive, they must needs work and work hard, otherwise they would surely starve and “I hoped they would not blame me should it not turn out according to their expectations.” Above all, they should not be too hasty in selling their land and possessions, burning their boats.