Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World

by Maya Jasanoff

  Captain Holland, Plan of Port Roseway Harbor, 1798. (illustration credit 1.7)

  On the return voyage from Annapolis to Halifax, Marston’s leaky ship Britannia foundered in the ice near Cape Sable, a short distance south of Port Roseway. Gathering up their small stock of provisions, Marston and his crew set off on foot for Halifax, 130 miles away. It was mid-December, a bitter season of freezing nights and deep snows. The first night they “lodg’d comfortably” in the woods and feasted on a quarter of a duck and half a boiled flour dumpling each. The next days they walked. By the fourth day—despite the happy discovery of a few ounces of cocoa in their baggage—they trudged onward with “very heavy hearts our provision growing lower & lower.” They saw nobody, heard no human sound, just the roar of the wind in the trees. By the tenth day, Marston could trek no farther. He gave his comrades his share of meat—freshly cut from their faithful dog Tiger, slaughtered the night before—and urged them to go on without him. They left him “very unwillingly”—for as everyone knew, to be alone in such circumstances was tantamount to a death sentence. All night and all the next day, then another night and day again, Marston lay helpless in the woods, gnawing on dried moosemeat, his thoughts spiraling into delirium. And then, footfalls, voices: two Indians standing above him. Rescue. Marston staggered into the Indian village “very Lame & very much exhausted wth fatigue & long fasting.” He returned to Halifax in March 1782, clutching the weather-beaten diary in which he had recorded his experiences.76

  Back in Halifax, Marston found his business dwindling to a standstill, his options and his cash spent.77 The job offer of surveyor could not have come at a better time. Marston immediately set off down the coast, stopping on the way to collect surveyors’ instruments. On May 2, 1783, he cruised into the forked harbor of Port Roseway. Rippled sheets of water ran into the horizon between dark wedges of land. Spindly herons strutted among the reeds. Wading onto the pebbly beach and into the tangled grass, he observed with relief that the soil looked more fertile than reports of the area had suggested. But Marston knew a thing or two about the Nova Scotian wilderness, and there would be labor aplenty in making this place a town. Tracking through the undergrowth on their first day ashore, Marston and his colleagues “fell in with a monstrous she-Bear,” who fortunately turned and ran off into the woods.78

  The next afternoon, the sails of the refugee fleet came into sight. By nightfall, thirty transports stood at anchor, carrying, Marston was told, three thousand people in their hulls. Marston set up a marquee on shore, and together with his assistants and settlers’ representatives he spent a day combing over the area to determine on which side of the harbor they would lay down the town. But the following day, “the Multitude” of refugees rejected the surveyors’ choice, “because—say they—’tis a rough uneven peice of Land—so they propose to mend the matter by choosing 3 men from every Company to do the matter over again.” They ended up resolving on exactly the same site, on the northeastern finger of the harbor.

  This would be just the first of many mounting frustrations Marston endured as he dealt with the refugees. (Even Sir Guy Carleton, back in New York, had lost his temper over their incessant complaints and demands. “It could not be supposed that Government would set a number of people down there, ‘and say we will do nothing more for you, you may starve,’ ” he snapped. “ ‘[I]f any were dissatisfied they had better not go if they could do better for themselves.’ ”)79 On the first day of work Marston noted with pleasure that “the People began very chearfully to cut down the Trees—a new employment to many of them”—but in less than a week he grumbled about the “people turning very indolent.” It wasn’t that he had no sympathy for the settlers’ predicament: none of them, after all, had been trained for this kind of work. “They are upon the whole a collection of characters very unfit for the business they have undertaken,” he noted. “Barbers Taylors Shoemakers & all Mechanics bred … to live in great Towns—are inured to habits very unfit for undertakings w[hi]ch require hardiness, resolution, industry & Patience.” Felling trees, uprooting stumps, moving boulders, draining marshland—it was arduous, Marston recognized, for those “who have come from easy Situations to encounter all the hardships of a new plantation.”80

  But Marston’s sympathy had its limits. The disorganized mass of humanity pouring off the transports appeared an altogether “miserable sett” of characters. “These Poor People are like sheep without a Shepherd,” he complained. “They have no [men] of abilities among them.” Even their so-called leaders, the captains of each company of loyalists, had been plucked from “the same Class” as the settlers themselves and seemed little more than “a Sett of low lived dirty fellows whom meer accident has placed in their present Situation.”81 The title of captain “made many men here Gentlemen & of course yr wives & daughters Ladies whom neither Nature nor Education intended for that Rank.” “Real authority,” Marston sniffed, “can never be supported without some degree of real superiority.”82 Meanwhile the makeshift tent village where they lived became a brewing, stewing, smelly place, littered with ashes and waste, and rudimentary taverns every few hundred paces. They drank and they drank, they drank and they sang (“such a damn’d noise”), and when they finished singing they had fistfights and boxing matches in the streets. On the king’s birthday, the rambunctious settlers managed practically to burn the whole place down with a “nonsensical feu du joie.” Two of the captains nearly fought a duel; others boasted that “they were going to effect a settlement without ye assistance of ye Clergy intending to have none of that order among them for the present.” Truly, Marston sighed, “the D[evi]l is among these People.”83

  You could almost see the snobbery dripping from Marston’s pen: the Harvard-educated New Englander sneering at New York riffraff. But there was something more about these loyalists that sharpened the edge of Marston’s critique. For from the very first day when the loyalist “mob” had challenged his decision about where to site the town, Marston believed that this was not only a disorderly crowd—it was a radical one. “This curs’d Republican Town Meeting spirit,” he growled, “has been the ruin of us already & unless checked by some stricter form of Governm[en]t will overset the prospect wch now presents of retreiving our affairs.” “Too much Liberty,” Marston knew, was a dangerous thing. He had seen its face in the mob that attacked him in Massachusetts; he had suffered its repercussions in patriot prison cells and in the wilderness, not many miles away, where he lay starving just eighteen months before. He could recognize the risks of freedom among these working-class refugees. In order for the loyalist colony to have any chance at success, he thought, “this curs’d levelling Spirit must be crush’d by every man whatever, or we shall be for reb[ellio]n soon.”84 So, on the rough ground of Port Roseway, Benjamin Marston clearly articulated what would become a recurring official commentary on loyalist refugees: American loyalists could shockingly resemble American patriots.

  Granted, the equalizing aims of their “curs’d Republican principles” quickly broke down when Marston held the first lottery for town lots. “The idea of owning land is some how or other exceedingly agreable to the human mind,” he noted; but there is nothing like competition over space to ignite animosities. “The Association from N York are a curious sett,” Marston decided. They chose a committee that promptly excluded hundreds of refugees from entering the lottery at all.85 The original settlers wanted to claim all the best lots for themselves, in order to sell them off at a profit to newer arrivals. Speculation in land grants became rampant, “so little do the Loyal Refugees have to do with common honesty.” Soon Marston was handling “a hundred applications in a day about bad house Lots & bad water Lots. Were I to enter into them all I should be constantly moving the people from one end of the Land to the other.”86 “My head is so full of Triangles, Squares, Parallelograms, Trapezias, & Rhomboidses that the corners do sometimes almost put my eyes out.”87

  All this hassle, though, attested to the stunning advances being made in
turning the woods of Port Roseway into a full-fledged town. In late July 1783, Governor Parr sailed into the harbor, swore in five justices of the peace, a notary public, and a coroner, and gave the town a name: Shelburne.88 (It was an insensitive choice, considering how many loyalists blamed Lord Shelburne for betraying them in the peace treaty.) Even before Parr cruised away again, new transports were arriving with hundreds more settlers from New York and beyond. By the end of the year, Shelburne’s population had reached at least eight thousand, rivaling that of Halifax.89 Governor Parr boasted that Shelburne was

  the most considerable, most flourishing and the most expeditious [town]… that ever was built in so short a space of time.… 800 Houses are already finished, 600 more in great forwardness, and several Hundred lately begun upon, with Wharfs and other Erections, upwards of 12,000 Inhabitants, about 100 sail of vessels, a most beautiful situation, the Land good, and the finest and best Harbour in the World. I have not a doubt of it’s being, one day or other, the first Port in this part of America.90

  Marston himself took a moment to acknowledge the fruits of the settlers’ efforts when McGragh’s Tavern hosted a ball in honor of the queen’s birthday in January. “About 50 Gentlemen & Ladies … danced—drank tea—& play’d at cards in a house wch stood where 6 months ago was an almost impenetrable swamp,” he mused, “so great has been the exertions of the settlers in this New World. The room was commodious & warm, tho in the rough the whole was conducted with good humour & satisfaction.”91

  While Marston justly congratulated himself on the progress made at Shelburne, he could have been equally satisfied by developments unfolding on the opposite side of the harbor. The stream of refugees arriving in Shelburne included hundreds of the black loyalists evacuated from New York, including the South Carolina runaway Boston King and his wife Violet. When the Baptist preacher David George came to Shelburne in the summer of 1783, having made his way to Nova Scotia from Charleston, he was pleased to find “numbers of my own color” already in residence.92 Governor Parr had ordered that, instead of receiving allotments within Shelburne, the blacks should have a nearby settlement of their own. At the end of August 1783, Marston went over to the northwestern fork of the harbor with the commander of the demobilized Black Pioneers “to shew him the ground alloted for his People.” “They are well satisfyed with it,” Marston noted with pleasure, and he promptly began to lay out a sister township to Shelburne, to be named Birchtown after the commandant who had signed off on the black loyalists’ certificates of freedom in New York.93

  At Birchtown, a parallel loyalist community quickly took shape. Muster rolls from January 1784 show 1,485 free blacks living in and around Shelburne—making this one of the largest free black settlements in North America.94 Where the Port Roseway associators had by and large been city dwellers unprepared for hard labor, these former slaves—like Boston King, a trained carpenter—possessed valuable skills for the work of settlement. “Every family had a lot of land,” remembered King, “and we exerted all our strength in order to build comfortable huts before the cold weather set in.”95 Their initial allotments may have been smaller than those of the whites—a half or quarter acre each—and their resources fewer. Some could not complete their houses before winter began, and lived through the harsh months in shelters dug down into the earth and covered with crude slanted canopies of logs. Yet while in Shelburne the loyalists remained “much at variance with one another—a bad disposition in a new settlement,” the black loyalists of Birchtown sustained an apparently close-knit community.96 And if the devil was among the white loyalists of Shelburne, God glowed over the blacks and Birchtown.

  They called the Methodist preacher Moses Wilkinson “Daddy Moses,” less for his age (just thirty-six) than for the charisma he exuded—spinning ecstatic visions of salvation despite his own blinded eyes, a legacy of the smallpox he had survived in Lord Dunmore’s floating town. During the war this former slave from Virginia had attracted a strong following among black loyalists, many of whom, such as George Washington’s runaway slave Harry Washington, had traveled to Nova Scotia with him on the very same evacuation ship from New York. Once at Birchtown, Violet King would be the first of Daddy Moses’s new converts, “so overwhelmed with anguish of spirit” by her experience that she became physically sick. Boston King struggled with salvation too, especially when he saw his coworkers assembling twice daily for prayer meetings. One January day King heard his friends relate the parable of the sower (“A sower went out to sow his seed: and as he sowed some fell by the way side … some fell upon a rock … some fell among thorns … and other fell on good ground, and sprang up, and bare fruit an hundredfold”) and found himself overcome by a rush of enlightenment.97 In the dead of a winter night, he trudged out into the snow and fell to his knees, “lifting up my hands, eyes, and heart to Heaven” to make a covenant with God. Before long, the Kings had joined the Methodist exhorters of Birchtown, and “the work of the Lord prospered greatly among us.”98

  The Methodists were not the only Christian community to flourish among the black refugees in Nova Scotia. David George quickly established a Baptist congregation too. It was God, as usual, who had guided him toward Shelburne. His family’s journey aboard the evacuation fleet from Charleston had been arduous, twenty-two days during which the blacks were “used very ill on board.” Halifax, their first point of arrival, appealed to George little more than it did to many white loyalist refugees. “Coming almost naked from the burning sands of South Carolina, to the frozen Coast of Nova Scotia, destitute of almost every necessary of life” (as Parr described the Charleston refugees), the Georges would have been woefully unprepared for the climatic shock of Nova Scotia in December.99 What was worse, George saw no chance in this heavily white city “to preach to my own color.” Hoping for more fertile ground in the new settlement at Port Roseway, he traveled south to join that burgeoning community in June 1783. “There were no houses then built,” just a clearing in the woods—but that was enough for George. On the first night he arrived he walked out into the encampments and began to sing. Every night for a week he continued to sing hymns, attracting more and more curious onlookers, both white and black. His first Sunday in Shelburne, so many people attended George’s morning service that “after I had given out the hymn, I could not speak for tears” of joy.100

  Though many in this hardscrabble frontier town remained skeptical of the earnest black preacher, an acquaintance who knew George from Savannah—a white man—generously gave the Georges permission to build on his land. By the end of the summer, David, Phillis, and their children lived in a “smart hut” of stripped poles, collected their daily food rations like everyone else, and received a quarter-acre land grant of their own. Best of all, a stream ran through the lot, just as George had hoped, “convenient for baptizing at any time.” His congregation prayed and grew and built. As snow melted off into spring, “the worldly Blacks, as well as the members of the church,” cut down wood, sawed boards, chipped shingles, invested their few spare coppers in buying nails, and gradually the frame and fittings of a meeting house took shape. This would be the first Baptist church in Nova Scotia: a lineal descendant of the congregation formed a decade earlier in the backcountry at Silver Bluff. Among George’s congregants, there flourished another American import at least as powerful as the “town meeting spirit” that Marston had identified among the whites.101

  But a third American inheritance was also at work on the forked harbor: racial animosities. When George arrived in Shelburne he discovered that “the White people were against me.” Part of the problem was that the fifteen hundred free black loyalists of the area lived alongside several hundred black slaves—a portion of the approximately twelve hundred slaves brought by white loyalists to Nova Scotia.102 Deeply rooted ideas connecting servitude and skin color remained alive and well among the white loyalists of Shelburne. Such attitudes peered out, for instance, from the engineer Robert Morse’s comparatively well-intentioned proposal for the No
va Scotia government to hire black loyalists on public works projects, “for it is known by experience that these Persons brought up in Servitude and Slavery want the assistance and Protection of a Master to make them happy; indeed to preserve them from penury and distress.”103 In reality, as former slaves relatively unused to wage labor, black loyalists frequently ended up pressed into work at exceptionally low wages. Many Birchtown blacks became indentured to whites in Shelburne, working under conditions that replicated their former positions of slavery. David George encountered another face of prejudice when he tried to baptize a white couple. Their relatives “raised a mob, and endeavoured to hinder their being baptized,” and the woman’s own sister “laid hold of her hair to keep her from going down into the water.”104