by Taylor, Alan
Jones directed Neale first to seek proof that the British had sold runaways: “This is an affair of no light concern as it respects the perfidy of those who seduced our Slaves or the future conduct in peace or war of the Slaves themselves.” In supplementary instructions, Monroe assured Neale that he could prevent a future race war in America by discrediting the British as slave liberators. Monroe and Jones sought to break the attachment of southern slaves to the British.23
But the instructions proved contradictory. While seeking proof that the British kept the runaways as slaves, Neale was also supposed to treat them as free to decide their future by persuading them to return to bondage in America. Jones explained,
The dread of punishment, on their return, which has been so industriously impressed upon the fugitives by their new protectors, has no foundation. It is within our knowledge that those who have returned have been gladly received & not punished at all. Some have been sent to parts of the Country remote from the Coast, where it is well known that they live in greater Comfort & Equality with the whites than in the older and more populous settlements of the State.
This misguided sales pitch undercut the prime reason for a runaway to return: a nostalgia for home and family left behind. If truly welcomed back, why would they face the distrust of sale into the interior? And why return at the risk of sale to a strange place “remote from the Coast” and so from their homes and kin, which probably meant to the dreaded Deep South?24
To impress the refugees, Neale hired and brought along Joseph Webster, “quite an intelligent and smart negroe” and one of the four slaves who had returned from Bermuda to Virginia with Spilman. Neale expected Webster to “give positive evidence of the humanity & forgiveness with which their former masters hailed their return.”25
Monroe sent Neale to Nova Scotia in a naval schooner with the unfortunate name of Nonsuch, which helped to confirm that Neale’s mission was no such thing as a private venture. Indeed, the British in Nova Scotia learned from an indiscreet New York newspaper that the Nonsuch would sail to Halifax “to bring home the blacks taken from the southern states by the British naval commanders during the late war, and who are to be delivered back to their owners.” In another misstep, the crew consisted primarily of free blacks, who were not exactly on board with Neale’s mission.26
Arriving in Halifax on August 25, Neale hoped to rally the white Nova Scotians in support of his mission. “The white Labourers complain that their wages are now less and employment rendered uncertain by the introduction of coloured people,” he noted. For this reason, however, the merchants welcomed the black influx, and they had more clout with the government than did the common white laborers. Moreover, even the poor whites turned against Neale’s mission once their dislike for “the despised Americans” trumped their distaste for black competitors. Foiling the Americans became more popular than ousting the refugees.27
A scrupulous investigator, Neale had to inform Monroe that the runaways were neither enslaved nor discontented in Nova Scotia: “But, sir, from a candid investigation into the condition of the Fugitives in this province, it is fair to conclude, upon the evidence I have heretofore had, that the far greater portion of them are in situations much easier & have prospects far better than I could have supposed.” He cautioned Monroe to cease claiming that the Britons had deceived and sold the runaways, for even if “a few solitary slaves have been sold, it will be equally notorious that thousands of the Slaves taken from the U.S. have been emancipated. The latter fact being so much the stronger case, will so entirely do away the first” that it was pointless to pursue a few stray leads.28
Despite the odds against him, Neale tried to persuade the refugees to return to Virginia. He played up “the winter’s frost of this climate” and appealed to their “customary attachment” to homes in old Virginia. But even the nostalgic balked at returning to “the horrors of anticipated punishment,” so Neale found it “extremely difficult to soothe their feelings into a contrary temper.” Above all, family ties kept them from returning: “For example, a Parent or wife wishes to return, but the child or husband does not—and vice versa.” Having escaped to live together in freedom, they were not about to separate again in slavery.29
Neale’s soothing message soured in mid-September, when Captain Trant of the Nonsuch cracked down on his black sailors. Deeming them “mutinous,” he imprisoned two in the hold of the ship, but another shipmate freed them, and all three “escaped to the shore, where they confirmed the terrors & prejudices of the Negroes to the vessel—that she had come most certainly to force them away & Joe [Webster] was sent on shore to decoy them on board.” Two more black sailors soon deserted to join the mutineers. Thereafter the five “were daily seen, sometimes on the wharf, waving defiance & insult to the vessel.” Aided by a white constable, Trant tried forcibly to retrieve the deserters, but they were defended by “a Mob of white persons” who struck down and kicked the beleaguered captain. Worse still, Webster “was all most murdered by the Blacks set on by the British.” The Halifax magistrates dismissed Neale’s protests, telling him to stay on board his ship and depart as soon as possible.30
In the end, Neale found one old woman, Harriot Johnson, who agreed to return to her home near Baltimore. Nova Scotia’s government, however, refused to issue a passport for her departure, and the admiral of the squadron ordered the Nonsuch to sail away on September 19 without Johnson. Indeed, Neale’s voyage suffered a net loss, for he left behind five deserters without a single refugee to compensate. Deprived of half of her able seamen, the Nonsuch had a difficult passage home. A frustrated Neale denounced Halifax as “the most unfriendly port & inhospitable clime I believe in the world.” All but one of the refugees disagreed, and they had the support of five deserters from the Nonsuch.31
Halifax, from Dartmouth Point, an 1817 aquatint by G. I. Parkyns. (Courtesy of the Archives of Nova Scotia)
None of the special agents retrieved a single refugee, which led all three to decline as futile the additional missions to the West Indies proposed by Monroe. Some Georgia planters did enlist a Halifax mercantile firm to help them woo the refugees to return, but the Nova Scotian merchants reported “that they can find none that wish to return except some old ones that are not worth sending.” Any refugees who disliked Nova Scotia had a better alternative than returning to slavery: moving on to Boston and New York to find paying work “remote from their former Masters,” as Neale put it. Soon Monroe lost interest in further missions that could only discredit the consoling fictions he wanted to believe as a slaveholder.32
Refugees
As the chief naval base for the North American squadron, Halifax was the easiest place for the Royal Navy to send hundreds of runaways. And the government of Nova Scotia would take them in—albeit grudgingly—in contrast to Bermuda, which restricted black newcomers to Ireland Island. Admiral Cockburn noted that “the laws at Halifax do not oppose any difficulty on account of [the] Colour of People landing there and endeavoring by honest labor to earn their own Maintenance.” Never particularly significant in Nova Scotia, slavery had withered away during the decade before 1812 as the Crown judges refused to assist the few masters in recovering their runaways. In effect, the judges applied the Somerset decision: that slavery lacked the sanction of either natural or positive law in Nova Scotia.33
Nova Scotia was a cold, northern colony on a long peninsula jutting between the Atlantic, to the east, and the Bay of Fundy, to the west. Fertile soil appeared only in modest pockets between gray rocky ridges and amid many bogs and lakes. Farmers struggled to push their plows through the rocky soils and to raise crops during the short growing season between the last frost of May and the first frost of September. They grew mixed crops of grains and the hay to feed a few livestock. The great port of Halifax hosted merchant ships, a fishing fleet, the North American squadron of the Royal Navy, and the province’s capital. A lieutenant governor and a council—both appointed by the Crown—administered the colony along with an asse
mbly elected by the men who owned at least a farm or a shop.34
During the summer of 1813 the first refugees from the Chesapeake reached Halifax. On arrival, they took an oath of allegiance to the king. Poor and often sick, the refugees strained Governor Sherbrooke’s budget to provide rations, clothing, and medical care. The imperial government promised compensation, but in the short term the burden fell on the government and taxpayers of Nova Scotia.35
Most Nova Scotians assumed this responsibility with a sour grace, disdaining blacks as dirty, lazy, and larcenous. After the American Revolution the colony had reluctantly taken in about 3,000 black refugees, but the inhabitants treated them so badly that most left during the 1790s, for either the northern American seaports or the new British colony of Sierra Leone, on the west coast of Africa. In 1815 the Nova Scotians similarly responded to the new surge of black refugees from America. Whenever any refugee transgressed, the press and public cast the culprit as the face of an entire race. In 1817, when a house caught fire, the authorities blamed a young black servant, so a Halifax newspaper warned against employing any refugees: “no kindness, comfort, or hospitality, can insure their integrity,” for they comprised “a race whose principles are so repugnant to the dictates of gratitude and morality.” Dismayed by that prejudice, the colony’s surveyor general lamented, “The common Sentiment has been—let them that encouraged their coming among us maintain them or answer for the consequences. We want none of the Seed of Cain among us.”36
Americans often misunderstood the British Empire as a monolith moved by a centralized power with a coherent vision for all the parts. In fact, that empire (like every empire) presented a complex set of disparate interests and scattered officials often working at cross purposes with one another and frequently opposed by their colonists. The Royal Navy’s admirals had promised freedom and land to black refugees only to deliver them to Nova Scotia, where the governor had to make good on those promises. That governor shared many of the prejudices held by legislators who balked at spending tax money on black newcomers or rewarding them with land grants. Deriding the refugees as “miserable wretches,” Sherbrooke asserted that “the generality of them are so unwilling to work that several of them are absolutely starving owing to their own idleness.” Six months later, however, Sherbrooke had to admit that “the greatest part of these People have since been able to support themselves by their labour & industry so that a very small proportion of them now remain chargeable to Government.”37
During 1813–1814 about 1,200 black refugees reached Halifax, and the end of the war in early 1815 promised a further surge from Bermuda. For short-term funding, the governor turned to the assembly, but the members resented taking in “a separate & marked Class of people unfitted by nature to this Climate or to an association with the rest of His Majesty’s Colonists.” In addition to the public cost, the legislators worried about their competition in the labor market to the “discouragement of white labourers & servants.”38
After conveying the assembly’s protest to his superiors in London, Sherbrooke did provide for the new refugees from the Crown’s customs revenue for the port of Halifax. The surge of fugitives began to arrive in late April and continued through the summer and fall. The Halifax poorhouse could not cope with their numbers, so Sherbrooke sent the sick, disabled, and elderly to the former prison on Melville Island, about three miles from the harbor. During the summer the island housed 727 refugees, although their number declined in the fall as their health improved and they left to find paying work. More refugees arrived, but in diminishing numbers, during 1816 and 1817. According to an official list kept in Halifax, 1,611 refugees entered the port between April 27, 1815, and October 24, 1818. Adding the previous 1,200 yields a total of 2,811 war refugees sent to Nova Scotia: comparable to the 3,000 runaways who arrived there after the revolution.39
That total does not include another 381 refugees who had been sent on to the neighboring colony of New Brunswick. To reduce Nova Scotia’s burden, Sherbrooke diverted one large transport, the Regulus, to New Brunswick, with the reluctant consent of that colonial government. Arriving at the port of St. John on May 25, 1815, the transport unloaded 168 men, 112 women, and 100 children. That was the first and the last shipment of the refugees to New Brunswick, where the officials followed the Nova Scotia practice of feeding and clothing the newcomers until they found work as common laborers in the port or countryside.40
In the preindustrial economy of the Maritime colonies, most of the wage work was seasonal. During the warmer months, ships, docks, and farms needed extra hands, but that work diminished in the winter, casting most laborers adrift without pay. Worse still, the refugees arrived during a recession that sharply reversed the wartime boom artificially stimulated by military expenditures, smuggling, and privateering. During the hard postwar years, 1816–1819, even the summer failed to provide enough work for Nova Scotia’s newly swollen laboring class.41
Rather than remain laborers most of the refugees wanted to become land-owning farmers, so they expected the government to keep the promise made in Admiral Cochrane’s April 1814 proclamation. In June 1815, Earl Bathurst chided Sherbrooke for failing to grant the promised lands to the refugees, but the governor preferred to retain the refugees as a pool of cheap wage labor to benefit the merchants and farmers of the colony. The governor blamed his own delay on black reluctance, assuring Bathurst in July that “the negroes on their first arrival seem to dread so arduous an undertaking as the tilling of ground.” If “instead dispersed through the province as farmers’ servants, labourers, &c,” they could serve a prolonged apprenticeship in northern agriculture before receiving their own lands.42
When Bathurst remained insistent, Sherbrooke promised to seek “the most favorable situations now unappropriated for the purpose of locating such of the free Negroes as are willing to become Settlers.” But Nova Scotia’s limited stock of good land had long been granted, leaving only barren pockets “unappropriated” in 1815. Sherbrooke also defined a “favorable situation” as near Halifax, where the settlers could continue to work for wages during the warm season. The colony’s surveyor general placed most of the refugees at Preston, ten miles east of Halifax, or at Hammonds Plains, about twenty miles west of the port. Both townships previously had been granted to disbanded British soldiers and Irish immigrants, who had quickly abandoned their new lands as too difficult to farm. During the late 1780s and early 1790s, some revolutionary refugees had lived there until they left for Sierra Leone. Thereafter, the lands lay unsettled for fifteen years, attesting to their poor quality.43
During the fall of 1815, Sherbrooke’s government provided provisions and boards, nails, axes, and saws to enable the refugees to build huts at Preston, where about 151 men, 117 women, and 200 children spent the winter. Another 180 black men began to cut trees and build huts at Hammonds Plains. While given hand tools by the government, the settlers got none of the oxen and horses needed to haul logs or plow the land. Sherbrooke’s measures sufficed to satisfy Bathurst as fulfilling the letter of Cochrane’s wartime promises to the refugees.44
Growing steadily, Preston had 924 black settlers and Hammonds Plains had 504 by the end of 1816. Former Chesapeake slaves tended to settle at Preston, while former Georgians prevailed at Hammonds Plains, although each township had a minority of refugees from the other region of origin. Smaller black settlements developed at Windsor Road, Refugee Hill, Beech Hill, Porters Lake, and Fletchers Lake, all on the periphery of Halifax. Other refugees persisted in Halifax as urban laborers and artisans, or they scattered around the colony to work for wages on farms and as loggers.45
The black settlers received only ten acres per family: a tenth of the land needed for a proper farm in Nova Scotia. Seeking mutual support and security in a white-dominated colony, the refugees wanted to cluster together, but none of the townships near Halifax had enough ungranted land to enable both clustering and substantial farms, so they had to settle for paltry lots. Sherbrooke also saw no reason
to help the refugees prosper as independent farmers, for he wanted to retain them as a reserve of cheap labor for the port. His government granted them just enough land to sustain a family on potatoes during the cold season, when the refugees could not find paying work. As seasonal retreats from unemployment, the little farms promised to reduce the government’s expenditures for poor relief during the winter. To discourage the black settlers from selling out to move away, the government denied them legal title to the land, instead merely giving them permission to occupy. Such paltry farms and scanty tenure fell far short of the 100-acre lots and freehold titles routinely granted to white settlers in Nova Scotia.46
Despite their daunting hardships, the refugees worked their new lands with a zeal that impressed the whites who knew them best. Each township had a supervisor, a locally prominent man who issued tools and rations to the settlers. The Preston supervisor, Theophilus Chamberlain, characterized the newcomers as “able” and “industrious.” With mere hand tools, they built “snug houses” and cleared garden plots to grow potatoes and vegetables between the rocks. In 1816 at Lake Porter, Rufus Fairbanks reported that “they raised upwards of three hundred Bushels of Potatoes beside other Vegetables upon Lands which the year before was covered with a Forest.” In 1817, John Rule extolled two black farmers as “very ingenious and industrious men,” who had “erected a very Comfortable House, cleared several acres of Land now in Cultivation . . . cut a road and Errected a very considerable Bridge.”47
A Quaker doctor, Seth Coleman, often visited the refugees. In March 1815, Coleman noted “a disposition in them to labour, and to help themselves, but the fact is they have nothing to do” during the long winter when they could neither farm nor find paying work in Halifax. Coleman then “found many of them subsisting on what we should think literally nothing.” Often the men watched the children, while the women walked several miles to the white-owned farms “to seek a day’s work at Washing or Sewing.” He deemed the refugees “a Virtuous People” despite their lack of education. Indeed, Coleman never saw any of the refugees intoxicated, which could be said of very few white folk in the colony.48
