| Book of Negroes | |
|---|---|
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| Date | 1783 |
The Book of Negroes is a document created by Brigadier General Samuel Birch, under the direction of Sir Guy Carleton, that records names and descriptions of 3,000 Black Loyalists, enslaved Africans who escaped to the British lines during the American Revolution and were evacuated to points in Nova Scotia as free people of colour.
The first African person in Nova Scotia arrived with the founding of Port Royal in 1605. [1] African people were then brought as slaves to Nova Scotia during the founding of Louisbourg and Halifax. The first major migration of African people to Nova Scotia happened during the American Revolution. Enslaved Africans in America who escaped to the British during the American Revolutionary War became the first settlement of Black Nova Scotians and Black Canadians. Other Black Loyalists were transported to settlements in several islands in the West Indies and some to London. Recorded in 1783, this 150-page document is the only one to have recorded Black Canadians in a large, detailed scope of work. [2]
The document contains records on 3000 Africans; the former slaves recorded in the Book of Negroes were evacuated to British North America, where they were settled in the newly established Birchtown and other places in the colony. According to the Treaty of Paris (1783), the United States argued for the return of all property, including slaves. The British refused to return the slaves, to whom they had promised freedom during the war for joining their cause. The detailed records were created to document the freed people whom the British resettled in Nova Scotia, along with other Loyalists. The book was assembled by Samuel Birch, the namesake of Birchtown, Nova Scotia, under the direction of Sir Guy Carleton.
Some freedmen later migrated from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, where they formed the original settlers of Freetown, under the auspices of the Sierra Leone Company. They are among the ancestors of the Sierra Leone Creole ethnic group.
Notable people recorded in the Book of Negroes include Boston King, Henry Washington, Moses Wilkinson and Cato Perkins.
As the Book of Negroes was recorded separately by American and British officers, there are two versions of the document. The British version is held in The National Archives in Kew, London [3] The American version is held by the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. [4] It was published under the title The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile After the American Revolution (1996), edited by Graham Russell Hodges, Susan Hawkes Cook, and Alan Edward Brown. [5]
The Canadian novelist Lawrence Hill wrote The Book of Negroes (2007, published in the United States as Someone Knows My Name). It is inspired by the 3,000 former Black African Slaves from America, many of whom were owned by White slave owners. The Former Black African slaves were given free land and housing by the British, in a Nova Scotia town called Birchtown, named after the original author of "The Book of Negros" British Brigadier General Samuel Birch.
In 1792 1,200 residents of Birchtown chose to emigrate to another British Colony called Sierra Leone, which was founded by a British Lieutenant John Clarkson for freedmen in South Africa.
During the 1784 Shelburne riots that lasted 5 days - no fatalities. The American refugees were upset the free land and jobs were only being given to the former black African slaves who worked for less pay.
He features Aminata Diallo, a young African woman captured as a child; she is literate and acts as a scribe to record the information about the former slaves. The book won the top 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. [6]
Canadian director Clement Virgo adapted the book into a six-hour television mini-series of the same title. The series premiered on CBC in Canada on 7 January 2015 and on BET in the United States on 16 February 2015 and starred Aunjanue Ellis, Lyriq Bent, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Louis Gossett Jr. [7]
Slavery in Canada includes historical practices of enslavement practised by both the First Nations until the 19th century, and by colonists during the period of European colonization.
Black Loyalists were African-Americans who sided with the Loyalists during the American Revolutionary War. In particular, the term refers to men who escaped enslavement by Patriot masters and served on the Loyalist side because of the Crown's guarantee of freedom.
Thomas Peters, born Thomas Potters, was a veteran of the Black Pioneers, fighting for the British in the American Revolutionary War. A Black Loyalist, he was resettled in Nova Scotia, where he became a politician and one of the "Founding Fathers" of the nation of Sierra Leone in West Africa. Peters was among a group of influential Black Canadians who pressed the Crown to fulfill its commitment for land grants in Nova Scotia. Later they recruited African-American settlers in Nova Scotia for the colonisation of Sierra Leone in the late eighteenth century.
Lieutenant John Clarkson was a Royal Navy officer and abolitionist, the younger brother of Thomas Clarkson, one of the central figures in the abolition of slavery in England and the British Empire at the close of the 18th century. As agent for the Sierra Leone Company, Lieutenant Clarkson was instrumental in the founding of Freetown, today Sierra Leone's capital city, as a haven for chiefly formerly enslaved African-Americans first relocated to Nova Scotia by the British military authorities following the American Revolutionary War.
Black Nova Scotians are an ethnic group consisting of Black Canadians whose ancestors primarily date back to the Colonial United States as slaves or freemen, later arriving in Nova Scotia, Canada, during the 18th and early 19th centuries. As of the 2021 Census of Canada, 28,220 Black people live in Nova Scotia, most in Halifax. Since the 1950s, numerous Black Nova Scotians have migrated to Toronto for its larger range of opportunities. The first recorded free African person in Nova Scotia, Mathieu da Costa, a Mikmaq interpreter, was recorded among the founders of Port Royal in 1604. West Africans escaped slavery by coming to Nova Scotia in early British and French Colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Many came as enslaved people, primarily from the French West Indies to Nova Scotia during the founding of Louisbourg. The second major migration of people to Nova Scotia happened following the American Revolution, when the British evacuated thousands of slaves who had fled to their lines during the war. They were given freedom by the Crown if they joined British lines, and some 3,000 African Americans were resettled in Nova Scotia after the war, where they were known as Black Loyalists. There was also the forced migration of the Jamaican Maroons in 1796, although the British supported the desire of a third of the Loyalists and nearly all of the Maroons to establish Freetown in Sierra Leone four years later, where they formed the Sierra Leone Creole ethnic identity.
John Marrant was an American Methodist preacher and missionary and one of the first black preachers in North America. Born free in New York City, he moved as a child with his family to Charleston, South Carolina. His father died when he was young, and he and his mother also lived in Florida and Georgia. After escaping to the Cherokee, with whom he lived for two years, he allied with the British during the American Revolutionary War and resettled afterward in London. There he became involved with the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion and ordained as a preacher.
David George was an African-American Baptist preacher and a Black Loyalist from the American South who escaped to British lines in Savannah, Georgia; later he accepted transport to Nova Scotia and land there. He eventually resettled in Freetown, Sierra Leone where he would eventually die. With other enslaved people, George founded the Silver Bluff Baptist Church in South Carolina in 1775, the first black congregation in the present-day United States. He was later affiliated with the First African Baptist Church of Savannah, Georgia. After migration, he founded Baptist congregations in Nova Scotia and Freetown, Sierra Leone. George wrote an account of his life, an important early slave narratives.
Boston King was a former American slave and Black Loyalist, who gained freedom from the British and settled in Nova Scotia after the American Revolutionary War. He later immigrated to Sierra Leone, where he helped found Freetown and became the first Methodist missionary to African indigenous people.
Harry Washington was a Black Loyalist in the American Revolutionary War, and enslaved by Virginia planter George Washington, later the first President of the United States. When the war was lost the British then evacuated him to Nova Scotia. In 1792 he joined nearly 1,200 freedmen for resettlement in Sierra Leone, where they set up a colony of free people of color.
The Davis family was one of the last of the Nova Scotian settler families and though the family has descendants in the United States and Europe, the Davis family was one of the original African American families of Sierra Leone, thus part of the Sierra-Leone Creole population.
The Snowball family was a prominent settler Creole family of Nova Scotian descent. The Snowballs were originally African-American slaves from "Princess Ann County, Virginia" and were formerly the property of Richard Murray. Nathaniel Snowball, who was the son of Violet Snowball and the brother of Mary Snowball, was only 12 years old when he was recorded in the Book of Negroes and described as a "fine boy. Formerly the property of Richard Murray of Princess Ann County, Virginia; left him 7 years ago". Nathaniel became a prominent settler and the patriarch of the Snowball family in Settler Town, Sierra Leone.
Moses "Daddy Moses" Wilkinson or "Old Moses" was an American Wesleyan Methodist preacher and Black Loyalist. His ministry combined Old Testament divination with African religious traditions such as conjuring and sorcery. He gained freedom from slavery in Virginia during the American Revolutionary War and was a Wesleyan Methodist preacher in New York and Nova Scotia. In 1791, he migrated to Sierra Leone, preaching alongside ministers Boston King and Henry Beverhout. There, he established the first Methodist church in Settler Town and survived a rebellion in 1800.
Cato Perkins was an enslaved African-American man from Charleston, South Carolina who became a missionary to Sierra Leone.
Birchtown is a community and National Historic Site in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, located near Shelburne in the Municipal District of Shelburne County. Founded in 1783, the village was the largest settlement of Black Loyalists and the largest free settlement of ethnic Africans in North America in the eighteenth century. The two other significant Black Loyalist communities established in Nova Scotia were Brindley town and Tracadie. Birchtown was named after British Brigadier General Samuel Birch, an official who helped lead the evacuation of Black Loyalists from New York.
The Nova Scotian Settlers, or Sierra Leone Settlers, were African Americans who founded the settlement of Freetown, Sierra Leone and the Colony of Sierra Leone, on March 11, 1792. The majority of these black American immigrants were among 3,000 African Americans, mostly former slaves, who had sought freedom and refuge with the British during the American Revolutionary War, leaving rebel masters. They became known as the Black Loyalists. The Nova Scotian settlers were jointly led by African American Thomas Peters, a former soldier, and English abolitionist John Clarkson. For most of the 19th century, the Settlers resided in Settler Town and remained a distinct ethnic group within the Freetown territory, tending to marry among themselves and with Europeans in the colony.
Lawrence Hartshorne was a Canadian merchant and political figure based in Nova Scotia. He represented Halifax County in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly from 1793 to 1799. He was a Quaker who was the chief assistant of abolitionist John Clarkson in helping Black Nova Scotian settlers emigrate to Sierra Leone in 1792 He is recorded in the Book of Negroes for having freed four slaves.
Stephen Blucke or Stephen Bluck was a Black Loyalist in the American Revolutionary War and one the commanding officers of the British Loyalist provincial unit, the Black Company of Pioneers. He was one of 3,000 people who left New York for Nova Scotia on British ships. He settled in a town designed for African-Americans, Birchtown, Nova Scotia. He was a leader in the town, called a magistrate and commissioned as lieutenant colonel of the Black Militia of the greater Shelburne district by Governor John Parr. He worked with a surveyor to identify the area that would become Birchtown and was involved in coordinating labour for roads and other public works. He lived the life of a middle-class person while his neighbors lived a life of poverty. He had a substantial well-built house, while most people lived in simple housing. He was a go-between for employment of some of the townspeople in labor or similar jobs.
The Book of Negroes is a 2015 television miniseries based on the 2007 novel of the same name by Canadian writer Lawrence Hill. The book was inspired by the British freeing and evacuation of former slaves, known as Black Loyalists, who had left rebel masters during the American Revolutionary War. The British transported some 3,000 Black Loyalists to Nova Scotia for resettlement, documenting their names in what was called the Book of Negroes.
The Shelburne riots were attacks in July 1784 by landless Loyalist veterans of the American War of Independence against Black Loyalists and government officials in the town of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, and the nearby village of Birchtown. They have been characterized as the first race riots in Canada, and one of the earliest recorded race riots in North America.
Deborah Squash was a slave on George Washington's Mount Vernon plantation before she escaped in 1781. She went to New Amsterdam, which was the headquarters for the British during the American Revolution. At the end of the war, she was one of the 3,000 blacks in the Book of Negroes that sailed on a British ship for Nova Scotia.