Nova Scotian Settlers

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The gravestone of Lawrence Hartshorne, a Quaker who was the chief assistant of John Clarkson.[1][2]

The Nova Scotian Settlers, or Sierra Leone Settlers (also known as the Nova Scotians or more commonly as the Settlers), were

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.

The Settler descendants gradually developed as an ethnicity known as the

Loan words in the Krio language and the "bod oses" of their modern-day descendants are some of their cultural imprints. Although the Jamaican Maroons and other transatlantic immigrants contributed toward the development of Freetown, the 1200 Nova Scotian Settlers were the single greatest Western black influence. The Nova Scotian Settlers have been the subject of many social science
books, which have examined how they brought "America" to Africa, because they naturally carried their culture with them. They founded the first permanent ex-slave colony in West Africa, and it was influential throughout the region.

Background and immigration to Nova Scotia

During the American Revolutionary War, the British offered freedom to slaves who left rebel masters and joined their forces. Thousands of slaves escaped during the war, disrupting some of the slave societies in the South, and many joined the British lines. After the British lost the American War of Independence, it kept its promise to the former slaves. Some freedmen were evacuated to the Caribbean or London.

But its forces also evacuated 3,000 former slaves to Nova Scotia for resettlement, and their names were recorded in the Book of Negroes. Nearly two-thirds of the Nova Scotian Settlers were from Virginia. The second largest group of black settlers were from South Carolina, and a smaller number from Maryland, Georgia, and North Carolina. Thomas Jefferson referred to these people as "the fugitives from these States".[5] The US appealed to have the slaves returned, but the British refused. As part of its compensation to Loyalists, the Crown also settled white Loyalists in Nova Scotia, and the western frontier of Upper Canada (Ontario). It made land grants to households and offered supplies to help them get settled.

Life in Nova Scotia

Main article: Black Nova Scotians

Upon arrival in Nova Scotia, the Black Loyalist settlers faced many difficulties because of discrimination. They received less land, fewer provisions, and were paid lower wages than White Loyalists.[6] Some fell into debt and had to sign terms of indentured servitude, which resembled their former enslavement in the colonies. They found the cold climate forbidding after living in more temperate areas.

In the late eighteenth century, the black Nova Scotians were offered a choice to emigrate to a new colony being established by Great Britain in West Africa, intended for the resettlement of blacks from London (who were also mostly African Americans resettled after the Revolution), and some free blacks from the Caribbean. In 1792, approximately 1,192 Black Nova Scotian Settlers[7] left Halifax, Nova Scotia and immigrated to Sierra Leone. The majority of free blacks did remain in Nova Scotia and made communities. Their descendants today comprise the Black Nova Scotians, one of the oldest communities of Black Canadians.[6]

The Nova Scotian Settlers to Sierra Leone tended to speak early forms of African-American Vernacular English; some from the Low Country of South Carolina spoke Gullah, a kind of creole more closely related to African languages. The Nova Scotians were the only mass group of former slaves to immigrate to Sierra Leone under the auspices of the Sierra Leone Company. After its officials learned what democratic and 'American' ideals the Nova Scotians held and practised, the Company did not allow other former slaves to immigrate in large groups to the new colony.

Fifteen ships, the first fleet to bring Free blacks to Africa, left Halifax Harbour on January 15, 1792, and arrived in Sierra Leone between February 28 and March 9, 1792. About 65 passengers died en route.[8]

One visitor to Sierra Leone distinguished the Settlers from other

ancestry
. Only fifty of the group had been born in Africa and more recently enslaved.

After settling in Sierra Leone, many Nova Scotian blacks intermarried with Europeans as the colony developed. The Nova Scotians' political ideology of a democratic, representative government was at odds with the Sierra Leone Company's managing an imperialistic colony. The Nova Scotians referred to themselves as the "Settlers" or "Nova Scotians" in Sierra Leone. Later scholars would describe them as "Afro-American", in reference to their ethnicity and particular historical origin in that culture of the Thirteen Colonies.[10]

Settler Town

In 1792, the Nova Scotians founded and established Free Town in Sierra Leone. They based its plan on what they were familiar with: the grid of a North American colonial town plan. When they learned the Sierra Leone Company had reserved the best waterfront land for its own use, tensions arose.[11] Soon the British deported some Maroons from Jamaica and resettled them in this colony. They mixed with the Novia Scotians, and this Settler part of Freetown became known as Settler Town.

The town was in close proximity to

Thomas Peters
or Stephen Peters), the Prestons, the Snowballs, the Staffords, the Turners, the Willoughsby, the Williams, and the Goodings. Some descendants of James Wise and other settlers were able to keep their land in Settler Town.

Relationship with Granville Town settlers

The Granville Town settlers were initially separate from the Nova Scotian community. After Methodist teaching to the Granville Town settlers, they were slowly incorporated into the society of the Nova Scotians. Nova Scotians like Boston King were schoolteachers to the children of Granville Town settlers. However, up until 1800, the "Old Settlers" (as the Granville Towners were called) remained in their own town.

French attack

During the War of the First Coalition (1792-1797)[12] the French attacked and burned Freetown in September 1794. For over two weeks the settlement was subject to the depredations of the French Army over whom the French Commodore had little control.[13] The Settlers offered the only resistance to the French during this time period. The Settlers assured the French that they were “Britons from North America” and were friends of the French. Despite showing they were Britons, the French still carried off two Nova Scotian boys as slaves. Zachary Macauley demanded all the supplies the Nova Scotians had managed to take from the French back. Many a Methodist preacher declared it was the judgment of God against their evil Caucasian oppressors. The aftermath of this was that Nathaniel Snowball and Luke Jordan established their own colony on Pirate's Bay to live as free men just as the Ezerlites.[14][15][16]

Trade

The Nova Scotians were exceptional traders and some of the houses they built in Settler Town, which were initially built of wood with stone foundations, were renovated or upgraded into stone houses. At this time, the Nova Scotians lived in Eastern Freetown and the

dollars and cents, by the Sierra Leone Company; however, restrictions were later imposed when the company wanted reduced American economic influence. Trade was opened up with the United States in 1831 but grew only slowly, mainly through smuggling.[17]

Culture

The Settlers had dance nights called 'Koonking' or 'Koonken' or 'Konken,' where Settler maidens would sing songs they brought from

illegitimate children
; many times they left land and property for them in their wills.

The majority of Nova Scotians were

Baptist. One half to two thirds of the Nova Scotians were Methodist; the former Anglican settlers converted to Methodism and the Methodists incorporated Moses Wilkinson's congregation, Boston King's congregation, and Joseph Leonard
's Anglican congregation which was openly Methodist.

British policy toward African Americans

Because of friction between the independent Nova Scotia settlers and British authorities, no further resettlement of Novia Scotians followed. When the

Black Refugees, another group of Africans who escaped American slavery, but instead chose to settle them in Nova Scotia and the West Indies.[23] The Nova Scotians in the 1830s and 40s would be faced with the large-scale settlement of Africans freed from slave ships by the British Royal Navy's anti-slave trade campaign.[24]

Relationship between Black Nova Scotians and Black Americans

Some of the settlers bore children during their nine-year sojourn in Nova Scotia; these children were Black Nova Scotians but retained many cultural habits similar to Africans in North America and Britain. The descendants of the Nova Scotian settlers (who are the Sierra Leone Creole people) are related to both Black Nova Scotians and Black Americans.

Notable Nova Scotian Settlers and their Creole descendants

Notable Nova Scotian Settlers

Notable Creole descendants of the Settlers

See also

References

  1. ^ Canadian Biography Also see Hartshorne's portrait by Robert Field (painter)
  2. ^ Find a Grave[permanent dead link]
  3. ^ "Birchtown Plaque "The Black Loyalists AT Birchtown" (1997)". Archived from the original on August 30, 2007. Retrieved January 10, 2008.
  4. Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution
    , Viking Canada (2005) p. 11.
  5. ^ Jefferson, Thomas. "To John Lynch Monticello, January 21, 1811." American History.
  6. ^ a b "African Nova Scotians". Nova Scotia Archives and Records Management. 20 April 2020.
  7. ^ Clarkson's mission to America 1791-1792, edited by Charles Bruce Fergusson, Public Archives of Nova Scotia (1971) p. 28
  8. ^ Sivapragasam, Michael, "Why Did Black Londoners not join the Sierra Leone Resettlement Scheme 1783–1815?" Unpublished Master's dissertation (London: Open University, 2013), p. 45.
  9. ^ a b 'Some grammatical characteristics of the Sierra Leone letters' by Charles Jones, in Our Children Free and Happy: Letters from Black Settlers in Africa in the 1790s, edited by Christopher Fyfe, Edinburgh University Press, 1991, p82
  10. ^ Brown, Wallace, The Black Loyalists in Canada, United Empire Loyalists' Association of Canada (1990), p. 14 online publication featured in "Our Roots / Nos Racines" website
  11. ^ The town grid was laid out by the Sierra Leone company's British surveyor Richard Pepys. Schama, pp. 352-253
  12. ISBN 9781452088716
    .
  13. Kaifala, Joseph
    (2016). Free Slaves, Freetown, and the Sierra Leonean Civil War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  14. ISBN 9780198043225
    .
  15. ISBN 9780802074027
    .
  16. ISBN 9780822323150
    .
  17. ISBN 978-0-521-33571-3
    .
  18. ^ Walker 1992, p. 207.
  19. ISSN 0044-5851
    .
  20. ^ Walker 1992, pp. 191, 207.
  21. ^ Fiona Leach, Reclaiming the Women of Britain's First Mission to West Africa: Three Lives
  22. ^ Winfield (2008), p. 394.
  23. The Journal of Negro History
    , Volume LVIII, No. 3, July 1973.
  24. ISBN 0814318053
    . Retrieved 1 December 2012. In neighboring Sierra Leone, the analogous group of liberated Africans delivered there by the British Navy are generally seen as having played a crucial role in the evolution of Krio.

External links
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