Birchtown and the Black Loyalists
Author: Wanda Lauren Taylor
Publisher: Nimbus Pub Limited
Published: 2015-02
Total Pages: 80
ISBN-13: 9781771081665
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A children's book about Nova Scotia's Black settlement of Birchtown.
Lanterna Rally
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Birchtown and the Black Loyalist Experience
Author: Stephen Davidson
Publisher: Formac Publishing Company
Published: 2019-05-31
Total Pages: 90
ISBN-13: 1459505565
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book chronicles experiences of African Americans who were part of the influx of Loyalist refugees from the American Revolution. The Black Loyalists were both freed and enslaved Black Americans who had joined the British side. For their loyalty, they were evacuated by the British Navy to Nova Scotia, where they were to receive freedom, land, and provisions. The Black Loyalists landed at a settlement named Birchtown, adjoining the white Loyalist town of Shelburne. On arrival they found virtually no shelter. Many died and others only survived by digging small holes in the ground and fixing logs over top for makeshift huts. Food was extremely scarce. White Loyalists quickly received their land and provisions. It was years before the Black Loyalists received their land grants, and not everyone got a plot. The lands provided proved to be rocky and hard to cultivate. Ultimately many Black Loyalists chose to leave Nova Scotia to go to Sierra Leone, West Africa, founding a new settlement there. Others remained, and their descendants are found in communities across Nova Scotia and beyond. Through images, artifacts, and text, this book tells the story of Birchtown and its residents as well as the larger story of Black Loyalist history, reflecting the research and exhibits in the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre in Birchtown.
Black Loyalists in New Brunswick
Author: Stephen Davidson
Publisher: James Lorimer & Company
Published: 2020-10-13
Total Pages: 136
ISBN-13: 1459506170
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Among the Loyalists who were transported to the shores of New Brunswick by the British after their defeat by revolutionary Americans were several hundred African Americans. Like their counterparts who went to what is now Nova Scotia, among this group were formerly enslaved men, women and children who had been granted their freedom in exchange for joining the British side during the revolutionary war. In the colony that soon became New Brunswick, slavery was still legal. Many African American Loyalists had to become indentured labourers to survive in this new situation. Many others took up the opportunity offered them in 1791 to move yet again, this time to Sierra Leone in Africa where many Black Loyalists established a new colony on the coast of Africa where they lived free of slavery. The stories of New Brunswicks Black Loyalists are captured in the brief biographies of eight individuals—men, women and youths—presented by author Stephen Davidson. Through their experiences a picture emerges of the narrow limits to the freedom which the Black Loyalists were able to experience in a predominantly white and highly racist colony.
The Book of Negroes
Author: Lawrence Hill
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 511
ISBN-13: 0552775487
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Abducted from her West African village at the age of eleven and sold as a slave in the American South, Aminata Diallo thinks only of freedom - and of finding her way home again.After escaping the plantation, torn from her husband and child, she passes through Manhattan in the chaos of the Revolutionary War, is shipped to Nova Scotia, and then joins a group of freed slaves on a harrowing return odyssey to Africa. Lawrence Hill's epic novel, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, spans three continents and six decades to bring to life a dark and shameful chapter in our history through the story of one brave and resourceful woman.
The Black Loyalists
Author: James W. St. G. Walker
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2017-06-22
Total Pages: 438
ISBN-13: 1487516967
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →There is a Canadian myth about the Loyalists who left the United States after the American Revolution for Canada. The myth says they were white, upper-class citizens devoted to British ideals, transplanting the best of colonial American society to British North America. In reality, more than 10 per cent of the Loyalists who came to the Maritime provinces were black and had been slaves. The Black Loyalists tells the story of one such group who came to Nova Scotia, but didn't stay. James Walker documents their experience in Canada, following them across the Atlantic as they became part of a unique colonial experiment in Sierra Leone.
Black Loyalists of Nova Scotia
Author: Carmelita Robertson
Publisher: [Halifax] : Nova Scotia Museum
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 154
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The preface of this report reviews the two-year project entitled Remembering Black Loyalists, Black Communities that researched the earliest group of Blacks to migrate to Nova Scotia. The main section traces the history of those Black Loyalists who were granted 3,000 acres of land at Tracadie, Nova Scotia, in 1787. The first chapter contains biographies of those persons listed in the Book of Negroes, an inventory of all Blacks aboard British vessels who were legally permitted to leave New York. Chapter two contains the limited information (name & whether a man, woman, or child) found in the Loyalist muster roll of Chedabucto Negroes, 1776-1785. The third chapter examines the 1787 Tracadie land grant documents, including the processes taking place before the grant, a list of who was granted land, and where the land was located. Appendices include a list of name variations of Tracadie land grantees, a list of ships departing for Port Mouton, Nova Scotia in 1783, and an origin distribution chart of Black Loyalists of Port Mouton. Includes name index.
Loyalists in Nova Scotia
Author: Canadian Authors Association. Nova Scotia Branch
Publisher: Hantsport, N.S. : Lancelot Press
Published: 1983
Total Pages: 172
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Black Loyalists
Author: James W. St. G. Walker
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 1992-01-01
Total Pages: 468
ISBN-13: 9780802074027
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Black Loyalists depicts the unique expressions of the Black Loyalist identity to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.
If This Is Freedom
Author: Gloria Ann Wesley
Publisher: Fernwood Publishing
Published: 2013-09-02T00:00:00Z
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 1552666026
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →If This Is Freedom continues the story of struggle for Loyalist settlers in Nova Scotia after the American Revolutionary War. In the black settlement of Birchtown, times are especially hard for the former slaves. They face the difficulties of a hardscrabble existence and continued discrimination from their white counterparts. Like many desperate Birchtowners, Sarah Redmond has signed an indenture agreement, a work contract meant to protect her rights and ensure a living wage. Sarah’s employers, the Blyes, do not honour the agreement, and Sarah and her family are all but shattered when Sarah takes a wrong step – one she will come to regret as it sets off a chain of unusual events that put her under further pressure. With her faith in the settlement running dry and the Birchtowners abandoning the settlement, Sarah is perplexed and soon faces the taxing option of whether to hold on to the only real life she has ever known or let go. At once a stand-alone story and a companion to Gloria Ann Wesley’s previous novel, Chasing Freedom, this story about moral courage and the enduring strength of dreams shares history with us in a way that is both honest and emotional.
The Life of Boston King
Author: Boston King
Publisher: Halifax, N.S. : Nova Scotia Museum and Nimbus Pub.
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 60
ISBN-13: 9781551094519
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In the summer of 1783, at the end of the American Revolution, several thousand Black men, women and children left New York City with the British Army, bound by ship for Nova Scotia. Now uniformly called "Black Loyalists", regardless of their status at leaving New York, theirs is a rich and fascinating history. One of the most well-documented of these Black Loyalists was a man named Boston King, born a slave to Richard Waring, a rice-planter in South Carolina. King experienced a religious revelation while in Nova Scotia, and became a Methodist preacher; he went to Sierra Leone in 1792 to spread the Gospel; and from there was invited to England to study at a Methodist school. While there, he wrote the story of his life and conversion. This was published in the Methodist Magazine of the times. Thus survived one of only three autobiographies of a Black Loyalist, full of details of the Loyalist settlement of Nova Scotia. It is reprinted here as "Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a Black Preacher," edited by Ruth Holmes Whitehead and Carmelita Robertson. An introduction by Ruth Holmes Whitehead presents new research findings about King's life, and her Afterword examines particularly his life as a slave on the Waring Plantation, near Charleston, SC. Whitehead and Robertson revisited the ruins of two Waring plantations, where King would have worked as a child and young man, and photographed the dirt road, still running through one plantation, down which he would have ridden away to freedom.
