200 Years a Slave
On an otherwise unremarkable day in 1788, former slaves Scipio and Diana Wearing testified at the Shelburne Court of Sessions that, despite having just been sold for 100 bushels of potatoes, Mary Postell was no longer the slave of Jesse Gray of Argyle and should not be returned to him custody.
Despite the court’s ruling otherwise, word had got out about this testimony and some white citizens of Shelburne were in a frenzy about the two free negroes testifying against the rights of slaveholder Gray and, when the couple returned to their home, they found it engulfed in flames.
Everything they cherished was incinerated, including their infant daughter.
Despite the commonly held myth that passage to Nova Scotia in the wake of the American Revolution meant freedom, liberation and a better life, the history of slavery in Nova Scotia is replete with tragic stories of the Wearings, Mary Postell and others. There were more than 3,000 blacks who arrived in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick from 1783 to 1785 and, according to records from the Black Cultural Centre in Halifax, more than 700 of those were slaves. In 1785, says the Centre’s web site, “Shelburne was largely known as a place with slave labour and approximately 1,269 "servants."
Most records of the time – and since - name these chattled souls as “servants”, but historians today recognize that servant was a legally accepted term for slave. Even the venerated Shelburne historian Marion Robertson shied away from much detail of this shameful past, delegating only four pages to the topic of “slaves and indentured servants”, and, of the more than 1200 entries in the index for “Kings Bounty”, neither slave nor servant appear once.
Robertson and others describe the ubiquity of slavery in Shelburne and elsewhere in Nova Scotia. Many of the town’s founding fathers, leaders of the Port Roseway Associates, were slave owners, proudly bringing their charges with them to a new life here.
James Robertson, printer and publisher of the Port Roseway Gazetteer, Royal American Gazette and Shelburne Advertiser arrived with a compliment of slaves, as did James Cox, merchant and court magistrate. Records show that, at one point in 1800, Cox hired out his slave Jolly to a ship’s captain at the rate of $14 per month.
Advertisements for both selling and recovering escaped slaves were ubiquitous in early newspapers in Nova Scotia, including those published by Robertson and others in Shelburne. The Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle regularly advertised slave sales for “…a well-made Negro boy.”, or “… able Negro wench...”, and printed pleas for the return of slaves, described as “... well built..”, “thick set and strong…”, and … a Negro girl named Thursday.”
The wills and last testaments of middle class British and Loyalist residents of Nova Scotia often detailed specific instructions about the disposition of slaves, along with the silver plate, clothing, furniture and “… all the live stock, utensils and instruments..” in [his] possession. In 1787, Thomas Robinson of Shelburne willed his “negro boy Manuel” to his eldest son with cash, gold watch and furniture and his “negro woman Pricilla and child Sally”. Son Peter became proud owner of the “negro boy Philip”.
In addition to out-and-out slavery, the practice of indentured servitude was common. For many of the loyalist blacks who arrived in Shelburne thinking they would find their just rewards of land and provisions as promised by the British, becoming indentured was the only way to stave off starvation for them and their families. Two of Stephen Shakespear’s freed slaves indentured themselves for 10 pounds per year to a master who then let them to Simeon Perkins in Liverpool for six months for fifty dollars.
Both slaves and “servants” were often treated harshly, or, as Marion Robertson describes it, “with brutal severity.” Courts often turned a blind eye to the cruelties of slave owners while meting out hard labour, fetters, shackles and whippings to misbehaving servants.
As late as the early 1800s, slaves were still sold at auction, in places like Halifax and Yarmouth and there is evidence of a black slave in Annapolis County being willed to a relative of her owner. In 1807, in southern New Brunswick, prominent businessmen and magistrates James Law and Titus Knapp were recorded as transferring title to some of their many slaves.
Slavery was eventually outlawed in Nova Scotia, but this yearly celebration of black history and African heritage may be cause to consider if the general ignorance of Nova Scotia’s historical relationship with slavery does anything to foster a clear picture about who we are as a people.
As the recently-celebrated black publisher Carrie Best told the Marshall Inquiry in 1988, “Slavery… is just the mother of racism ... there is no difference between racism and slavery.”
This story is part of a series of articles celebrating African Heritage Month by Shelburne-based writer, Timothy Gillespie. Sources for this article include The Slave in Canada, by T. Watson Smith, The Black Loyalists, by James W. St. G. Walker and Kings Bounty, by Marion Robertson.
