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carman and a doctor. They had skills, schools for their children, and their own churches, including one ministered by David George, a Baptist minister who had founded the first black church in America a decade earlier. Most of all they had freedom, or at least a piece of paper saying they were free.
    Before that they were servants and slaves in the American South. Then came the Revolutionary War. No definitive record exists of how many served on either side in the conflict. But it is safe to say that more fought with the Loyalists, who promised them land,rations and independence, than stuck with the continental army. They fought valiantly for freedom, then landed in New York during the final days of the Revolution. The British were showing worrisome signs of reneging on their promises and handing the slaves back to the rebels. A commission was set up to sort out the conflicting claims. But Yankee slave owners took matters into their own hands. Wrote an anguished black refugee named Boston King: “We saw our old masters coming from Virginia, North Carolina and other parts, and seizing upon their slaves in the streets of New York, or even dragging them out of their beds.” George Washington insisted all the slaves be returned. Guy Carleton, the British governor-in-chief of North America, refused, agreeing only to compile a list of numbers so that compensation could be paid to the former owners. When the ships left New York harbour fully 2,775 of the 3,000 free black Loyalists selected for immigration headed for Nova Scotia and a place named Port Roseway.
    Immigration didn’t live up to expectations, not by a long shot. Most of the black Loyalists received no land at all. Instead they were left to work the rocky, barren soil near their shanty town or to work as servants to the white Loyalists at the nearby settlement of Shelburne, for wages as low as fifty or sixty dollars a year. “Many of the poor people were compelled to sell their best gowns for five pounds of flour, in order to support life,” King recounted in his autobiography. “When they were parted with all their clothes, even to their blankets, several of them fell down dead in the streetsthrough hunger. Some killed and ate their dogs and cats; and poverty and distress prevailed on every side.” In Shelburne, the indentured black servants were cheated of their rations, shackled and whipped for being idle or stubborn, and jailed merely for attending a “negro frolick” or dance. Trifling crimes were punished with brutal severity: a woman named Dianna, convicted for two petty larcenies (a theft under twelve pence) was sentenced to 200 lashes at high noon for the first offence and 150 lashes for the other; a man named Light Horse Jack was given 100 lashes at the hands of the common hangman—20 lashes in front of the jail, 20 lashes at the corner of King St., 20 at the corner of St. John’s St. and 20 each at the corners of Ann and St. George’s Streets; a man named Thomas stole two pieces of pork from a docked ship and was sentenced to two months of jail and hard labour and 12 lashes.
    Unable to work the boulder-strewn land, their services no longer in demand by Shelburne’s rapidly dwindling white population, the people of Birchtown sank into squalor and despair. The hapless whites in Shelburne claimed that the blacks had devalued their wages with cheap labour and blamed them for their own sorry lot. One summer day in 1784 hundreds of club-carrying whites ran the blacks into Birchtown, pulled down a bunch of their houses, then went home with that feeling of satisfaction that comes from a good day’s work. Visiting Birchtown a few years later, an aide to Prince William Henry (later King William IV) wrote back home that the place was “beyond description wretched, situated on the coast in the middle of barren rocks, and partly surroundedby a thick impenetrable wood. Their huts too miserable to guard against the inclemency of a Nova Scotia winter, and their