Notices by Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco (deglassco@mastodon.social)

Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy playing with a toy gun in Cleveland—gunned down by police.

John Crawford III, shopping in Walmart with a BB gun in Beavercreek—gunned down by police.

Walter Scott, running from police in Charleston—shot in the back.

Botham Jean, sitting in his own living room, eating ice cream after work in Dallas—gunned down by police.

Black woman, an old Black woman, an old Black man, a young Black man, a Black child—they make the police SO afraid they just have to open fire.

More Primary Sources
Shelburne Muster Rolls and Blucke Papers. 1783–1791. Nova Scotia Archives and Shelburne County Museum Collections.
https://loyalist.lib.unb.ca/record/local-records-1782-1860

Fergusson, Charles Bruce, ed. Clarkson's Mission to America, 1791-1792. Publication No. 11. Halifax: Public Archives of Nova Scotia, 1971.
https://archives.novascotia.ca/african-heritage/archives/?ID=686

Hodges, Graham Russell, ed. The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile after the American Revolution.
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/6919744
17/19

Primary Sources
British Government. Book of Negroes. 1783. Nova Scotia Archives. Accessed May 28, 2025.
https://archives.novascotia.ca/africanns/book-of-negroes/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C3070438?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Clarkson, John. The Clarkson Papers. Edited by Kenneth C. Barnes. London: Hakluyt Society, 1998.
https://blackloyalist.com/cdc/documents/diaries/mission/153-155.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com

https://equianosworld.org/associates-abolition.php?id=9&utm_source=chatgpt.com

https://nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15052coll5/id/28142/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Colonial Office Records. Nova Scotia Correspondence and Land Grants. CO 217. The National Archives (UK).
https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4408
16/19

And in those names, and the memory of Birchtown’s huts, there remains a trace of that first spring—a moment when the future seemed possible, even if the land beneath their feet would not hold it.
15/19
Image: Freetown, Sierra Leone, mid-19th century. [Drawings of Western Africa, University of Virginia Library, Special Collections, MSS 14357, no. 8]

Walker, James W. St. G. The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

Whitfield, Harvey Amani. North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016.
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/acadiensis/article/view/20066/

Winks, Robin W. The Blacks in Canada: A History. 2nd ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. See
https://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/archivalcollections/pdf/SCMicroR5858.pdf

Further Reading
https://preserve.lib.unb.ca/wayback/20141205153647/http://atlanticportal.hil.unb.ca/acva/blackloyalists/en/bibliography/
19/19

Further Primary Sources
MacNutt, W. S. Select Loyalist Memorials: Typescript. University of New Brunswick Archives and Special Collections.
https://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/archivalcollections/pdf/americanloyalists.pdf

Stephen Blucke’s Leadership in Birchtown.
https://blackloyalist.com/cdc/people/secular/blucke.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Secondary Sources

Barry Cahill, “The Black Loyalist Myth in Atlantic Canada”, Acadiensis, XXIX, 1, (Fall 1999),pp.76-87.
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/Acadiensis/article/download/10801/11588/14683

Schama, Simon. Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
18/19

They had staked everything on the loyalty of an empire thathad used them to bleed a continent dry of rebellion. And now, on these northern shores, they came seeking a new beginning—some still wearing the tattered uniforms of the Black Pioneers, others with children in tow, all with histories of bondage pressed into the muscle of their backs and the callouses of their hands.
3/19
Image: Double-page spread detailing Black Loyalists that embarked for Nova Scotia. Canadian National Archives.

They landed with nothing but their names, their memories, and the inked promise of liberty—names logged by British officials in New York, names which had once belonged to property now claimed by themselves. In the summer of 1783, the Black Loyalists arrived in Nova Scotia not as refugees but as free men and women. Or so they were told.
2/19
Image: Black Soldier, Rhode Island Regiment, by Jean Baptiste Antoine de Verger, Williamsburg, Virginia, circa 1781-1784.

For 3 days each week, they were conscripted for public works for food: clearing trees, digging roads, laying the rough lines of empire. The rest of the week, they scrounged for sustenance. Colonel Stephen Blucke, once their commanding officer, became their reluctant intermediary—respected by British officials, but distrusted by many in Birchtown.
7/19
Image: Stephen Blucke, in William Booth, "Rough memorandums from 20th January to 24th March 1789," Esther Clark Wright Archives, Arcadia U.

Their knowledge of building came not from books or blueprints but from plantation quarters and military trenching—adapted now, poorly, to northern latitudes they had never known. And as they labored to construct homes from forest and frost, they were denied the timber that had been stockpiled in nearby Shelburne, denied the farm plots that white settlers had claimed for themselves.
6/19
Image: Reconstruction of Black settlers shelters after arriving in NS. Black Loyalists Heritage Center.

Birchtown may have been named for General Birch, the British officer who had authorized their evacuation, but there was little of shelter or shade in the naming. It was less a town than a gesture.

With no nails, few tools, and promises still drifting like fog over the harbor, the Black settlers built what they could: dugouts covered with timber scraps, huts of wattle and daub, cone-shaped shelters tied with birch bark.

5/19
Image: Muster Book of Black loyalists in Birchtown - 1784.

They disembarked in Port Roseway, a port that would be rechristened Shelburne, only to find themselves exiled again—this time to the rocky, forest-choked margins of that settlement, to a place soon called Birchtown. It was land granted, but only nominally: swamp at its rear, stones at its feet, and the cold Atlantic pressing in from the bay.
4/19
Image: Detailed inset map of Burch Town (Birchtown) & the black suburb of Shelburne, London 12 July 1798, Cartographer: Captain Holland, NS Archives.

In Preston, near Halifax, the proximity to markets offered a faint opportunity—until even there, sharecropping tethered Black settlers to white landowners whose titles outranked their toil.
By 1792, Birchtown still looked much as it had a decade earlier: a sprawl of huts, temporary shelters made permanent by neglect. Governor John Clarkson, visiting that year, wrote of the squalor with a mixture of pity and bureaucratic alarm.
11/19
Image: Portrait of John Clarkson (1764–1828), Artist unknown.

The same pattern repeated itself across the province. In Guysborough, a fire destroyed the initial Black settlement in 1784, and the survivors were relocated to remote and infertile Tracadie—3000 acres of scrub and stone that was better than nothing, and often little more. In Digby, Brindley Town was built, then displaced, then built again, each move set in motion by the bureaucracy of dispossession.
10/19
Image: Some of the area's Black Loyalist communities.

And slowly, then more overtly, white settlers seized terrain that had never been offered to Black Loyalists to begin with. Promised 40 or 50 acres, many Black settlers received far less—or nothing. They were penned in by land grants they could not access, and watched, helpless, as lumber-rich homes were seized for tax arrears and torn down rather than offered to Black laborers in need of shelter.
9/19
Image: The National Historic Event of Canada plaque onsite in Birchtown, NS, erected 1996.

Many saw Blucke as too closely tied to the authorities who kept their community in a state of enforced dependency.

Still, Blucke’s Black Pioneers became the only source of paid employment in the town—if one could call the pittance “pay.”

As early as 1784, the encirclement of Black land began. Surveyors acting in the interests of white settlers sliced off large sections of Birchtown’s northern tract.
8/19
Image: St. Paul’s Anglican Church, Birchtown, Nova Scotia. Built 1888.

Yet they stayed. And in the shallow soil and chill fog of Nova Scotia, they built communities that still exist: Tracadie, Digby, East Preston. Their descendants carry the names of those who arrived with the evacuation fleet and lived through the second exile.
14/19
Image: The historic Black community of North Preston, on Oct. 2, 1934. Photo courtesy: Nova Scotia Archives.

For those who remained, what had begun as a vision of equality hardened into the reality of apartheid-by-survey. They were no longer Loyalists; they were tenants. And then, they were tenants without title. They became what the empire had always feared they would become: permanent reminders that freedom, once granted, could not be contained.
13/19
Image: Earthenware pot and ceramic plate was found in Birchtown at the remains of the home of Black Loyalist leader Col. Stephen Blucke. (NS Museum).

Clarkson found the Black settlers still in rags, still in huts with no stoves or insulation, and still waiting for the land and liberty they had fought for.
Some left. Many, in fact. That same year, over 1,200 Black Loyalists boarded ships again—this time bound for Sierra Leone, where Clarkson promised a new settlement in Africa, free of white interference.
12/19
Image: On January 15th, 1792, 15 ships left Halifax for Sierra Leone with 1,196 Black Nova Scotians, some 540 families. NS Museum.

In 1783, nearly 3,000 Black Loyalists arrived in Nova Scotia—free in name, but not in fate. Promised land and liberty, they built settlements from bark and memory, while the empire marked their freedom with boundaries. It is a story of what they built, what was taken, and what remains. #Juneteenth #Histodons #politics #BlackMastodon #history #photography
1/19
Image: Temporary shelters the Black Loyalists lived in on their arrival in Nova Scotia in 1783. Black Loyalists Heritage Center, NS.