Black Loyalists: Southern Settlers of Nova Scotia's First Free Black Communities

By Ruth Holmes Whithead

“Engaging and steeped in years of research . . . a must read for all who care about the intersection of Canadian, American, British, and African history.” —Lawrence Hill, award-winning author of Someone Knows My Name

In an attempt to ruin the American economy during the Revolutionary War, the British government offered freedom to slaves who would desert their rebel masters. Many Black men and women escaped to the British fleet patrolling the East Coast, or to the British armies invading the colonies from Maine to Georgia.

After the final surrender of the British to the Americans, New York City was evacuated by the British Army throughout the summer and fall of 1783. Carried away with them were a vast number of White Loyalists and their families, and over 3,000 Black Loyalists: free, indentured, apprenticed, or still enslaved. More than 2,700 Black people came to Nova Scotia with the fleet from New York City.

Black Loyalists strives to present hard data about the lives of Nova Scotia Black Loyalists before they escaped slavery in early South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, and after they settled in Nova Scotia—to tell the little-known story of some very brave and enterprising men and women who survived the chaos of the American Revolution, people who found a way to pass through the heart, ironically, of a War for Liberty, to find their own liberty and human dignity.

Includes historical images and documents

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 25, 2014
• ISBN: 9781771080613

Book preview

Black Loyalists

Southern Settlers of Nova Scotia’s First Free Black Communities

Ruth Holmes Whitehead

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Copyright © 2013, Ruth Holmes Whitehead

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.

Nimbus Publishing Limited

3731 Mackintosh St, Halifax, NS B3K 5A5

(902) 455– 4286

nimbus.ca

Printed and bound in Canada

NB1028

Author photo: Sandra Kipis, 2011

Cover and interior design: John van der Woude Designs

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Whitehead, Ruth Holmes

The Black Loyalists : southern settlers of the first free black

communities in Nova Scotia / Ruth Holmes Whitehead.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued also in print formats.

eISBN 978-1-77108-017-0

1. Black loyalists—Nova Scotia—History. 2. Black loyalists—Nova Scotia—Biography. 3. Nova Scotia—History—1775-1783. 4. Nova Scotia--History--1784-1867. 5. United States—History—Revolution, 1775-1783. I. Title.

FC2321.4.W55 2013 971.6’00496 C2012-907368-7

Nimbus Publishing acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of Nova Scotia through the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage.

For all the descendants of the Black Loyalists everywhere, who wish to know what life was like for their ancestors as slaves and as free people in the Before Time.

In memory of Isabelle (Miss Molsey) Simmons, Louisa Sellars, and Eliza Logan Cherry.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Part ONE

Chapter One

-Rise of the English Slave Trade

-Slavery in South Carolina

Chapter Two

-I am an Eye Witness to it, it is not what I have heard.

-The Richardson Family

Chapter Three

-Benjamin

-Katy

-John and Princessa Prince

-Tom Cain and Sillah Banbury

-Patty Shubrick and her baby

Part TWO

Chapter Four

-The Abolitionist Movement in Great Britain

-The Gathering Clouds of War

-Liberty to Slaves in Virginia

-Sanctuary in New York

Chapter Five

-1775

-1776

-1777

-1778

-1779

-1780

-1781

Chapter Six

-1781

-1782

-1783

Part THREE

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

-Birchtown, Shelburne County

-Port Mouton, Queen’s County

-Chedabucto Bay, Antigonish (later Guysborough) County

-Tracadie, Brownspriggs Grant, and the Tracadie Backlands, Antigonish County

-Halifax, Halifax County

Chapter Nine

-Birchtown, Shelburne County

-Tracadie, Lincolnville, Birchtown Number II, Antigonish and Guysborough Counties

-Port Mouton

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

It’s the third of May, 1783. In Barrington, Nova Scotia, a seven-year-old boy named Thomas Doane is fidgeting at the graveside where his father is being buried. When finally he looks up and out to sea, he is transfixed by what he is seeing. Bracketed by the headlands of the harbour, passing by in silent stateliness like great cumulus clouds on a summer’s afternoon, the British fleet out of newly surrendered New York City, on its way up the coast to Port Roseway, is delivering a thousand Black Loyalists to freedom in Nova Scotia.¹ These men and women would found the first free black communities in the province.

During the following months, and over the next two years, more than four thousand black men, women, and children would come to Nova Scotia as a direct result of the American Revolution (1775–1783). They came as freeborn persons, as former slaves who had seized freedom from the chaos of war, or as indentured servants. Some came still enchained to their enslavers. They came fleeing the British surrender of thirteen American colonies: the Massachusetts Commonwealth (which then included Maine), New Hampshire, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. During the course of the war, as these colonies fell one by one to the victorious Americans, mass evacuations of British forces and supporters to their remaining centres of power began to take place.

As early as 1775, slaves were being promised freedom if they deserted rebellious colonists to come behind the British lines. Many of them took advantage of this offer, following the British Army or sailing with the Royal Navy, as the lines of battle and power surged up and down the Atlantic Coast. Historians now refer to these people as the Black Loyalists — a term that seems to have been extended to cover all the blacks who emigrated to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec, whatever their circumstances, between the years 1775 and 1785.

The colonies of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia (which at that time included what is now New Brunswick), Île Saint-Jean (later Prince Edward Island), and Quebec had remained loyal to King George III of England throughout the revolution. In the south, East Florida never left British control (West Florida was retaken by the Spanish toward the end of the war). Midway between the two lay the city of New York. By August 1776, the British were entrenched in New York, holding it until the end of the war. Thus, by 1783, the bulk of Black Loyalists, enslaved originally all along the east coast from Georgia on up through Maine, were concentrated in New York, the port from which many would later sail to Nova Scotia.

They would not be the first Black Loyalists to come to Nova Scotia, however. Boston had fallen to the American forces before the British seizure of New York; hence a number of black Bostonians evacuated directly to Halifax. According to historian James Walker, The first known group of free Black Loyalists to arrive in Nova Scotia was the ‘Company of Negroes,’ evacuated from Boston with the other British forces in 1776. No sooner had they arrived in Halifax than the suggestion was made that they should be used as ransom in exchange for Loyalist prisoners held by the Americans. Such was apparently to be their reward for sharing the hazards and hardships of the New England campaign.²

For all practical purposes, the American Revolution ended in October 1781, with the surrender of General Cornwallis to General Washington at Yorktown, Virginia. Sporadic fighting continued in other places for several months. As the British were evacuating Savannah and Charlestown from July through the end of December 1782, more persons poured into New York. By April 1783, the first transports had begun taking thousands of British and Hessian troops home to Great Britain and Germany. With them went many who had been loyal to Britain, black and white, with their families and the little they had been able to salvage from the wreckage of war. Refugees also made directly for Nova Scotia, sailed for the West Indies, or took ship to Quebec. Others went to St. Augustine, East Florida, where they were promised peace, provisions, and land.

Florida was not to remain a refuge for long, however. The English colony of West Florida was retaken by the Spanish prior to the signing of the peace treaty in 1783, and East Florida by that same treaty was ceded back to Spain, with its refugees and old settlers given until 1785 to complete evacuating the territory. Many of these opted for the same promises of provisions and land in Nova Scotia, far to the north.

A number of excellent books have told the story of the part played by black men and women in the American Revolution. Others have written about the arrival of the Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia, and the departure of many of them, in 1791, for a new life in Sierra Leone — all good general surveys. This book, however, is much more specific, taking a look at those founding members of the Black Loyalist communities in Nova Scotia whose stories began in the southern provinces of South Carolina and Georgia (which was carved out of South Carolina in 1732). I chose the South Carolina Black Loyalists to focus upon particularly because that province, before the American Revolution, had the largest black population of any in North America; many contemporary Nova Scotians who are descended from Black Loyalists have ancestors who were enslaved there. South Carolina is also where I was born, and a number of my own ancestors there were slave owners who lost people to Nova Scotia. As a former registrar at the Charleston Museum, I knew the research infrastructure. It seemed a good place to start looking at individual Black Loyalists, following them through the war that led to their arrival in Nova Scotia. This book is an attempt to recover their history — and that of their contemporaries — for their descendants, many of whom live in Nova Scotia today.

How their names have survived is an interesting story in itself. All people are a treasure house of information, of personal memories. If we are fortunate, ancestors pass some of this down to us. Nowhere on earth, however, has the generational transmission of history been cut more devastatingly than in the forcible migrations whereby an estimated ten million persons of African birth were brought as slaves to the New World. Torn away from their heritage, their extended families, their languages and culture, these men and women have left to their descendants often little more than a handful of memories.

Restoring this lost family history is hampered in the United States, in many cases, by the lack of surnames in historical documents before 1863 — the year the Emancipation Proclamation declared slavery illegal. (Slavery had been abolished in the British Empire in 1834.) The Black Loyalists who left New York in 1783, therefore, provide a unique window for their descendants, and for historians and genealogists in general, for two reasons. First, they had surnames and, second, they were documented with these surnames from the time of their leaving New York with the British.

Once again, this fortuitous circumstance arose because of the war. General George Washington, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, demanded at the end of the American Revolution that all people formerly considered American property and now living behind the British lines be returned. General Sir Guy Carleton, newly appointed commander-in-chief of the British forces, met with Washington in May 1783, but refused this request in a letter dated May 12, saying he had no right to deprive them of that liberty, which had been granted by proclamations of various British officials and generals, beginning with Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, in November 1775.³ Carleton announced that he’d ordered a list kept of each black person leaving New York with the British convoys. This document, which came to be called the Book of Negroes (see Note at end of introduction), in most cases gave a first and last name, the person’s age and physical description, as well as the name and location of his or her former enslaver, with details as to when each had left him. Names of blacks still enslaved or of indentured black servants leaving with the fleet were also to be included in this list of free black émigrés. Because of this unique list, which fixes each person in time and space at one particular moment in their lives, many descendants of these Loyalists can track their families from 1783, when they first arrived in Nova Scotia.

Using, in addition, census records, muster rolls, poll tax records, court cases, and church records of births, deaths, and marriages, family trees can be established for some Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia seventy years earlier than any comparable record can be created for most blacks in the United States. This material also enables some tracking of Black Loyalists coming to Nova Scotia in ways other than those mentioned in the Book of Negroes. Less well known, for example, are the Black Loyalists who were shipped from East Florida or Jamaica to Guysborough, Nova Scotia, in 1784, whose names appear in a Guysborough muster. Almost no records of their lives prior to their arrival have survived, but many were originally enslaved in South Carolina or Georgia, before post-war evacuation took them further south and north. A number of Carolinians, such as David George and his family, or the Reverend John Marrant, are not listed in the Book of Negroes, but were discovered through other sources documenting their origins.

This is not the only good news. Using their former slave owner’s names and locations, some Black Loyalists can be tracked backwards in time from 1783 to their enslavement and escape in an American colony. In some cases, using wills and inventories of the estates of previous owners, family histories can be taken back another twenty years or more, and sometimes all the way home to Africa. Because it is known where they were, and by whom they were enslaved, and when they were born, the lives of many can be fleshed out beyond all previous expectations. After fifteen years of searching, I am still astonished by the amount of data available. A biographical entry for every person I’ve found has been prepared, and will eventually be made accessible, possibly on the Black Loyalist Heritage Society’s website.

Everyone’s story has a beginning, and to understand the lives of these Black Loyalists, it is necessary to start with their circumstances before the war — circumstances that were a direct result of the African slave trade. Consequently, I first examine European involvement in the West African slave trade through the journals of slave ship captains, slave fort administrators, and others. These materials include a first-hand account by someone who accompanied a Muslim slave trader on a months-long journey through the interior of Africa to collect slaves for sale to the English on the coast. In the early twentieth century, historian Elizabeth Donnan amassed four huge volumes of records on the slave trade — a blessing to researchers, the first two of which I have relied on heavily. The original accounts are so vivid that I may have erred on the side of presenting extracts from too many people, but as one South Carolina slave, Warwick Francis, said, I am an Eye Witness to it.⁴

Black life in South Carolina is next presented. From its initial founding in 1670, Carolina was involved in the slave trade. Some of the Lords Proprietors to whom Charles II initially granted the colony were members of the Royal Company of Adventurers Trading into Africa. Slavery there first took root when the thin coastal margin of colony was still the frontier of Carolina — beyond it was wilderness. In the early days of the colony, slave owners often worked side by side with their slaves. Marriage between blacks, Native Americans, and whites was legal. Moreover, slaves were often freed after a term of service, manumission made possible simply by the owner signing a statement of emancipation — later each case had to be approved by the legislature (usually they refused), and the emancipated slave had to leave South Carolina. Prior to the American Revolution, however, as slave labour helped the colony morph into a place of wealth and ease, Carolina substituted the relative freedom of the frontier for a much more severe and rigid legalism, designed to control the ever-growing population of the enslaved. The slave statutes, for example, those laws regulating slave life, are grim but telling documents that shed light on how slavery evolved in the colony.

Excerpts from the memoirs of three Black Loyalist ministers who came to Nova Scotia, one of them born free and two born enslaved, provide windows into life in the colony. Other resources are the runaway-slave advertisements of the period: rich mini-vignettes of daily life. Enslavers’ personal and business documents offer another avenue, in particular the voluminous correspondence of Henry Laurens, which spans many years (1747–1792). I have included a few of his comments on his own slaves to illustrate how an enslaver felt and acted within a slave-owning society. The oral history of a family living in Christ Church Parish (across the harbour from Charleston) provides glimpses of lifeways preserved and passed down from African ancestors during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — lifeways vastly unchanged from those of Black Loyalists.

Chapter 3 profiles eight Black Loyalists (including a baby), using the available data to reconstruct their lives as much as is presently possible. During the course of this research, I remember telling my father, I’ve done minimal biographies now for about eight hundred people, but there’s so much information turning up. I could write whole essays on about two hundred of them! He looked at me pityingly, and said, "I really think you need to narrow your focus." So I’ve chosen to profile certain Black Loyalists who settled at Birchtown, Port Mouton, Guysborough, Halifax, and Annapolis Royal or Digby. They represent the spectrum of black people who came to Nova Scotia: free men and women, some still employed by the British Army; indentured servants; people still enslaved. Their enslavers also come from a variety of backgrounds: male and female, married and single, rich and poor, planters and artisans; their homes in rural areas, small towns, or Charlestown itself.

The middle portion of the book covers both the war that would provide freedom for the Black Loyalists, and the ways in which they escaped to Nova Scotia. Here, I was helped by the series of documents collected in Naval Documents of the American Revolution, published by the US Department of the Navy. Unfortunately, this undertaking does not yet cover all the war years, but the volumes completed to date — running well over a thousand pages each — are the next best thing to having been there. K. G. Davies’ multi-volume work containing calendars and transcripts of documents in the National Archives of Great Britain (Documents of the American Revolution, 1770-1783: Colonial Office Series) provided excellent primary data, and some fascinating side trips. The British Headquarters Papers (in the same archives) and contemporary South Carolina newspapers added greatly to my research on the war years.

Another research highlight was the Royal Navy muster rolls, which list the names of black people who made it to sanctuary on board the King’s ships as well as the names of those captured to be sold as booty as soon as the ship reached an appropriate port. Such musters added to my knowledge of the interactions between Black Loyalists and the Royal Navy, and provided corrections or elucidations of some of the data in the Book of Negroes. In addition, ships’ daily logs provided added texture and background.

The final three chapters take a look at life after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The first describes the evacuation of New York, detailing the voyages of a few of the ships that carried Black Loyalists to England and Germany, Quebec and Nova Scotia, or the West Indies. The second examines the early years of the Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia and the history of their largest founding communities. These include Birchtown, Annapolis Royal, and Digby, largely abandoned for Sierra Leone in 1791; the doomed community at Port Mouton, destroyed by fire on a spring night in 1784, with many of its people being relocated to Birchtown, Chedabucto, or Saint John; and the Tracadie land grants given to local Black Loyalists in 1787. The final chapter looks at the recent rise of interest in Black Loyalist history, and the resulting books, museum exhibits, and videos, as well as the findings of archaeological digs. Birchtown in Shelburne County, once (for a short time) the largest town of free blacks in North America — fifteen hundred people — has become a primary centre for this sort of study. The creation there of the Black Loyalist Heritage Society and the work of its individual members has done a lot to bring the history of Black Loyalists into public knowledge.

To sum up, this book presents a picture of what life was like for Black Loyalists, before they escaped slavery in early South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida and after they settled in Nova Scotia. My intention is to illustrate how some very brave and enterprising men and women found a way to pass through the heart, ironically, of a War for Liberty, to liberty and human dignity. They had a passion for freedom, and they acted upon it. This book is for their descendants, who, over the succeeding generations, have made a life for themselves in Nova Scotia.

A note on Book of Negroes: Its full title is Book of Negroes Registered & certified after having been Inspected by the Commissioners appointed by His Excellency Sr. Guy Carleton K.B. General & Commander in Chief, on Board Sundry Vessels in which they were Embarked Previous to the time of sailing from the Port of New York. Because I mention it eighty-nine times in this book, I use the shortened form, Book of Negroes, and I use it without quotation marks. It is not to be confused with Lawrence Hill’s novel, The Book of Negroes, which uses it as inspiration for a novel about a single fictional Black Loyalist.

A note on the combatants: The term British is used for everyone on the side of King George III except for the American Loyalists, whom their opponents called Tories. (They weren’t any more British — or less American — than were their opposite numbers, most being Americans of British descent.) The term Loyalists seems a reasonable one for them, since that is what they called themselves. Black persons assisting the British army or navy during the war, taking refuge behind the British lines, are herein referred to as Black Loyalists. The term Americans or rebels refers to all those opposing King George III.

Part

ONE

Chapter One

THE SLAVE TRADE AND THE PROVINCE OF CAROLINA

Charlestown Harbour, early December, 1782: The British Navy is loading ship after ship with people who want to leave South Carolina. Those civilians who sided with King George III are all aboard now with their families, their allowance of baggage, their slaves, their dogs, a favourite parrot in a cage. Up the side come the Black Loyalists, freed from slavery by coming in to the British forces, perhaps bringing with them a change of clothes, some bedding, a few tools, a small bag of cornmeal. Then are brought aboard people still technically the property of King George III: the slaves captured in war or taken from the sequestered estates of rebellious Americans. They have almost nothing except the rags on their backs. And lastly, on December 14, the ships begin boarding the regiments of the British Army and their Hessian allies, evacuating a former colony at the tail end of the American Revolution.

For those of African birth — and out of the more than three thousand blacks evacuated, a great many had suffered the experience of the African slave trade first-hand — being taken aboard a troop transport surely brought back the time when they had been brought to the Province of Carolina from West Africa in the hell of a slave ship’s hold. The darkness below decks, the smell of tar and bilge, the sound of water against the hull, the beginnings of seasickness from the heave of the ship and the heat of so many bodies packed together, not to mention their anxiety about the unknown, would have caused a cascade of memories. As their vessels began to make sail down the ship channel, they could see out the gunports Sullivan’s Island, the ground they would have first set foot on to complete quarantine. Many must have sat speechless in those first moments on board, re-experiencing their African past, their capture and forced march to the sea, their placement in irons, the long wait in slave-factory dungeons until the ship arrived that would take them across the ocean. They had been victims of one of the biggest forced migrations the world has ever seen, part of a terrible trade in humans already several hundred years old, and one which would continue for nearly a century in South Carolina.⁵

The fifteenth century saw the first rush of European explorers to Africa south of the Sahara. One of the most fascinating seeds for this interest in exploration originated in the African empire of Mali in the early 1300s. Mali’s ruler, Abu Bakari II, filled with curiosity and the desire for epic adventure that was to win for him the praise name The Voyager King, decided to equip a fleet of two thousand ships and sail with them across the Atlantic. He wanted to know what was on the other side. Abu Bakari departed his kingdom from somewhere on the west coast of Africa, and as late as 1324, had not returned, vanishing into speculation. He left his wealth and power, as well as his sense of adventure, to his regent, Mansa Musa (1312–1337), who as a devout Muslim decided in 1324 to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. While passing through Egypt, Mansa Musa astounded the Mediterranean world with the massive amounts of gold he had brought with him from Mali. His huge retinue and his lavish spending turned heads and fired imaginations: there was gold in Africa, south of the Sahara. While in Cairo, this Malian ruler gave an interview to the Arab historian and geographer Shihab al-Umari, who in 1340 preserved for history the account of Abu Bakari and his quest into the South Atlantic.

To men of the Mediterranean littoral, Abu Bakari had done the unthinkable, launching himself due west into the unknown and terrifying World Ocean, following a dream of clouds and birds and land beyond the seas. Mansa Musa gave Europeans other themes to ponder, ideas that amplified the lure of exploration: uncharted regions of Africa as realms of mysteries, of wealth and wilderness. And flowing through all of their imaginings, a river of gold, gold, gold. Eyes and thoughts turned west and south. Europeans took up the story of Mansa Musa and preserved it: an image of the king, for instance, appears on the map of Angelino Dulcert, published in 1375. In the same year, a portrait of Mansa Musa was included in the 1375 Catalan atlas, and — just to make sure no one forgot the salient point — he is portrayed holding an enormous gold nugget.⁶

Thirty-five years later, intrigued by similar stories of African gold, a prince of Portugal began to push the boundaries of the world as known to Europeans. Dom Infante Henrique, third son of King João I and his English wife, Phillipa of Lancaster, took part in the conquest of North African Ceuta (now a Spanish enclave in northern Morocco). Here, in 1415, he evidently

Reviews for Black Loyalists

[lamour_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In 1991 the Nova Scotia Museum decided it needed to create a database of of resources on the Province's Black heritage. The author was involved in the project and met Carmelita Robertson who was searching through early Nova Scotia newspapers for information on early Black settlers. The author is from the South Carolina and had slave owners in her family tree. Robertson, from Nova Scotia has slaves who escaped from the Carolina during the American Revolution in her tree. The two women joined forces and started the research that became this book.Although Robertson did not assist in the writing of the book, she did contribute research and the idea of producing a book. Slaves and indentured servants who were able to escape from their bondage because of the chaos of the war, fled to areas still in British hands such as New York & Florida. From these areas they were moved by Royal Navy ships to Nova Scotia, England and Jamaica. Whitehead decided to focus on the Blacks who left Carolina for the safety of New York and eventually Nova Scotia.She describes how slavery got its toe hold in the Americas and why it grew to be of such enormous economic importance. She describes the cruelty of slaveholders as well as the kindness of some to their chattels. By using the information in the Book Of Negroes and ship musters, she is able to identify from which plantation and its owner a slave fled and on which ship they left New York and in which port in Nova Scotia they landed. Painstaking research that at times is almost too detailed for the reader. However, it would be of great assistance to someone researching their family history.

[readerbynight · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This historic non-fiction book has increased my awareness of many things I didn't know or recall, both in 1700s America and in Canada. Ruth Holmes Whitehead has done her research well, and from very good sources. She has written the book in three major parts: the Slave Trade years; the British-American skirmishes of the 18th century and finally the American Revolution; and the eventual escape to freedom in Nova Scotia, slaves and freemen alike. Many of the original slaves were a mixture of three or more races: African, Native Americans primarily of the south and whites. These are basically the divisions of the book, but there is more to each part than I am including. There are also some photos, drawings, prints and records included in the book.What I find fascinating is the number of Black Loyalists whose family tree has been recovered and recorded, even occasionally going right back to Africa. This is amazing research. There are many citations and quotes in the book, perhaps a few more than necessary but all give an excellent picture of life in these centuries.This is the first known record of biological warfare being used (in the wars of the late 1700s). The virus which became a part of the wars was smallpox, and it was indeed used as a targeted weapon. So, we have the horrors of slavery, the horrors of war, and possibly the biggest killer, smallpox.Part three brings us to the final routing of the British from the Carolinas and other southern provinces. From this point negotiations begin between the Americans and the British. Negotiations meaning mostly the fate of the slaves, freed or not, as this was almost the only "currency" left, the land being totally devastated.This section also brings us to the early part of the movement of the Black Loyalists and escaped slaves toward what is now Canada, to Nova Scotia, the establishment of Black settlements, and the group of Black Africans that had paired up with these slaves and with Native North Americans. Loyalists who requested a return to Africa carried on to settle in Sierra Leone. This movement becomes a source or resource for genealogy today and some people are able to actually trace their ancestry to the original lands in Africa from which they came.It was not all smooth sailing to eventually reach this northern clime however. Many were "dumped" at separate and often barren locations along the way. The author is to be commended for the amazing research she has done putting this cohesive work together both in the book and in the Nova Scotia Museum. There is so much more than I can say in this book, excellent coverage of a difficult time in North American history.