Africa's Children. Sharon Robart-Johnson
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book would not have been possible without the love and support of my husband, Arthur, and our son, Darrell. They were patient with me through all the long hours spent on research and sitting at the computer trying to put the information I had researched into book form.
Many thanks to J. Stuart McLean, B.A., M.L.I.S., former archivist at the Yarmouth County Museum and Archives. While doing other research, if he found any information regarding Black history, no matter how small a tidbit, he would print it or bookmark it for me. I also wish to thank all those many people who assisted me by providing photographs and those who so willing gave of their time to speak with me and share their stories. Also, a thank you to Craig Smith for writing the foreword to this book
I would also like to thank my editor, Jane Gibson, for patiently guiding me through this process; my copy editor, Shannon Whibbs; and Barry Penhale, publisher emeritus of Natural Heritage Books, for all the effort made to bring this to publication.
March 23, 1801
NEGROES
The manner in which they treat the Negroes, is shocking to every principle of humanity; and were it not for custom, which they say is second nature, I think even a West Indian could not have the heart to do what I have seen done by the overseers of some of the Sugar Plantations near this place. Of all the other islands, Jamaica is said, in this respect, to be the least inhuman: but if the others exceed it as much as is reported, it would be doing an act of justice to mankind to exterminate them from the face of the Globe. The labor of the Slaves is peculiarly severe in the Sugar-Works. From day break they are employed under the lash of the overseer, in cutting and preparing the Cane; and when evening arrives, instead of being allowed to go to rest, the mill is set going; and the poor creatures, harrafsed [sic] with the day’s hardships, are forced to work at two watches all night — if they obtain four hours sleep, in the twenty-four, they think themselves comparatively fortunate. However this extreme barbarity continues only for those months in which they make Sugar, viz. January, May, June, July, November and December; if it was carried out longer the poor wretches would sink under the oppression … they would then be freed from an existence, which as it is, they are often induced to rid themselves of by Suicide — The most accurate description fails in deliniating the horrors of the Negroes Slavery … Would decency, would humanity permit it, I would unfold some tales of the cruelties exercised on the Blacks by the Planters that would make even a savage shudder, would draw tears of compassion from a very brute! But, in short, he who never beheld the woes of Slavery, can form no idea of their magnitude, and I am persuaded that were those members of the British Parliament who so strenuously uphold this detestable traffic, in their situation for a single hour, we should have the happiness of seeing the Abolition of the Slave-trade.”1
Before proceeding with a history of the Blacks in Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia, it is important to briefly look at the background of the commercialization of enslaved Africans from its beginning. Slavery certainly was not unique to Yarmouth County, neither beginning nor ending there. Slavery has been part of human history from the earliest of days. It was August 8, 1444, when the first shipment of 235 slaves was loaded onto a Portuguese ship bound for its native land. Most of those slaves came from one village in Africa that the Portuguese had attacked, taking as many as they could. Despite the valiant efforts of the Africans to escape, some lost their lives. This ill-fated trip for the slaves was viewed as the first sell for profit cargo of human flesh from Africa.2
It was not only greedy sea captains and nefarious criminals, however, who profited from the capture and sale of slaves. Across various European countries, including England, many prominent men, lords, mayors, members of Parliament and wealthy landowners, to identify but a few, made a lucrative living off the trafficking of slaves. When slave ships left the various ports, slaves were packed into the holds of those ships like sardines in a can. Upwards of fifteen million Africans were crammed into crowded sailing ships crossing the Atlantic to North America, South America, and the Caribbean between 1450 and 1850.3
Introduction In 1856, Benjamin Drew, an American abolitionist from Boston, Massachusetts, who travelled through eastern Canada meeting with former slaves who had escaped on the Underground Railroad, wrote a book titled The Refugee; Or a North-Side View of Slavery, a compilation of narratives told by slaves. One of those slaves was named John Little. He told of how he had been bought and sold by several masters. At about the age of twenty-three (he was not certain of his age), he was finally sold to a man who “abused me like a dog — worse than a dog, — not because I did any thing wrong, but because I was a ‘nigger.’”4
One day, with hat in hand, he went to his master and asked for a pass to visit his mother. “No! I don’t allow my niggers to run about Sundays, gawking about; I want you to-morrow to look after the mules and the horses along with the rest of the niggers.”5 John, being a stubborn man and wanting desperately to see his mother, went without his pass. When he returned he received five hundred lashes for his disobedience.
Nor did children escape the drudgery of hard labour. By the age of five, children were sent to the fields, and at the age of seven or eight, plantation toil became their life of drudgery. Because the mortality rate of slaves was extremely high, many thirteen-year-old girls, just children themselves, were raped and forced to give birth to as many as five babies before they reached their twentieth birthday, only to have those babies ripped from their arms and sold to the highest bidder. Some owners sold as many as 6,000 babies in a single year. Young girls were offered their freedom if they gave birth to fifteen babies. Their reward of freedom was unlikely, however, as long as they were able to bear more children.6
In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries the economic climate in Europe began to change. Agriculture was in the decline as industry — with its mechanization — was on the upswing. All the same, it was the humanitarian movement that spawned the anti-slavery groups, signalling the downward slope of slavery. Slaves were cruelly mistreated and punished for little or no reason, sometimes simply because they were slaves. Sometimes slaves would actually kill their own children or other family members to save them from these horrendous cruelties. Such inhumane practices were no longer tolerated by certain groups, and the cry for the abolition of slavery became loud and long, both in Europe and across North America. One group that became extremely active in the anti-slavery campaign was the American Quakers. They worked diligently for their cause and went so far as to form an association of different religious denominations called “The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.”7
The American Revolution, also known as the American War of Independence, was fought between Great Britain and the thirteen British colonies on the North American continent. These colonies, with their different way of life and religious and political beliefs, wanted to be independent from their homeland. When the first shot was fired at Lexington in 1775, the war had begun. In November of that year, Lord John Murray Dunmore (John Murray), the British governor in charge of the New England colonies, promised freedom to those Black people who would fight on the side of the British. General George Washington, in charge of the rebel forces fighting for independence from Britain, had at first refused to recruit Blacks into their troops. However, when Lord Dunmore made his proclamation to indentured servants and Negroes, Washington decided to do the same with those slaves who agreed to fight on the American side.8
The first known free Black Loyalists to arrive in Nova Scotia were a group that became known as the “Company of Negroes.” They had been evacuated from Boston with other British troops in 1776, but there is very little information as to exactly how many came or where they settled. Robert S. Allen, in Loyalist Literature, notes only that a small “Company of Negroes” arrived in Halifax with the British after the evacuation of Boston.9 He does not mention whether they stayed there or were relocated. Although these Black men had fought gallantly, the British, in exchange for postwar reconciliation, began negotiations to return the Blacks to their former slave masters, contrary to their former commitment to providing freedom. Because of this betrayal, hundreds of Blacks were forced into inadequate housing and died of disease in the unsanitary conditions