In Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815-1860, the arrival of the Black Refugee population is skillfully placed in its chronological and cultural context. He brings a fresh perspective to what is, after all, both an American and a Canadian story. Harvey Amani Whitfield is an African American whose study of Black Nova Scotians can be traced back to his doctoral work at Dalhousie University in Halifax. It is their subsequent fate, their ongoing concern for and relationship with Blacks living along the American seaboard and throughout the Atlantic world, and the hardships they endured on the way to becoming Black Nova Scotians, which form the core of this important and timely volume. Many never received their land grants, with those who did being settled on small allotments of rocky soil, mainly at Hammonds Plains and Preston outside Halifax. Although as was the case with both the Black Loyalists and the Refugees, unscrupulous British officers returned some to their erstwhile American masters and sold others into slavery in the British West Indies, some 2,000 of the so-called Black Refugees were carried in the ships of the Royal Navy to Nova Scotia, with 400 settling in what is now New Brunswick. Similarly, the Black Refugees were African Americans, also both slave and free, who accepted Britain's offer of freedom and land in return for their service to the British forces in the War of 1812. Those who had fought in the British forces were, however, at least accorded their freedom. ![]() These newly styled African Canadians were located in communities widely scattered through Nova Scotia, often on very inferior land. Furthermore, their sudden influx into an overwhelmingly white and homogeneous population, coupled with their anomalous position as free Blacks into what was, if not a slave society, at least a society with slaves, contributed to a growing antipathy towards free Black settlers. Despite promises of free land and liberty, only about one-third of the Black Loyalists were rewarded with such land grants by 1788, and these were smaller than those accorded white veterans. Ironically, white Loyalist owners were permitted to transport thousands of enslaved Blacks into what remained of British North America. ![]() Some 3,500 Black Loyalists were evacuated to Nova Scotia by the British after their own defeat in the American Revolutionary War. The Black Loyalists were African Americans, the vast majority formerly enslaved, who had sided with and fought for the British in the American Revolution. The story of Nova Scotia's Black Refugees is generally less well known than that of the earlier migrants from the United States, the Black Loyalists. This, Whitfield maintains, came about largely because of the hardships the so-called Black Refugees faced, not the least of which was the unrelenting and pervasively discriminatory treatment these brave and hardworking people encountered in their adopted Maritime home. He further details their subsequent development as a community and as a new, hybrid culture. Harvey Amani Whitfield, an assistant professor at the University of Vermont, demonstrates how African Americans from different parts of the United States, slave and free, who fought in the British forces in the War of 1812 came to found families, cultural institutions, and communities on Nova Scotia's inhospitable soil. Far more than the sum of its parts, this slim volume focuses on several critical themes while expertly detailing the history of an important segment of the African Diaspora. Reviewed by Karolyn Smardz Frost (Atkinson College School of Arts and Letters, York University)īlacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815-1860 is a wonderful book. Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815-1900.īurlington: University of Vermont Press, 2006.
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