Black Loyalists after the American Revolution

Black Loyalists After the American Revolution

Freetown in 1798 as drawn by William Augustus Bowles, a visiting Creek Indian leader.

Hardcover published in 1999 by McFarland & Company .

Softcover published in 2006 by McFarland & Company.

During the American Revolution over 3,000 persons of African descent were promised freedom by the British when they deserted their American rebel masters and served the loyalist cause. Those who responded to this promise found refuge in New York. In 1783, after Britain lost the war, they were evacuated to Nova Scotia, where for a decade they were treated as cheap labor by the white loyalists. In 1792 they were finally offered a new home in Africa; over 1,200 responded and became the founders of Freetown in Sierra Leone.

From Slavery to Freetown follows ten of these freed slaves from their escape from masters in Virginia and the Carolinas to their sojourn in New York, their evacuation to Nova Scotia, and finally their exodus to Freetown, where they struggled for another decade for not only freedom and dignity but the right to worship as they chose, make an honest living, and govern themselves.

Hard cover, maps, notes, appendix, bibliography, index, 259 pages.

ISBN 0-7864-0615-1 1999. Softcover 2006.

Library Journal: "An important contribution . . .. Clifford has uncovered a fascinating and underrepresented aspect of the black diaspora."

Click here for Birchtown pilgrimage

Approaching Bunce Island, an English slave factory in Sierra Leone

The cotton tree still stands in the center of Freetown

Chapter 1 Mary Perth of Norfolk, Virginia

Mary Perth was born around 1740 as the property of John Willoughby of Norfolk, Virginia, who owned 90 slaves. She left no record of her own, but some of the events that mattered most to her were recorded in later years by others. Mary had learned to read in Virginia—an extraordinary fact at a time when most slaveholders feared that education would cause their slaves to question the reasons for their bondage. Mrs. Willoughby, however, admired Mary’s initiative and gave her a New Testament, which she cherished through her long, dramatic life.

Mary not only learned to read and find solace in the Gospels, but while she lived in Norfolk, she was intent on spreading her message of hope for the down trodden and Jesus’s promise of heavenly mansions for all of God’s children—white or black. One night each week, after her master and mistress were in bed, she would tie her baby on her back (the name of the man who fathered her child, Patience, is not known, for Mary’s own name was not recorded until after she married Caesar Perth some time before 1783) and walk ten miles to a secret meeting place in the country where other slaves assembled in a barn to hear her read God’s message. After the lesson, Mary plodded the ten miles home before her owners awoke and the next day’s labor began. She continued her teaching until the group was large enough to have its own preacher.

During her bondage in Norfolk, Mary certainly never imagined that in 1775 events in the colonial capital of Virginia would change her life forever. John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, was the English governor, living in a palace in Williamsburg. He had dissolved the Virginia House of Burgesses for denouncing the closing of the port of Boston after the Boston Tea Party. The Burgesses promptly met elsewhere and activated their Committee of Correspondence to coordinate a convention of all the colonies; their purpose was to oppose British taxation by imposing sanctions against the export and import of all goods to and from Great Britain. The Virginia convention met in St. John’s Church in Richmond in March 1775 and decided to form a militia to defend themselves.

Alarmed by this move, Dunmore imposed martial law and ordered British sailors to empty the powder magazine in Williamsburg in the dead of the Night. In April, the first shots were fired against the British at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. When Dunmore learned that the Virginia militia was about to gather in Williamsburg, he fled from his palace to the British man-of-war Fowey and sailed to Norfolk; he felt safer among the Tory merchants dominating that port.

Dunmore was anxious about his ability to control the rebels for he had only 600 regular troops and perhaps 60 able-bodied Tories at his command. As he cast about for some way to increase his military force, he was inspired to issue a proclamation promising freedom to any slaves of rebel masters who would come to his side and fight the colonists.