Short Stuff: Black Loyalists

The Black Loyalists were a group of Colonial slaves who fought for their freedom alongside the British. Learn all about this nearly forgotten group in today's Short Stuff. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey there, ho there, Hi again. This is Josh, there's Chuck,
there's Jerry. You put us together. You give us like
a twelve minute time limit, maybe less. It's short stuff
the podcast. That's a short term version of stuff you
should know, which is also a podcast, but it's a
longer version of short stuff. I guess you could say.

(00:25):
That's right. And as per tradition, you started off the
show by saying, hey, there, ho there, Right, you want
to talk about black loyalists? I do, man, So you
pick this one, Hats off to you, try cornered hat
with a big old Yankee doodle feather off to you. Um,
because I've never heard anything about this, and I majored

(00:46):
in history colonial history, and I didn't even pick up
on this one. Yeah, so this is uh this. We
did a regular long form episode for Black History Month
on Tuskegee Airmen, and now we're doing a shorty version
for the Black Loyalists for Black History Month. And it
goes a little something like this one and the two.

(01:09):
So the Black loyalists, Chuck, yes, are in a very
much overlooked um group in American history. And they were
African Americans, or I guess African African slaves who lived
in the colonies. Uh, some of whom were free too,
but mostly were slaves that ended up fighting for Great

(01:34):
Britain in the American Revolutionary War. Yeah, so it's important
to kind of set the stage here. What's going on
in seventeen seventy six, Um, African slaves were all over
the place, and well, not all over the place, but
you know, basically east of the Mississippi River at this point.

(01:56):
Um Or am I wrong about that? No? No, you're right.
I was gonna I was gonna support you, like a
lot of people think, well, yes, slavery was just southern, no, man,
and the colony. Slavery was everywhere, and slaves made up
of the population. In some states they were more concentrated
than in other states. And I think they might have
never been in Rhode Island or Pennsylvania. I'm not sure,

(02:18):
but they You could find states in the North as
well as the South at the time, for sure, because
the South was a lot of the commerce was based
on the plantation model. Obviously a lot more slaves in
the South, to the tune of like fort in Virginia.
South Carolina was sixty percent slaves, but even up in Boston,
slaves made up of the population. So before the War

(02:43):
for Independence even started, there was an effort by the
British to get American slaves on their side and basically say, hey,
be a loyalist and take up arms against your plantation
owner and we will grant you freedom. Yep. Not only
are we gonna grant you freedom, we're going to give
you some land after we uh kick the rebels. Butts uh. Yeah.

(03:07):
There was a governor, the British Royal Governor of Virginia,
Lord Dunmore, said this was sort of the first um,
I guess, the first emancipation proclamation where he said, you know,
you guys can be free take up arms against your oppressors.
Because they were looking for for people to fight, Like
every time this happened a couple of times, it's because

(03:30):
they needed men to fight on their side. It wasn't
I mean, I wish it was just some altruistic move,
but it was like we need feed on the ground
with guns. Right. That first proclamation by dunn More was
was um I guess, proclaimed before the Declaration of Independence
was ever signed. This is yeah, this is while the

(03:51):
rebellion is just starting up and it's kind of isolated
and sporadic. And there was an armed rebellion in Virginia
that done more the governor of Virginia it was trying
to put down. And so that's why he said, you
come fight for us, Rise up against your um, your
plantation owners, and the the the what were the guys
who like the overseers, You rise up against these guys,

(04:15):
the rebels, we will we will give you your freedom.
And I mean, at this point, it's not even clear
that the colonies are going to form an armed, um
organized revolt like the Revolutionary War. So it just seemed
like this was a rebellion, local rebellion that needed putting down. Yeah,
and they even, uh, I believe between about eight hundred

(04:37):
and two thousand slaves and servants, uh, indentured servants fled
their plantations, took up arms. That was one regiment named
dun Moore's Ethiopian Regiment, which had a on their uniform
the insignia Liberty to Slaves, which is pretty cool. Uh.
And this was, like I said, the first big mass
emancipation um close a hundred years before Abraham Lincoln signed

(05:02):
the official Emancipation Proclamation. Yeah, and what was cool about
it was these these um, the slaves who took up
the British offer. Um, We're not just like fighting for
their own freedom. They were fighting to free the slaves
who were you know, left behind. It was really um.
It was pretty cool. I had not heard about the

(05:23):
Ethiopian regiment before, but um. As the as the American
Revolution goes into full swing and by uh, I think
seventeen seventy nine, when the tide is turning against the British,
the British released a second Emancipation Proclamation and said, hey,
if you just leave and come over to British held territory,

(05:46):
we'll we'll you'll be free. You don't even have to fight,
which is this is a cool idea because this this
basically was like they think they can get more people
to do that if they don't think they have to fight.
And what it does is is it leaks all these
workers from the plantations. And then in order to guard
their plantations, now the plantation owners had to you know,

(06:09):
use people that would have been fighting in the war
to stay at home and guard that plantation. So it
was it was known as economic warfare basically, right, which
is pretty smart. And for the African slaves who took
them up on their offer. There was win win for them,
so um, I think a total of twelve thousand African

(06:31):
descended slaves fought for the British during the Revolutionary War,
and at the end of the war um which the
American colonies won, there was a there was a problem
because I mean, it wasn't like the Brits were like,
all right, fine, we're going home. There was a negotiated treaty,
like there was an end to hostilities. The there was.

(06:51):
It was like a formal war, and in formal wars,
things come up, things happen in war that um need
to be settled. After the war, one of the main
points of contention was the status of the African slaves
who had defected or just gone over to the British
side and said, hey, we're here to fight. What was

(07:12):
to be done with them? And the Brits could have
very easily been like, ha ha, suckers, we're not We're
not gonna keep our word on any of this. But
they didn't do that. They didn't keep their word on
all of it, but they kept their word on some
of it. And let's just take a quick break Chuck,
and we'll come back and fill everybody in on the
rest of the details. All right, So when we left

(07:50):
the war is over. George Washington is negotiated to have
quote unquote US property return, which included these enslaved Africa ends.
And on the other side you have a commander in
chief named Guy Carlton who said, well, you know, we
gave our word and negotiated these certificates of freedom for
these loyalists. Um, but here's what we're gonna do everyone. Uh,

(08:12):
we I think you need to leave the country, and
we think you should go to Nova Scotia, which is
a province in Canada that we rule. And I'm sure
they were like Nova Scotia, this is not what I
signed up for, um, But they went there anyway. And
in the eighteenth century, in the late eighteenth century, forty

(08:33):
thousand uh loyalists, both white and black went to Nova Scotia, um,
including more than twelve slaves of these white loyalists, And
all of a sudden, Nova Scotia was like, we don't
have resources for all these people. It was called Nova
scarcity at the time, which I'm guessing you knew, yes, So, um,

(08:56):
this is kind of a big problem, Chuck, because the
population of Nova Scotia at the time was like like
maybe twelve or something thirteen thousand people and all of
a sudden showed up. And when that happens, just common
economics means that you have a really really big labor

(09:16):
supply and probably not very not nearly enough demand. And
so when that happens, people start to fight with one another. Yeah,
and you know, uh, like you would imagine even in
Nova Scotia, these um new arrivals were kind of kicked
to the back of the line and things got tents. Uh. Finally,
at one point there was a black creature named David

(09:38):
George baptize a white woman and that sparked what people
basically say is the first race riot in North America.
In yeah, the Shelburne Riot. Um, the white showed up
and they beat David George pretty bad. They went through
the Shelburne Settlement, which is largely UM African uh freed

(10:02):
slaves and literally pulled their houses over, just trash the place.
And this riot went on for months and it was
it sounds pretty familiar. It's you're you're you're selling your
labor for too cheap and stealing our jobs. So we're
going to take all of our ankst out on you.
So the riot was finally put down Um when troops

(10:25):
came in from Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia, and
restored order. But by this point, Um the Black loyalists
who had been promised not just freedom but remember land
and are now ending up in Nova Scotia where things
are really really tense. They're like, we've got to We've
got to get the crown to do something about this.
So they sent a guy named Um Thomas Peters to

(10:46):
go petition the crown in London or Parliament, at least
one of them, and Um say, hey, you know, can
we get our land now? We we did everything we
were asked of and uh, he didn't get anywhere with
the Crown at least no. They they said, well, we've
got another idea. We've got this, Uh, we've got this
area in West Africa and Sierra Leone, and what we

(11:09):
think is a good idea is to make this like
a sanctuary for for you folks, and we can send
you over there and it'll be great. You're gonna love it.
That's the best place for freed slaves to be back
in Africa. Uh, it became basically in se when fifteen
ships sailed from Halifax Harbor, the very first voyage of

(11:30):
the Back to Africa movement. And there were some that
um stayed back in Nova Scotia and they settled a
place called Birch Town named after Samuel Birch. But a
lot of them left and went to Sierra Leone, and um,
that was sort of the you know, the end dish
of that story. The cool thing is is you can

(11:50):
still trace. Uh, there are twenty thousand black people living
in Nova Scotia today and you can trace a lot
of those back to these Black Loyalists. Yeah, there's one
guy that shows up in this article named Jason Farmer.
He's a ninth generation descendant of a Black loyalist named
Jupiter Farmer, and Jupiter married a woman named Venus if
you can believe that, and his family has been living

(12:12):
in Birchtown for about two d and thirty years. Yeah,
it's pretty cool. He works at the Black Loyalist Heritage
Center and Historical site, and he said a lot of
people in Nova Scotia, even descendants, don't even realize that
this is their history. And so when I tell the story.
He said. It's it's pretty powerful stuff. Yeah. Well, good
pick Chuck. I'm glad we did this one. Yeah. Uh.

(12:34):
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