On the first Thursday of October, 1781, St.George Tucker, who would go on to write a few lines about hunger personified, reported almost four hundred dead horses floating in and sprawled along the shore of the York River in Virginia. The corpses indicated that Lord Charles Cornwallis had ordered the animals killed to save on forage and had “no Intention of pushing a march” from his besieged position at Yorktown. Cornwallis was close to surrendering to the American rebels. His men, who had been short on provisions even before reaching Yorktown, now battled an outbreak of smallpox.¹ Throughout the Revolutionary War, ex-bondpeople had prevented British hunger. But when the tides of the war shifted, the military had little use for black victual warriors, for the provisioners like David George and Boston King who had supplied soldiers, or for their families.

Formerly enslaved men, women, and children struggled to obtain British help after Yorktown. Cornwallis ousted the runaways from a hospital at Gloucester to save on rations, while dogs ate the amputated limbs left behind. It was during this chaos that Boston King heard rumors that the British were planning to return escapees to former masters, and it was also during this period that he recalled his loss of appetite. Yet people like Boston King, and like David George, who had used provisioning roles to ensure their mobility from one colony to another, also managed to leave the former American colonies and go to Nova Scotia. David George would dictate his history to the editor of The Baptist Annual Register. Boston King would take care to indicate that his memoir was self-authored, though he likely received some assistance writing it.²

The food system that these men and women encountered and described in maritime British Canada in the 1780s emerged from a state of uncertain power relationships that resembled Native and non-Native affairs in the United States. In contrast to Indians, however, black and white colonists in Nova Scotia were relatively powerless in 1783, when they arrived. These migrants sought power in Nova Scotia in different ways; black colonists won temporary and informal economic power, and white colonists won lasting legal rights. During black colonists’ first year in Nova Scotia, disorganization and lack of structure gave them temporary freedom to produce garden vegetables, to fish, and to buy and sell what they wanted in various marketplaces, but they rapidly lost that mobility and ability. Only white Loyalists—the colonists who had also sided with the British during the War for Independence—would gain the legal right to fight hunger, but even they struggled to convince Great Britain of their authority during the colony’s founding months.

When white Loyalists fled the mainland American colonies, they transported ideas about hunger prevention with them. As refugee colonists, they advocated for food aid based on their knowledge of previous colonization efforts. In Nova Scotia they blocked black colonists’ access to land while taking more of it for themselves, and they enacted food laws to avoid famine. Their actions became a way to fight white hunger while ignoring—and sometimes creating—black hunger. Because white Loyalists interfered with black people’s food choices while keeping them from obtaining land, their actions in Nova Scotia can be characterized as victual imperialism. These food laws were so consequential because they stopped black colonists from producing and obtaining edible commodities using the methods that had previously worked in land-scarce environments. Black hunger was a product of several factors: inadequate planning prior to migrants’ arrival in the province, land dearth, distance from food-aid distribution centers, unfavorable weather, and, finally, the introduction of laws controlling bread production, fish harvesting, and marketing practices.

Accounts of black hunger in Nova Scotia varied. During the Revolutionary War, black runaways had provisioned themselves and could thus at times seem to ignore hunger. In Canada observers began to talk more about famine, and to link its presence to a state of slavery—even though many of the black colonists had obtained freedom. At the same time, however, black colonists did not advocate for the immediate eradication of hunger, nor did they agitate for the right to prevent it themselves. Instead, they drew upon established ideas about aid, charity, and usefulness to make a case to Britain’s abolitionists that they should be granted the ability to migrate. These families once again sought to move—using food and information networks—and to escape, one last time, to Sierra Leone.

First, self-liberated men and women needed to get out of the United States to avoid reenslavement by vengeful masters. When General George Washington met with Sir Guy Carleton in May 1783 to finalize peace terms, the two men disagreed about how to define an American slave. Earlier, in 1782, when they decided upon the provisional articles of British surrender, the seventh of those articles stated that the British would withdraw all troops without transporting Americans’ bondpeople out of the former colonies. Carleton delayed negotiations in 1783, when he modified his stance and argued that people who had run away to British lines after proclamations such as Dunmore’s of 1775 and Clinton’s of 1779 had earned their freedom. By his reasoning the seventh article did not apply to these men and women, so the British could not be accused of carrying them away. Some British records state that “such Negroes as were taken after the day of Treaty, or that came within the Lines, were given up” to the Americans, but the absence of a date in these records makes it difficult to say whether the “Treaty” mentioned referred to the provisional articles or the 1783 peace agreement.³ In any case, despite Washington’s protestations that the provisional article forbade the removal of any black people, Carleton had already allowed some fugitives to leave the country. Others would follow in large numbers.

At the end of the Revolution, over sixty thousand white Loyalists departed the American colonies. This diaspora took them to places like Great Britain, Canada (the Maritimes, Ontario, and Quebec), the Caribbean (Jamaica and the Bahamas), Florida, and France, and even further afield to Australia and India. They transported fifteen thousand enslaved people with them. Nearly forty thousand Loyalists established themselves in the Maritimes—about half of them in Nova Scotia. Slavery continued to exist; some of these white refugees were southern planters, and their removal from the United States did nothing to free the two thousand bondpeople who traveled with them.⁴

Nova Scotia was not uninhabited before the Loyalists arrived. Early on it was Mi’kmaq territory, invaded by French colonists throughout the seventeenth century. The French had ceded Nova Scotia to the English after the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713), and although Mi’kmaq peoples continued to live alongside English inhabitants, many of them had died. Natives, French, and English continued to fight over boundaries before, during, and after the War for Independence. In 1779 British officials reported, “The Indians of Nova Scotia consist[ed] of about Five hundred familys, all Roman Catholicks, containing near three thousand persons.” Prior to the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, some fifteen thousand non-Natives had lived in the borderlands between British Nova Scotia and French Acadia (present-day New Brunswick); the victorious British expelled these Acadians. After they left, Nova Scotia’s population stood at about fourteen thousand people.⁵

In addition to the white Loyalists who traveled to Nova Scotia by choice, a separate group of formerly enslaved people—including three thousand of the men and women over whom Carleton and Washington had quarreled—moved to Nova Scotia as freedpersons. In the last half of April 1783, Carleton’s commissioners in New York began counting; they recorded 328 men, 230 women, and 48 children headed to Nova Scotia. They listed their names, ages, and physical descriptions in a long document now known as the “book of negroes.” Boston King, the man without an appetite, and his wife, Violet, arrived in August. Their ship, L’Abondance (translated as “Abundance”), was an ironically named testament to their wartime past and refugee future. King would become a Methodist minister during his time in the colony.⁶

More people continued to migrate; another 165 free blacks were registered when the first two vessels docked in Nova Scotia in June. From April to November, ships continuously transported people from New York to the Maritimes. By November, 2,714 formerly enslaved colonists had gone to Nova Scotia, with another 286 slated to depart. Of these, 1,336 were men, 914 were women, and 750 were children. Two-thirds hailed from Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina. The rest came from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.⁷

British organizers made some preparations that would hypothetically allow the colony to thrive. Land surveys constituted part of this project, as did hunger-prevention efforts. In a January 1783 meeting, the Port Roseway Associates—the name the white Loyalists in New York gave to themselves—learned that they had “chosen the best Situation in the province for Trade, Fishery, and Farming.” The surveyor general described “the Lands back of Port Roseway, Jordan River, and towards the An[n]apolis to the good,” but cautioned colonists to “expect some indifferent land in every part of the Province.” They would find that “Strawberry’s are in great perfection,” as well as “Currants, Rasberrys, Cherrys, Gooseberrys, Plumbs, Apples, & Pears and almost every other New England fruit but peaches at Port Roseway.” They could grow “Oats, Barley, Rye, and the best of Flax,” and during the previous year inhabitants had raised “Siberian Wheat in perfection.”⁸ In this early evaluation, most of the land was marked for farmland, and orchards and fish would provide additional sustenance. The double use of the word perfection in the summary of this report suggests that land assessors worked hard to portray the territory as a paradise. The American colonies may have fallen, but refugees could build a new Eden to the north.

The British government also organized supplemental provisions for the Loyalists’ first months in Nova Scotia. This decision was a standard one; officials had made similar arrangements for the colony at Liverpool, Nova Scotia, about two decades prior to the Loyalist diaspora. The Port Roseway Associates anticipated receiving food aid for white emigrants and for the enslaved people they brought with them—whom the Associates referred to as “servants.” These bondpeople would receive rations as long as their masters traveled in government vessels. Colonists who sailed on their own ships would not collect provisions. It is possible that officials imposed this rule in order to keep track of the number of people entering the province, and to prevent refugees from claiming more compensation than that to which they were entitled. Once on the ground, all white and enslaved people over the age of ten were to draw an allowance of six months’ full provisions, while children would get six months’ half allowance. Accordingly, on March 8, 1783, members of the Port Roseway Associates in New York passed a motion that proposed, “that each member do immediately give … a correct list of their names and families, with the age of every person in the family, describing their sexes, and that the same may be attended to with respect to their Servants.”⁹ The Associates made some efforts to count the number of people embarking, to make sure they would receive food, and to effect this process quickly.

Even before embarkation, white Loyalists tended to challenge the hunger-prevention efforts they deemed insufficient, while at the same time ignoring the free black population migrating alongside them. White colonists complained when they learned that the Nova Scotian government had revised some of the provisioning plans. By the start of 1783 Governor John Parr decreed from Halifax that although men and boys over thirteen years of age would get six months of full provisions, half provisions would suffice for women, and children under thirteen would receive one-fourth of the full amount.¹⁰

At the end of March, Rhode Island–born Captain Joseph Durfee, one of the key Port Roseway leaders, reported that after hearing about these arrangements, some Loyalists “were much affect’d and discouraged.” He said that they had “indulged the Idea … they were to have the same allowance, as those Loyalists, who went to Nova Scotia” during the previous autumn of 1782. Durfee noted that some of them “were so much dismayed that I believed many of the number would not go.” The Associates drew on past precedent to claim their right to comparable aid, but there is no evidence in the archival record that they advocated for similar assistance for free black refugees. When the first of these black colonists arrived in Canada in 1782–1783, there were no provisions waiting for them—though they may have witnessed white Loyalists’ preparations for themselves.¹¹

British officials did not concern themselves overmuch with complaints about provisioning—or the lack thereof—because they did not believe white Loyalists’ threats to remain in the United States. Guy Carleton responded to Durfee even though Carleton would not take charge as governor-in-chief of Upper Canada until 1786; technically, Frederick Haldimand still performed that role. Carleton also drew on past precedent—and its absence—to explain the government’s stance on food aid. His response to Durfee was “to say that Six Months Provision was ordered, [and] that all Males and Females upwards of ten years of Age would draw full allowance, which was never done before.” Carleton reminded them that the Loyalists who had relocated the preceding fall had been “obliged to live the whole winter on their Provision, and our Associates would (if they arrive there early) have equal benefit.” He reassured them that the Government would not “set a number of people down there, ‘And say, We will do nothing more for you; You may starve. There is no doubt but if they are in want they will be supplied.’ ” Carleton then switched from this amicable tone to one that conveyed his annoyance with the Loyalists’ wavering. “Government did not Chuse to make a bargain with the Association,” he chided, “and if any were dissatisfied they had better Not Go, if they could do better for themselves.”¹² Carleton offered encouragement, restored full provisions to women, and agreed to feed more children by pushing the age limit for full provisions back to ten instead of thirteen years of age. But he also explained that the government’s food policy would be largely reactive, not preventative. The government would supply some provisions, but thereafter, if people were starving, then they would receive assistance. There was no mention, yet, of food laws to manage famine in a more coherent way. Ordinary people could question these decisions but not revise them.

And so, the colonists sailed. One group of Loyalists arrived on May 4, 1783, and established themselves about 130 miles southwest of Halifax, in Port Roseway, which they renamed Shelburne. Free black colonists lived in predominantly white communities such as Shelburne or Preston, and they also lived in mostly black towns. Ex-bondpeople constituted the majority of the population at Birchtown, Brindley Town, and Little Tracadie. Birchtown is on the Shelburne harbor, four and a half miles away from Shelburne itself; Brindley Town is now called Jordantown, and is about a hundred miles away on the opposite, northwestern side of the peninsula; Little Tracadie is the farthest away from Shelburne, over two hundred miles, on the northeast portion of Nova Scotia. One 1784 Birchtown muster stated that Birchtown officially housed a large portion of these black refugees—1,521 of them—but the black population in all of Shelburne County was more likely at least double that number.¹³

Many of the black colonists, particularly the Black Pioneers, who had fought for the British during the war, came with the skills necessary to provide food for themselves and their families. Robert Roberts was twenty-four when he arrived in Birchtown; his wife, Jenny, was twenty-three. Record keepers listed Roberts as a farmer in the Shelburne muster book. Other farmers included Richard Laurence and Charles Wilkinson of Captain Nicholson’s Company; Anthony Cooper, Henry Darling, Thomas Freeman, Pompey Donaldson, Jacob Williams, and Richard Jarrat of Captain Scott Murray’s Company; and Anthony Davis, William Fortune, and Peter Daniel of Captain Jacob With’s Company.¹⁴

Many of the other occupations recorded suggest abilities to gather, process, or prepare foodstuffs. David George was described as a farmer, but his narrative makes clear that his wartime activities also included butchering; once in the colony, he would become a Baptist preacher. Anthony Post, aged thirty, was a miller; Thomas Kane, thirty-one, was a fisherman; Marsh Jones, forty, was a gardener; Isaac Taylor, forty-three, was a butcher; John Charles Glass, forty, and John Brown, forty-seven, were both cooks; and men named Fortune Rivers and Norfolk Virginia were a cook and a baker, respectively. Women were less likely to have their occupations recorded, but readers might speculate about the ways that female travelers aided with or took charge of food preparation. Phillis George, David George’s wife, had taken in washing and might have continued to do so. John Thomas was a baker, but he died either en route or upon arrival. Perhaps his wife, Elizabeth, took over his work in order to feed their daughter, Christiana, who was nine years old.¹⁵

For a very brief period of time, the government’s disorganization was an advantage to black colonists. And the government was disorganized in most regions of diasporic Canada. Loyalists arrived in Quebec, for example, to find that new towns had no names, only numbers. Birchtown’s black colonists thrived in this environment, experiencing a degree of control over local markets that mimicked but also improved upon their previous lives as victual warriors. Some people accumulated enough wealth to become an influential buying force: when a large number of black colonists left the Preston-Dartmouth region for Sierra Leone in 1792, their imminent departure caused the price of potatoes to drop from three dollars and one shilling to two and a half dollars per bushel, meaning that white potato farmers earned less for their produce.¹⁶

During the early 1780s, Nova Scotia did not possess a central marketplace. In this regard, it lagged behind food systems in many areas that belonged to, or would become part of, the United States. In the eighteenth-century Mississippi Valley, colonial officials had wavered between allowing slaves to openly market their goods and produce and requiring them to carry written permits from their owners. As early as 1763, Savannah’s market had moved to Ellis Square, where planters policed the goods that enslaved people could sell. In 1784, New Orleans officials had established a fixed marketplace, where they required sellers to do business in rented stalls, and made it difficult for bondpeople to obtain stall permits and licenses.¹⁷

In Nova Scotia, by contrast, a number of locations, either in the center of urban areas or along the roads of the hinterland, served as venues where free black inhabitants could buy and sell produce with relatively little oversight. There were “Several markets in Halifax,” and the “Butchers and Fishmongers” who “for want of a public market” set up “shops and stands in different places about the Town.” These men “hawk[ed] their meat and poultry through the Streets.” People in Preston sold seasonally caught fish—dogfish, eel, flounder, haddock, herring, salmon, shad, skate, and sturgeon—to whites in various local markets. Remembering the black colonists after they left, Sir John Wentworth, lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, reflected that they “contributed very materially to … supplying this Market with Vegetables and Poultry.” Even as late as 1797, when a central market existed, some of those who remained in British North America enjoyed the fact that their produce garnered a “great profit” in Halifax.¹⁸ The absence of food regulations benefitted black colonists.

For the most part, the profits and self-sufficiency that former bondpeople enjoyed did not last. Land problems quickly became apparent in September 1783, when surveyor Benjamin Marston discovered that another surveyor had encroached on lands reserved for black colonists by reserving those lots for white emigrants instead. Only 184 of the 649 Birchtown residents obtained land, and those lots averaged 34 acres, compared to white allotments, which averaged 74. By 1785 in Annapolis County, seventy-six free black people had received land grants of 1 acre each, all in Digby, whereas white occupants each had received between 100 and 400 acres. Here, as well as in Annapolis, black refugees spent months waiting for lands that took a long time to be given out. In Clements in 1789, 148 out of 184 acres went to ex-bondpeople. Each person was supposed to receive 50 acres, but the transactions on these grants were rarely confirmed—these families did not get the land promised to them either. At Tracadie, Preston, and Hammond’s Plains, the land was notably barren. By 1788 most of the refugees in all of Nova Scotia had received their lands, but these lots averaged 40 acres—a significantly smaller allotment than those given to most white colonists. Southern slaveholders in the United States restricted slaves’ free time but not their access or ability to grow produce on garden plots. British officers during the Revolutionary War left black victual warriors to their own devices so that they could feed themselves by stealing. In Nova Scotia, black colonists possessed time but no economy of land.¹⁹

In addition to preventing black colonists from receiving land, white colonists also began to seek out better foodstuffs for themselves while controlling formerly enslaved peoples’ access to provisions—thus creating black hunger. An anonymous writer of a 1787 depiction of Shelburne observed, “Never were known greater mixtures of privy & meanness than many of the families here exhibit.” Some people, most likely whites, “seem passionately fond of all kinds of delicious food & drink.” These people reminded the writer of what St. Paul said “in the Characters of the Cretians ‘Whose God is their Belly & who glory in their shame.’ ” In Halifax, white Loyalists received provisions of codfish, molasses, and hard biscuit, with a very occasional supply of meat; black colonists, by contrast, subsisted on cornmeal and molasses.²⁰ Although provisions for white people could hardly be called luxurious—contrary to the Shelburne writer’s claims—these foodstuffs became more prestigious because some people could not have them.

In other instances, white colonists denied black people food altogether. In Shelburne, all Loyalists were hypothetically entitled to pork and flour, but black “servants” who left the white families with whom they had migrated—either through emancipation or by running away—lost their rights to government-issued rations. Often, white employers continued to draw those provisions in their absence. When they provided food aid to former bondpeople, distributors doled out provisions in Shelburne, meaning that the former slaves who lived in Birchtown faced a three- to six-mile trek through frozen woods to collect the same weekly subsistence to which white residents were also entitled. By December 1,784 black people in Digby had received 12,098 pounds of flour and 9,352 pounds of pork. This distribution amounted to eighty full days of rations for 160 adults and 26 children, total—the only rations they would ever receive in Nova Scotia.²¹ Despite the preparations of the Port Roseway Associates, the skills of black colonists, and their momentary influence in Nova Scotian marketplaces, the process of obtaining food grew more and more difficult.

The state of usefulness that free black colonists had enjoyed in Nova Scotia’s various marketplaces declined beginning in the mid-1780s as a result of new food laws—but they were new only in Canada, because similar regulations had existed elsewhere for centuries.

Governments had passed food laws to fight famine in the medieval and early modern periods in Europe, and such practices had traveled to the North American colonies. These laws have come to be known as the “moral economy,” or a model in which, during times of scarcity, common folk stop accepting inequalities of power and wealth to pressure wealthy men into fulfilling their end of the social contract by guaranteeing access to food at a just price.²² People did not expect to legislate against hunger themselves, but they did expect the government to do it for them.

During the medieval period English leaders played their role in the moral economy by fixing the price of bread and allowing the size of the loaf to change; by the early modern period local governments periodically changed both the price of the loaf and its size. Price-fixing of other foodstuffs—codified between 1580 and 1630 and published as the Book of Orders under Charles I—became common in England during the reign of the Tudors in reaction to population growth and enclosure. Such practices for regulating grain distribution also existed in places like France, where officials controlled the conduct of farmers, officials, millers, and bakers. People asserted their right to be protected against dearth, and governments passed laws to fight hunger, particularly during wartime, and often in reaction to riotous subjects. In the colonies, Revolutionary northern state governments, in response to food rioters, supply struggles, and the behavior of self-interested colonists during the war, began to experiment with price-fixing and embargoes.²³ In all of these instances, people pressured the government to fix prices but did not suggest that this right should be allocated directly to the people.

During the late eighteenth century much of Canada’s government oversight had occurred at the local level. In Nova Scotia the county court system was the primary body responsible for adjudicating questions of government and legality (and thus questions about the moral economy) until the 1830s. At the start of 1784 the Shelburne Courts set about passing food-related laws. Joseph Durfee, who had worked with Guy Carleton over the issue of white Loyalists’ provisions, assumed the judgeship over the Court of Common Pleas, and a Court of Sessions was established to handle matters of everyday governance.²⁴

The structure of land allotments meant that these laws, and the patterns of marketplace hunger prevention that they codified, affected black residents of Shelburne and Birchtown. In February 1785 the Shelburne court ordered that bread sold by bakers “shall be a six-penny loaf, to Weigh one pound, thirteen ounces.… And that all such Bread shall be made of good, sound inspected Wheaten flour.” In June of the same year the court further stipulated that people who sold bread needed to shape it into “single, or double Loaves,” the pricing of which would “from time to time be regulated.”²⁵ Bread laws may have meant that free black bakers, like Norfolk Virginia, who practiced baking as a side occupation and who baked with cheaper cornmeal—a slave staple—or rye flour, would find it difficult to conform to government-decreed standards of weight and appearance. The surveyor who reported to the Port Roseway Associates had established that rye flour could be grown, but there is little evidence of black colonists raising either corn or rye. Even if they had, it is easy to shape a loaf of bread made with wheat flour because the gluten gives the dough structure; dough made from cornmeal and buttermilk, by contrast, does not hold its shape well unless placed in a pan or skillet, where it will form a denser cake. It would have been challenging to bake such bread into loaves.

More significantly, the courts also modified the meaning of the marketplace itself, making it harder for freedpersons to hawk edible goods. In May 1785 the court forbade meat, fish, vegetables, “or other articles of provisions” from being sold “in any street, lane, or on the strand, or shore of this town, other than in the market, or places established by order of Sessions,” such as “Markets in King street, and at the Cove.” Not everyone adhered to these laws, as evidenced by the fact that even as late as 1800, members of the Shelburne Grand Jury observed “That the want of some place as a Market for the reception of a Number of small articles of the Provision kind, brought by the Country People” caused “a Number of Inconveniences, & indeed, Impositions.” “In many Instances” these foodstuffs were “bought up, and sold again at a shameful advance.”²⁶ The court complained that “country people”—likely black inhabitants who lived in the country precisely because of unequal land distributions—were taking advantage of the lack of a central marketplace to purchase and resell goods for profit. People still managed to sell provisions in odd places and at high prices, but the passing of such regulations began to limit participation in the market economy. For the most part, free black people could no longer sell their goods where they wished, which meant that if they could obtain permission to sell out of a market stall, they would then need to adhere to market prices that delayed profits.

Another set of rules and regulations passed on April 10, 1786, limited fishing activities—one of the main ways in which people without lands supplemented their diet and income. Boston King later observed that upon first arriving in Nova Scotia, white colonists were too focused on “building large houses, and striving to excel one another in this piece of vanity.” Only “when their money was almost expended” did these inhabitants begin “to build small fishing vessels”; they realized that they, too, would require additional food sources. Once white colonists began to catch, eat, and sell fish, fishing laws began to appear. Whites prohibited fishing nets and seines from reaching more than a third of the way into a river; fishing was banned from Saturday to Monday; and erecting a dam on the river was not allowed “under any pretence whatever” as a means to “obstruct the Passage of the Fish.”²⁷

This practice of restricting land use near riverfronts deviated from earlier practices. In mid-eighteenth-century Liverpool, for example, all single men owned a share in the fish lots laid out along the shores of rivers and harbors. This egalitarian lot-sharing seems to have fallen out of practice (if it ever existed in Shelburne) by the mid-1780s. These rules also tended to give preference to white fishermen: people who owned advantageous land by the river got the first choice of net placement. Later remembrances indicated that black colonists did not receive riverine land, and subsequent court decisions indicate that white Loyalists did in fact restrict black people’s access to the water, thus making it impossible for these fishermen to fish in the same way as white Loyalists.²⁸ If a man had to work on a white man’s farm during the week, he could not fish on the weekend; and if he was lucky enough to live on the river but far away, the law prevented him from damming it to trap fish. These regulations allowed whites to gain control of the fish trade. Although it is difficult to prove that whites enacted such laws with the intention to circumscribe black access to food, the laws nevertheless threatened black food security specifically.

Land problems and changes in the legal system were challenging enough, but hunger became a real problem as a result of adverse weather. During the late 1780s extreme cold weather led to short planting seasons, which in turn resulted in sparse crops. Nova Scotian food supplies suffered from the same agricultural challenges that plagued upstate New York and the southern states during this time period, but there had been far less time to build up grain reserves. Most white Loyalists possessed the means to leave, and the fact that many of them moved closer to Liverpool, Tusket, and Yarmouth underscores the reality of these food shortages. Some freed blacks followed them, but those without the funds to do so stayed behind. By the late 1780s, Shelburne was turning into a ghost town. In 1785 a nameless slave was hanged in Halifax for the crime of stealing a bag of potatoes. The cold winters did not help the situation: some of the Nova Scotians spent them living in shoddy shelters that were really holes in the ground with flimsy roofs.²⁹

Poor harvests should have compelled government officials to issue more food provisions, as Sir Guy Carleton had said they would, but instead, in 1787, the British government ignored its moral economic responsibilities and stopped sending provisions. The central government had a history of ceasing provisions supplies a couple of years into a colony’s development; it halted the arrival of foodstuffs two years after colonization of Liverpool. Even white colonists worried about this change; some of them noted that officials still had not distributed land, and “future subsistance by Agriculture has been denied.” They complained, “It is now above six weeks since the Salt Provisions provided for the use of the Loyalists have been expended, and now there remains no provisions of any kind in his Majesties Stores.” They speculated that the absence of land combined with the lack of provisions meant that “the horrors of Famine must ensue.”³⁰ It is not difficult to understand why the black colonists, denied land with even greater frequency than whites and struggling under the burden of new legislation, likely found this situation even more troublesome.

Whereas in Liverpool earlier in the century, where the British government had assisted the poor even when general provisioning ceased, in Shelburne the local people tried to exile its poor, mostly black population. In 1789 a body called “the overseers of the poor” sent a petition to the magistrates of Shelburne. They noted, “there are a great number of Black people, both in this Town & in Birchtown, who are in the most distressing Circumstances.” Because “the number of white People, whom we have constantly to supply, are very considerable,” they explained, “it is not in our power to afford the Blacks that assistance” they required. The petitioners pleaded with the magistrates to “free this Infant Settlement from a Burden which it is by no Means in a Capacity to bear.”³¹ Absent from the records are black colonists’ reactions to this petition to push them out of the province.

By the eighteenth century, overseers of the poor had become common to deal with growing numbers of unemployed people and vagrants, so the office was not unique to the institution of slavery. It is difficult to tell what formerly enslaved black colonists made of the fact that the men in charge of providing them with aid were known as “overseers,” or what they thought about being described as a burden when white Loyalists’ land interests and legislative changes had taken away their abilities to make themselves useful. The overseers clearly hoped that Shelburne magistrates would lean on the British government to begin the process of relocating black colonists. Between 1789 and 1791 Nova Scotia earned the nickname “Nova Scarcity,” and former slaves began to reconsider whether they wanted to call such a place their home.³² The combination of land issues, scanty or nonexistent provisions, and restrictive food laws made Nova Scotia a colony where victual imperialism ensured the continuation of black hunger while at the same time giving displaced white Loyalists an advantage over black refugees.

While the British failed to apportion land in Nova Scotia, a group of British abolitionists in England confronted the institution of British slavery and their options for ending it. They had hoped to create an antislavery colony in Africa that stood as an example that would convince other countries to eradicate the slave trade, but thus far they had been unsuccessful. Several schemes on the upper Guinea coast had failed: the province of Senegambia, the colony of Bulama, and the first Granville Town colony of London’s Black Poor. In 1791 Thomas Clarkson, his younger brother John, Granville Sharp, Henry Thornton, and William Wilberforce formed the Sierra Leone Company to supervise a new antislavery venture in Africa. On August 19, 1791, John Clarkson sailed on the Ark from Gravesend to Halifax, arrived on October 7, and began making preparations for departure to Africa. In Nova Scotia he witnessed the effects of hunger on the colony’s black population.³³

John Clarkson associated land dearth with hunger, and thus with bondage and powerlessness. When he arrived in Halifax, he observed that because black refugees had “never had Lands,” they had been “obliged to live upon White-mens property … and for cultivating it they receive half the produce so that they are in Short in a state of Slavery.” He interviewed various people in late 1791, linking land and food absences. “Jacob Coffee” had “served in the army last war,” but “never rec[eive]d either Lands or Provisions.” He made the same annotations about a man named Samuel Jones.³⁴ Men and women without land, who had previously provided useful military assistance, now earned provisions instead of wages. According to Clarkson, people without land felt forced into remaining in Canada because they depended on whites with farmland to give them the labor that allowed them to earn their bread.

David George and Boston King also described the efforts they made to obtain provisions through usefulness—George, after receiving government and charitable aid, and King, by traveling widely to find work. David George, who separated briefly from his wife and children so that he could work as a preacher in Shelburne, returned to find that the new governor, Governor Parr, had arranged six months of provisions for the Georges as well as a quarter acre of land. The family still struggled to establish themselves with a comfortable subsistence, despite George’s efforts to convert people to the Baptist faith. During a later, difficult period, a white Baptist colonist named Ann Taylor gave him money “to buy a bushel of potatoes,” from which George produced “thirty-five bushels.”³⁵ In his narrative he made sure to explain that this Christian charity—which came from one person, rather than from the government—prompted him to make better plans to become self-sufficient by planting part of her gift to him.

Boston King survived by moving and attributed his deliverance to his faith in God. In 1787, a year of “dreadful famine,” he left Birchtown because he “could get no employment” and so “travelled from place to place, to procure the necessaries of life” to support him and his wife. He described his resignation “to the divine will” and began to pray more. He saved his family by making a chest that a white captain paid for in maize, which gave him “a reprieve from the dreadful anguish of perishing by famine.” “Oh what a wonderful deliverance did GOD work for me that day!” he wrote. He also built fishing boats in exchange for corn. King favorably compared his ability to work for food to the situation of his “black brethren, who were obliged to sell themselves to the merchants, some for two or three years; and others for five or six years.” Thereafter he resolved “to live by faith, and to put my trust in him, more than I ever had done before.”³⁶

Even though David George and Boston King were only two men, their writings offer several readings of what it meant to be hungry and different strategies to avoid want. During the 1787 famine that King described as “dreadful,” people perished. He wrote that they “fell down dead in the streets, thro’ hunger,” while those fortunate enough to survive did so by killing and eating “their dogs and cats.” He himself was “pinched with hunger and cold,” and while he searched for work he remembered falling “down several times, thro’ weakness,” expecting “to die upon the spot.”³⁷ His hunger was a test from God, and his remembrance clarifies the comments that Clarkson had made in his observations about black colonists receiving no wages from white landowners. King seemed pleased to earn food instead of wages, indicating that payment in foodstuffs was not necessarily a bad thing as long as it seemed that God had willed it. Black colonists may also have believed that this sort of compensation was tolerable as long as they retained a say in limiting the length of their employment. Boston King thought himself useful, but he also believed that God made him fortunately so; it was not his fellow colonists’ uselessness but unluckiness and perhaps lack of faith that forced them to sell themselves into a state of indenture that resembled slavery.

David George’s portrayal of eating, by contrast, offered black men and women a great deal more power. One Christian’s charity allowed him to plant potatoes and thrive in subsequent months as a Baptist preacher. He told the story of a moment at St. John’s, where he went to baptize other black colonists. George wrote that when he disembarked from his ship, the people “were so full of joy that they ran out from waiting at table on their masters, with the knives and forks in their hands, to meet me at the water side.”³⁸ In this vivid image, black people abandoned their roles as food preparers and servers, taking with them the cutlery that allowed people to serve food in a civilized way. If these white masters wished to remain satiated, George implied, they would need to eat with their fingers.

Black experiences with hunger were tied to ideas about charity, freedom, and usefulness. In John Clarkson’s estimation, it was difficult to distinguish between freedom from hunger and freedom from slavery. David George’s account provided readers with one of the few possible examples in the early years of British colonization of Nova Scotia in which black people created white hunger—or at least delayed white Loyalists from eating. His focus on formerly enslaved people running away from tables to be baptized at water’s edge, furthermore, prioritized addressing spiritual hunger over physical want. Boston King conceptualized hunger as something that made people physically weak, and sometimes killed them. It was also something that people could avoid, given the right combination of providence and hard work. He had been ambivalent about migrating to Sierra Leone but changed his mind when he heard that colonists would receive “provisions till we could clear a sufficient portion of land necessary for our subsistence.”³⁹ The absence of a time limit on provisions distributions, compared to those years in Nova Scotia when government aid disappeared, gave him confidence to think that black colonists could attain a state of usefulness—to themselves, to their fellow colonists, and perhaps even to the British Crown—in Africa.

Sierra Leone Company officials envisioned Nova Scotia’s formerly enslaved population as potential migrants, and Clarkson sailed to Halifax to resettle them because of the actions of a man named Thomas Peters. Peters, a Yoruba man who had labored on a sugarcane plantation in French Louisiana, had run away from slavery in North Carolina, joined the Revolution on the British side, and earned a position as a private in the Black Pioneers. In November 1790, at the age of fifty-three, he sailed to England to petition for the black colonists’ removal from Nova Scotia to a more advantageous place. Peters heard about the plan for a colony in Sierra Leone after another, unnamed black man, who was waiting on a party of people eating dinner, overheard them talking about the scheme; he passed the news on to others. Here again, colonists’ relationships with food service was important—in this case, not because it offered freedom from hunger, but because it offered freedom of mobility. When Thomas Peters arrived in London, General Sir Henry Clinton procured a meeting for him with Sharp, Wilberforce, and the Clarkson brothers. Peters confirmed that these men were indeed envisioning a new colony “on the River Sierra Leona” and viewed this plan as a resettlement opportunity. In a bold petition to them, he argued that Sierra Leone would be “an Asylum much better suited to their Constitutions than Nova Scotia and New Brunswick,” and suggested that he and the black colonists be allowed to migrate.⁴⁰

The various groups of black colonists reacted to the idea of the new colony in different ways. By the time Clarkson arrived in 1791, Shelburne was divided between four free black factions, led by a free-born Barbadian mulatto, Colonel Stephen Blucke; Methodist Boston King; another Methodist preacher called Moses Wilkinson; and David George, who led a Baptist congregation. In Halifax Clarkson met David George and Stephen Blucke. George expressed enthusiastic interest in the Sierra Leone project, whereas Blucke denounced it as a foolish death mission. Blucke might already have heard rumors about the unhealthy and dangerous environment in Sierra Leone and judged Nova Scotia preferable. Stephen Skinner, Blucke’s former militia commander, bribed others into staying with promises of two years of free food rations. When another group chose to remain behind, they felt justified in asking Governor John Parr for funds for “a Cow & two Sheep,” because the expense “is by no means adequate to the vast expence of transporting so many of our fellow Subjects to Africa.”⁴¹ By demonstrating that they required less funding and posed less inconvenience to government, they also used their knowledge of food aid to loyal subjects. Wilkinson’s and King’s congregations, like George’s, prepared to depart.

Clarkson did what he could to promote the new colonization scheme. After witnessing the starving conditions of landless black colonists, he even made land-related promises on behalf of the Sierra Leone Company that he was unauthorized to offer.⁴² Little by little, prospective colonists and their families trickled in from various points to Halifax; by the beginning of December over a thousand people had gathered to wait for officials to sort out provisions and shipping matters.

At the very end of December, Clarkson received a joint petition from Thomas Peters and a man named David Edmonds on behalf of the people bound for Africa. Anticipating that this year would be “the larst Christmas day that we ever shall see” in America, they asked him “to grant us one days alowance of frish Beef for a Christmas diner.”⁴³ The men knew that the Nova Scotian government had failed to prevent black hunger, but they nevertheless appealed to the established notion that organizers of new colonial projects would provide them with food aid during times of celebration. Yet this beef was not meant to sustain them in the long term; it was a symbolic request that asked Clarkson and the other gentlemen to make a gesture of good faith. This was the colonists’ last request for food aid in Nova Scotia. It, along with Thomas Peters’s, was also one of their first petitions. They set sail for Sierra Leone in January 1792.

Decades later, during the mid-nineteenth century, English reformers would argue that only hunger could teach the poor the morality they needed to want to labor virtuously.⁴⁴ Authors like Boston King, who contended that hunger could be avoided through a combination of hard work and God’s grace, were already articulating the morality and work ethic that anticipated these English Poor Law reforms by almost half a century. When Thomas Peters and David Edmonds requested beef for a Christmas dinner in light of provisioning failures in Nova Scotia, they were appealing to British imperial agents’ sense of moral obligation, but they did so while planning to be useful in Sierra Leone—both men would seek political office there.

The colonists who sailed were entering a fluid, expanding Atlantic World. That world had connected people, plants, and animals at least since Europeans had invaded North America, but the black refugees who sailed were some of the first to cross back across this oceanic network to Africa. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was possible to imagine lines that forcibly connected enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and the Caribbean to North America. In the eighteenth century, imperial officials and ordinary folks imagined new connections between the former American colonies and Nova Scotia, and between Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.

Black colonists used food and information networks to leave the former American colonies, but most of those networks froze up in Nova Scotia. After food laws went into effect, Boston King and David George did not try to address their hunger by procuring, producing, or preparing food, even though they possessed those skills. They had to prove their usefulness in other ways because white Loyalist lawmaking had inhibited the abilities of black colonists to participate in the Nova Scotian food system. Even the black colonists associated with food preparation in Canada—the men and women who may have been servants or may have been enslaved—tended to ignore their food-related responsibilities when given the opportunity, casting their forks and knives aside.

The black colonists’ time in Nova Scotia taught them new strategies about old practices. It showed them how conventional food laws could be used to control the lives of other people, and it also illustrated the potential of failure when hunger prevention was left jointly in the hands of local courts and distant government. When Clarkson made his offer of migration, a third of the population decided to take their chances in Sierra Leone. Imperial officials like Clarkson and the other members of the Sierra Leone Company had learned to look further abroad to help the British Empire expand. They also drew lines between North America and India as it became clear that the empire’s interests lay further east to make up for its lost North American colonies.⁴⁵

Timothy Pickering knew about this imperial expansion, and he wanted Native Americans to know about it in ways that served the interests of the United States. So when he met Cornplanter in 1791 to deliver his history lecture, Pickering also offered a lesson in demography. “Brothers, on the other side of the Great Water, far beyond the nations of white people,” he told the Iroquois, “there are many nations of Indians who have dark skins, black hair & black eyes, like you. But these Indians are farmers, carpenters, Smiths, Spinners and weavers, like the white people.” The existence of these Indians mattered to Pickering, but it was not his main point; “above all tea is brought from those countries, and from those countries alone,” he explained.⁴⁶ Historians could say a lot about this comparison: about the importance Pickering placed on tea, which after all had mattered so much to the colonists who rebelled against Great Britain; about his conflation of Native Americans with Indians from India and evolving notions of race in the eighteenth century; and about whether Pickering spoke out of malice or ignorance.⁴⁷

For our purposes, the moment is significant because Pickering was trying to use this information to convince Cornplanter that by becoming farmers and weavers, the Six Nations could also grow and enjoy the tea they drank at treaties. The federal government was making plans for its own food policy and thus its own hunger-prevention initiatives, ushering in a new era of American victual imperialism.