Black Loyalist - Postwar Treatment

Postwar Treatment

When peace negotiations began after the Battle of Yorktown, a primary issue of debate was the fate of Black British soldiers. Although General Cornwallis abandoned his Black troops to re-enslavement, many other British commanders were unwilling to do the same. Loyalists who remained in the United States wanted Black soldiers returned so their chances of receiving reparations for damaged property would be increased. But British military leaders fully intended to keep the promise of freedom made to Black soldiers despite the anger of the Americans.

In the chaos as the British evacuated Loyalist refugees, many American slave owners attempted to recapture their former slaves. Some would capture any Black, including those born free before the war, and sell them into slavery. The US Congress ordered George Washington to retrieve any American property, including slaves, from the British, as stipulated by the Treaty of Paris (1783).

Since Sir Guy Carleton intended to honor the promise of freedom, the British proposed a compromise that would compensate slave owners, and provide certificates of freedom to any Black person who could prove his, plus the right to be evacuated to one of the British colonies. The group of refugees who arrived in Nova Scotia were the greatest number of people of African descent to arrive there at any one time. One of their settlements, Birchtown, Nova Scotia was the largest free African community in North America for the first few years of its existence.

Black Loyalists found the northern climate and frontier conditions in Nova Scotia difficult, and were subject to discrimination by other Loyalist settlers, many of them slaveholders. The land given to the Black Loyalists was the most rocky and hard to cultivate compared to that given to White Loyalists. In 1792, the British government offered Black Loyalists the chance to resettle in a new colony in Sierra Leone, Africa. The Sierra Leone Company was established to manage its development. Half of the Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia, nearly 1200, departed the country and moved permanently to Sierra Leone. They set up the community of Freetown.

In 1793, the British transported another 3,000 Blacks to Florida, Nova Scotia and England as free men and women. Their names were recorded in the Book of Negroes by General Carleton.

Not all were as lucky. In the South, blacks were seen as easy targets, and planters often ignored their claims of freedom. Many British officers and Loyalists saw them as spoils of war. When Britain ceded Florida to Spain, many of the freedmen who had been transported there from the United States were left behind when the British pulled out.