CHAPTER 11

Possibilities and Peril

Exploring the Transnational Experiences of Black People in the Maritimes, 1783–1792

HARVEY AMANI WHITFIELD AND SARAH CHUTE

The history of Black people crossing the early American-Canadian border is usually framed as a crossing from American enslavement to Canadian freedom.1 This threshold model of the border does not do justice to the diversity of outcomes inherent in transnational migration in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. After the American Revolution, the Maritime colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island were sites where indentured servants, enslaved, and re-enslaved people lived next to free Black Loyalists who sometimes gained meaningful freedom, formed families, and owned small farms. Watery borders shaped life in the Maritime colonies. The ocean readily enabled connections to other Atlantic locales, from Boston, to Kingston, to Liverpool. This connectivity meant the water borders held both possibilities and perils for unfree Black people in the Maritimes.

Historians Isaac Land and Michael Pearson have argued that “maritime influence” shaped individuals beyond the littoral; a “proximity of causation” could tie people to the ocean whether they were physically close to shore or not.2 Such an expansive proximity challenged the security of free and enslaved Black people in coastal towns and on inland farms alike. Water could take people to enslavement in the West Indies, United States, or other parts of the Maritimes through sales and kidnappings, but it could enable escapes and migrations to freedom. John Morton argues in this volume that borderland residents and itinerant missionaries in New Brunswick and Maine were responsible for the on-the-ground understandings of international boundaries, largely dictated by their use of waterways that could connect or separate people.3 Similarly, free and enslaved Black people in the Maritimes discussed and demonstrated their understandings of international and imperial politics—and thereby helped legitimize British colonial claims—whenever they referenced the Crown’s obligations to Black Loyalists, many of whom had fled Patriot enslavers to fight and seek refuge behind British lines during the Revolutionary War.4 At the same time, Black people still faced exploitation in the Maritimes, and thousands remained enslaved to white Loyalists as they migrated north from the United States. As our study shows, free and enslaved Black people in the Maritimes were quickly threatened by the Atlantic’s fluid connectivity to other slave societies, but also sometimes chose to traverse those waters in search of greater security and autonomy. How meaningful and tangible were these colonies’ borders, then? While archival fragments seldom include the direct words of Black people in the Maritimes, their diverse actions can tell us something about how they might answer that question. How and why Black people interacted with the aquatic highway of the Atlantic was deeply informed by the politics, laws, racism, and labor that took place within the jurisdictions of Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.

The connectivity to Atlantic trade and migration afforded by the coastal nature of Maritime port towns—as well as the constant influence of the land as a place of local displacement and settlement—reflect the significance of these histories’ locations, where landed imperial powers could cast people forcibly across the Atlantic. These relationships thereby strengthened capitalist colonial power on the ground, whether in the form of carrying out criminal charges to uphold a social system, bolstering the wealth of merchants and enslavers who forged and exploited the ties between the regions, or denying self-sufficiency and the means for power to Black individuals locally. The environmental, spatial, and geographic dimensions to this human history reflect David Austin’s identification of the historical and political experiences of Canada, or in this case the Maritimes, as “a laboratory through which we can understand Black diasporic experiences, perhaps in ways that studies of the United States or Britain, for example, have generally not afforded.”5 The perilous experiences in the Maritimes—the exclusions, exploitations, and denials of Black humanity—were deeply shaped by those colonies’ surrounding Atlantic boundaries and by jurisdictional, economic, and sociopolitical claims steeped in notions of dominance on and over the land.

Peninsular and insular in geography, the Maritime coasts and islands were hardly isolated from other parts of the Atlantic world. Shaped by a nexus of ideologies that spanned the Atlantic, the region can be thought of as an extension of the plantation complex. The plantation complex usually centers upon Brazil or the greater Caribbean, but what we are showing is the significance of slavery and waterways to what Philip D. Curtin calls the “important trading partners” in the northern region of the plantation complex encompassing the Maritimes, New England, and part of northern New York, which were connected to the tropics by water.6 Paul Musselwhite’s chapter reminds us how plantations in the seventeenth-century English Caribbean cartographically stood as “nodes of communal authority” and later “a coherent vision of imperial jurisdictional space”—concepts that persisted rhetorically throughout the eighteenth-century British Atlantic.7 For example, among Maritime enslavers, Caribbean plantations functioned as a rhetorical device and actual destination of private and court-sanctioned punishment and violence against Black people.8 By looking at the northern reaches of the plantation complex, we gain a broader understanding of the many dimensions of enslavement in the Atlantic world. Connected by overseas routes of trade and migration, northern and tropical systems of slavery were mutually reinforcing. Our study approaches enslavement through the specific cases of three individuals—Jupiter Wise, Hector, and Lydia Jackson—to demonstrate the complex interplay between political jurisdiction, water borders, possibilities, and perils at this northern outpost of the British Atlantic. These short biographies are not widely known and deserve to be told in detail. Ultimately, a combination of personal contacts, the circumstances of control, and chance factored into whether they found possibility or peril in the waters that met the rocky Maritime shore.

Jupiter Wise

The mid-1780s case of Jupiter Wise demonstrates how local conflicts had Atlantic consequences for Black people in the Maritimes. This intricate case enriches our understanding of relationships between enslaved, indentured, and free people.9 It also showcases how enslaved people in Prince Edward Island (PEI) thought about their bondage in relation to other places like the United States, specifically, Massachusetts, where slavery had been tested against the new state constitution and recently outlawed through a series of Supreme Judicial Court cases in the early 1780s.10 Jupiter Wise’s experience with the justice system in colonial Charlottetown demonstrates the region’s close imperial connections to the West Indies.11 Historians have used the example of Jupiter Wise as an illustration of slavery and resistance on PEI. Examining this case anew tightens our grasp on Black attitudes about enslavement on the island and about the function and flexibility of the colony’s water border.

According to the Book of Negroes, in 1783, Jupiter Wise left New York for Shelburne, Nova Scotia, as a twenty-five-year-old “[stout] fellow” who was “Certified to be free.”12 The Book of Negroes is not simply a record of free and enslaved Black people; it also contains hints about how Black people were easily re-enslaved. The Book of Negroes listed free Blacks as being in the “possession” of a white Loyalist even if they had a GBC (a General Birch Certificate, or freedom pass issued in New York to Black people who could provide evidence that they had “resorted to British Lines” during the Revolutionary War).13 Throughout the Maritimes, the difference between enslavement and servitude could be nebulous. Even those who were indentured servants were often treated as slaves and consistently faced the fear of being sold to the West Indies or elsewhere. Unlike in the other Maritime colonies, though, slavery was legally protected in Prince Edward Island. An act that dealt with baptism gave statute recognition to slavery, which allowed it to persist in the colony until legislation overturned it in 1825.14 This recognition made it difficult for enslaved islanders to successfully challenge their bondage in court. For example, in 1802, the PEI Supreme Court returned an escaped slave to his enslaver, noting that the owner’s proof of ownership was “perfect and compleat.”15

A muster book reveals Jupiter lived in Birchtown, Nova Scotia, with a woman, Hannah Wise, who was probably his wife.16 Coming to the Maritimes as a Black Loyalist, Jupiter Wise should have been able to enjoy his “Certified” freedom.17 By 1785, however, he had left Birchtown and was living on Prince Edward Island as a “Black Servant” to Captain George Burns in Charlottetown.18 Another record described him as a “Labourer.”19 This transition from freedom to servitude deserves scrutiny. First, the local markets were largely controlled by middling and elite white merchants who profited from the slave trade, some of whom were enslavers themselves. As Kim M. Gruenwald’s chapter in this volume shows, merchants exploited their advantages in their most lucrative and efficient domains: watery spaces (in this case, the Atlantic) that served as “arteries of trade.”20 In both the colonial “Riverine West” and postwar coastal Maritimes, enslaved people of African descent were victims of merchants’ capitalist and imperial competitions over water.21 But the businesses of individual merchants were not the only ways in which Caribbean slavery shaped life in the Maritimes. Shirley Tillotson’s research about the tropical origins of Nova Scotia’s provincial revenue further attests to how the Maritimes were culturally and economically “part of an Atlantic-Caribbean region—a region in which the culture of the plantation naturalized white hostility towards independence for Black people.”22 Jupiter Wise may have suffered from the scarcity of resources allotted to Black Loyalist refugees or the hostility toward Black people that was endemic in Shelburne and eventually culminated in the 1784 Shelburne race riot. While the initial reason for Wise’s move to Prince Edward Island is unknown, the process of going from freedom in Nova Scotia (promised by the British, though largely nominal) to a dependent relationship of servitude in a neighboring colony exemplifies how the Maritime political economy was ultimately inhospitable to Black Loyalist efforts for self-determination.

The court records from Prince Edward Island testify to this reality. The earliest events relayed in the court documents from Wise’s trial come from James Stevens, who described himself as “A Free Black Man” and accused Jupiter Wise of burglary. Stevens explained that before he met Wise, he had joined a group of unfree islanders in making plans to escape the colony.23 In the summer of 1785, a Black man named Mingo, enslaved to Captain Callbeck, made a tentative proposal to James Stevens to run away, having recently suffered beatings from Callbeck. Mingo and Stevens were cautious because they needed to recruit loyal co-conspirators who would be willing to help Mingo gain freedom. According to court records, the two hoped to “propose the scheme to Ben (Gov. Pattersons black Slave) but the aforesaid Mingo said he would first mention it to him as a joke, as he had no great dependence on his faith And also that he would speak to the Chief Justices Black Slave Peter.” Stevens ended up seeing Ben before Mingo could make the sarcastic suggestion, and upon hearing the plans, “Ben instantly consented, and said that By God he had been a long time waiting to join some others in running away and further said he would have a Dance before he went off.”24

As Mingo’s intended joke to Ben suggests, trust was a powerful currency among enslaved people, who carefully spent or reserved it to protect themselves, their interests, and aspirations. Ben was likewise a judicious participant, having “observed that he would not take Peg (a female Slave of Governor Pattersons) as he could not trust her.” Ben was eager to escape, ready to “sell all his Cloathes but two or three Shirts” to fund the escape and “proposed taking the Governors Green Barge and going to Boston where he could work for more Cloathes.” Resulting from a series of freedom suits in the early 1780s, the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts may have made Boston an especially attractive destination to skilled, enslaved men like Ben.25 When Stevens and Mingo proposed the scheme to Peter a week later, they warned him that “the first who flinched would be put to Death.” Despite the dangers, Peter agreed to the conspiracy under the condition that they take the governor’s sloop instead of his “Boat.” During their conversations, the men were careful to avoid being overheard. They even made plans to defend themselves by making sure they had a musket, musket balls, powder—enough ammunition that “if any Boat pursued them . . . they would stand Sixteen rounds.” However, when Ben later reported to Stevens that he could not find “a Boat” on Governor Patterson’s property and Mingo made no more mention of it to Stevens, “there the matter dropped.”26

According to the court record, “shortly after Captain Burns’ arrival in Town,” James Stevens had been in Burns’s kitchen when Jupiter Wise, one of the captain’s “Black Servants,” called him over and requested he get a “Gimblet” so Wise could get “Rum which was not his Masters.” Stevens consented to the plan, borrowed the drill-like tool, and returned with it. Wise then asked him for a candle, which Stevens obtained “from his Masters House.” Taking with them an empty “Stone Jugg,” Stevens followed Wise to a house “lately occupied by Mr. Michael McDonald in CharlotteTown” where Wise broke in and came out with the vessel filled with nearly two gallons of rum. The two hid the jug in a lot where it would be safe.27

The next Sunday, James Stevens, Jupiter Wise, Guy (“a black Servant of Capt. Callbecks”), and Joe (“another of Capt. Burns’ black Servants”), met at “Raineys Hutt” in Charlottetown. Jupiter Wise and Guy suggested having a dance there the following night, offering “to bear each half of the expense of the Supper.” The others pitched in, too: Stevens stated he could provide “half the rum” and Joe charitably “said he would offer a Dollar if it was wanted.” Finishing up the rum they had at present, Wise mentioned to Stevens that “he knew where to get more.” Carrying a mug to the yard where they had stored the stolen liquor, Wise filled the cup and returned to share it with the group at Rainey’s hut, where shortly afterward James Stevens agreed to “invite the Company for the next evening in his own name.” To prepare for the affair, Jupiter Wise promptly arranged for Stukely Burns—his master’s son—to write “Cards of invitation” which were “sent round to their black acquaintances that evening and one to Mrs. Pollard Capt. Gores Servant Maid.” The fact that the men extended a party invitation to a presumably white servant demonstrates that trust over shared, pilfered food and drink sometimes extended outside the circle of enslaved Blacks to unfree white associates. Over the course of that evening and the next morning, the company returned to the Rainey house to deposit their goods for the party. Four freshly killed fowls, “a piece of Beef” and “some Potatoes” were courtesy of Jupiter Wise. Guy brought some flour and butter wrapped in a handkerchief, tucked in a basket. Stevens stated that Wise directed him on the evening of the party to fetch the stolen rum where they had left it. The celebration then took place that night at the Raineys’. The sole details known about the party itself relate to how it was dissolved: Captain Callbeck “took away His black Slave the aforesaid Guy sometime after which they broke up and went severally home.”28

Stevens’s motives for making this statement are not certain, but it seems possible he was trying to protect himself from the consequences of having associated with Wise. A tavern-keeper and legislator named John Clark claimed that a man named James “in the Service of Mr. Walter Berry” had joined Wise and Clark’s slave Thomas Williams in an attack against him and a white servant and soldier named Sylvester Petty. Four days later, Walter Berry witnessed James Stevens’s statement about Wise’s burglary. It seems probable, as Hornby suggests, that Stevens “may have been buying freedom from prosecution or his master’s punishment by testifying against Wise.”29 Berry’s influence over Stevens and among his own peers should not be understated; he had served as Speaker of the Legislative Assembly several years before.30

The accounts of John Clark and Sylvester Petty outlined their recollection of the events that took place on November 26, 1785.31 On that Saturday evening, Jupiter Wise and a man enslaved to John Clark named Thomas Williams sat in Captain Burns’s kitchen with some stolen items, playing cards. Williams had been missing and was believed to have thieved from the house of Dr. Walker, a garrison surgeon for whom Sylvester Petty labored. When Petty saw Williams and Wise, he explained to John Clark that their goods were the ones that had been stolen from the doctor. Petty feared being blamed—lashed—for the disappearance of these items, so exposing the Black men allowed Petty to protect himself.32 The mutual vulnerability of Black slaves and white servants could pit these groups of lower-class people against one another for fear of retribution by their more powerful white masters. Wise, reacting to the accusation, cursed and assaulted Petty. Clark, in turn, used a large stick he was carrying to strike down Wise.33

Subsequently, Captain Burns’s wife, whose husband held Wise as an indentured servant, called Clark into the parlor where slaveowner Thomas Haszard was paying her a visit. There, Mrs. Burns expressed regret that Clark “was going home alone, and that She had no White Man about the House to send with him, as she was apprehensive the black People had premeditated some design against him.”34 Sylvester Petty, meanwhile, waited outdoors. As John Clark left the house, Wise and Williams attacked Petty. Joined by “another Black who he Supposed is named James and is in the Service of Mr. Walter Berry,” they then turned upon Clark.35 A stick fight broke out. Wise hit Clark over the eye “and Clark also exchanged stick blows with James.”36 Jupiter Wise sprinted inside the Burns’s house and returned to the street, brandishing a cutlass. He used the short sword against Clark, “who fended him off with his stick.” Thomas Haszard then opened the door and illuminated the scene with a candle, which quelled the brawl. Wise bid Clark to join him in the darkness of the street, but Clark declined to fight further.37 Soon thereafter, the local authorities arrested Wise and charged him with assault.38

On February 24, 1786, the court convicted Wise of felonious assault and sentenced him to death.39 Wise “Pleaded ye Benefit of Clergy,” which the court accepted and duly reduced his sentence.40 Hornby explains that this plea “allowed first-time convicts of some felonies to escape the usual hanging,” and that Wise was the first person on Prince Edward Island to request it.41 Jupiter Wise was “to be Transport’d for seven Years to some one of his Majestys Islands in the Wst. Indias.”42 Of course, this sentence probably meant a lifetime sentence of enslavement as it is hard to believe that in the Caribbean he would have been freed and allowed to go where he pleased.

The shared grievances of the resisters in this intricate story—from Mingo’s Boston-bound hopefuls to Jupiter Wise and his party invitees—about their experiences of subjugation in Prince Edward Island show us how these people challenged the wrongs against them and how they carved out landed, coastal, and maritime spaces of freedom amid their exploitation. Despite slavery’s statutory recognition on the island, this jurisdiction was supposed to represent freedom to formerly enslaved African Americans who had escaped their Patriot enslavers and sided with the British during the Revolutionary War. As documented in the Book of Negroes, the voluntary migrations of free Black Loyalists suggest many Black colonists resettled with the hope of a better life, a life of meaningful freedom. Yet the imperial and economic connections between the Maritimes and West Indies ensured the ongoing insecurity of Black Loyalists who, like Wise, were vulnerable to the loss of their autonomy or re-enslavement, often carried out through transatlantic voyages.43

This imperial relationship is one of the reasons why Wise was sentenced to the Caribbean, where he would have entered a competitive market that not only exploited Black laborers but was also driven by the lucrative demands of sugar production. Wise received seven years, the minimum sentence for transportation.44 This type of punishment was “shaped by Atlantic labour markets.”45 As historian Hamish Maxwell-Stewart explains, transportation sentences for convicts like Jupiter Wise were often fixed at seven years “not for legal reasons but in order to competitively position convicts within the transatlantic market in unfree labour.”46 Whether in the Maritimes as an unfree Black Loyalist or in the West Indies as a convict and potentially re-enslaved, Jupiter Wise faced continual exploitation in the British Atlantic.

The water border facilitated the relationship between the Maritimes and the Caribbean. Although largely a colony based on subsistence farming, Prince Edward Island had ties to other parts of the empire, including through the fishing industry: to northern Atlantic places such as Halifax or London, but also tropical islands such as Barbados and St. Vincent.47 Throughout the region, access to the sugar islands enabled Loyalists to obtain rum distilled in the British West Indies.48 This connection, then, was an important precondition for Wise and his friends to even consider stealing the rum. Their actions make us wonder, what did the stolen products of enslaved labor from the Caribbean mean to unfree people in the Maritimes? Wise was ultimately sentenced to the region where that drink was produced, so, once in the West Indies, did the liquor or the place take on new meaning to him?

Like other parts of the Maritimes, the way in which the ocean surrounded the island meant its imperial connections to other parts of the British Atlantic were actualized by way of water. For Jupiter Wise, though, the water border ultimately offered more obstructions than avenues to freedom. Unfree Black islanders’ proximity to the Atlantic meant the ocean functioned as a steady threat (for the reasons outlined above) as well as a source of opportunity for escape. James Stevens and his counterparts, who faced the vulnerability of residing on Prince Edward Island, attempted to take advantage of the fluidity of the water border.49 The initial plans to steal and escape to Boston aboard Governor Patterson’s sloop demonstrates how the group of enslaved and indentured people perceived their watery surroundings as an important channel to freedom. Bound on an island, it is logical that they would turn to the sea; a terrestrial escape on tiny Prince Edward Island would offer limited protection. Enslaved Black people had sought escape through these means before. For example, when Mingo proposed to James Stevens the idea of running away as a group, he warned him about saying too much to Ben because Ben had “before deceived some men who had intended to run away with a Schooner from Governor Patterson’s farm.”50 The unfree community clearly recognized and attempted, at least a couple times, to profit from the water border’s ability to facilitate escapes. In the end, the aquatic connectivity between Prince Edward Island and the Caribbean made Wise’s ultimate sentencing there possible, linking him all too easily to a dangerous environment with arduous tropical labor conditions.

We know that the land border and imperial networks influenced Wise after his sentencing and before his arrival in the Caribbean. The summer after his sentencing, he and another convict named John O’Neil escaped from the jail where they had been awaiting transportation. They did not get very far. A sheriff caught them in Pictou, Nova Scotia, and brought them back to PEI.51 It seems as though Wise and O’Neil hoped crossing the Northumberland Strait would offer better opportunities to take control of their futures. Not only was Nova Scotia larger than PEI, but it also had larger Black communities as well as more robust shipping networks where they could potentially connect to other places. The border, these imperial connections, and the brutality of plantation labor in the Caribbean were possibly the reason Wise tried to flee from his imprisonment: to escape such a fate. More simply, perhaps he was seeking to reunite with Hannah Wise, who presumably remained in Birchtown. Jupiter Wise, like other Black islanders, recognized that the Atlantic waters surrounding the colony offered a slim, perhaps final chance at freedom: the opportunity to circumvent punishments that colonial society could enforce ashore. His recapture shows the extent of the danger he was willing to risk in order to have some control and a sense of security in his life. It is unknown what happened to Jupiter Wise after this.52

These factors exemplify how the jurisdictional border—the legal, political, and ideological distinctions between Prince Edward Island and elsewhere—distinguished the colony as a space where Black people were vulnerable to enslavement locally and in other parts of the British Atlantic. Although we do not know their exact thoughts about PEI as a jurisdiction where slavery and servitude were legal, we do know that several of them planned to leave the island on a vessel for Boston “where [they] could work.”53 The motives underlying this proposed trip are unclear, but it is possible that Boston seemed to offer better opportunities, especially in light of Massachusetts’s recent abolishment of slavery. This conception of the jurisdiction goes against the way we typically think of the significance of the Canadian border: a bulwark against American slavery, a distinct threshold to security and freedom. The border and the lack of protection it provided to Black Loyalists, despite the promises made to them by the British government about land and freedom, mattered. The border encouraged Mingo and his companions to contemplate sailing to Boston. It led Wise to orchestrate a nighttime celebration for joy, movement, and resistance. It pushed him to defy an imprisonment that endangered him within a British Atlantic system of enslavement and servitude. Ultimately, Wise’s story allows us to reevaluate the jurisdiction’s relevance.

Within the jurisdiction of Prince Edward Island, subject to the laws of the colony, the watery border ultimately endangered Wise because it linked the plantations of the West Indies to the island. Some enslaved islanders saw possibilities with water escape, but for Wise, embroiled in a system of legal punishment and constantly threatened by the legality of slavery on the island, his biography demonstrates that his life was increasingly in peril from the time he landed in the Maritimes.

Hector

Not every enslaved person operated in close connection to others. Many found opportunities to resist by taking solitary action and running away by themselves. A man named Hector chose this path. He was enslaved in New Brunswick to Frederick William Hecht, a Loyalist from New York. In the Saint John Gazette, Hecht placed the following runaway advertisement:

Five Guineas Reward.

RUNAWAY from the subscriber, on Saturday evening the 26^th ult. A negro man Slave, named Hector, by trade a cooper, a tall slender fellow, speaks English like the West India negroes, and is very talkative; he came from St. Augustine to this place, via New-York, on December last, had his feet frost bitten on the passage, and has a very lazy gait. Whoever secures and delivers him up to me shall have the above reward.

And as I have reason to suspect that he has been carried off by some vessel or other, I hereby offer the like rewards to any person who can give information, so as the offender or offenders shall be convicted thereof.

Fred. Wm. Hecht.

Fort Howe, 13^th July 178454

This advertisement is an important piece of evidence for the vast Atlantic connections that enslaved Black people had in the Maritimes. From the Caribbean or possibly Africa, to East Florida, to New York, to finally, New Brunswick, Atlantic slavery dictated Hector’s movements across various bodies of water.55 Although succinct, the details in this advertisement provide a glimpse into his personality, skills, background, experiences, and resistance. Runaway slave advertisements like this one are a valuable way for historians to better understand the lives of enslaved people in the region.

In addition to offering fascinating biographical details of one enslaved person in the Maritimes, the advertisement for Hector illuminates the many different places a single individual experienced Atlantic slavery. The imperial connections between New Brunswick and other jurisdictions played a role in shaping Hector’s life. For Hector, crossing into the Maritimes from New York represented a change of location but also the continuity of living under the British Crown. East Florida had been a British colony since 1763. Frederick William Hecht probably acquired Hector after he had arrived in St. Augustine in December 1782 and before he left the following November, so it is clear Hector more than likely had lived in St. Augustine when British control of the region was contested.56 What colony, if any, in the West Indies he lived in prior to this is uncertain. Regardless, Hector had spent at least a portion of his life enslaved within various British colonies.

The restriction of willful movement inherent to enslavement had an effect in determining the spaces and places people like Hector occupied. As enslavers like Hecht decided upon the migrations of enslaved people and dictated where they worked, ate, socialized, slept, and breathed, enslaved people challenged their landed restrictions and proximity to their enslavers in numerous ways. These forced migrations to different parts of the British Empire caused the frostbite Hector had suffered from the prior winter’s sailing. By the time Hector ran away several months later, this injury may have still been painful and possibly was what his “very lazy gait” indicated.57 Fleeing from Hecht despite injury required courage and strength. Hector’s actions reveal he did not accept the continuum of control that characterized his crossing into New Brunswick.

Hector’s migrations suggest the durability of ties between different colonial regions.58 These connections were predicated on economy. If Hector’s skills as “a cooper” were applied in the Maritimes, the barrels he built were probably used to transport local salted cod to the British West Indies, which fed enslaved Africans there.59 The Maritimes’ “advantages derived from fish and lumber” regularly embroiled enslaved people in these daily operations.60 For example, a 1786 runaway advertisement described a man named Tom, who ran away from Captain James McDonald of Shelburne, as a sailor.61 Though enslaved people’s labor could be maritime in nature, the reasons for these connections had everything to do with empire.

Hector’s life reveals how living on one side of a British colonial border fostered deep connections to other lands connected to the Crown. Since Hecht enslaved Hector, the immediate explanation for these forced migrations is Hecht’s own discretion. At the same time, however, it is crucial to also remember that Hecht was appointed as assistant commissary in 1783 to go to New Brunswick to “take charge of the Provisions, Fuel, &c. and be accountable for the same.”62 Even Hecht’s duties and movements, then, were in deference to powerful imperial ties and demands. Hecht, who had lived in New York but also owned property in St. Augustine, had an “unaccommodating temper and ill humor,” which undoubtedly made Hector’s life in the interconnected British Atlantic miserable.63 Clues from the advertisement suggest Hector attempted to liberate himself from this networked world by means of water.

Living so close to the Atlantic, enslaved people regularly took advantage of the numerous ships in the harbors or escaped via water routes. For example, in 1786, a man named Joe Charleton allegedly stole several items from a vessel in Saint John and took a “small skiff.”64 The next year, two enslaved teenage siblings named Sam and Beller escaped with a free Black man named Tony Smith “IN a BIRCH CANOE” from their master, Thomas Lester of Waterborough, New Brunswick.65 It was common practice for advertisements to include a warning to “masters of vessels” who might try “to harbor or Carry [off]” the fugitives, either in cooperation with an escaped enslaved person or through force or deceit.66 Rather than just giving the usual warning, however, Hecht gave a little more credence to the idea that Hector possibly escaped on board a ship, as he stated, “I have reason to suspect that he has been carried off by some vessel or other.”67 As Kevin Dawson has shown, enslaved people throughout the Atlantic world used their aquatic skills such as swimming, boating, and diving.68 The aquatic culture of enslaved Black people on the Atlantic coast is captured in a 1751 advertisement in the Boston Post-Boy, which says “JUST arriv’d from Hallifax, and to be sold, Ten hearty Strong Negro Men, mostly Tradesmen, such as Caulkers, Carpenters, Sailmakers, Ropemakers: Any Person inclining to purchase may enquire of Benjamin Hallowell of Boston.”69 Over twenty years later, Lieutenant Governor John Wentworth described his enslaved men as “expert in boats.”70 It is possible Hector used his own aquatic skills on the water to facilitate his escape.

The advertisement reveals nothing about what that specific reason was. Perhaps he heard about enslaved people being captured or choosing to escape aboard ships. Perhaps Hector had connections to people who could give him access on board a boat, and Hecht knew this. Perhaps working on a boat would have been more comfortable than a job that required him to be on his feet because of his disability.71 Whatever the cause for this reason, it shows that enslaved people and enslavers were familiar with the ease with which the watery borders of the Maritime colonies connected places like New Brunswick to other corners of the Atlantic world.

This fluidity helped facilitate the transatlantic culture of Maritime slavery. Atlantic connections shaped enslavement at the personal and systematic levels. The British Atlantic, specifically, the West Indies, had an immeasurable impact on Maritime slavery. On a personal level, for instance, the advertisement tells us that Hector had a West Indian accent, but it does not tell us about any Caribbean customs, knowledge, and background he would have eventually carried with him to New Brunswick. We know also that Hector’s painful, frigid voyage caused frostbite, but historians will likely never find evidence for what other traumas and memories it may have inflicted upon him.

Systematically, Caribbean slavery shaped the role of slavery in the Maritimes, a colonial region built to support West Indian sugar production. In Shelburne, for example, nearly 60 percent of enslavers were either farmers, merchants, or traders.72 With Nova Scotia and New Brunswick’s “highly developed trade networks with the West Indies,” these individuals could use these Atlantic connections “as an outlet for their crops or the goods they manufactured in their shops.”73 When enslaved people were involved in industries associated with this trade (as Hector possibly was, as a cooper), they deepened the interregional links. Empire and land borders formed the reasoning behind these Atlantic connections, but they were only possible through the connectivity inherent to the water that surrounded the colonies. Appreciating the role of Atlantic slavery in terms of how it shaped Maritime slavery at the personal and systematic scales gives us a better understanding of the porousness and interconnectivity of the Maritimes’ watery borders.

Although brief, the advertisement for Hector gives us a glimpse into how the Maritimes’ aquatic border connected different parts of the British Empire, shaping the life of one man over the course of at least three dramatic migrations across the British Atlantic. The imperial and economic rationale for those connections explains the continuity of control Hector experienced within the jurisdiction of the colony of New Brunswick and as he remained in continued bondage to Hecht, his Loyalist enslaver. It also explains why Hector likely took to the seas to escape this bondage. Though the nautical connections to places such as the West Indies endangered enslaved people in the Maritimes and could perpetuate their enslavement, it also afforded people like Hector the means for escape aboard ships out of that system. The fragmentary evidence we have of Hector’s life testifies to this fact that land and water borders severed ties just as easily as they created them. While it is possible Hector was recaptured or re-enslaved, the evidence is certain that he escaped, demonstrating the possibilities the watery border afforded to Black people in the Maritimes.

Lydia Jackson

While it was enslaved men who usually attempted to escape aboard ships because they could become or pose as sailors, enslaved women like Lydia Jackson encountered more obstacles. Her story demonstrates the overlapping hardships and exploitation that Black Loyalists faced, the tenacious efforts of a re-enslaved woman to regain her freedom, as well as the ways in which the land and water borders shaped her experience in Nova Scotia. The tenuousness of slavery is highlighted by the numerous attempts of owners to gain statute protection for their property (in 1787, 1789, 1801, and 1808 in Nova Scotia, and in 1801 in New Brunswick). The bills were defeated each time. Yet, slavery in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia lasted until the late 1810s and possibly even the early 1820s primarily because owners constantly fought in the courts and legislatures to protect their alleged right to own slaves.74 The other way slavery lasted was through re-enslavement of free Black people like Lydia Jackson, who was told she was a servant, but became virtually enslaved.

The story of Lydia Jackson comes from the diary of John Clarkson, a Royal Navy officer and one of the organizers of the Black Loyalist exodus to Sierra Leone in 1792.75 In his journal, Clarkson explained that as a result of poverty and the desertion of her husband, Jackson indentured herself to a Loyalist in Manchester named Henry Hedley. Most free Black Loyalists faced arduous conditions as the postwar recession restricted employment opportunities, and some sought to use an indenture to provide the short-term necessities of life. Jackson’s reluctant concession to what she thought would be a one-year term of servitude demonstrates the way in which formerly enslaved people strove ardently for self-sufficiency, negotiating terms of labor to the extent their desperate situations could tolerate. It turned out that Hedley took “advantage of her ignorance” (her illiteracy) and tricked Jackson into signing an indenture for thirty-nine years, essentially making her a servant for life. The next day, he told her “that she was to serve out the year with Dr. Bulman of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia and sent her round for this purpose in a Schooner.” Once in Lunenburg, Jackson learned “to her great astonishment that she had been articled for the term of thirty nine years, and that she had been made over to [Bulman] for the consideration of £20 which he had paid to Henry Hedley.”76 In effect, a woman who gained her freedom during the American Revolution had been re-enslaved in the Loyalist Maritimes. In this example, up to this point, it did not matter that she had crossed an international border.

Enslaved to Bulman, Jackson suffered from the most brutal mistreatment. He regularly beat “her with the tongs, sticks, pieces of rope &c. about the head and face” with the assistance of his wife.77 Clarkson’s diary is clear that Jackson regularly endured beatings for little or no cause whatsoever. In one instance, Jackson spoke to Bulman carefully and “with the least intention of giving offence,” but “Bulman took occasion to knock her down, and though she was then in the last month of pregnancy, in the most inhuman manner, stamped upon her whilst she lay upon the ground.”78 Sadly, it seems as though she lost the baby she was carrying since Clarkson made no mention of a child.

With the assistance of an attorney in Lunenberg, Jackson “lodged a complaint” against her enslaver, but the case “was soon silenced by the overbearing manners & influence of Bulman, who then or soon after expressed his intention of selling her to some Planter in the West Indies to work as a slave.” As the town was deeply enmeshed with maritime trade, the threat to sell Jackson into enslavement was not an idle or empty threat. Instead, Bulman sent Jackson to his farm, which was three miles outside of town, “giving authority and sanction to his servants to beat & punish her as they thought fit.” After three years of this cruelty, she escaped to Halifax, where she presented a memorial to the governor to no avail.79 She also petitioned for assistance from the chief justice, who apparently only “promised to enquire into the business.” Finally, she came to Clarkson, who “immediately wrote to Dr. Bulman respecting her and consulted a Lawyer on the business who gave it as his opinion that her wages could be recovered for the time she lived under Bulman but the forms of law would most likely prevent its being finally settled, so as to enable her to go with me.” Clarkson found “there was no chance of the business being settled” and “advised her to give it up and leave Bulman to his own reflections.” Lydia Jackson’s story must be considered in the context of Clarkson’s following comment: “I do not know what induced me to mention the above case as I have many others of a similar nature; for example, Scott’s case, Mr. Lee, Senr. case, Smith’s child, Motley Roads child, Mr. Farish’s negro servant, &c.”80 The point here is that Black people throughout the Maritimes were regularly re-enslaved and sometimes sold down to the West Indies. Abolitionist Thomas Clarkson explained the phenomenon of re-enslavement in Nova Scotia: “It was not long till these loyalists, many of whom had been educated with all the ideas of the justice of slavery, the inferiority of negroes, and the superiority of white men, that are universal in the southern provinces of America, began to harass and oppress the industrious black settlers, and even wantonly to deprive them of the fruits of their labour, expelling them from the lands they had cleared.” Clarkson continued by noting that whites reduced “again to slavery those negroes who had so honourably obtained their freedom. They hired them as servants, and, at the end of the stipulated time, refused payment of their wages, insisting that they were slaves: in some instances they destroyed their tickets of freedom, and then enslaved the negroes for want of them; in several instances, the unfortunate Africans were taken onboard vessels, carried to the West Indies, and there sold for the benefit of their plunderers.”81 Clearly, enslavers in the Maritimes used the watery Atlantic highway to send re-enslaved Black people to the Greater Caribbean. This phenomenon connected slavery and enslaved people in the northern reaches of the plantation complex to its heart in the Caribbean. Arriving first over water to the Maritimes as free people, Black Loyalists also experienced the Atlantic as a watery conduit to enslavement in the staple-producing tropical regions of the British Empire.

Evaluating the life of Lydia Jackson enables historians to get a glimpse of the possibilities and perils associated with the borders in the Maritimes. As it was for Jupiter Wise and other Black Loyalists, the land border for Lydia Jackson signified the insecurity of living in Nova Scotia, where local figures of authority regularly disregarded the promises of freedom that British generals had extended to Black Loyalists. Having arrived in Nova Scotia three years after her escape from her enslaver in New York, Jackson’s crossing into the colony demonstrates her hope, if not her trust, that she would enjoy such liberty. The natural and social environment attached to this border, however, did not yield an easy life for Black Loyalists. As they received paltry land grants (if they received any land at all), white Loyalists took advantage of and exacerbated formerly enslaved people’s vulnerability in order to cushion their own lives, constructing a colonial hierarchy built on racism and zealous exploitation.82 For Lydia Jackson, these preexisting and developing hardships of settlement in the Maritimes, compounded by the fact that her husband left her, meant Nova Scotia’s frontier was a disenchanting landscape of inescapable challenges.

Doing as much as she could to secure her autonomy, Jackson recognized that there were spaces within the colony’s landed boundaries where her chances of obtaining freedom were greater. She positioned herself to contact white people who could help her—first, the attorney in Lunenburg—an act of bravery. Her escape to then seek the aid of the governor, the chief justice, and eventually John Clarkson required her to turn a dangerous woody landscape separating her from Halifax’s colonial officials into her pathway to potential freedom. Jackson’s refashioning of the Nova Scotian land from a barrier to a byway demonstrates her hope in ultimately obtaining the justice she knew she was owed upon British soil, having entered the colony as a Black Loyalist. In a sad twist of irony, this hope renders Jackson as a figure who pursued to uphold and possibly earnestly believed in the purported meaning of the colony’s border. The Nova Scotian authorities, on the other hand, disgraced themselves when they “paid little or no attention” to instances like Jackson’s where Britain’s promises were unfulfilled.83 (Of course, however, such promises had never been made solely for the sake of the formerly enslaved, having been leveraged more as military strategy against the American rebels.84) Beliefs and actions of what it meant to live on Nova Scotian or Maritime soil—or in other cases, colonial Canada or the Bahamas85—reveal how Black Loyalists thought about themselves in relation to the rest of the British Empire and how they assigned meaning to the border.

Like the land border’s signification as a domain of British influence, the water border signified Nova Scotia’s ties to other parts of the British Atlantic world. More easily than any other natural form, water connected enslaved people to other parts of the British Atlantic, for better or for worse. For example, Jackson experienced her sale to Bulman by way of a “Schooner” that transported her from Manchester to Lunenburg.86 Later, Bulman’s dangerous threat to send her to the West Indies intensified the power of the aquatic highways that could have resulted in Jackson’s enslavement on a sugar plantation.87

Lydia Jackson’s story is the ultimate example of how one person could experience both perils and possibilities as a Black person in the Maritimes. She experienced the perils of being re-enslaved, being beaten so much she lost her child, and running away to get her freedom. But water brought disappointment and danger as it did hope. For Lydia Jackson, her story ends with the ultimate possibilities of the water border. That Jackson cast her faith in Clarkson, a man who was arranging a transatlantic crossing to Sierra Leone, is significant. Possibly, Jackson believed the chance to join the exodus to Africa would enable her to finally have the security she sought. If that is the case, then water—the Atlantic Ocean and the distance from Nova Scotia’s unfulfilled promises that it could afford—likely factored into her effort to garner Clarkson’s support. Though Clarkson’s writings are not clear about Jackson’s future, it is hard to believe she would not have continued to pursue freedom in other, ongoing ways. The assurances of freedom associated with having crossed the border into the British colony were ones Jackson fought to have realized for her own life, whether by means of land or water.

Conclusion

The biographies of Jupiter Wise, Hector, and Lydia Jackson demonstrate how Black people—enslaved or minimally free—faced both possibility and peril. The balance could be tipped by luck, friendships, as well as political, economic, and social power. Charged with a felony, peril overwhelmed Jupiter Wise, and he probably ended up re-enslaved in the West Indies. Hector, on the other hand, experienced the possibilities of freedom when he got to the Maritimes and ran away from Frederick William Hecht. As a Black Loyalist, Lydia Jackson experienced possibility upon arrival in the Maritimes, but she soon suffered the peril of re-enslavement before she escaped and met John Clarkson. It is possible that she went to Sierra Leone with Clarkson or remained in Nova Scotia.88

These Black lives demonstrate how people negotiated and moved, voluntarily and involuntarily, over borders, along coasts, and across oceans. Although policymakers in Halifax and London could draw boundaries, people transcended these borders and helped map out realities on the ground. The areas encompassed within the lines of the Maritime colonies on a map were not merely spaces that were strictly “the Maritimes.” The history explored in this chapter reveals that these were spaces that were connected to Boston, New York, St. Augustine, the greater Caribbean, and Africa. In other words, we do not want to think of the Maritimes as separate and cut off from the rest of the plantation complex when they were an integral part of it. The migratory lives of Jupiter Wise, Hector, and Lydia Jackson demonstrate the embodied reality of these transatlantic and transnational connections. Their movements across borders are significant because they reveal the obstacles and opportunities associated with borders and jurisdictions, particularly the far-reaching impact of slavery in the Atlantic world.

Black people who arrived in the Maritimes after the American Revolution attempted to inscribe meanings upon the jurisdictional boundaries of Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. The meaning that they hoped to embed in these colonies was freedom: freedom of movement, freedom to work and receive payment, and freedom to have control over their own lives. The three people in this chapter are examples of how possibility and peril were part of these attempts. In addition to their understanding of jurisdiction, water—whether as a means of escape or a conduit to enslavement—connected them to other legal jurisdictions that inhibited or facilitated their ability to have that freedom.

Notes

1. 1.  For work that has pointed to the migration of enslaved Black people from Canada to the United States and the selling of free Black people into colonial Canada, see Gregory Wigmore, “Before the Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom in the Canadian-American Borderland,” Journal of American History 98 (September 2011): 437–54; Harvey Amani Whitfield, The Problem of Slavery in Early Vermont, 1777–1810 (Vermont Historical Society, 2014). For a bibliography on Black Canadian history and slavery in Canada, see Suzanne Morton and Donald Wright, “Black History in Atlantic Canada: A Bibliography,” Acadiensis 50, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 223–75. See also Harvey Amani Whitfield, North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes (University of British Columbia Press, 2016); Sarah Elizabeth Chute, “Bound to Slavery: Economic and Biographical Connections to Atlantic Slavery Between the Maritimes and West Indies After 1783” (MA thesis, University of Vermont, 2021); Franco Paz and Harvey Amani Whitfield, “On the Edge of Freedom: The Re-Enslavement of Elizabeth Watson in Nova Scotia,” in In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World, ed. Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power Greene (University of Georgia Press [Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900], 2021), 17–39; Harvey Amani Whitfield, “White Archives, Black Fragments: Problems and Possibilities in Telling the Lives of Enslaved Black People in the Maritimes,” Canadian Historical Review 101, no. 3 (September 2020): 323–45; Catherine M. A. Cottreau-Robins, “Exploring the Landscape of Slavery in Loyalist Era Nova Scotia,” in The Consequences of Loyalism: Essays in Honor of Robert M. Calhoon, ed. Rebecca Brannon and Joseph S. Moore (University of South Carolina Press, 2019), 122–34; Charmaine Nelson, “A Tone of Voice Peculiar to New England,” Current Anthropology 61, supplement 22 (October 2020): S303–S316; Charmaine Nelson, “Special Issue: Expanding and Complicating the Concept of Creolization,” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 12, no. 3 (2019): 267–70; Harvey Amani Whitfield, “Runaway Advertisements and Social Disorder in the Maritimes: A Preliminary Study,” in Violence, Order, and Unrest: A History of British North America, 1749–1876, ed. Elizabeth Mancke et al. (University of Toronto Press, 2019), 214–35; Afua Cooper, “‘Deluded and Ruined’: Diana Bastian—Enslaved African Canadian Teenager and White Male Privilege,” Brock Education Journal 27 (2017): 26–34; Harvey Amani Whitfield, “The African Diaspora in Atlantic Canada: History, Historians, and Historiography,” Acadiensis 46, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2017): 213–32; Ken Donovan, “Female Slaves as Sexual Victims in Île Royale,” Acadiensis 43, no. 1 (Winter/Spring, 2014): 147–56; Harvey Amani Whitfield and Barry Cahill, “Slave Life and Slave Law in Colonial Prince Edward Island, 1769–1825,” Acadiensis 38, no. 2 (Summer/Autumn, 2009): 29–51; Harvey Amani Whitfield, “Black Loyalists and Black Slaves in Maritime Canada,” History Compass 5, no. 6 (November 2007): 1980–97; Kenneth Donovan, “Slaves and Their Owners in Île Royale, 1713–1760,” Acadiensis 25, no. 1 (Autumn 1995): 3–32; D. G. Bell, “Slavery and the Judges of Loyalist New Brunswick,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal, 31 (1982): 9–42; Barry Cahill, “Habeas Corpus and Slavery in Nova Scotia: R v. Hecht, ex parte Rachel, 1798,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal, 44 (1995): 179–209; Barry Cahill, “Slavery and the Judges of Loyalist Nova Scotia,” University of New Brunswick Law Journal, 43 (1994): 73–135; Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (Yale University Press, 1971); W. A. Spray, The Blacks in New Brunswick (Brunswick Press, 1972); T. W. Smith, “The Slave in Canada,” Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, 10 (1899): 1–161.
2. 2.  Isaac Land, “Port Towns and the ‘Paramaratime,’” in The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400–1800, ed. Claire Jowitt et al. (Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2020), 193.
3. 3.  John Morton in this volume, “Data Maps of Downeast Maine: Missionary Records from the Early Republic Borderlands,” 89–111.
4. 4.  James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783–1870 (University of Toronto Press, 1992), 2–4.
5. 5.  David Austin, Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal, 2nd ed. (Between the Lines, 2023), 222.
6. 6.  Phillip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1998), xi.
7. 7.  Paul Musselwhite in this volume, “Depicting and Defining the Plantation in the Early English Caribbean, 1625–1675,” 121, 129.
8. 8.  Sarah Elizabeth Chute, “‘To ship her to the West Indies, and there dispose of her as a Slave’: Connections of Enslaved People to the Loyalist Maritimes and the West Indies,” Acadiensis 51, no. 2 (Autumn 2022): 34–59.
9. 9.  Sarah Elizabeth Chute, “WISE, JUPITER,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 4 University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed 16 January 2025, https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/wise_jupiter_4E.html.
10. 10.  Emily Blanck, “Seventeen Eighty-Three: The Turning Point in the Law of Slavery and Freedom in Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 75, no. 1 (March 2002): 22–51.
11. 11.  There are other examples that demonstrate these regional connections. For example, an 1828 slave register indicates that four slaves belonging to Catherine Ormsby of Montserrat resided with Mr. Ormsby in Prince Edward Island. See Montserrat Slave Register, 13 December 1828, p. 285, T/71/450, TNA.
12. 12.  Book of Negroes, Sir Guy Carleton Papers, RG 1, Nova Scotia Archives, Halifax (hereafter NSA); for an online version, see https://archives.novascotia.ca/africanns/book-of-negroes/.
13. 13.  Walker, The Black Loyalists, 11; Passport for Cato Ramsay to emigrate to Nova Scotia, 21 April 1783, Gideon White family fonds, MG 1 vol. 948 no. 196 (microfilm 14960); Book of Negroes, Sir Guy Carleton Papers, RG 1, NSA. There is a column in the Book of Negroes called “Names of the Persons in Whose Possession They Now Are”; see, for example, https://archives.novascotia.ca/africanns/book-of-negroes/page/?ID=19. It is the column right before the page break. Most of the time this column is filled out but occasionally it is not.
14. 14.  An Act, declaring that Baptism of SLAVES shall not exempt them from BONDAGE, 1781, CO 228, Colonial Office Acts No. 1, Prince Edward Island, 1770–1781, MS. 1–66, Public Archives and Records Office, Prince Edward Island (hereafter PAROPEI).
15. 15.  Supreme Court, Prince Edward Island, RG 6.1, ser. I, sub-ser. I, vol. 10, p. 49, PAROPEI.
16. 16.  Muster book of free Black settlement of Birchtown, 1784, 7, MG9-B9-14, Library and Archives Canada (Ottawa). Copy available online at heritage.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.lac_ reel_h984, image 83.
17. 17.  Book of Negroes.
18. 18.  James Stevens, Information against Jupiter Wise for a Burglary, 30 November 1785, Supreme Court, M. McDonald vs. Jupiter Wise-1786, RG 1, PAROPEI.
19. 19.  Verdict, Supreme Court Fonds, Case Files, 1770–1899, 1785, The King vs. Jupiter Wise, RG 6.1, Series 5, Subseries 1, PAROPEI.
20. 20.  Kim M. Gruenwald in this volume, “When the River Is a Border: Rivalries and Commercial Networks in the Riverine West,” 143.
21. 21.  Gruenwald, “When the River Is a Border,” 160.
22. 22.  Shirley Tillotson, “Importing the Plantation: The Greater Caribbean Trade and Loyalist Nova Scotia’s Public Revenue, 1789–1835,” Journal of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society 25 (2022): 1–26, esp. 18.
23. 23.  James Stevens, Information against Jupiter Wise for a Burglary, 30 November 1785, Supreme Court, M. McDonald vs. Jupiter Wise, 1786, RG 6.1, Series 5, Subseries 1, PAROPEI.
24. 24.  James Stevens, Information against Jupiter Wise for a Burglary.
25. 25.  Blanck, “Seventeen Eighty-Three: The Turning Point in the Law of Slavery and Freedom in Massachusetts.”
26. 26.  James Stevens, Information against Jupiter Wise for a Burglary.
27. 27.  James Stevens, Information against Jupiter Wise for a Burglary.
28. 28.  James Stevens, Information against Jupiter Wise for a Burglary; Jim Hornby, Black Islanders: Prince Edward Island’s Historical Black Community (Charlottetown: Institute of Island Studies, 1991), 17.
29. 29.  Hornby, Black Islanders, 19.
30. 30.  James Stevens, Information against Jupiter Wise for a Burglary; Hornby, Black Islanders, 19; Chronological List of Past Speakers of the Legislative Assembly: 1773–Present,” Government of Prince Edward Island Web Archive, accessed 30 November 2021, http://www.gov.pe.ca/photos/original/leg_speakers.pdf.
31. 31.  Information of John Clark, Supreme Court Fonds, Case Files, 1770–1899, 1785, The King vs. Jupiter Wise, RG 6.1, Series 5, Subseries 1, PAROPEI.
32. 32.  Hornby, Black Islanders, 18.
33. 33.  Information of John Clark.
34. 34.  Information of John Clark.
35. 35.  Information of John Clark.
36. 36.  Hornby, Black Islanders, 18.
37. 37.  Hornby, Black Islanders, 18.
38. 38.  Supreme Court Fonds, Minutes, 24 February 1786, RG 6.1, Series 1, Subseries 1, Vol. 2, 2–3, PAROPEI.
39. 39.  Supreme Court Fonds, Minutes, 24 February 1786, RG 6.1, Series 1, Subseries 1, Vol. 2, 2–3.
40. 40.  Supreme Court Fonds, Minutes, 24 February 1786, RG 6.1, Series 1, Subseries 1, Vol. 2, 2–3.
41. 41.  Hornby, Black Islanders, 16.
42. 42.  Supreme Court Fonds, Minutes, 24 February 1786, RG 6.1, Series 1, Subseries 1, Vol. 2, 2–3.
43. 43.  Carole Watterson Troxler, “Uses of the Bahamas by Southern Loyalist Exiles,” in The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era, ed. Liam Riordan and Jerry Bannister (University of Toronto Press, 2012).
44. 44.  Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, “Transportation from Britain and Ireland, 1615–1875,” 183–210, especially 187, in A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, ed. Clare Anderson (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
45. 45.  Maxwell-Stewart, “Transportation from Britain and Ireland,” 187.
46. 46.  Maxwell-Stewart, “Transportation from Britain and Ireland,” 187.
47. 47.  Royal Gazette and Miscellany of the Island of Saint John, 29 April 1793; Graeme Wynn, “1800–1810: Turning the Century,” in The Atlantic Region to Confederation: A History, ed. Phillip A. Buckner and John G. Reid (University of Toronto Press, 1994), 211. For more on PEI during the eighteenth century, see J. M. Bumsted, Land Settlement and Politics on Eighteenth-Century Prince Edward Island (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987).
48. 48.  S. Hollingsworth, The present state of Nova Scotia: with a brief account of Canada, and the British Islands on the Coast of North America (Printed for William Creech, 1787), 169–171; Chute, “Bound to Slavery,” 57.
49. 49.  James Stevens, Information against Jupiter Wise for a Burglary.
50. 50.  James Stevens, Information against Jupiter Wise for a Burglary.
51. 51.  Executive Council Fonds, Minutes and Orders-in-Council, RG 5, Series 1, Vol. 1, 95; Hornby, Black Islanders, 18.
52. 52.  H. T. Holman, “Slaves and Servants on Prince Edward Island: The Case of Jupiter Wise,” Acadiensis 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1982): 100–104.
53. 53.  James Stevens, Information against Jupiter Wise for a Burglary.
54. 54.  Runaway slave advertisement, Saint John Gazette, 15 July 1784.
55. 55.  J. Leitch Wright Jr., “Blacks in British East Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly (April 1976): 425–42; Linda K. Williams, “East Florida as a Loyalist Haven,” Florida Historical Quarterly (April 1976): 465–68, 469–78.
56. 56.  Peter Wilson Coldham, American Migrations, 1765–1799 (Genealogical Publishing Society, 2000), 156.
57. 57.  Runaway slave advertisement, Saint John Gazette, 15 July 1784.
58. 58.  Wright, “Blacks in British East Florida,” 425–42; Williams, “East Florida as a Loyalist Haven,” 465–68, 469–78.
59. 59.  Runaway slave advertisement, Saint John Gazette, 15 July 1784.
60. 60.  Samuel Goldsbury to Edward Winslow, 1 March 1785, in Winslow Papers, A.D. 1776–1826, ed. W. O. Raymond (The Sun Printing Company, 1901), 271.
61. 61.  Runaway slave advertisement, Nova Scotia Packet and General Advertiser, 6 July 1786.
62. 62.  Esther Clarke Wright, The Loyalists of New Brunswick (E. C. Wright, 1955), 97.
63. 63.  Wright, The Loyalists of New Brunswick, 97; Coldham, American Migrations, 156.
64. 64.  Runaway advertisement, Royal Gazette and New Brunswick Advertiser, 15 August 1786.
65. 65.  Runaway slave advertisement, Royal Gazette, 10 July 1787.
66. 66.  Runaway slave advertisement, Nova Scotia Gazette and Weekly Chronicle, 20 May 1783.
67. 67.  Runaway slave advertisement, Saint John Gazette, 15 July 1784.
68. 68.  Kevin Dawson, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
69. 69.  Advertisement, 23 September 1751, Boston Post-Boy.
70. 70.  John Wentworth to Paul Wentworth or his attorney, 24 February 1784, Wentworth Letters, vol. 49, NSA.
71. 71.  For more on disability, see Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (University of Illinois Press, 2020).
72. 72.  Whitfield, North to Bondage, 65.
73. 73.  Whitfield, North to Bondage, 65.
74. 74.  Journal and Proceedings of the House of Assembly [hereafter JHOA], (Halifax: King’s Printer 1787), 17 and 22, NSA; An Act for the Regulation and Relief of the Free Negroes Within the Province of Nova Scotia, In Council, 2 April 1789, RG 5, Series U, Un-passed Bills, 1762–1792, NSA; JHOA, 1801, 72, NSA; A Bill relating to Negroes, 6 February 1801, Legislative Assembly Records, RS 24, S 14-B 9, Provincial Archives of New Brunswick; An Act for regulating Negro Servants within and throughout this Province, 1808, RG 5, Series U, Un-passed Bills, NSA.
75. 75.  C. B. Fergusson, ed., Clarkson’s Mission to America, 1791–1792 (Public Archives of Nova Scotia, 1971).
76. 76.  Fergusson, Mission to America, 89.
77. 77.  Fergusson, Mission to America, 90.
78. 78.  Fergusson, Mission to America, 90.
79. 79.  We have been unable to locate this document and secondary sources about Lydia Jackson’s life have not mentioned it, but that does not mean it does not exist.
80. 80.  Fergusson, Mission to America, 90.
81. 81.  Harvey Amani Whitfield, Biographical Dictionary of Enslaved People in the Maritimest (University of Toronto Press, 2022), 139.
82. 82.  Marion Gilroy and D. C. Harvey, Loyalists and Land Settlement in Nova Scotia (Public Archives of Nova Scotia, 1937; Clearfield, 2002).
83. 83.  Fergusson, Mission to America, 90.
84. 84.  Walker, The Black Loyalists, 2.
85. 85.  For works on slavery in Canada outside of the Maritimes, see Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Frank Mackey, Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal, 1760–1840 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Montréal (University of Georgia Press, 2007); Marcel Trudel, L’esclavage au Canada français: histoire et conditions de l’esclavage (Presses universitaires Laval, 1960); Nelson, “A ‘tone of Voice Peculiar to New-England.’” For the Bahamas, see Christopher Curry, Freedom and Resistance: A Social History of Black Loyalists in the Bahamas (University Press of Florida, 2017).
86. 86.  Fergusson, Mission to America, 89.
87. 87.  Fergusson, Mission to America, 90.
88. 88.  It is unclear from Clarkson’s diary whether Lydia Jackson joined the voyage to Sierra Leone.