The Revolution of Departure
When no flag would protect them, they carried their own
The Story of the Black Loyalists, Pt. 4
Image: Founder of Sierra Leone, Thomas Peter's memorial statue in Freetown Sierra Leone. Source: https://flic.kr/p/2amHbqo
In the winter of 1792, more than a thousand Black Loyalists stood on the icebound edges of Nova Scotia and prepared to leave. Not for the first time. A decade earlier, they had crossed an ocean in service to an empire that promised them freedom in exchange for loyalty. They had believed it, or at least wagered that British hypocrisy was more survivable than American cruelty. They fought. They labored. They arrived in Shelburne, Birchtown, and Brindley Town with names logged in the Book of Negroes and orders in hand. But the orders gave way to excuses. The promises, to lies. The land they were told was theirs was either withheld or offered in terrain no white settler wanted. Liberty came without tools, without protection, and without recourse.
Image: Colonial Williamsburg actor-interpreters portray the Royal Ethiopian Regiment, formed by Virginia Royal Governor Lord Dunmore after his 1775 proclamation that offered freedom to slaves of rebel masters if they would take up arms and join the British cause. Source: https://research.colonialwilliamsburg.org/Foundation/journal/Autumn07/slaves.cfm
By 1791, it was clear. Nova Scotia had not been a sanctuary. It had been a holding pattern—a place to bury the contradiction, to delay the reckoning. And when that reckoning finally arrived, it came not from Parliament or the governor’s house, but from the worn hands and worn-down patience of Black settlers who had already endured too much.
Their departure did not begin with the offer. It began with Thomas Peters.
Peters was not merely a leader. He was a political instrument forged by betrayal. Yoruba by birth, enslaved in North Carolina, and a veteran of the Black Pioneers, Peters had become the de facto envoy of the Black Loyalist communities—respected, feared, and increasingly intolerant of the evasions handed down by white officials. When land commissioners failed to deliver, he did what no white Loyalist would have dared: he traveled across the scattered settlements of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick collecting signatures, building consensus, and preparing to take the grievance not to Halifax, but to the imperial core.
He crossed the Atlantic poor, unknown, and alone. But he arrived with more than a petition. He arrived with leverage. Granville Sharp, the abolitionist who had failed once before to establish a colony of free Blacks in Sierra Leone, saw in Peters not just a cause, but a solution. Sharp needed settlers who were Christian, orderly, and could serve as proof of Britain’s moral project. Peters needed an exit—a structure through which his people could claim not charity, but self-determination.
Images: Thomas Peters's certificate of service in the Black Pioneers from 1776-1783. Image courtesy of https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk
The Sierra Leone Company, underwritten by abolitionist capital and imperial ambition, accepted the match. The British government gave its reluctant blessing. The public was told that a wrong would be righted. Privately, officials in Nova Scotia were told to offer no assistance. But the plan had momentum. Ships would be chartered. A colony would be formed. And the Black Loyalists who left Nova Scotia would no longer have to beg for freedom. They would build it.
There was precedent. Sharp had tried before. In 1787, he had financed the first Black settlement in Sierra Leone, known as Granville Town. It lasted barely two years. Supplies ran out. Agreements with local rulers unraveled. The settlers sold their tools to survive. Some worked for slave traders. In 1789, the settlement was destroyed in a rent dispute with the Temne. Sharp sent aid. It was too late.
This time, he assured supporters, would be different.
Image: Declaration of the Sierra Leone Company of their readiness to receive into their Colony certain Free Blacks. Nova Scotia Archives.
John Clarkson, a naval officer and brother of abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, was dispatched to oversee recruitment. He arrived in Nova Scotia and found not passive victims, but eager emigrants. He had been instructed to prepare for five hundred. Within weeks, over eleven hundred had enrolled. Entire congregations signed up. Entire villages emptied. Clarkson appointed Peters, John Ball, and David George to help process the flood of applicants. Many arrived barefoot. Some walked miles through snow to reach the coast.
He traveled from Birchtown to Digby to Shelburne, meeting families who had buried children in the frost, who had waited ten years for land that never came. Clarkson listened to their stories and promised what he could not guarantee. There would be land. There would be no rent. There would be self-governance. In truth, he had no authority to make such claims. But he believed—or needed to believe—that the men and women who had waited a decade for justice would not be failed again.
But departure was not just opposed. It was threatened. Governor John Parr, fearing exposure of his administration’s racial duplicity, tried to sabotage the migration. Loyalist landlords, dependent on cheap Black labor, offered bribes. Others spread false rumors: the ships were bound not for Africa, but for slavery. Even in leaving, the Black Loyalists were told that freedom was a delusion.
They left anyway.
It was winter. There was no housing. The emigrants camped in tents and overcrowded cabins outside Halifax. Clarkson, already ill, labored through every detail—cargo manifests, provisioning, contracts. He insisted on traveling aboard the hospital ship to show solidarity. When the fleet finally sailed in January 1792, Clarkson had to be hoisted aboard. By the time they reached Sierra Leone in March, over sixty had died—most of them on his ship.
What they found on arrival was no settlement. No plots. No roads. No homes. Only jungle, heat, disease, and the skeletal remnants of Granville Town. Clarkson was made governor, but stripped of authority—his decisions subject to a white council loyal to the company, not the settlers. His earlier promises—no land tax, Black constables, self-rule—were revoked within weeks.
Peters, enraged, petitioned again. He was ignored. Soon after, he was accused of theft and died from a sudden illness. No one who knew the politics of the colony believed the timing was accidental.
Clarkson, too, would soon be gone. By December, exhausted and politically isolated, he left Sierra Leone on temporary leave. He would never return. The company dismissed him months later.
Image: In 1792, 1,200 blacks are pictured arriving in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Source: https://research.colonialwilliamsburg.org/Foundation/journal/Autumn07/slaves.cfm
His replacement, Richard Dawes, was a military man. He halted all public works to focus on fortifications. The settlers derided him as “Fort-Mad.” He created an elected assembly but gave it no power. When Black leaders Isaac Anderson and Cato Perkins attempted to petition the company directors in London, they were denied a hearing.
The pattern held.
Dawes was replaced by Zachary Macaulay, who brought order—but not justice. He imposed taxes Clarkson had promised would never be collected. He jailed a Black settler for insulting a white slave trader. Riots followed. Macaulay threatened to deport dissenters back to Nova Scotia.
Then came the French. They bombarded Freetown, looted buildings, and left. Macaulay demanded that salvaged supplies be returned under oath. Most settlers refused—not just to hand over goods, but to swear loyalty to a government that had never honored theirs.
And yet, from that collapse, something survived.
The Nova Scotians remained. They built. They remembered. They formed their own elected assembly. They appointed tythingmen. They defended the colony when the French attacked, even as British administrators hid behind their walls. Their descendants would become the core of Sierra Leone’s political class, cultural elite, and historical memory. They preserved not only their faith and names, but the conviction that they had once been promised a nation—and had come closer to building one than most ever would.
They had left one revolution, only to launch another.
Image: Character of the settlers: From the folder containing "Reports - Description of the sailing from Halifax, Nova Scotia; list of Methodists and Baptists among the settlers; reports of the early days of the Freetown settlement, 1792". University of Illinois at Chicago. Library. Special Collections and University Archives.
They wanted land, not paternalism. Rights, not tribute. What they built was not a model colony—it was a claim. A collective assertion that Black freedom did not require permission. That political autonomy did not wait for benevolence. That dignity was not contingent on imperial approval.
Freetown did not fulfill the promise. It outlived it.
What the Black Loyalists built was not utopia, but resistance in durable form. A foothold. A polity. The seed of Krio identity. Their descendants would lead churches, found schools, shape a nation. But none of that was inevitable. It was wrenched from the teeth of abandonment.
In the end, the Black Loyalists were betrayed by every flag they had ever saluted. The American colonists had fought for liberty, but not for theirs. The British had promised freedom, but not belonging. And the white settlers in Nova Scotia—many of them recent refugees of empire themselves—drew the line of community at color. Across three continents, the message was consistent: Black freedom could be acknowledged in rhetoric, but not in practice; Black humanity could be granted in theory, but not lived alongside.
Neither in Nova Scotia’s frozen clearings, nor in the alleyways of London, nor even in the utopian outpost of Sierra Leone—founded ostensibly for their benefit—were these men and women ever fully welcomed as equals. What the Black Loyalists wanted was not charity, but reciprocity; not a place to survive, but a place to flourish. And yet everywhere they went, they encountered the same refusal: to be seen not merely as freed people, but as free people—capable of ownership, self-governance, and the moral claim to the land they helped defend and build.
This was not mere neglect. It was a deliberate cordoning off of Black autonomy from the democratic promise. What began as an imperial bargain—freedom in exchange for loyalty—curdled into a transatlantic rejection of Black political agency. No colony, no empire, no republic was willing to make room for a Black yeomanry or to admit that Black pioneers could be founders, not just wards. And so, generation after generation, they were pushed to the edge—of the map, of the polity, of the moral imagination.
Image: Freetown, Sierra Leone, mid-19th century. [Drawings of Western Africa, University of Virginia Library, Special Collections, MSS 14357, no. 8].
The Black Loyalists’ odyssey, from the American Revolution to the West African coast, was not just geographic. It was philosophical. It exposed the deep fault lines in Enlightenment thought: that liberty was always bounded by race, that equality was always conditional, and that freedom—if it was to be real—would have to be forged anew, by those long denied it.
Primary Sources
British Library. Granville Sharp Papers. London, United Kingdom. Access via: Online Books Page
Clarkson, John. The Journal of John Clarkson, 1791–1792. New York Historical Society. Digital version:
https://nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15052coll5/id/27837
National Archives (UK). The Book of Negroes, CO 5/5. Kew, London. Digital access: British National Archives
https://archives.novascotia.ca/africanns/book-of-negroes/
Transcription Archive:
https://blackloyalist.com/cdc/documents/official/book_of_negroes.htm
National Archives (UK). Sierra Leone Company Records, CO 270 series. Kew, London. Digital access:
Colonial Office and Predecessors: Sierra Leone Original Correspondence
https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4458
Sierra Leone Public Archives: Records of Colonial Governors, Police and Court Officials in Freetown and Neighbouring Villages
https://eap.bl.uk/collection/EAP782-1
Nova Scotia Archives. Land Petitions, Correspondence, and Records of Black Loyalists. Halifax, NS. Access via: https://archives.novascotia.ca/african-heritage/results/?Search=AR2&SearchList1=all&TABLE1=on
Parliament of Great Britain. Debates of the House of Commons, 1783–1792. Internet Archive. Available at:
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Great%20Britain%2E%20Parliament
Sharp, Granville. Correspondence and Papers. Gloucestershire Archives, MSS series. Digital collection: New York Heritage Society.
https://nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15052coll5/id/36245
“Thomas Peters Petition.” April 18, 1790. Public Archives of New Brunswick, RS 108, Reel F1037. Digital version:
https://www.royalprovincial.com/military/black/blkpet1.htm
Isaac Anderson and Cato Perkins Petitions. 1792–1793. Referenced in Sierra Leone Company papers and Freetown council records. Discussion available at:
Secondary Sources
Books
Chopra, Ruma. Almost Home: Maroons Between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
Fyfe, Christopher. A History of Sierra Leone. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
Jarvis, Michael J. In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783.Williamsburg, VA: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.
Schama, Simon. Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution. London: BBC Books, 2005.
Walker, James W. St. G. The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.
Wilson, Ellen Gibson. John Clarkson and the African Adventure. London: Macmillan, 1980.
Winks, Robin. The Blacks in Canada: A History. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971.
Digital Archives and Repositories
Nova Scotia Archives:
https://archives.novascotia.ca
Black Loyalist Heritage Centre:
https://blackloyalist.com
British History Online:
https://www.british-history.ac.uk