It was during the last years of the American Revolution that the terms, the promises, and the expectations with which the loyalists came to Nova Scotia were formed. These years also defined the cast that their values and emotions, attitudes and rhetoric, would assume in Nova Scotia. They came fresh from the trauma and humiliation of the war’s end, and the memory of that experience had a marked influence on their lives in the new settlements. To understand the loyalist in Nova Scotia it is necessary to be aware of the events that overtook him in the closing years of...

In the fall of 1782 the agents of the associations were joined in Nova Scotia by a vanguard of early loyalists. In October about 500 had come from New York to Annapolis.¹ Jacob Bailey vividly described the overcrowding, each house being shared by several families, many unable to procure lodging at all. He stressed the shortage of necessities and the destitution of the refugees. Yet he still placed the scene closer to inconvenience than catastrophe.² It was a strange and disconcerting winter for both loyalist and Nova Scotian in Annapolis, people tumbling over each other in a community too small...

The issue of provisions was a dominant one in the first years of the loyalist settlements. It loomed large because it was the key not to comfort but to sheer survival. The early years were filled with the scurry and worry of loyalist and official over the delivery and extension of the bounty. The desire for an efficient and fair distribution of provisions led to the musters of 1784 and 1785, which showed the distribution of loyalists throughout the colony. The lists also partly revealed the mobility among the settlements, the numbers still arriving, already departing, and frequently moving from...

Comments on the progress of the loyalist communities during the early years varied with and depended upon the perspective of the observer. The overview of the settlements given by officials and others stressed the visible progress: the land granted, acres cleared, and houses built. Upon this was erected an optimistic impression of the future of the loyalist in Nova Scotia. The pace of settling, however, differed from community to community, depending upon the calibre of the refugees and their leadership, the efficiency of the surveyors, and the quality of the location. For the individual loyalist, moreover, the sense of overall...

In a study of the loyalists of Nova Scotia, what keeps intruding is the question of who these people were. Were they, for example, a cross-section of the society they left, or a peculiar fragment of it? How much did the loyalists of Nova Scotia, in background and motivation, resemble the profile of the loyalist in general, and in what particular ways did they differ?

On the 150th anniversary of the loyalist arrival in British North America, D.C. Harvey, the late archivist of Nova Scotia, wrote an article concerning these people and their contribution to Canadian development. Not all of...

Like their backgrounds, the reactions and attitudes of the loyalists in Nova Scotia were varied and complex. There were certain views common among them, for they had to a great extent shared a common experience. Most had lost more than a war. They had lost their homes and property, they had lost their birthright, and, long before the official peace, they had lost their faith in their cause. This loss of faith and sense of betrayal enveloped the loyalists as they set sail for Nova Scotia in “this hour of Darkness, Calamity & Confusion.” There were brave epithets cast over their...

There were perhaps as many reactions to the loyalists as there were non-loyalists in the province, making it futile to seek a common attitude. What one finds is a wide mixture of views running from those almost obsessed by the loyalist presence to those who felt hardly at all the impact of those great numbers. And, as might be expected, these observations tell us as much about the observer as they do about the loyalist.

Britain, for example, was caught in past rhetoric and promise, in the image she had helped create of the loyal subjects who had decided for...

The politics of the loyalist was not necessarily that of the establishment. He had once been an American colonial seeking greater autonomy in reaction to a growing centralization on the part of Britain, until reform had turned to rebellion, and rebellion had polarized the combatants. Yet once freed from the choice between loyality and rebellion, it is unlikely that he would have completely abandoned what was a natural American reflex, the desire for self-government. Benjamin Marston indirectly explains much of this attitude in speaking of an incident in Shelburne: “the settlers were all called upon to take the oath of...

More immediately pressing than the political realm was the economic, for the first task of the loyalist was to ensure economic survival, and the period of this struggle was dominated by the dependence on provisions, the confusion surrounding the clamour for land, the rush to put wives and families under some form of roof, and the beginning of land clearing. And yet if one could stand back and weigh the changes wrought along Nova Scotia’s coastline since 1783, the clearing, the building, and the growth, they seemed impressive.

This is what Jacob Bailey did in his description of Nova Scotia...

So much had turned out not at all as they had hoped or expected. The loyalists knew within a few years that there was little assurance of an easy economic future in Nova Scotia. Within those few years other perspectives were also shifting. New attitudes were being shaped while old attitudes were being altered. One such evolving attitude was that of the refugees towards the United States.

All great passions are difficult to sustain, and even more so when one is removed from the object of that passion. The loyalists came to Nova Scotia at the very flood-tide of their...

Not all of the loyalists experienced failure. Many of the refugees had come simply to get what they could in free land and provisions and then, having received and disposed of those, they drifted away. They had achieved their goal in Nova Scotia. Others attempted to put down roots in the colony and succeeded. The fisheries, with loyalist fishermen involved, continued off the coast. As the loyalist centres declined many of the tradesmen drifted out of the colony, but some remained in the shrunken centres where, despite the decreased population, they found sufficient demand for their labour. Others moved to...