DURING THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF THE 18TH CENTURY, approximately 150 deported Maroon families – fugitive slaves and their descendants from northern Jamaica – lived in Preston, Nova Scotia, under the tutelage of 59-year-old Lieutenant Governor Sir John Wentworth, former governor of New Hampshire and the only Loyalist who served again as head of a British North American colony. Wentworth, the oldest of three children born to the richest man in New Hampshire, was nothing if not ambitious.[1] Having recently been granted a baronetcy, he seized upon the Maroons to push the colony towards greater agricultural competence and even prosperity. Voluntary English migration to Nova Scotia, known for its harsh winters and poor soil, remained difficult to promote and, moreover, many settlers drifted south to better opportunities in the United States.[2] The Maroons represented an unexpected boon – a chance to reinvigorate the Loyalist enclave and to showcase Wentworth’s talents as imperial mediator.[3] Wentworth’s plan for them derived from his experience both with the black Loyalists and the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia: the Maroons would function as cheap labour like the former and serve as military allies like the latter.[4] Eager to promote cultivation in the colony, and to protect the region in the midst of the ongoing Anglo-French war, Wentworth convinced British authorities that Nova Scotia should become the Maroons’ permanent home. Wentworth’s calculations towards Maroon integration reveal the complex machinery of colonialism in the anti-slavery era, one that extended the fractured relationships among black and Aboriginal communities in the Maritimes.[5] They also draw explicit attention to the intertwined histories of Aboriginal and black people.

Three large transports brought 549 Jamaican Maroons to the harbour of Halifax in late July 1796, on a “glorious day of warmth and sunshine.”[6] The rebellious Maroons, from the northern mountains of Trelawney Town, had been deported after an eight-month violent struggle that took the lives of hundreds of British troops and Jamaican militia. In the midst of the nearby revolution in Saint Domingue, the Jamaican government refused to tolerate the proximity of rebellious free blacks; Nova Scotia proved conveniently distant from the Caribbean zone. The Maroons came with two white superintendents and 25,000 pounds of Jamaican currency as reparation.[7] No one knew how long the refugees would stay in Nova Scotia as instructions on their final destination had not arrived.

The civil and military leaders of Nova Scotia – Lieutenant Governor Sir John Wentworth, Prince Edward Augustus as the British commanding officer, and Admiral John Murray – disembarked the Trelawneys without waiting to hear from London. They had no reason to fear the Maroons’ military background: unarmed and weary families, many sick and enfeebled from being imprisoned in transport ships for four months, hardly posed a danger in an environment alien to them.[8] Two-thirds were women and children. Halifax was a garrison and could answer misbehaviour by military force.[9]

As it had in Jamaica, the ongoing war between France and Britain created urgency in the British Maritimes – but in the Maroons’ favor. Nova Scotia was in dire need of military labourers; just a year before, Wentworth had tried to request 200 men for repairing fortifications. The Trelawneys met Nova Scotia’s needs with no cost to government.[10] Wentworth and Prince Edward ordered the Maroons to come on shore so they could build the fortifications in Citadel Hill to guard against a French attack on the city.[11] An even longer confinement in crowded vessels would have led to more sickness and deaths; as it was, some died soon after reaching Nova Scotia.[12]

The Maroons’ arrival during the harvesting season made them particularly valuable to the colony. They could substitute for white workers working on fortifications who clamored to return to their farms.[13] In a colony where families grew food for subsistence and the growing season was short, the absence of men on farms, especially between April and July, could have dire results.[14] The Maroons’ labour would help save white families from wrenching scarcity in the winter.

In 1796, the Maroons’ appearance of submission inspired confidence. As Prince Edward noted approvingly, “It is but justice to them to say that they conduct themselves in the most orderly and obedient manner, and that whatever may have been their former errors, they now seem fully determined to do their utmost to merit His Majesty’s favour and forgiveness.”[15] The Trelawneys earned goodwill. They reassured Wentworth that they regretted the conflict in Jamaica and had only sought self-preservation.[16] Yet memories of the bloodhounds that had created terror and compelled their surrender had not faded. In September Wentworth heard them mention Spanish dogs “as objects of terror.” When he inquired further, they reassured him that they had “never suffered by or even seen them.” Preoccupied with his own agenda, Wentworth accepted their studied humility: “I rather think they are ashamed of being frightened by them, and that they would now be esteemed a ridiculous Scarecrow.”[17]

No one suggested re-enslaving the Maroons, although the hardships of a northern climate had not prevented African slavery in the Maritimes.[18] Slave advertisements in newspapers and wills showed the wide acceptance of the institution amongst the populace and the elite.[19] Britain also legally protected slavery in 1790, encouraging the importation not only of household utensils and farming implements but also of immigrants who owned slaves.[20] Most slaves toiled side by side with their owners on farms, shops, or the docks.[21] White settlers used slaves to clear stumps, cultivate fields, fell trees, and build homes and barns; slave women did domestic chores and minded white children. The fewer number of slaves in Nova Scotia did not blur the racial divide; as in the United States, deeply ingrained racial prejudices precluded black people’s chances of integrating into Nova Scotia’s civil society. Slaves, along with free blacks, received harsh indications of their servile place: public whippings for small offences were the most visible and painful reminders.[22]

Yet white Nova Scotians imagined themselves as a people apart. Criticism of slavery and the slave trade appeared in Nova Scotia’s magazines and newspapers. Anti-slavery debates in the House of Commons circulated widely. Long essays delineated the disposal of slaves in the West Indies in minute detail. Slave buyers, the essayists declared, eyed slaves in auctions and encircled slaves with two hands; others used several handkerchiefs or tied the slaves with ropes. When some slaves fled the scene in fear, they were “hunted down and retaken.” The essays condemned slave purchasers as bargaining for bodies with the “ferocity of brutes.”[23] Nova

Scotians portrayed West Indian slaves as worked to death, always hungry, and inhumanly punished by evil, power-hungry tyrants. In contrast, Nova Scotia appeared to them to be humane: the prevalence of black servitude and racism in its midst did not compare, supposedly, to the callousness in the Caribbean.

No slave code existed in British Nova Scotia during the 18th century. During the 1780s and 1790s, Nova Scotia’s courts, drawing support from slave runaways and voices of sympathetic whites, ruled against slaveholders. [24] An incipient anti-slavery movement in the 1780s, charted by immigrants such as the Scottish Presbyterian minister James McGregor, challenged the injustice of black enslavement and the prevalent thinking in the Maritimes moved in the direction of anti-slavery.[25] Although these sentiments did not lead to a large-scale evangelical movement, as they did in Britain, they affected the sensibilities of influential whites.[26] Legal opposition to slavery, of course, did not equate to social or political equality with blacks, and racism persisted long after slavery faded away by the late 1810s and early 1820s.[27] Still, Wentworth might have been more likely to liken the Maroons to free blacks than to slaves.

Yet, surprisingly, Wentworth distinguished the Maroons sharply from the black Loyalists.[28] In 1796, when the Maroons arrived, approximately 3,000 free blacks lived in the colony – but in scattered locations distant from Halifax. Disillusioned by racist treatment, unfair wages, and rocky soil, over 1,000 had left for Sierra Leone in 1792.[29]

The black Loyalists’ exile just four years before the Maroons’ arrival in Halifax naturally invited comparisons. Wentworth insisted that the two groups were absolutely distinct. The black Loyalists – recent ex-slaves “who lacked every idea of providing for themselves or having any property” – could not adjust to freedom.[30]

They suffered because they arrived with thousands of white Loyalists with whom they competed for lodging and place. And they struggled because local administrators lacked local knowledge in settling inhabitants.[31] Wentworth’s prejudices stood apparent when he wrote that British charity had encouraged black Loyalists’ “idleness and profusion.”[32] British handouts – and not the humiliating conditions they endured – had created dissatisfaction. Wentworth dismissed the black Loyalists as immoral and indolent but upheld the Maroons as a people ready for redemption. He would come to regard the Maroons, in effect, as “black Mi’kmaq.”[33] The Maroons’ military background, their physical strength, as much as their self-representation as a separate and independent people, likely led Wentworth to associate them with the Mi’kmaq.

Within weeks, Wentworth received permission to settle the Trelawneys permanently in Nova Scotia. The secretary of state, the Duke of Portland, sidestepped Major General George Walpole’s concerns about the injustice and illegality of the Maroons’ expulsion from Jamaica. He hedged. He sent news of imperial approval to settle the Maroons in Halifax “for the present.” Pragmatically, the duke encouraged their use in military works: “Consider whether some of the young men may not be applied usefully on the works now carrying on for completing the defences of the province.”[34] Wentworth, of course, had already put the duke’s recommendations into effect. Other details of Maroon settlement the duke left to Wentworth and the two accompanying Jamaican superintendents, William Dawes Quarrell and Alexander Ochterloney.

The question of Maroon settlement caused disagreement between Quarrell and Wentworth. Quarrell, a member of the Jamaican assembly, advised the dispersal of the Maroons to remote areas in Nova Scotia.[35] As Quarrell observed to the Jamaican agent in London nearly six months after the Maroons’ arrival in Nova Scotia, “nothing but dispersal and that pretty extensively promises a proper disposal of them.”[36] Quarrell proposed segregating them: a hundred should remain near Halifax, with a hundred sent to remote locations in Nova Scotia, a hundred sent to slave states in the United States, and a hundred each to Bermuda and the Bahama Islands. Quarrell also suggested dispersing the most “peevish and discontented” Maroons to a location most remote from Nova Scotia: Sierra Leone, the British colony in West Coast of Africa.[37]

Quarrell, like other white Jamaicans, blamed the war there on the Maroons’ sense of superiority and exclusivity. He echoed Jamaican Councilor, Bryan Edwards, who regretted that the 1739 treaty had kept the Maroons segregated from colonial society; it had encouraged “keeping them a distinct people,” and “introduced among them what the French call an ‘esprit de corps’.”[38] This sense of togetherness had allowed them to sustain resistance for eight grueling months. Quarrell hoped that the Maroons’ dispersal would lead to their incorporation with other inhabitants and weaken their sense of being a separate people. Ambitiously, he also hoped the Maroons would facilitate a trade relationship between Nova Scotia and Jamaica: the Trelawneys could cut timber and catch fish and ship both to the West Indies; in return, Jamaica would send its produce to Nova Scotia.[39]

Yet Wentworth decided against dispersion. He disregarded Quarrell as having Jamaican prejudices and saw himself as managing and directing the Maroons’ settlement.[40] Wentworth took advantage of Quarrell’s confinement to bed in late July and early August by violent attacks of fever.[41] Within two months of their arrival, using the money supplied by Jamaica, Wentworth moved the entire community of Trelawneys to Preston, across the harbor from Halifax and some six miles to the northeast. As Wentworth reported to the Earl of Balcarres: “These people are settled in a little village near the town: this was a happy and cheap purchase as it furnished houses for them which could not possibly have been built in time for this season.”[42]

Preston, previously a settlement of black Loyalists, offered multiple conveniences. It would serve as adequate preparation for farming; here, the Maroons, as tenants, would acquire a “knowledge of agriculture and discover inclinations and exertions to support themselves.”[43] Maroon men would sell the fruits of their labour – potatoes and turnips – along with firewood to the nearby marketplace in Halifax.[44] The soldiers stationed in Halifax would benefit from much-needed provisions, and the settlers could utilize surfeit Maroon labour to build fences and construct homes. Most of all, the Trelawneys would live within Wentworth’s jurisdiction but “separate from the [white] inhabitants.”[45] Quarrell, when he got over his sickness, witnessed a fait accompli.

Wentworth’s vision for keeping the Maroons together – in a single site – drew from his association of the Maroons with the Mi’kmaq.[46] The confusion about the Maroons’ origins crossed the Atlantic. During the Maroon war, London’s newspapers expressed puzzlement about the Maroons’ origins, reflecting muddled thinking on Aboriginal people in the growing empire. Were the rebels more similar to the Mi’kmaq or Africans, or were they something in between?[47] Another report from March 1796 described them as “the remains of the aborigines and of the Spanish and other negroes.”[48] In Wentworth’s first estimation, the Maroons stood closer to the Mi’kmaq and hence merited the same paternalistic benevolence. Like others influenced by romantic ideals of colonization, Wentworth regarded Aboriginal people as noble savages: a community to be admired for their endurance, pitied for their sufferings, and pacified through gift giving.[49] In 1796, he created a similar fantasy of savage innocence around the Trelawneys: they could transform into law-abiding farmers if properly civilized and Christianized.

Wentworth’s acquaintance with the Mi’kmaq was longstanding.[50] He first encountered the community when he arrived in the colony after rebel victory in the War of American Independence. He was one of approximately 30,000 white Loyalists who entered Nova Scotia to escape the punishment of the victorious rebels to the south.[51] Wentworth sought a replacement career after his loss of the governorship of New Hampshire.[52] In 1783, at the age of 46, he secured an appointment as surveyor general of Nova Scotia. He undoubtedly received help from the Mi’kmaq as he traveled west to east, reserving regions with white pine trees suitable for masts in British ships.[53] Holding his post as surveyor general for nearly a decade, Wentworth also witnessed the constraints on Mi’kmaw ways. The massive Loyalist immigration disrupted the Aboriginal-imperial balance that had sustained relations in the colony for decades. Previous British-sponsored settlements by Germans, Highland Scots, and New England planters had remained confined to the coastal areas and to farms along the Bay of Fundy.[54] But the scale of Loyalist immigration as much as Loyalist demands touched every region in Nova Scotia and would compel the Mi’kmaq to transform their way of using the land.[55]

The Mi’kmaq had co-existed with Europeans for almost 200 years.[56] Before the British takeover of the region in 1710, French settlers, few in number, had lived in close proximity to the Mi’kmaq: French missionaries converted many to Catholicism and French imperial officials solidified alliances with the Mi’kmaq through annual presents of arms, ammunitions, food, and clothing.[57] The British recognized the political and religious ties between their French enemy and their inherited Aboriginal subjects. Multiple treaties signed between 1725-1726 and 1778-1779 indicate British acknowledgement of the Mi’kmaw position; diplomatic ties with the Mi’kmaq were viewed as essential.[58] However, the treaties hardly guaranteed Mi’kmaw submission to the British government. During the war with France from 1744 to 1748, the Mi’kmaq sided with the French and against the British; they also defended Louisbourg in 1758.[59] In 1783, after more than seven decades of British jurisdiction over most of the region, a Hessian soldier observed the Aboriginal people’s casual observance of Catholic ritual: on hearing bells from the church, they crossed themselves and said, “Au nom de Dieu, du pere, du fils, et du saint esprit.”[60] The close ties between the Mi’kmaq and the French, combined with a scarcity of Protestant settlers and soldiers, long precluded British domination over the area.

The process of Mi’kmaw dispossession began with the sudden arrival of thousands of American Loyalists.[61] Earlier treaties did not protect the Mi’kmaq from this massive demographic shift. Endemic respiratory ailments and outbreaks of typhus and smallpox swept the region.[62] Moreover, the displaced Loyalists saw themselves as entitled to rewards for their sacrifices on behalf of the empire. The Loyalists, many of whom had traveled all the way to the Maritimes from the southern colonies of Georgia and South Carolina, viewed the Aboriginal nations who “wandered” across the countryside as vagrants and as inferior. The Mi’kmaw peripatetic life, which the immigrants exploited, became intolerable after Aboriginal land became British property. In one instance, a leading Loyalist proposed regulations so that “every Indian shall be obliged to Stay att his Respective place of River and Not be Running from one place too an Other.” To secure against Mi’kmaw mobility, some advocated that they carry a pass if outside of an allotted area.[63]

By 1796 – when the Maroons arrived in Nova Scotia – the numbers and the ambitions of the American settlers had begun to overwhelm the Mi’kmaw way of life. The Loyalist immigrants did not want Mi’kmaw neighbours. As one settler, Edward Barron, put it: “I do not mean to have an Indian Town at my Elbow.”[64] As never

before, the Loyalists’ takeover of Mi’kmaw grounds created displacement and led to impoverishment. As Loyalist settlers set fires to clear land, they destroyed the slow-growing moss and thereby destroyed the game that fed on it. Eager to settle in their new homes, the Loyalists grabbed land along rivers for agriculture, for the building of sawmills, and for fishing.[65] As wildlife and fish became less plentiful, the customary Mi’kmaw means of earning a livelihood became much more difficult to sustain.[66] When the Office of Superintendent of Indian Affairs lapsed in 1784, no one protected land for Mi’kmaw use or prevented the newcomers’ unfettered claims to the land.[67]

Wentworth undeniably had some sympathy for the distress the Aboriginal inhabitants endured with the massive Loyalist influx. The “poor savages” had suffered because the extension of roads and settlements had “driven off wild beasts” and deprived them of hunting.[68] They had lost their means of subsistence by the “augmenting settlements of His Majesty’s subjects.” Only “a royal and just charity” would benefit them: they needed the aid of “potatoes, meal, fish, bread and clothing” for survival.[69] Indeed, with continuous subsidies, Wentworth hoped that the Mi’kmaq “in a very few years” would support themselves. In December 1796 he noted that by his criteria the Mi’kmaq had already improved: they wore English clothes and began to understand the meaning of “property.”[70] He saw himself as their protective and kindly patriarch.

Wentworth had long pitied Aboriginal societies’ losses in the wake of white colonization. His paternalistic compassion for Native Peoples grew out of his years in New Hampshire. In 1770, he expressed his sentiments: “I most sincerely pity these poor people and shall heartily rejoice to have them under my protection, to have an opportunity of rendering them the benevolence due to Humanity, which I fear has been too much neglected toward Indians in general wherever Europeans have come.”[71] Other Loyalists shared his view. In 1783, when he made the Maritimes his new home, Jonathan Odell envisioned living with a transformed Aboriginal group, men involved in cultivation and farming and not hunting. He equated hunting with diversion and leisure, not labour. Odell put the matter succinctly: “If they [Indians] are ready to learn, we are willing to teach them . . . all the methods of agriculture by which an unfailing Subsistence is secured to all civilized and industrious Planters.”[72] But the Mi’kmaq resisted becoming a supervised society.

In the wake of the Loyalist migration, Mi’kmaw families stubbornly held on to customary sites with spiritual and cultural histories.[73] Their resilient cultural framework enabled them to adapt to a mixed economy, combining older practices of seasonal migration with wage work. Despite suffering material deprivation and political marginalization, they did not rush to become sedentary farmers visualized by a faraway imperial government. They preserved what white settlers called “roving practices” and sought to participate in economic activities that enabled them to survive while maintaining their rounds of hunting, fishing, and gathering. Some Mi’kmaq adopted British ways by growing potatoes, and keeping pigs, cows, and sheep.[74]

The Atlantic-wide idealization of the farmer impacted Nova Scotia’s vision for both the Mi’kmaq and the Maroons. In 1790, the Nova Scotia Magazine painted a glowing portrait of the small-scale self-sustaining farmer: “No class of men is more useful or respectable in society – none more independent or happier.”[75] The essayist, Columella, proclaimed: “I glory in the name of the farmer.” By meeting the subsistence needs of the whole community, farmers supported expansion in the realm of commerce. Only with the assistance of the farmer’s plough could British ships sail across the globe. In 1796, planter Bryan Edwards’s hopes for Maroon colonization in Nova Scotia followed this thinking. He anticipated that the Maroons’ removal from a “former wild and savage way of life” wou ld produce a new people: a “useful body of yeomanry.”[76] Wentworth echoed Edwards. In time, he believed, both the Mi’kmaq and the Maroons would embrace to the rhythms of agricultural work.

Wentworth’s repeated requests for funds for the Mi’kmaq wearied the imperial and local government, especially when he exceeded the 200 pounds sent annually.[77] If white settlers struggled for subsistence, why should the Aboriginal residents be given a handout? Wentworth assured the home government that the expense for the Mi’kmaq would go down after the restoration of peace. He only used aid, he emphasized, as a temporary quieting tactic. Yet, in 1798, when the French threat had subsided, he continued to lament the “indigent and distressful situation” of the Mi’kmaq. Their native country lay destroyed though “progressive occupancy, culture and improvement.”[78] But Nova Scotia’s assembly had had enough. Its members viewed the Mi’kmaq as a nuisance. Despite Wentworth’s opposition, it determined to cut all aid; the less civilized could support themselves by hunting or fishing whereas “civilized” Aboriginal neighbors could procure a living by cultivating land. Continuing charity only encouraged “indolence and supineness.” The vast majority of the members of the assembly believed that distress proceeded from their “unwillingness to labor.”[79] By 1799, the Nova Scotian assembly had ruled that the Mi’kmaq merited no different treatment than transient paupers.[80] They would be treated as refugees in their own land.

Wentworth could not overrule the determined imperial and local objections to supporting the Mi’kmaq. However, in 1796, Jamaican funds allowed Wentworth to experiment with settling the Maroons and add his signature to the age of reform. From the first, he did not view the Maroons as dangerous to Nova Scotia. He never thought to shackle or imprison the Maroon families; he viewed them as victims of Jamaican slaveholders’ paranoia just as he viewed the Mi’kmaq as victims of European conquest. As zealous as the evangelical William Wilberforce, Wentworth hoped to bring the Trelawneys under his wing. The Catholic Mi’kmaq would not regard him as their savior, but he could perchance claim a paternalistic role with the Maroons. Wilberforce had upbraided Jamaican slave masters for the war: if acquainted properly with the “principles, habits and manners of the people who surrounded them,” the Maroons would “neither have been ignorant or cruel.”[81] The slaveowners, too ready to utilize the branding iron or the lash, could not become custodians of free blacks. Like Wilberforce, Wentworth blamed the Maroon war on white Jamaicans who had, even after 140 years with them, neglected to school them in Christianity or English laws, customs, and civilization. The Maroons had to remain in one group; dispersal would require a Christian teacher for every family and Jamaica would have to incur heavier expenses.[82]

Wentworth imagined a utopia of peaceful coexistence between whites and Maroons sealed by Anglican teachings. In contrast with his attitude towards the black Loyalists, he did not dismiss the Maroons as unredeemable and lowly.[83] He saw his chance to transform them into a godly community of grateful farmers. Wentworth’s words demonstrated his high esteem for Maroon families. “They are remarkably clean in their persons, houses, cloathing and utensils, and very healthy,” he noted. They worked harder than “an equal number of more enlightened white people from any part of Europe or America.”[84] And, according to Wentworth, they showed deep attachment to their wives and children.[85] He also praised their potential as good colonists and thought that the first steps in realizing the Maroons as a black peasantry entailed instruction in farming and religion.[86] What Odell had envisioned for the Maliseet, Wentworth conceived for the Maroons: to incorporate them as a farming community. Christian teachings were also essential. Wentworth would not have agreed to settle the “six hundred pagans” in Nova Scotia “without a faithful establishment for their instruction in the Christian religion and in reading and writing the English language.” Only through these means could “any people be reclaimed and fitted for living in a British colony.”[87]

Thus, Christianity would domesticate the Maroons. The church would change them from the “Maroons of war and hunting for those of peace and patient industry”; the Maroons would soon lose the “self-importance” derived from their migratory customs.[88] Within a month of the Maroons’ arrival, Wentworth noted that “it will be of the most serious importance, both civil and religiously considered, to instruct these poor people in the Christian religion and to teach their children to read and write and common cyphering for which I find them both capable and much disposed.”[89] Successful colonization required conversion as a rite of passage, and this could only happen in a single site.

Not only the route to farming but also the path to loyalty lay with Christian teachings. In the long run, Wentworth felt that dispersion would be more costly and conversion cheaper for the empire. Like the bishop of Nova Scotia, Charles Inglis, Wentworth linked faith in the Church of England with attachment to the empire.[90] Just as white youth imbued with the principles of loyalty to their king and country would be more likely to remain loyal to Britain – and much less likely to emigrate south for greater prosperity in the United States – Maroon families would establish attachments to their land and the mother country though exposure to the Church. Christian teachings would “disseminate piety, morality and loyalty among them.”[91] The Maroons would resist becoming “dreadful instruments in the hands of designing men.” They would refuse to side with the French enemy in times of crisis.[92]

The Maroons’ military experience presented no danger.[93] It counted as bonus. Wentworth likened the martial experience of Maroons to that of the Mi’kmaq. In September 1796, when he feared an attack against Halifax from a French squadron, Wentworth contemplated assistance from both groups.[94] In October, he exulted that the Maroons would be “decidedly good men against any enemy.”[95] He compared the Maroons to the Mi’kmaq because both could maneuver skillfully in hilly terrain. The men had experience in guerilla warfare against European armies and could assist British soldiers. British riflemen would supervise “Maroons or Indians in the wood or difficult rocky country.”[96] One hundred and fifty Aboriginal men could be “very serviceable” to repel an invasion.[97] An equal number of Maroon men would serve the same role. Wentworth imagined that each group would serve as a “useful and faithful corps” in case of invasion.[98] And, of course, Maroon soldiers, like Aboriginal soldiers enlisted to fight in British armies for decades, were cheap. They would receive compensation in the form of presents and provisions and not pay or pension. They would not permanently burden the resources of the imperial government.

Yet the same characteristics that made the Maroons and Mi’kmaq ideal allies also made them potentially dangerous enemies. Men with talents suited to frontier warfare could terrify adversaries but also might prove harder to discipline and control. This worry existed especially with respect to the Catholic Mi’kmaq. Too few to pose a threat on their own, the Mi’kmaq, allied with the French, could cause havoc. In 1793, during Britain’s involvement in the French Revolutionary Wars, the Indian superintendent, George Henry Monk, resumed office.[99] Wentworth instructed Monk to issue provisions to those who appeared most wretched or who showed proper humility, and to look for signs of “democratic French practices among the savages.”[100] Wentworth called the Mi’kmaq a “restless savage people” who would work to Nova Scotia’s advantage only if supported by being “fed and lightly clothed.”[101] But Wentworth stood ready to exploit their attachment to their families to ensure their allegiance in times of war. Holding wives and children captive would serve as “pledges for their fidelity.[”102] At least temporarily, Maroon and Mi’kmaw men would be induced to side with British interests.[103]

Just two months after their arrival, Wentworth executed his Christian vision for the Maroons. He appointed Reverend Benjamin Gerrish Gray to minister them.[104] Services would begin on the second Sunday in October.[105] The Maroons, he believed, would be “more easily reformed” than an “equal number of more enlightened white people from any part of Europe or America.”[106] At the same time, he authorized a Maroon school and appointed 59-year-old fellow Loyalist, Theophilus Chamberlain, as teacher.[107] A member of the Society for Promoting Agriculture in Nova Scotia, Chamberlain had long explored ways to stabilize Nova Scotia: he studied methods for preparing hemp and making oil-compost, and for choosing the best seeds for wheat. He would now strategize on how best to domesticate the Maroons. As a former teacher to “Indians in the wilderness of America,” Chamberlain met what Wentworth saw as the necessary qualifications.[108]

Wentworth’s vision for fitting the Maroons for British Nova Scotia followed earlier schemes for converting Aboriginal people.[109] He envisioned transforming the manners and the morals of the Maroons to make them more conformable with English occupations, burial practices and, most of all, marriages. The Trelawneys should abandon hunting wild hogs and pigeons and settle into an agricultural mode of life. They should stop “festive excesses” upon internment and desist from burying their dead near their dwellings. The men should renounce polygamy and accept the rites of a Christian marriage. The steady inculcation of Christian principles would “accomplish a reformation on their head and affect the manners of the rising generation.” The old Maroons would carry their customs to the grave, and the newer generation would adopt English ways.[110]

Surviving handwritten copybooks hint at Wentworth’s core vision for the Maroons.[111] Maroon boys copied rules of conduct, such as “Good Manners Always Procure Respect.” They recited the catechism, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments perfectly. Wentworth described one 14-year old, John Tharpe, who learned to write in eight months. Another boy, John Morgans, 12 years of age, possessed “traits of the most wonderful genius and avidity for instruction.” In his correspondence with the Duke of Portland, Wentworth enclosed their copied hymns as “some specimens of progress.”[112]

Wentworth knew, of course, the Maroons as people of African and not Aboriginal ancestry. Multiple times, he inquired if Nova Scotia could receive an additional allowance for the Maroons from funds destined “for the civilization of negroes.”[113]

Still, he held the Trelawneys as a people apart. He did not wish Nova Scotia to lose the Maroons, whom he saw as inherently more malleable than the black Loyalists. He viewed his charity towards the Maroons – as with the Mi’kmaq – as nurturing allegiance. His aims would succeed because he gave personal attention to the distressed people. He met the Mi’kmaq individually, “examined their respective distresses, instructed them in their loyalty, and receive engagements of their fidelity and ready appearance.”[114] Under his direct supervision, the Maroons too would become useful settlers. They came with funds, they would be converted, and they would stay. He would not spoil them. He visited the Preston Maroons regularly and did his utmost to “establish their happiness.”[115]

Wentworth downplayed the expressions of racial prejudice in the Maritimes. As slavery moved towards a slow “extinguishment,” he noted optimistically that “distinctions actually painful to these people are gradually dying away.”[116] His scheme for the Maroon settlement would further this goal and draw the approbation of abolitionists. In a short time, they will be “so much more happy than they ever were, that their condition will satisfy Mr. [William] Wilberforce or any other reasonable philanthropic patron of the black race.”[117] Here, Wentworth sought praise from British eyes monitoring his experiment. He went so far as to assure the Duke of Portland that the Maroons could not “be prevailed on by any persuasion to return to Jamaica.”[118] The duke stood taken aback: Wentworth’s reports exceeded his every expectation.[119]

But Wentworth’s confidence in the pacification of the Trelawneys came too soon. One Jamaican Councilor, Bryan Edwards, had suspected the Maroons’ resistance to Christian teachings and incorporation into farming society. As Edwards would later write in 1801, the “conversion of savage men from a life of barbarity to the knowledge and practice of Christianity, is a work of much greater difficulty than many pious and excellent persons in Great Britain seem fondly to imagine.”[120] Edwards’s observation unwittingly acknowledged the independence and pride of the Trelawneys. An assimilated and grateful group of Christianized Trelawneys did not materialize.[121] Jamaican funds and Wentworth’s Christian zeal could not compel the exiles to forsake dreams of living on their own terms.

Starting in 1797, with the help of anti-slavery colonists and soldiers, the Maroons petitioned the imperial government to relocate them to a warmer climate.[122] In an

age of anti-slavery, the Maroons’ circumstances in Nova Scotia caught the ears of British evangelical reformers and, by 1800, the Maroons, denied a return to Jamaica, embarked for an uncertain future in Sierra Leone.[123] Imperial humanitarians had long regarded the deportation of the Maroons from Jamaica to Nova Scotia as a flagrant injustice; they supposed that the cold in Nova Scotia was unfit for black bodies and the tropical climate of Sierra Leone would better suit them. Like free blacks who migrated to Sierra Leone in 1787 and 1792, the Maroons would help extend British claims over the struggling settlement in Sierra Leone.

The Mi’kmaq found no comparable supporters in Nova Scotia or elsewhere in the empire in the 1790s. The British favored the allegiance of white Loyalist families over the friendship of the Mi’kmaq. As American Loyalists encroached on the best lands in Nova Scotia, the Mi’kmaq gradually found themselves with fewer resources and supporters. Imperial administrators and humanitarians, when they considered the Mi’kmaq at all, viewed them as an annoying expense, to be watched and pacified during times of war with France, and otherwise dismissed as a nuisance; promises made to the Mi’kmaq in earlier treaties appeared extravagant and breakable. It would be white settlers who would build and protect British Nova Scotia.

After 1815, when an outside invasion from France or the United States became unlikely, the Mi’kmaq lost more ground. They endured insults from white newcomers who felt entitled to Mi’kmaw land, and who viewed the dispossession of the Mi’kmaq as a logical outcome of white settlement. In 1819, Walter Bromley cited one disturbing instance of settlers’ readiness to use violence against Mi’kmaw families. In Chedabucto Bay where the Mi’kmaq had long fished, white people “entered their camps, defiled their women, abused and beat the men, and in fact, conducted themselves in such a manner as to prevent the possibility of their remaining any longer.”[124] While the Maroons left Nova Scotia to become black colonizers in Sierra Leone, the Mi’kmaq endured appalling violence as white colonizers engulfed their world and shattered the friendship that had persisted between the Mi’kmaq and the British imperial state for decades.

Drawing attention to the Maroons helps bring Aboriginal and African Nova Scotian history into conversation with one another. Like the Mi’kmaq, Nova Scotia’s blacks – ex-slaves and Loyalists – confronted, in place of slavery, a pervasive racism.[125] Intolerance and openly segregationist policies greeted the 2,000 black refugees who arrived in the Maritimes at the end of the War of 1812. They were placed on the worst land and given the most menial work. In 1815, the government attempted to block further black migration; they shrewdly adopted the environmental rhetoric of an earlier era and maintained that the cold was unsuited to the black constitution. In 1834, two decades later, Nova Scotia tried to prohibit the landing of liberated slaves from the Caribbean. Like the Mi’kmaq, free blacks symbolized nuisance and disorder; the former should be pushed down and latter kept out of the Maritimes.[126] In place of slavery, racism and poverty remained.[127] An exclusive and narrow focus on the political evil of slavery enabled do-good reformers to ignore the economic deprivations and racial assumptions that kept non-white groups unequal – and unfree.