Black Loyalists: The Other Side of the 1783 Migration
Canadian genealogy already tells the story of the Loyalist migration of 1783, but that story looks very different depending on which Loyalists you're following. Alongside the roughly 40,000 to 50,000 white Loyalists who resettled in British North America after the American Revolution, between 3,000 and 3,500 Black Loyalists made the same journey, and their experience once they arrived was fundamentally different.
Most Black Loyalists had been enslaved in the Thirteen Colonies before the war and had escaped to British lines in exchange for a promise of freedom. British authorities largely honoured that promise, even under pressure to return them as “property” under the terms that ended the war. As the last British-held port, New York, was evacuated in 1783, British officials compiled a detailed list of every Black person leaving the city: their name, age, description, and former enslaver, alongside a certificate confirming their free status. That list, known as the Book of Negroes, survives today as one of the richest genealogical resources for early Black Canadian history, since it records surnames and personal details for a population that eighteenth-century record-keeping otherwise almost entirely ignored.
Roughly 3,000 Black Loyalists sailed to Nova Scotia between April and November of 1783. About half settled at Birchtown, near Shelburne, which briefly became the largest free Black settlement anywhere outside Africa. The rest settled in communities including Annapolis Royal, Digby, Preston, and Guysborough, place names that still anchor Black Nova Scotian communities today.
The land and provisions Black Loyalists had been promised in exchange for their wartime service were, in practice, delivered far more slowly and far less generously than what white Loyalists received. Many waited years for land grants that never matched what they'd been assured and were left to work as indentured or low-paid labour for white neighbours in the meantime. Racial hostility escalated into open violence in 1784, when white residents attacked Black homes and property in what's now known as the Shelburne race riots, one of the earliest documented race riots in North American history.
Frustrated by broken promises and ongoing discrimination, roughly 1,200 Black Loyalists chose to leave Nova Scotia altogether in 1792, sailing to West Africa to found the colony of Freetown, in what's now Sierra Leone. Their descendants form part of the Sierra Leone Creole population today, meaning the genealogical thread that starts with the Book of Negroes in 1783 doesn't necessarily end in Canada at all, but may lead onward to West Africa a decade later.
The Book of Negroes itself, along with the Birchtown muster rolls (created to distribute rations and therefore organized by household, listing spouses and children), Nova Scotia land grant records, and parish registers from Black Loyalist settlements, together form a genuinely usable research trail. If your family history touches early Black Nova Scotia, this migration, arriving the same year and for related reasons as the white Loyalist migration, but living through a very different aftermath, is very likely where it begins.
