Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Black Loyalists

Episode Date: February 27, 2019

The Black Loyalists were a group of Colonial slaves who fought for their freedom alongside the British. Learn all about this nearly forgotten group in today's Short Stuff.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, ho there. Hi again, this is Josh, there's Chuck, there's Jerry. You put us together, you give us like a 12 minute time limit,

maybe less, it's short stuff. The podcast that's a short version of stuff you should know, which is also a podcast, but it's a longer version of short stuff, I guess you could say. That's right, and as per tradition, you started off the show by saying, hey there, ho there. Right. You wanna talk about black loyalists?

I do, man, so you pick this one, hats off to you, try a cornered hat with a big old Yankee Doodle feather off to you, because I'd never heard anything about this, and I majored in history, colonial history, and I didn't even pick up on this one. Yeah, so this is, we did a regular long form episode for Black History Month on Tuskegee Airmen, and now we're doing a shorty version

for the black loyalists for Black History Month, and it goes a little something like this, a one and a two. So the black loyalists, Chuck, Yes. are in a very much overlooked group in American history, and they were African-Americans, or I guess African slaves who lived in the colonies, some of whom were free too,

but mostly were slaves that ended up fighting for Great Britain in the American Revolutionary War. Yeah, so it's important to kind of set the stage here, what's going on in 1776. African slaves were all over the place, and well, not all over the place, but basically east of the Mississippi River at this point, or am I wrong about that?

No, no, you're right, I was just gonna support you, like a lot of people think, well, yes, slavery was just Southern, no, I mean, in the colonies, slavery was everywhere, and slaves made up 20% of the population. In some states, they were more concentrated than in other states, and I think they might have never been

in Rhode Island or Pennsylvania, I'm not sure, but you could find states in the North as well as the South at the time. For sure, because the South was, a lot of the commerce was based on the plantation model, obviously a lot more slaves in the South to the tune of like 40% in Virginia, South Carolina, was 60% slaves, but even up in Boston,

slaves made up 20% of the population. So before the War for Independence even started, there was an effort by the British to get American slaves on their side and basically say, hey, be a loyalist and take up arms against your plantation owner, and we will grant you freedom. Yep, not only are we gonna grant you freedom,

we're gonna give you some land after we kick the rebels' butts. Yeah, there was a governor, the British royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, said this was sort of the first, I guess the first emancipation proclamation where he said, you know, you guys can be free, take up arms against your oppressors,

because they were looking for people to fight. Like every time, this happened a couple of times, it's because they needed men to fight on their side. It wasn't, I mean, I wish it was just some altruistic move, but it was like we need feet on the ground with guns. Right, that first proclamation by Dunmore was, I guess, proclaimed before the Declaration of Independence was ever signed.

This is while- Yes, it's 75. Yeah, this is while the rebellion is just starting up and it's kind of isolated and sporadic, and there was an armed rebellion in Virginia that Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, was trying to put down. And so that's why he said, you come, fight for us,

rise up against your plantation owners and the, what were the guys who, like the overseers, you rise up against these guys, the rebels, we will give you your freedom. And I mean, at this point, it's not even clear that the colonies are going to form an armed, organized revolt like the Revolutionary War. So it just seemed like this was a rebellion,

a local rebellion that needed putting down. Yeah, and they even, I believe between about 800 and 2000 slaves and servants, indentured servants, fled their plantations, took up arms. There was one regiment named Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment, which had on their uniform the insignia Liberty to Slaves. Yeah. It's pretty cool.

And this was, like I said, the first big mass at emancipation close to 100 years before Abraham Lincoln signed the official emancipation proclamation. Yeah, and what was cool about it was these, the slaves who took up the British offer were not just like fighting for their own freedom, they were fighting to free the slaves who were left behind.

It was really, it was pretty cool. I had not heard about the Ethiopian Regiment before, but as the American Revolution goes into full swing, and by, I think 1779, when the tide is turning against the British, the British released a second emancipation proclamation and said, hey, if you just leave and come over to British held territory, you'll be free.

You don't even have to fight. Yeah, this was a cool idea because this basically was like, they think they can get more people to do that if they don't think they have to fight. And what it does is, is it leaks all these workers from the plantations and then in order to guard their plantations now, the plantation owners had to use people

that would have been fighting in the war to stay at home and guard that plantation. So it was known as the economic warfare basically. Right, which is pretty smart. And for the African slaves who took them up on their offer, there was win-win for them. So I think a total of 12,000 African descended slaves fought for the British during the Revolutionary War.

And at the end of the war, which the American colonies won, there was a problem because I mean, it wasn't like the Brits were like, all right, fine, we're going home. There was a negotiated treaty. Like there was an end to hostilities. There was like a formal war.

And in formal wars, things come up, things happen in war that need to be settled after the war. One of the main points of contention was the status of the African slaves who had defected or just gone over to the British side and said, hey, we're here to fight. What was to be done with them? And the Brits could have very easily been like,

ha ha, suckers, we're not gonna keep our word on any of this, but they didn't do that. They didn't keep their word on all of it, but they kept their word on some of it. And let's just take a quick break, Chuck, and we'll come back and fill everybody in on the rest of the details. ["The Nineties Call David Lasher and Christine Taylor"]

On the podcast, Hey Dude, The Nineties, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the nineties.

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All right, so when we left, the war is over. George Washington is negotiated to have, quote, unquote, US property returned, which included these enslaved Africans. And on the other side, you have a commander-in-chief named Guy Carlton who said, well, you know, we gave our word and negotiated these certificates of freedom for these loyalists.

But here's what we're going to do, everyone. We think you need to leave the country. And we think you should go to Nova Scotia, which is a province in Canada that we rule. And I'm sure they were like, Nova Scotia? This is not what I signed up for. But they went there anyway. And in the 18th century, in the late 18th century,

40,000 loyalists, both white and black, went to Nova Scotia, including more than 1,200 slaves of these white loyalists. And all of a sudden, Nova Scotia was like, we don't have resources for all these people. That was called Nova Scarcity at the time, which I'm guessing you knew. Yes.

So this is kind of a big problem, Chuck, because the population of Nova Scotia at the time was what, like maybe 12 or something, 13,000 people. And all of a sudden, 40,000 showed up. Yeah. And when that happens, just common economics means that you have a really, really big labor supply and probably not very, not nearly enough demand.

And so when that happens, people start to fight with one another. Yeah. And like you would imagine, even in Nova Scotia, these new arrivals were kind of kicked to the back of the line and things got tense. Finally, at one point, there was a black preacher named David George, baptized a white woman,

and that sparked what people basically say is the first race riot in North America in 1784. Yeah, the Shelburne riot, the whites showed up and they beat David George pretty bad. They went through the Shelburne settlement, which is largely African freed slaves and literally pulled their houses over, just trashed the place.

And this riot went on for months. And it was, it sounds pretty familiar. It's you're selling your labor for too cheap and stealing our jobs. So we're going to take all of our angst out on you. So the riot was finally put down when troops came in from Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia and restored order.

But by this point, the black loyalists who had been promised not just freedom, but remember land and are now ending up in Nova Scotia where things are really, really tense, they're like, we've got to get the crown to do something about this. So they send a guy named Thomas Peters to go petition the crown in London

or parliament, at least one of them and say, hey, can we get our land now? We did everything we were asked of. And he didn't get anywhere with the crown at least. No, they said, well, we've got another idea. We've got this area in West Africa and Sierra Leone. And what we think is a good idea is to make this like a sanctuary for you folks.

And we can send you over there and it'll be great. You're going to love it. The best place for freed slaves to be back in Africa, it became basically in 1792 when 15 ships sailed from Halifax Harbor, the very first voyage of the back to Africa movement. And there were some that stayed back in Nova Scotia and they settled a place called Birch Town

named after Samuel Birch. But a lot of them left and went to Sierra Leone. And that was sort of the end dish of that story. The cool thing is, is you can still trace, there are 20,000 black people living in Nova Scotia today. And you can trace a lot of those back to these black loyalists. Yeah, there's one guy that shows up in this article

named Jason Farmer. He's a ninth generation descendant of a black loyalist named Jupiter Farmer. And Jupiter married a woman named Venus, if you can believe that. And his family's been living in Birch Town for about 230 years. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

He works at the Black Loyalist Heritage Center and historical site. And he said a lot of people in Nova Scotia, even descendants don't even realize that this is their history. And so when I tell the story, he said it's pretty powerful stuff. Yeah.

Well, good pick, Chuck. I'm glad we did this one. Yeah. If you wanna know more about black loyalists, go check it out on the internet and send us an email in the meantime at stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. I'll see you in the next one.