This Unfriendly Soil: The Loyalist Experience in Nova Scotia, 1783-1791

Nora D.S. Robins is co-ordinator of Internal Collections at the
University of Calgary Libraries.

The arrival in Nova Scotia of over 16,000 Loyalists changed the demographic, economic, and political face of the colony. Neil MacKinnon’s detailed account of the immigrants answers a number of questions: how many and who they were; how they came and how they settled; the reaction of Nova Scotia’s “old” inhabitants; the loyalist impact upon the colony’s institutions; and the manner in which the new circumstances and the passage of time changed the refugees themselves.

The Loyalists have been narrowly defined as those Americans who remained true to the British crown and, having lost their cause, were forced to emigrate to the colonies or return to England. MacKinnon prefers a broader definition, and sees the Loyalists as refugees who, in characteristics, background, and motivation, were a mixed multitude. The refugees included those who had not found war a hardship and profited by it, and those who lost everything; British regulars disbanded in Nova Scotia, foreign troops, and provincials with their dependents; Blacks (slave and free); and those among the lower classes who regarded provisions and land in Nova Scotia as better than their lot in New York. MacKinnon certainly puts paid to any notion that the Loyalists were all Tory gentlefolk. The Loyalists were, in fact, a varied and divergent group of people who had little in common with each other apart from their abrupt presence in Nova Scotia, and their fragile bond of loyalty to the British Crown.

MacKinnon’s work is a scholarly study that is an important addition to the growing body of contemporary research on the Loyalists. It is based on a thorough analysis of primary sources (public documents, newspapers, private papers). He found the Musters of 1784 and 1785 to be invaluable sources of information. Extensive notes fully document sources and obviate, at least in the opinion of the author, the need for a separate bibliography.

The lack of maps and thus the inability easily to pinpoint such settlements as Shelburne and Port Roseway is frustrating.

The reader in search of a sense of the individuals involved, of the human element, may want to read C. Moore’s The Loyalists (Macmillan, 1984).

Neil MacKinnon is a member of the Department of History, St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia.