Читать книгу Planters, Paupers, and Pioneers - Lucille H. Campey - Страница 15
ОглавлениеNova Scotia’s English Settlers: Two Types of English
There is a continual passing and returning of people from the western shore of this province [Nova Scotia] to New England, from whence these people originally emigrated and still have property and family connections, — but I think the balance of population retained, is in favour of this province. 1
LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR JOHN Wentworth was relieved to note that the Nova Scotia of 1806 still retained a sizable portion of the New England population that had been acquired forty-five years earlier when around eight thousand Planters came to the province. As the descendents of English immigrants who had settled in New England, they were Americans of English ancestry, although in most cases their Englishness was very distant.
When two Yorkshire farmers, John Robinson and Thomas Rispin, first met Nova Scotia’s New Englanders they deplored their farming methods: “Nothing can be said in favour of the inhabitants as to their management in farming. They neither discover judgment or industry.” To Robinson and Rispin they were “lazy, indolent people.” 2 There was no sense of a shared English kinship here! This is hardly surprising since, although they spoke the same language, the New England and Yorkshire settlers had little in common. They had different backgrounds, values, religions, mannerisms, work ethics, and traditions. Although they and their descendents would both use the label of “English” to describe their ethnic origins, they were effectively two types of English. Those like Robinson and Rispin who came to the province directly from Yorkshire and other parts of England were recent English, while those who came in the large-scale migrations from the United States were Americans with distant English roots.
Immigrants began arriving directly from England, from the mideighteenth century, but their number was dwarfed by the large influx from Scotland that followed. The ongoing wars between Britain and France from the 1790s to 1815 had been obvious disincentives to emigration, although a significant number left the Highlands and Islands of Scotland for various parts of British North America during this time, despite the obvious risks.3 The economic depression that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 stimulated a great rise in emigration from Britain, but, because of gaps and ambiguities in shipping and customs records, it is impossible to state precisely how many British people permanently established themselves in Nova Scotia.4 The recorded data reveals that at least 39,243 British immigrants arrived between 1815 and 1838, of whom only 2,120 (5 percent) were English, the majority being either Scottish or Irish in origin.5 However, the actual number of British arrivals may have been a great deal higher.6
Customs records show that nine hundred English immigrants arrived at Halifax between 1817 and 1819, although few ship crossings were recorded for this period.7 The surviving shipping data reveals that the majority embarked from Plymouth in Devon, indicating that southwest England supplied a goodly share of the immigrants (see Appendix II). A total of ninety-four people arrived from the Cumberland ports of Workington and Whitehaven in 1819 and 1822 respectively, but no further emigrant departures were recorded in later years from either port.8 There were regular passenger arrivals from Liverpool between the mid-1820s and mid-1830s, and some from London and Jersey, but the numbers were generally small. Notable examples were the seventy-nine people who arrived at Pictou from Liverpool in the Penelope in 1828, the fifty people who arrived at Halifax from London in the Minstrel in 1831, the 102 from Liverpool who came in the Mary Ann, Jean Hastie, and Lady Dunmore in 1832, and the sixty-seven people who sailed from Jersey in 1833, 1834, and 1836.9 But at this stage English immigrants were very much in a minority.
With the growing economic opportunities that stemmed from the province’s mining industry the proportion of English immigrants rose between 1839 and 1851. Instead of being a poor third, the English moved into second place, representing 22 percent of the total, but once again they were a mere fraction of the Scots, who accounted for 61 percent of the influx.10 By 1871 the English represented 29 percent of the population, just five percentage points below the Scots. And they were the dominant ethnic group in Kings, Annapolis, Yarmouth, Shelburne, and Queens counties on the west and Cumberland County on the east (see Map 5). With its large influx of settlers from Yorkshire during the eighteenth century, Cumberland’s later classification as an English county was inevitable, but the dramatic improvement in the English ranking in the western counties has a different explanation. This was a mainly American population, with distant English roots, that later classified itself as English.
Looking back to the time when it first became a British possession, Nova Scotia looked set to become a very English colony. Having acquired Acadia (renamed Nova Scotia) from France in 1713, Britain launched a large-scale immigration program thirty-six years later, after establishing Halifax as the capital. The government took the unprecedented step of actually sanctioning public funds to finance the relocation costs of over 2,500 people: such was their desire to place British settlers in Halifax in order to counterbalance the French-speaking Acadian population. The immigrants, recruited in London, included ex-soldiers and sailors, some of whom were of Irish descent, and tradesmen who worked in wide-ranging occupations.11 They were brought out by Governor Edward Cornwallis in 1749 to build the new capital, but the extremely tough conditions prompted many to leave.12 Around 1,500 or so of the hardiest remained and founded the town, as was intended, but they were soon joined by large numbers of merchants and other settlers from New England who had correctly anticipated Halifax’s potential as a future economic hub. Although there was much conflict between the immigrants from England and New England initially, both groups eventually came to live in harmony, as they shared common economic and political aspirations.
The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had immediately sent an Anglican minister, together with funding to build St. Paul’s Anglican Church, one of the first Protestant places of worship in British North America. A school and hospital were hastily constructed and a site was chosen for the marketplace. By 1765 the Reverend John Breyton could report that the “Church of England is in a flourishing state. St. Paul’s is furnished in a most elegant manner and harmony prevails.”13 The church’s congregation of 1,300 symbolized the town’s strong English presence, despite growing rivalry from the Congregationalists, of New England origin, who had also built their own church by this time.
St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, erected in 1750. Its architectural plans were based on the design of St. Peter’s Church, Vere Street, in London, which was created by James Gibbs, a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren. With the arrival of Charles Inglis in 1787 as the first Anglican bishop of Nova Scotia, St. Paul’s was made a cathedral and continued as such until 1865.
Halifax attracted many Loyalists and, after the Napoleonic Wars ended, immigrants from Britain. Notable were the West Country arrivals who came in a short-lived influx from 1817 to 1819. Devon ancestry would be claimed later by a number of Halifax residents, including Francis Paulin, whose ancestors came from Jacobstone; Florence Edwards, whose father had been a carpenter in Barnstable; Thomas Maynard, who was descended from “a gentleman born at Tavistock”; and John Bond, whose father was born near Torquay.14 When John MacGregor visited Halifax in 1828, he concluded that “the style of living, the hours of entertainment and the fashions are the same as in England as were their ‘amusements’ — such as picnics, amateur theatricals, riding, shooting and fishing.”15 But eleven years earlier Lord Dalhousie had thought that Halifax was still “in its infancy.” He was shocked to find a town of around ten thousand people in which “there is not a bookseller’s shop.” He immediately authorized funds for a library at the military garrison, having previously “suggested to the officers the great comfort and advantages”16 that might result from it.
Shortly after establishing Halifax’s population in 1749, the British government had sought a second source of settlers.17 Up to 2,700 so-called “Foreign Protestants,” chiefly Germans, Swiss, and French Huguenots, were recruited from Europe between 1750 and 1752 and they, too, received a free passage, land, and a year’s subsistence. However, because of difficulties in obtaining suitable sites, most remained in Halifax, but around 1,450 (mainly German immigrants) were moved to a location fifty miles west of Halifax, where they founded the town of Lunenburg.
Despite an early riot sparked off by grievances over land allotments and later raids by Native people who were being encouraged by the French authorities at Louisburg to cause trouble, the settlers flourished.18
Map 6. Based on Clark, “Old World Origins and Religious Adherence,” 327.
Since they immediately transferred their religious affiliation from Lutheranism to Anglicanism, the new Lunenburg arrivals gave the Church of England’s mission in Nova Scotia a terrific boost (see Map 6). By 1845 the Anglican minister, sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to Lunenburg County, could take pride in the four Anglican churches, capable of holding 1,900 people, and ten outlying preaching stations.19 When Lord Dalhousie visited in 1817, he noticed that people still spoke their native language: “All here is German, scarcely do they speak English intelligibly. Agriculture is their only pursuit, they are not wealthy, but live very frugally and are all comfortable … there never has yet been a pauper maintained by the parish.” However, he was less approving of nearby Mahone Bay, with its “miserable farms, all in patches, raising potatoes and hay for the Halifax market.”20 Here, too, a committed Anglican minister would deal with the religious needs of its mainly German population, travelling to the various preaching stations which were sometimes twenty miles distant, including the one at Mahone Bay, to the north of Lunenburg town, and the one at New Dublin (now Dublin Shore), just south of it.21
Meanwhile, back in 1755, Britain’s continuing hostilities with France were causing it to revise its military strategy in Nova Scotia. Acadians were now regarded as potential accomplices of the French, and the British solution to this threat was immediate and brutal. The entire Acadian population was deported in 1755, and a third group of land-hungry New Englanders was brought in to take their place.22 The expulsion certainly undermined French power and fighting ability in the region, but the policy was exceedingly inhumane for the people who were displaced. Civilized behaviour was thrown aside, and this terrible, barbaric act would continue to haunt the British for many years.
Launching a generously funded emigration scheme, the government recruited eight thousand New Englanders who mainly originated from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island — areas where good agricultural land was in short supply. Arriving between 1759 and 1762, they came in large family groups and sometimes as entire communities, with farmers settling mainly on the former Acadian lands in the Annapolis Valley, and fishermen along the southwestern coastline.23 The province’s fertile acreages also attracted the attention of highranking officials and politicians. After all, they had the easiest access to the choicest land. John Perceval (second Earl of Egmont), first Lord of the Admiralty and a prominent politician, helped himself to several thousand acres in Nova Scotia and East Florida. He hoped to establish a mansion house, park, and castle on his twenty-two-thousand-acre estate at Egmont Harbour, just east of Halifax, but his silly notions of creating a fiefdom in Nova Scotia bore little relevance to the needs of the province or its prospective settlers.24
Lord Dartmouth, secretary of state for the Colonies from 1772, grabbed forty thousand acres of land in the same area for himself, although he at least intended to find tenants to work his land:
I daresay that your lordship is acquainted with the method practised by proprietors of great territories in the northern district of North America; they lay out their tracts in several hundred lots, ensure some of them are in a favourable place for themselves and then let every 3rd or 4th lot by lease to tenants at a certain rent per annum.25
Ten other prominent people, who included Halifax merchants, a former governor, and a naval commander, claimed tracts of land near to Lord Egmont’s property in Nova Scotia, although few made any serious attempt to recruit settlers or provide funds for commercial development.
Being creatures of the New World, New Englanders refused to have anything to do with European-style leaseholds and insisted on having freeholds. While these aspirations were met, many were disappointed both with the quality of the land they received and the Nova Scotia government’s unwillingness to tolerate a strong local democracy. They became dissatisfied and possibly half of the new arrivals left within a few years of the termination of subsidies. Few had brought much capital with them, and, as a consequence, new communities progressed very slowly. With the great Loyalist influx of the mid-1780s, thousands more Americans came to the province. Many had English ancestry and were drawn mainly from New York and New Jersey. But, unlike the Planters before them who simply took over Acadian farms, they often had the backbreaking task of clearing vast wildernesses, and, feeling dispirited, many left. Like the New Englanders, they, too, insisted on having freeholds.
Cornwallis and Horton (later Wolfville) acquired their settlers from Connecticut in 1760 and became two of the most populated townships in the Annapolis Valley26 (see Map 7). Large numbers of Loyalists later came to the area, as did a few Yorkshire families who had previously settled in Cumberland County. Having been caught in the line of fire during the American Rebellion, men like Nathaniel Smith and his family had left their farms in Fort Cumberland in 1778, hoping for better conditions in Cornwallis. Smith sold his property and stock, for which he obtained five hundred pounds, but he felt as if he had “[fallen] into the hands of worse plunderers than those that break [into] houses and rob shops.”27 In 1775 he had owned more than 1,500 acres of land in Cumberland, but four years later, after falling victim to the swindlers, he was only able to rent land in Cornwallis, and a small amount at that.
By Nathaniel’s time the area was “pretty thickly settled in many places where there [are] rivers, marshes and intervales, and in many places along the shores by the Minas Basin and the Bay of Fundy.”28 The Cornwallis that Lord Dalhousie observed thirty years later had a small Anglican congregation, this being a region where Baptists were in the ascendancy, and the Established Church of England “was scarcely entitled to a name.”29 He was appalled by the people “living poorly or chiefly upon rum … they are idle, insolent and quarrelsome. All in debt … they are strongly tinctured with Yankee manners, ideas and principles — canting and preaching constantly, they have no thought of religion or morality. The state of agriculture is wretched.” However, Lord Dartmouth had to admit that, however poor they were, they could each afford to have a “horse and gig or shay at the church service of the Established Church and that of the Anabaptists; we counted 70 of these buggies hung up to the rails or trees nearby.” 30
Meanwhile, his lordship found Parrsboro, on the opposite side of the Minas Basin, more to his liking. He greatly approved of James Ratchford, who had the entire township under his thumb: “Keeping a shop for every sort of supply the whole population is individually indebted to him. Selling his goods at enormous profit, he makes money of those that pay their accounts and, of those that do not, he takes mortgages on their lands, and takes that in payment.” 31 Lord Dalhousie believed that ordinary people needed to be controlled by someone in authority, irrespective of how much they were exploited, placing him somewhat at odds with the egalitarian ideals of the New World!
The New Englanders, and Loyalists who poured into the rest of the Annapolis Valley, founded new communities at Annapolis, Granville, and Wilmot, townships with some of the finest land in the region32 (see Map 7). When he passed through Wilmot nearly six decades later, Lord Dalhousie was enraged by the defiant manner of the local people: “They stood and stared at us, as we passed, with the utmost American impudence.” He greatly disapproved of their freehold grants, since it made every man think that he “is laird here” and “fostered a dangerous levelling mentality.”33 He was shocked to find that a member of the Assembly dressed like a common labourer in his own home. Where was his coat and waistcoat? But dress codes and social etiquette were not high on his host’s list of priorities. As is apparent, Lord Dalhousie never came close to understanding the harsh realities of pioneer life.
George Ramsay, ninth Earl of Dalhousie. He was lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia from 1816 to 1820, and afterward governor general of Canada until 1828.
Annapolis Royal had an unusually high proportion of Anglicans by 1871, as well as a substantial Methodist congregation, possibly signifying a stronger than average English presence. The first Anglican church had been founded in 1764 and nearly thirty years later a second church had been built at Wilmot. On a tour of the province in 1791, Bishop Charles Inglis had preached “in the new church, which was the first time that divine services had been performed in it.”34 Having previously enjoyed the blueberries at nearby Aylesford (later in Kings County) 35 Bishop Inglis was in high spirits, but his mood changed when he met the “infirm” local minister, who stumbled through prayers at the inaugural service:
Hitherto Mr. Wiswell officiated in the School House or in a private home on the mountain … and to my very great surprise he had neither gown or surplice…. I told him I would have read the prayers myself rather than let him officiate without his clerical habit … his excuse was that he had but one gown and it was at Aylesford in St. Mary’s Church.36
Holy Trinity Anglican Church at Middleton (previously Wilmot). It was established in 1789.
Meanwhile, the Methodists of Annapolis Royal had built themselves a chapel by 1894 capable of accommodating four hundred people, and another at Granville that could house one hundred. This despite the fact that the congregations often went without a minister for up to six months at a time.37
New England fishermen and their families settled along the south shore at Yarmouth, Barrington, and Liverpool in the early 1760s (see Map 7), but with the arrival of around five hundred Loyalist families just over twenty years later, the instant town of Shelburne sprang up and the new county divisions of Yarmouth, Shelburne, and Queens suddenly appeared (see Map 5). Although Shelburne’s growth had been dramatic, its demise was equally spectacular, as Lord Dalhousie observed thirty years later:
Bringing with them very large property in money they [Loyalists] built fine houses, neglected the more immediate objects of new settlers, the clearing of land for food, or the establishment of fisheries, for which the situation of the settlement was admirably adapted, and having very soon wasted and squandered their funds were obliged to fly back to America leaving large grants of land untouched to this day, but laying still as the property of these individuals. Now, Shelburne is the picture of despair and wretchedness…. The large homes rotten and tumbling into the once fine and broad streets, the inhabitants crawling about idle and careworn in appearance and stuck in poverty and dejected in spirit.38
A Methodist missionary ruefully noted how “the population of the town has exceedingly decreased, so it does not contain one tenth of the inhabitants who settled in the year [17]83.”39 “The neat Methodist Chapel, capable of holding 400 people,” was a very sad reminder of better times.40 However, Yarmouth fared much better, having attracted Massachusetts settlers from 1761, Acadians six years later, and large numbers of Loyalists.41 The Cheshire-born Loyalist Joseph Bond certainly did well here. Having first gone to Shelburne, he swiftly moved on to the town of Yarmouth, where he practised as a physician for twenty years. When he died, he left a homestead of sixty acres, various properties in Yarmouth, including a wharf, and three thousand acres of land.42
The New England advance continued into Falmouth and Newport in 1761, when Rhode Islanders founded communities there. And Windsor’s first Anglican church materialized by 1764, soon after its New Englanders arrived.43 Loyalists went on to found King’s College at Windsor in 1789, the oldest degree-granting institution in the Atlantic region. An exclusively Anglican college, it was visited in 1801 by Bishop John Inglis, who welcomed the consignment of books that had just arrived: “It will be a respectable beginning for our library … unquestionably it [the College] will be the best and most reputable seminary of learning in North America.”44 But when Lord Dalhousie came in 1817 the college had a leaky roof and only fourteen students. “The state of the building is ruinous; extremely exposed by its situation, every wind blows through it. The passage doors are torn off, the rooms of the students are open and neglected.”45 Given the appeal of the other dissenting religions in Hants County and in the region generally, the college had little chance of attracting sufficient pupils to be viable46 (see Map 6). Lord Dalhousie pressed for it to be made non-denominational, which happened in 1829, and after that its future was secured.47
Liverpool, founded in 1760 as a fishing port, benefited from the piratical activities of its privateer ships during the American Revolution and the War of 1812, and went on to become a major seaport, second only to Halifax. But its rise was checked with the growth in the timber trade, which gave Pictou an unrivalled advantage. Methodism had become well-established in the town of Liverpool by 1804, although the minister struggled to cope financially, since the congregation was poor and he had not received his full allowance for several years.48 Writing in 1818, a Methodist minister found the Liverpool inhabitants to be “in general very respectable and very friendly … it is a Maritime town and their trade is chiefly in lumber and fish.”49 This assessment was corroborated by Lord Dartmouth:
Liverpool is in all respects a most striking contrast to Shelburne. The houses large and clean and handsome, many new ones building, the streets broad, gay and bustling in work, the people wealthy and confessing themselves to be so. Their concerns are mercantile and in the Labrador fisheries. They do trade to the West Indies but on a small scale; they were fortunate in privateering speculations during the war with America and keenly bent on that pursuit against the States.50
Anglicans established their first congregation by 1820, this being the only part of Queens County where the Church of England attracted significant support.
Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Liverpool, built in 1821.
Immigration to the province had reduced to a trickle during the mid1760s but increased dramatically between 1772 and 1775, when around nine hundred people from Yorkshire and nearby parts of northern England took up residence on both sides of the isthmus connecting Nova Scotia with New Brunswick. A combination of high rent increases in Yorkshire and the desire to benefit from Nova Scotia’s agricultural potential were the main driving forces, although many were Methodists seeking a safe haven in which to practise their faith. Having been enticed to the Chignecto Isthmus by the availability of rich marshland, they joined New Englanders who had already established themselves at Amherst, Cumberland, and Sackville51 (see Map 7). The Yorkshire settlers effectively doubled the population of the isthmus and, by bringing their advanced farming techniques with them, greatly enhanced the economic development of the area.52
When he visited Cumberland County in 1829, Thomas Haliburton observed the rivers “emptying into the Bay of Chignecto, upon which there are extensive tracts of alluvial land, and flourishing settlements. On the Maccan and Nappan rivers are to be found many substantial farmers, composed of Yorkshire men and their descendants.” Many more were situated along the River Hébert, “up which the tide flows thirteen miles, enriching it with 1,800 acres of excellent marsh land.”53 Yorkshire settlers were also to be found along the River Philip, farther to the east (see Map 8). Eleven years earlier, when our roving reporter Lord Dalhousie had arrived on the scene, he described their farms in glowing terms: “The large fields, extensive crops and gardens about their houses show them strangers in this country and more industrious than others of their class.”54 He had seen their New Canaan settlement, established in 1798, indicating that further contingents of Yorkshire people had followed the initial groups of the early 1770s. Undoubtedly, the Yorkshire farmers were in a class of their own and, according to his lordship, were “more rich and comfortable” than people in the rest of the province.
However, success had come at a price. Having recently lost his father, John Harrision wrote to a cousin he had had not seen for thirty-six years, to try to reconnect with his long-lost Yorkshire past. He recalled how he and his family had first brought an untamed wilderness into cultivation:
I settled here on this River [Maccan] about 23 years ago [1787] upon lands that had never been cultivated, all a wilderness. We cut down the wood of the land and burnt it off, and sowed it with wheat and rye, so that we made out a very good living. Here we make our own sugar, our own soap and candles and likewise our own clothing. We spin and weave our own linen and wool and make the biggest part of it into garments within our own family. This I suppose you will think strange but it is merely for want of settlers and more mechanics of different branches.55
But he was so very lonely: “Dear cousin, I could wish to see you once more to talk with you face to face.” Having left as a fourteen-year-old, he hardly knew his cousin, but he inquired whether they could now begin to correspond “every year or at every opportunity.” John was also deeply troubled by the shortage of people in the Maccan River area: “If there are any young men have any notion of coming to this country, of an industrious turn of mind, there is no doubt of making out very well for himself, for if he does not like this part he can soon earn money to carry him out again for wages are very high here.” Also, his two grown-up sons each needed “a good industrious wife.” Likewise, thinking beyond his needs, he wrote, “Pray send out a shipload of young women, for there is great call for them that can card and spin. The wages is from five to six shillings a week.” Like his brother Luke, who “oftimes visits Rillington”56 in his dreams, John would never forget his Yorkshire origins.
The naming of New Canaan, with its biblical connotations, suggested a people who hoped to find their “promised land” in Nova Scotia. Having strong Christian beliefs, they had been drawn specifically to Methodism because it “was of that strenuous type which must give expression to its faith in hearty song and lively preaching.”57 Even during the Jenny’s sea crossing in 1775, the eighty passengers were called by the captain “to come to his cabin, morning and evening” to pray together.58 Many of the Yorkshire families who came to Nova Scotia had been influenced by John Wesley’s teachings and sought to live according to the Christian disciplines that he had enunciated. Their great spiritual leader, William Black, only a boy of fourteen when he emigrated in 1775, would devote his life to the Methodist cause.
Like Henry Alline, who was twelve years older, Black had suffered from a sense of profound guilt over his perceived wickedness. But he experienced a dramatic conversion one day in 1779 “when his guilt was removed” and “a sweet peace and gladness were diffused” through his soul.59 Feeling himself to be saved, the nineteen-year-old Black went on to become a preacher, concentrating initially on the Yorkshire settlers on the isthmus. Embarking on a single-minded mission “to save souls,” he travelled far and wide, bringing the message of redemption to many hundreds of people across Atlantic Canada. Known affectionately as Bishop Black, he was often referred to, long before his death in 1834, as the father of Methodism in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.60
United Church, River Philip (Cumberland County), built in 1862. It replaced the original log-built Methodist meeting place that had been constructed in 1827.
The Reverend William Black, Methodist minister.
Although he was more anxious to save souls than build organizations, Black secured the appointment of further preachers, thus establishing Methodism firmly in many parts of the province. With the help of the British Methodist Missionary Society61 a structure was in place by 1804 that had Black based in Halifax but taking charge of Liverpool and Shelburne, William Bennett taking services in Cumberland from his base in Annapolis, John Mann presiding over Horton (where he lived), and his brother John doing the same at Windsor.62 By 1817 there were sufficient Methodists in Ramsheg (near Wallace) in Cumberland County to attract a minister there, where a congregation of 120, spread over an area of around fifty miles, would have been an enormous challenge.63 By 1871 Cumberland County was almost entirely Methodist, having the largest concentration in the province64 (see Map 6). Meanwhile, the Church of England commanded some support at Amherst, which had its first Anglican church built by 1822.65
With the opening up of Guysborough on the east side of the province to Loyalists, the county acquired an instant population in the mid-1780s, but its settlers struggled to survive. Lord Dalhousie found “utmost poverty in every hut” when he visited in 1817. The people subsisted as best they could “by fishing and their small potato gardens.”66 An Anglican church had been built as early as 1787, and by 1845 the county had five other churches and ten outlying preaching stations. One of the stations was at Marie Joseph, where that year “a body of 50 men marched joyfully into the woods to procure materials” for a chapel, and “a singular harmony of religious sentiment appears to prevail.”67 Methodism also enjoyed support in and around Guysborough itself, with the first mission having been established in 1838 (see Map 6).
Lord Dalhousie’s tour of the province occurred just as British immigrants were streaming into the Maritimes. With the growing timber trade, ships sailed regularly from the major British ports to Pictou, Saint John, and Charlottetown, and when the ships docked they often arrived with a fresh batch of immigrants in their holds. However, when Upper Canada, with its more favourable climate, fertile soil, and job opportunities, became more accessible once inland routes were established in the mid-1820s, the Maritimes experienced a steady decline in immigrant numbers. The majority of those who did arrive came from Scotland, not England, but the province’s ability to attract immigrants improved somewhat when the coal-mining industry began to develop, although the numbers were relatively small.
The Old English Church at Guysborough, 1910.
The English-owned and managed General Mining Association, which controlled operations at the Albion mines near New Glasgow (Pictou County) and the Sydney mines in Cape Breton, sought its skilled workforce initially from Britain. The Acadian Recorder had first alerted its readers to the arrival of English miners and labourers in 1827 when the Margaret came to Pictou from Liverpool “with 85 miners and all the necessary engines and machinery to work the mines at this place.”68 Miners from the north of England played an important role in laying the foundations of Nova Scotia’s coal-mining industry, as shown by the larger than average number of English passenger arrivals between 1827 and 1832, in 1838, and again between 1842 and 1847.69 However, English settlers were only ever going to be a small fraction of the total immigrant population in the coalproducing regions, which was heavily dominated by Scots.70
Lord Dalhousie had been astonished to learn of the thickness of the Albion coal seam: “They have bored 47 feet and did not get through the pure seam.” By comparison, “the thickest seam in England … is 30 feet of solid coal.”71 Oddly enough, the province’s lucrative coal mines were first owned by a firm of London jewellers. In 1826–27, Rundell, Bridge and Rundell acquired the rights to virtually all of the province’s mineral resources in settlement of the Duke of York’s debts.72 Taking its acquisition very seriously, the London jewellers formed the General Mining Association and invested large amounts of capital in state-of-theart machinery.73 Although initially many of its workers were recruited from Britain, most of the later workforce were locally based. Coal was extracted through the use of steam-driven mining equipment,74 and by 1830 the province’s first railway line was in place to take coal from the pits to Pictou Harbour, where it was shipped onward, primarily to the United States.75 While Cape Breton’s coal mines had been worked much earlier, their productivity had initially been very low.76 But with the General Mining Association’s involvement, coal production and the numbers employed rose sharply beginning in 1830.77 By 1846 the company had invested some three hundred thousand pounds in Pictou’s and Cape Breton’s coal mines.78
Thomas Neville, from Lichfield in Warwickshire, had sailed on the Thomas Battersby to Pictou in 1828 with his wife, Frances Bridgen, as part of a larger group that had been recruited in England by the General Mining Association. Working initially at the Albion Mines as an engineer fitter until 1841, he later found work at the Sydney mines in Cape Breton, being paid six shillings per day, “and having his travel expenses paid.”79 With the money accumulated from working in the mines, he then went on to buy a farm at Denmark, near Tatamagouche in Colchester County, in 1849.80
The 1840s were difficult years for family and friends still living in the Midlands. Joseph Bridgen, Neville’s brother-in-law who lived in Coventry, described the “very great distress in this town and everywhere; there is no work to be had of any kind.”81 The large number of ribbon-makers who were concentrated in Coventry suddenly found that their jobs were being taken over by machines: “Three parts of the hands are out of employ[ment] and everything seems to be getting worse. I am sorry to say that my father has not had scarcely a day’s work this summer … my brothers were all out of work last winter.”82 This calamitous situation would stimulate further emigration, although it was directed principally to the United States and Upper and Lower Canada, but not to the Maritimes.
Meanwhile, Thomas’s brother Simon had immigrated to Quebec in 1840, where, as a skilled tradesman, he easily found work in stencilling, plastering, and brick setting. But he wondered whether he should join Thomas in Nova Scotia: “Please send me word as I can do well in almost any place, and send me word how far you are from Saint John, New Brunswick and the name of your landing place, as a gentleman wanted to hire me to go to there; but I did not know what sort of place it was.”83 However, Thomas was clearly thinking about doing the reverse. Asking Simon about conditions in Quebec, he was told that “engineers get from 6 to 7 [shillings,] 6[pence] per day; and as you wanted to know the price of land, you can buy 100 acres of good land and a house on it for £30 and there is 20 acres cleared of it…. If you think of coming please to send me word and I will look out for a comfortable [place] for you.”84 Yet, despite these tempting advantages, Thomas remained in Nova Scotia.
Peter Barrett was another English recruit. The son of a Cornish farm labourer from St. Mellion, he had found work in 1865 in the Cramlington Colliery in Northumberland, unwittingly arriving as a blackleg “to fill the places of native miners” during a strike. Emigrating a year later, he sought employment at the Albion Mines, but initially was turned away.85 The local Wesleyan Methodist minister, the Reverend Chapman, came immediately to his aid. He took him to the “mission house,” where he lived for a few days, and helped him to secure a job at the mines. Peter was clearly shocked by the “old dilapidated log houses” that were used to accommodate local workers and their families. He disapproved of the “herding together of the sexes” and the use of the same room for sleeping and cooking.86 “There were to be seen one to three beds in the room where cooking had to be done.” However, to his relief, he learned that General Mining Association employees of his status were to be housed in “nice cottage rows.”87
Miners’ dwellings, Sydney, Cape Breton, photograph circa 1890.
Two years later Peter became “deputy under boss,” a position he held for two years, after which time he went gold prospecting in the United States and, after visiting Ontario, returned to the Albion Mines.88 While in Ontario he wondered “why tenant farmers in England don’t leave their high rented farms with their cursed game laws and other grievances shackled upon them? Why don’t they go out by the thousands to that free and prosperous country of Canada and become their own landlords?”89 Moving to Stellarton, he took up employment with the Acadia Coal Company at the Drummond colliery “and, by dint of hard work and economy was able to save several hundred dollars.”90 Marrying Hortense Langille, daughter of John Langille, a farmer and miller from River John, Pictou, in 1873, Peter Barrett was fast becoming a man of substance. That same year a tragic explosion occurred at the colliery, causing seventy deaths, some of whom were Cornishmen.91
Peter and Hortense then moved to Springhill Mines (Cumberland County) and boarded briefly in temporary accommodation “until a company house was ready for us.” In the meantime, Peter’s entrepreneurial talents had led him into property speculation and moneylending. Having bought land “at between £100 to £200 per acre,” he sold it “as small building plots at £800 to £900 per acre.” He claimed that he “accumulated property fast and there were not wanting those who envied my prosperity.”92 Possibly it was envy that triggered off his swift downfall. He became embroiled in a legal battle that resulted in the loss of all his property and a spell in prison. Claiming that he had been defrauded, Peter felt bitter that he had ended up “a pauper (thanks to Nova Scotians).” After working hard for twentyseven years and “having been nearly 12 years in North America,”93 he and his family returned to Cornwall with no money except what Peter had borrowed from his brother-in-law to finance their crossing.
Few men would have experienced Peter Barrett’s rapid rise and downfall. Most English immigrants were like the Yorkshire-born Adam Bousfield, who found work at the mines in Stellarton and later moved on to the Sydney mines as job opportunities presented themselves.94 Thomas Dixon, born in Exeter, ended up in South Harbour, Cape Breton, after becoming shipwrecked near the entrance of Cape North Harbour in 1834. After marrying Martha Fitzgerald, a local girl, he turned his hand to fishing, and together they “left many descendents [sic].”95 In fact, Cape Breton had a fair sprinkling of English inhabitants who struggled to make a living as fishermen. A plaintive request was sent in 1819 to the London Missionary Society96 by householders living at Ship Harbour, near Port Hawkesbury, who claimed they were “destitute of every means of religion.” Their community, “spread over 30 miles,” was increasing, “amounting to 1,000 souls.”97 Described as “extremely poor” fishermen living along the coast, they could not support a minister themselves, and hoped that the London Missionary Society would be able to provide financial help.98
The London Missionary Society also provided funding in 1815 for the Reverend John Mitchell, who was based at River John (Pictou County) but served the people in nearby Tatamagouche, as well. Intriguingly, he described the inhabitants as being “almost entirely French, but [they] always call themselves Protestant,” possibly indicating that many had Channel Island ancestry. The Reverend Mitchell had a gruelling life: “The place where I preach in Tatamagouche every fortnight is 13 miles from my house on River John … [each year] I travel upwards of 600 miles on very bad roads.” 99
By 1823 there were sufficient Anglicans in the town of Pictou for it to have its first Anglican church, which was completed in 1827 with funds provided by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and by Samuel Cunard, the local shipbuilder. But it was not until 1851 that the first Anglican church was built at Albion Mines.100 The Reverend Joseph Forsythe had “much difficulty” in dealing with newly arrived immigrants from Britain: “They have not been accustomed to religious or even moral habits.” As far as he was concerned they were “worthless demoralisers” who were “sunk in poverty.”101
The Reverend William Elder, the Anglican missionary based at Sydney Mines a decade earlier, reported that there were forty-six families (about three hundred people), living at or near the mines, who supported the Church of England.102 However, his successor, the Reverend Robert Arnold, found that few of the new arrivals “professed themselves to be of the Church of England” and felt that “the paucity of the clergy was a barrier to conversion.”103 He presumably agreed with the Reverend Forsythe!
Meanwhile, the Reverend William Young Porter, based at St. George’s Anglican Church in Sydney, had a more positive outlook but had to endure a staggering work schedule, as he travelled far and wide in Cape Breton County.104 His preaching commitments brought him to Sydney Mines, Baddeck, Northwest Arm, Coxheath, Glace Bay, Bridgeport, Cow Bay, Main-a-Dieu, Louisburg, Gabarus, Catalone, Mira, and the Forks of Sydney River. His claim that “members of other denominations seldom attended services” suggests that he mainly attracted people with English ancestry, who were clearly scattered along these coastal communities.105 The fisheries and coal mines were probably their principal sources of employment.106
Apart from mining industries, the province had little to attract immigrants, since most of the good farming land had long been settled by the earlier arrivals. About 174 immigrants arrived from Britain in 1850 and only about half that number the year before. The United Kingdom Commissioners of Land and Emigration concluded that “it did not seem that the people of Nova Scotia wanted any emigration.”107 The reality was worse than that, since not only was the province failing to attract immigrants, but much of its population was draining away to Upper Canada and the United States. The issue of prime concern to the province’s administrators was how to direct the outflow to Upper Canada rather than have people lost to the United States. Rising to the challenge, the Canada Company108 issued advertisements urging people “who may contemplate leaving Nova Scotia” to go to Upper Canada
rather than that they should proceed to the United States…. In Upper Canada they will find a most healthy climate, the soil very fertile, and abundance of excellent land to be obtained on easy terms from the Government and Canada Company. The great success which has attended settlers in Upper Canada, is abundantly evidenced by the prosperous condition of the farmers throughout the Country, and also shown by the success of many natives of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia who have settled in many townships of the country.109
Anxious to attract further immigrants, the provincial government organized an assisted emigration scheme in 1857 for some 350 Germans who arrived at Halifax in the Golconda: “During the afternoon crowds of these strangers could be seen on the streets…. There are many fine athletic fellows among them who bid fair to make good settlers.”110 The group, which included many tradesmen, had been recruited to work either in the Acadian Charcoal Iron Company’s iron mines at Nictaux Falls (Annapolis County), “which are now in active operation,” and at the smelter in Londonderry (Colchester County). But the initiative prompted an irate response from a Halifax resident, who criticized the government for being overly concerned about the needs of industry while neglecting the agricultural development of the province, since large areas of the interior still remained unsettled.111
Around seventy immigrants, mostly single miners, labourers, and domestic servants, arrived at Halifax from Liverpool in 1862,112 while more couples and families came in 1864, when seventy-eight English immigrants landed113 (see Table 1). Two years later nearly seven hundred assisted English immigrants arrived at Halifax from Liverpool expecting to find work in the mines and the Pictou Railway.114 The 260 or so Cornish miners included in the group headed chiefly for the gold-mining districts,115 while the other miners went to the coal mines at Cape Breton, Pictou, and New Glasgow.116 However, a sudden downturn in the province’s coal trade with the United States depressed employment prospects, and, feeling disappointed, most of the newly arrived coal miners either moved to the United States or returned home. But some of the Cornish men did well from contracts “for work in sinking shafts in the gold districts.”117
Table 1 Passenger Lists for Crossings from Liverpool to Halifax, 1862 and 1864
1. British Queen, Aylward master, April 1, 1862 [NSARM RG1 Vol. 272 Doc. 142]
| Name | Age | Occupation/Other |
| Barrett, Henry | adult | Labourer |
| Condon, Mary | adult | Spinster |
| Fitzgerald, Mary | adult | Spinster |
| Foxe, Cathe | adult | Spinster |
| Griffiths, Margaret | adult | Spinster |
| Hodgson, Robert P. | adult | Farmer |
| Holmes, Robert | adult | Labourer; plus 1 m. adult. |
| Hornsby, John | adult | Labourer |
| Jones, Chas | adult | Labourer |
| Lyons, Bridget | adult | Spinster |
| Mason, Mrs. | n/k | n/k |
| Matthews, John | adult | Labourer |
| Moyahan, Cathe | adult | Spinster |
| Price, Josh | adult | Labourer |
| Sahegan, Mary | adult | Spinster |
| Smith, Edward | adult | Farmer plus 1 f. adult/1 f. child 114 |
2. Morning Star, McKenzie master, April 1, 1862 [NSARM RG1 Vol. 272 Doc. 141]
3. Frank Flint, Fabeg master, May 28, 1862 [NSARM RG1 Vol. 272 Doc. 144]
