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  • Loyalists and Layabouts: The Rapid Rise and Faster Fall of Shelburne, Nova Scotia 1783–1792
  • J.M. Bumsted
Loyalists and Layabouts: The Rapid Rise and Faster Fall of Shelburne, Nova Scotia 1783–1792. Stephen Kimber. Scarborough, ON: Doubleday Canada, 2008. Pp. 335, $34.95

The first American Civil War threw up a number of communities of refugees north of the American states. Of these the most perplexing [End Page 547] and notorious was Port Roseway, aka Shelburne, which experienced a meteoric rise and fall over ten short years. Within a decade, a town of 10,000 people, upon which much money and energy, both public and private, had been lavished, was reduced to a veritable shell of itself. What had gone wrong? This is the question directly addressed by author Stephen Kimber only in a brief afterword to a breathless narrative of nearly three hundred pages that cuts swiftly from one participant to another. His answer is ‘everything,’ which is fair enough in some ways but not in others. There are some cogent reasons why things went much worse in Shelburne than in any other Loyalist settlement in Canada. We can perhaps identify the principal factors as situation, site, and settlers.

In the first place, the international situation in which the town was founded was virtually impossible. New York City had collected thousands of Loyalists of all sorts from all over the thirteen colonies. The author’s account of the last days of New York City is one of the strongest parts of the book. The Loyalists were unexpectedly totally abandoned by the British government in favour of an instant and unconditional peace with the Americans. Thanks to Sir Guy Carleton, who realized that the collected refugees, Black and white, could not be left to the mercy of the Yankees, they were shipped out of New York in a hastily assembled fleet and sent to many places to the north, including Nova Scotia. Virtually no advance preparation was made for their arrival, partly because it was so sudden and partly because the British government (like many another governments) was not very good at responding to emergencies. Some of the refugees had organized themselves into a private corporation that intended to settle in Port Roseway in southwestern Nova Scotia, but not much had been done. The first arrivals in Port Roseway literally camped on the beach while a team of ill-trained surveyors attempted to allocate land for their settlement. Under the circumstances, the British had not made a bad job of evacuating New York City. The Bush administration’s effort in New Orleans suffers badly in comparison.

The site for the settlement, which was soon ironically enough renamed Shelburne after the British minister who had sold the Loyalists down the river, was a typical howling wilderness on the southwest coast of Nova Scotia, many miles from the nearest centre of population. It had a decent harbour teeming with fish, but indifferent soil at best. It was not the sort of location suited to pioneer subsistence dirt farming, and in fairness to the settlers, few were experienced dirt farmers accustomed to the hardships of starting from scratch. The [End Page 548] Blacks were probably most acclimated to the difficult conditions, but they were badly treated in supplies and land. Too many of the new arrivals probably had some romantic notion of starting from scratch to create an ideal Loyalist society. They would have been far better off in Halifax, which was considerably more like New York than Shelburne was.

The lack of congruence between site and settlers was made worse by the absence of cohesion among the newcomers, not surprising given the way they were collected. The settlers represented Loyalist civilian refugees, the soldiers from a number of provincial regiments, freed Blacks, and a number of New York merchants and artisans. In short, the new settlement had no natural cohesion, and one thing the British government failed to provide was proper leadership. One can applaud Guy Carleton for his initiative in sending the fleet, but either he or some other well-respected British soldier, such as General Samuel Birch, should have been placed in charge. To make matters worse...

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