Hector Maclean: The Writings of a Loyalist-Era Military Settler in Nova Scotia ed. by Jo Currie, Keith Mercer, John G. Reid (review)

This handsome volume reprints twenty-one letters (1779–87), a brief orderly book (1781), and the diary (1786–7) of Hector Maclean. He was born in London in 1751, served in the 2nd Battalion of the 84th Regiment (Royal Highland Emigrants) for the duration of the War for American Independence, and then settled near Windsor, Nova Scotia. The three primary sources were previously difficult to examine together since the letters are privately owned in the Maclaine of Lochbuie Papers, on loan to the National Archives of Scotland (gd 174), and the orderly book and diary (kept by Maclean in a single volume) are at the Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

The excellent thirty-seven-page introduction ably pieces together Maclean’s story, provides helpful local details, and comments upon the broader significance of these sources. The rich scholarly notes identify almost all of the individuals mentioned here. The editorial collaboration is an exemplary one. Currie (an archivist in Scotland who has published about the Isle of Mull) initiated the project and was joined by Maritimes historians Mercer and Reid, who are at junior and senior career stages, respectively. The writing throughout is clear and insightful, and the editorial decisions meet a high scholarly standard.

Hector Maclean wrote all but three of the letters, and all pertain to him. All but two letters were received by his senior officer Captain Murdoch Maclaine, a friend and patron (though likely not a kinsman), and they shared ties to the Isle of Mull. A majority of the letters were written from Nova Scotia (two in 1779 and eleven from 1783 to 1787) with the remaining three from Ireland in 1780 (where Maclean had been shipwrecked after recruiting troops in Newfoundland), four from South Carolina in 1781 (where Maclean took part in a significant battle), and a single letter from New York City in 1782. The orderly book covers three months leading up to, and just after, the Battle of Eutaw Springs on 8 September 1781, but Maclean’s postwar settlement in the newly created Hants County, Nova Scotia, is the best documented portion of his life. The diary deepens our understanding about the challenges of creating a new farm, labour relations with hired hands (one of whom may have been enslaved or a free person of colour), and a striving gentleman farmer’s social relations with fellow veterans and local elites. Contextual information is especially detailed thanks to the effective use of the local history by John V. Duncanson, Rawdon and Douglas: Two Loyalist Townships in Nova Scotia (Mika Publishing, 1989).

These primary sources strikingly reveal the enormous geographic scope of individuals and events that shaped the postwar settlement of seemingly small and isolated communities in places like the Kennetcook area of Nova Scotia. Also of interpretive interest is how Maclean was a “military settler” during the “Loyalist era” of Canadian history, as the volume’s title pointedly reminds us, a theme that might have been more directly explored. Maclean’s life prior to recruitment in June 1775 is hard to reconstruct, and we do not know when or why he emigrated, nor is the place where he was recruited entirely clear (New York City it seems, but perhaps Boston or Halifax). More editorial commentary about military matters would have been welcome such as about the representativeness (or not) of this particular orderly book and the broader contours of postwar military settlement in British North America. Financial struggles challenged Maclean in the mid- 1780s, even with his half-pay as an officer and a substantial land grant, and might have merited more attention. The reprinted documents do not shed light on Maclean’s successful marriage in 1788 (which may have brought him financial stability), service in the Nova Scotia Assembly in the 1790s, and his later political and...