Freedom and Resistance: A Social History of Black Loyalists in the Bahamas by Christopher Curry (review)

The story of the Black Loyalists has become increasingly well known. Since the mid-1970s more than thirty scholarly publications have described all or part of the Black Loyalist experience through the American Revolution within various locations throughout the African diaspora.¹ Above all the multiple award-winning and internationally best-selling novel by Lawrence Hill entitled The Book of Negroes spread their important history to an audience of well over one million readers.² The subsequent six-part television miniseries was the most-watched program on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 2015.

Most of the existing scholarly literature follows the movements of the majority of the Black Loyalists through their relocations to Nova Scotia and often to Sierra Leone. Now, in Freedom and Resistance, Christopher Curry examines the smaller number of them who resettled in the Bahamas. Like most historians, Curry begins his saga with the American Revolution and the declaration by John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, the Royalist governor of Virginia, promising freedom to "indentured servants, negroes or others (appertaining to rebels)" (33) who deserted their masters and joined the Loyalist forces. Dunmore sent his "Ethiopian Regiment" (27) into battle wearing sashes with the slogan "Liberty to Slaves."³ Later proclamations extended the offer to any patriot-owned slaves, whether fit for military service or not, allowing them freedom to follow any occupation they might wish within the British lines. As a result, uncounted thousands fled from enslavement to British protection and served as soldiers and spies, musicians and foragers, launderers and cooks, skilled and unskilled laborers. The proclamations allowed them to believe that a defeat of the republican rebellion would result not only in their personal freedom but also in the elimination of slavery for all African Americans. Of course, those who were convinced of Britain's commitment to abolition misinterpreted its motivation, which was simply to win the war by enhancing its own military numbers and undermining the patriot economy by depriving it of labor. Slavery continued to be practiced in the British Empire for another half century.

With the republican victory in 1783, the British evacuated some of the formerly enslaved and free African Americans who had joined the Loyalist cause to other territories still within the empire. Besides Nova Scotia and the Bahamas, they were sent to London, to the British West Indies, and even to British posts in Asia and Australia. Their experience as supposedly free settlers deserving of the rewards extended to other loyalists was remarkably similar wherever they went. Nowhere did they receive those rewards, including the land grants that were intended to make them self-sufficient. Instead they became laborers on white-owned land or government projects, or in extreme circumstances they could be indentured for periods of up to forty-nine years. In the years immediately after their arrival, there were frequent attempts to reenslave them, which sometimes succeeded.

Generally located in segregated settlements, however, the Black Loyalists had the opportunity and the critical mass to establish institutions to serve their own needs. Churches, usually Baptist or Methodist, offered leadership experience, organizational strength, and a sense of community. With variable supervision from white church officials, the Black Loyalists developed their own styles of worship and theological understandings, incorporated retentions from African religions, and adapted to a membership that was predominantly illiterate. The second institution to be established was usually a school, where the teacher was often also a preacher. Here, as in the community more broadly, black students had the world interpreted for them by black leaders. The Black Loyalists brought cultural practices from enslavement, and indeed from Africa, that they shaped to meet their new circumstances, gradually producing a distinct identity that made them aware of their differences from white co-loyalists and the slave society they had left behind.

Curry describes all these developments as they manifested in the Bahamas. It is striking...