PRINT SOURCE: Thomas Raddall Fonds, Correspondence. From Thomas Raddall to Robin W. Winks, 2 August 1965. MS-2-202 48.90.
Subject HeadingsWhen Yale University professor and author of a major history of Canadian Blacks, Robin Winks, seeks advice on sources for information about Nova Scotia Blacks, T. H. Raddall directs him to his history of Halifax. Raddall goes on to relate details of the lives of three Black settlers in eighteenth century Liverpool and notes two of the three had returned to the United States. Raddall concludes with details of a Liverpool schooner, "Jack Hilton", which was owned and operated by Liverpool Blacks in the nineteenth century.
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August 2, 1965 Mr. Robin W. Winks,Department of History, Yale University. Dear Mr. Winks: The only research I have done about Negroes in Nova Scotia was incorporated in my history of Halifax ("Halifax, Warden of The North", published by Doubleday in New York and Toronto) which possibly you have seen. There are various items indexed under "Negroes" and "Slavery". Here at Liverpool we have a small Negro minority whose origin goes back to slaves brought here in the eighteenth century. Liverpool was settled in 1759-60 by people from New England, notably Cape Cod. One of the "Proprietors" who received a grant of land was a Negro freed-woman named Barbara Cuffee or Cuffy. She is said to have been a slave of Samuel Bartlett in Plymouth, Mass. in 1734. Her land in Liverpool adjoined that of Colonel Simeon Perkins, the colonial diarist,1 whose house is preserved and exhibited by the provincial government. Barbara Cuffee is believed to have returned to the United States. Perkins bought the land which had been hers, and always referred to it in his diary as "my Barbary lot." Another Negro pioneer was Isaac Coffee or Cuffy, who was one of a group of New Englanders engaged in the fishery on Bear Island in the mouth of Liverpool harbor. He, too, returned to New England soon after the settlement of the town. Perkins records in his diary, May 4, 1772, the marriage of "Deborah Cuffe", a Negro woman, to an Irishman named John Carroll. There is no clue as to the relationship of Isaac, Barbara, and Deborah. During the nineteenth century, the heyday of Nova Scotia's "wooden ships and iron men", Negro seamen of this town shipped on an equal basis with white seamen and traveled all over the world. They had the Negro gift of music and were favorite chanty-men. One schooner was owned and operated entirely by Liverpool Negroes. She was the "Jack Hilton", which eventually was wrecked on Ironbound Island, Lahave N.S. |
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