Loyalists identified principally with the colony in the United States from which they had come rather than the part of England from which they or their forbears may have originated. As a result English Loyalists did not, as a rule, attract followers from England. In any case, most of the British immigration to Atlantic Canada that occurred immediately after the Revolution was dominated by Scots who mainly settled in eastern Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, and Prince Edward Island. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, when emigration soared ahead, the English and Irish gradually overtook the Scots numerically, settling in all three Maritime provinces, although Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick attracted most of the English during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Around 150 English immigrants arrived in Nova Scotia in 1784, but they were Loyalists who, having returned to England the year before and not finding it to their liking, sought a better situation. They were immediately followed by English merchants and fortune seekers, and later by convicts who arrived in a ship from Liverpool. Needless to say, the governor of Nova Scotia put a stop to any further shipments of English convicts!60 Relatively few English followed them. Skilled miners came from England to work in Nova Scotia’s coal mines but most of the growth in its English population was generated by its existing communities. Yet, in a sense Nova Scotia already was English. With its large Planter and Loyalist intake, Nova Scotia had a majority of native Americans with mainly English roots, some traceable over several generations.
British settlement in Nova Scotia was driven far more by power politics and war than by the province’s farming or timber trade potential. The struggles between Britain and France determined that colonization proceeded initially along its militarily strategic coastal areas. People of English descent were in the vanguard of this population movement as it gathered strength in the middle of the eighteenth century.
Nova 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