The Port Roseway Debacle, Some American Loyalists in Nova Scotia

by Anne Borden Harding, Cambridge, MA
Published in The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Vol. CXVII,
January 1963, p. 3:

 Excerpt....
   “In any civil conflict in which brother is pitted against brother father
against son, in which ideological differences are the cause of the struggle,
each camp may claim a plethora of those who for conscience sake risk ³their
lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.² ...conflict between
revolutionist...and the Loyalists who wished to secure the rights of free
men within a united empire...New York City and the surrounding countryside
were firmly in the hands of the British and thither the dispossessed Loyalist
flocked....Sir Guy Carleton, on whom rested the responsibility for
protecting and resettling the refugees crowded into New York, wrote to the
president of Congress that the Loyalist ³conceive the safety of their lives
depends on my removing them²...The disheartened Loyalists, many of them
descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans who had constructed civilization
with their very bones, had no choice but to turn their backs of all they
loved and make a new start in some British Territory...In 1781 Mr. Joseph
Durfee of Rhode Island had approached Sir Andrew Shape Hammond, Governor and
Commander of Nova Scotia and Richard Bulkeley, the Secretary of the
Province, and had been encouraged to pioneer a settlement at Port Roseway,
now Shelburne.... (group) formed the ³Loyalist Associated for the purpose of
removing and settling at Port Roseway Nova Scotia....By Dec. 14 1782 there
were 224 subscribers....Sir Guy Carleton, faced with the almost impossible
task of moving approximately thirty thousand people from New York to Great
Britain...pressed for the departure of the Associates....Associates elected
Thomas Hartley et al as Captains...left with only ³license for
occupation....some refused to go....Many of these...Associates did appear
later in Shelburne but some went to Great Britain and New Brunswick....the
project a failure...”