A tale of Loyalist enslavement
Seven years ago, Patrick O’brien was at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, going through old documents, as historians are wont to do.
He can still recall the jolt he felt reading the postscript to a 1799 letter from a widow in a prominent Marblehead, Mass., family to a granddaughter, living in exile in Halifax following the American Revolution.
“Flora sends her duty to you & her love to her child,” Hannah Lee wrote to the former Mary Bradstreet, who had fled with her merchant husband Thomas Robie just weeks after the battles of Concord and Lexington.
The written words were an afterthought, a throwaway line to someone presumably homesick and living far from loved ones.
But there was a mystery there, too.
O’brien, whose academic specialty is Loyalism, and refugee women in Nova Scotia, had seen Flora’s name in the Lee family correspondence, but had no idea who she was, or what the relationship was to the family.
Nevertheless, that small scrap of information sent him on a trail to learn more about her and why she found it necessary to send her love to a child in faraway Halifax.
‘THIS FAMILY HAD BEEN TORN APART’
“It wasn’t totally clear what was going on, but it was clear that this family had been torn apart,” O’brien told me Tuesday. “It was a mother expressing love to a child taken from her because of the revolution.”
On Thursday night, O’brien, who teaches history at the University of Tampa, was scheduled to tell a virtual gathering at the Marblehead Museum what he has learned about this woman known as Flora and her moving, human journey from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia and back again.
It would have been hard listening for the residents of the coastal New England town. The story of the enslaved black woman, and the lengths she went to protect her family, contains some woeful truths for the city of Halifax, as well.
It took some digging. The postscript is the only bit of writing O’brien has ever seen that conveys Flora’s own sentiments. Everything else comes from descriptions from members of the families that enslaved her.
But O’brien has managed to put together the broadbrush details of her life: how she was born into slavery in the mid-18th century, in a colony, where, he has written “slavery and the slave trade were integrated into all levels of New England’s economy and social structure.”
And how from birth she was the property of others, first to the family of Marblehead housewright Samuel Lee Jr., who, at death bequeathed Flora Lee — slaves traditionally carried their first enslaver’s last name — to his widow.
Slavery moreover was generational. Children of the enslaved were no better off than their parents.
At some point, Flora’s daughter, who is never mentioned by name in any correspondence, was sent to live in the household of Hannah’s granddaughter, the aforementioned Mary Bradstreet and her husband Thomas Robie along with their three children.
‘NO LEGAL IMPEDIMENT TO SLAVERY’
When the Revolutionary War broke out, Robie, who was thought to be loyal to the British crown, took his household, and joined the more than 30,000 refugees who fled to Nova Scotia during the early 1780s.
Some of them, like the Robies, brought their enslaved with them.
“There was no legal impediment to slavery in Nova Scotia,” said O’brien, “and it was socially acceptable, too.”
O’brien says it is impossible to say how prevalent the practice was in Halifax in the years before the Revolutionary War, but he points to a Boston newspaper in 1751 advertising the sale of 10 slaves just arrived from Halifax, and, a year later, a Halifax merchant advertising for the sale of several slaves ages 12-35.
O’brien also cites the work of historian Harvey Amani Whitfield who has calculated that no fewer than 1,500, and as many as 2,500, enslaved people came to Nova Scotia during and after the Revolution, and that in 1783, black refugees made up at least eight per cent of the total migrant population to Halifax.
The move to Nova Scotia was surely good for one person: Thomas Robie, who arrived in Halifax as a hardware merchant, but then diversified into selling lace, fabric, and books. A son, Simon Bradstreet Robie, would go on to become a prominent-enough Nova Scotia lawyer, judge and politician that streets would be named after him in Halifax, Amherst and Truro.
O’brien said that 1780, as a sign of the family’s growing prosperity, he purchased a lot near the waterfront on bustling Granville Street. Three years later, Flora was living there too.
O’brien’s research has led him to believe that the Widow Lee died in 1781, making Flora “nominally free.”
“But if she were to leave, she would lose the connection to the family that took her daughter away and would never see her again,” he said.
So, instead, the mother travelled to Halifax to live in the Robie home with her daughter. There she worked as a “servant” which, O’brien concludes, would have differed little from being a slave.
GRIM LIFE
The pain of this woman’s life seemed unrelenting: a measles epidemic took Flora’s daughter in 1783. Yet even through the mists of time, her heroism shines through.
Life was grim for the Black population of Loyalist Halifax, where Mary Robie, in a letter, recounts going for a walk one day and seeing “a poor miserable looking Hovel covered with sods,” which, she discovered “was the abode of some Negro’s.”
What was more, O’brien said that the threat of re-enslavement was real in a place where the kidnapping of free people of colour to be sold as slaves in the West Indies was so common that the Nova Scotia legislature tried and failed to pass a bill curbing the practice in 1789. Slavery did not become illegal in this province until the Slavery Abolition Act came into effect on Aug. 1, 1834, freeing about 800,000 enslaved people in most British colonies.
It seems impossible to know if that was why she took over the care of a young Black Halifax boy named Prince, who may or may not have been biological kin.
All we know for sure is that when a Robie daughter married and settled in Marblehead, Prince was given to the young couple.
A year later, in 1789, O’brien discovered, Flora was back there too, looking after Prince once again.
“When we talk about abolition, we normally highlight the white men who ‘ended’ slavery,” said O’brien, whose upcoming book about the Robie family includes a chapter about Flora.
“But Flora’s story shows us the importance of enslaved women who worked to end the worst suffering of slavery from within the system.”
And also reminds the residents of Halifax that our city is hardly blameless in the long and deplorable saga of human slavery.