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Towards Community: Black Methodists in Nineteenth-Century Nova Scotia

Works on African Canadian and Canadian Methodist history are virtually silent on black Methodism. This is surprising for black Methodists have been a continuing part of the provinces’ institutional religious life. In the Maritime provinces they participated in the post-revolutionary Loyalist migration to Nova Scotia and maintained a provincial presence throughout the nineteenth century. This paper examines black Nova Scotian Methodism to the mid-nineteenth century as an aspect of black associational activity in nineteenth-century British North America. 2 Methodists were among the 3,500 black Loyalists who came to Nova Scotia at the close of the Revolutionary War. They were most numerous on the province’s south shore around Shelburne where blacks settled in considerable numbers. Their principal leader was Moses Wilkinson, a blind and lame former slave from Virginia, who arrived in Shelburne on board the L’Abondance in August 1783 with 409 other blacks. Already evidently an avid Methodist, Wilkinson immediately began preaching in Birchtown, an adjacent black settlement. He was an effective exhorter for a religious awakening occurred among black immigrants there in the winter of 1783-1784. When William Black, the province’s future Methodist leader, visited Shelburne in the spring of 1784, he reported preaching to 200 blacks at Birchtown, sixty of whom were Wilkinson converts. 3 Wilkinson’s first convert was Violet King, the wife of Boston King, a former slave from a plantation near Charleston, South Carolina. Violet, a North Carolina fugitive, and Boston met and were married in New York