Some 3,000 Black Loyalists were evacuated from New York to Nova Scotia; they were individually listed in the Book of Negroes as the British gave them certificates of freedom and arranged for their transportation.

[2] More than 3,000 Black Loyalists relocated to Nova Scotia after the British defeat in 1783, settling in Birchtown, Digby, Guysborough County, Annapolis Royal, Preston and Halifax.

However, the Black Loyalists were consistently denied land grants and exploited as a source of free labor by the colonial government.

The decision did not apply to the North American and Caribbean colonies, where local legislatures had passed laws to institutionalize slavery.

As Virginia's royal governor, he called on all able-bodied men to assist him in the defence of the colony, including enslaved people belonging to the Patriots.

[8] The 1776 Declaration of Independence refers obliquely to the proclamation by citing it as one of its grievances, that King George III had "excited domestic Insurrections among us".

[11] An earlier version of the Declaration was more explicit, stating the following of King George III, but these controversial details were dropped during the final development of the document in Congress: He is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.Jamaican Governor John Dalling drafted a proposal in 1779 for the enlistment of a regiment of mulattoes and another regiment of free Negroes.

But as Boston King noted in his memoir, both Patriots and Loyalists who captured escaped enslaved people often sold them back into slavery.

[14] When the British evacuated their troops from Charleston and New York after the war, they made good on their promises and took thousands of freed people with them.

British abolitionists ultimately founded Freetown in what became Sierra Leone on the coast of West Africa as a place to resettle Black Loyalists from London and Canada and Jamaican Maroons.

[20] They served under General Clinton in a support capacity in North Carolina, New York, Newport, Rhode Island, and Philadelphia.

Tye and the Black Brigade were the most feared Loyalists in New Jersey, and he led them in several raids from 1778 at the Battle of Monmouth to defending the British in occupied New York in the winter of 1779.

[22] When peace negotiations began after the siege of Yorktown, a primary issue of debate was the fate of Black British soldiers.

[24] The U.S. Congress ordered George Washington to retrieve any American property, including enslaved people, from the British, as stipulated by the Treaty of Paris of 1783.

The British transported more than 3,000 Black Loyalists to Nova Scotia, the greatest number of people of African descent to arrive there at any one time.

One of their settlements, Birchtown, Nova Scotia was the largest free African community in North America for the first few years of its existence.

Half of the Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia, nearly 1200, departed the country and moved permanently to Sierra Leone.

[28][29] Approximately 300 free Black people in Savannah refused to evacuate at the end of the war, fearing they would be re-enslaved once they arrived in the West Indies.

They established an independent colony in swamps near Savannah River, though by 1786, most of them were discovered and re-enslaved, as Southern planters ignored the fact that the British had freed them during the war.

[34] Measha Brueggergosman (née Gosman), the Canadian opera and concert singer, is a New Brunswick native and descendant of a Black Loyalist through her father.

In the closing days of the Revolution, along with British troops and other Black Loyalists, her paternal four-times-great-grandfather and grandmother left the colonies.

The Society began plans for a major expansion of the museum to tell the story of the Black Loyalists in America, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone.

This organization backed the resettlement of the black poor from London to a new British colony of Sierra Leone in West Africa.

In addition, Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia were offered the opportunity to relocate, and about half chose to move to the new colony.