Atlantic revolutions: Slavery and freedom in Newport, Rhode Island and Halifax, Nova Scotia in the era of the American Revolution.

Abstract

This study examines the evolution and demise of slavery in maritime Newport, Rhode Island and Halifax, Nova Scotia during the era of the American Revolution. By focusing upon the relationship of the slave trade to the larger Anglo-American colonial political economy, it raises the question of whether these communities were societies-with-slaves or slave-societies. This study demonstrates that the degree to which the institution of slavery permeated colonial life influenced the ways British Americans in Newport and Halifax responded to the American Revolution. Connection to the Atlantic world facilitated the growth of slavery in colonial Newport and Halifax, producing cultural and social diversity characteristic of seaports along the Atlantic littoral. The tradition of cultural adaptation and syncretism among black slaves in the Atlantic world continued through the eighteenth century in places like Newport and Halifax because these maritime communities encouraged cultural heterogeneity. This study explores how these social and cultural conditions influenced black response to the American Revolution. The American Revolution transformed slavery and black life in Newport and Halifax. It produced a social and ideological struggle that questioned historic ideas of social arrangements, empowering enslaved men and women to challenge the institution of slavery throughout Anglo-America. By juxtaposing the lives of black men and women in Newport and Halifax, this study illustrates how they defined freedom depending upon their respective relationships with post-war political institutions. While blacks in Nova Scotia continued to identify with the larger Anglo-American colonial structure, Newport's emerging black leadership began to view themselves and the black community in the context of the new American republic. Once the African colonization movements declined at the end of the eighteenth century, blacks in both communities increasingly viewed themselves as part of their respective national communities. As social institutions such as churches and mutual-aid societies anchored themselves in these seaports at the turn of the century, they fostered ideas about cultural, political, and social relationships with the larger community. In this context, a new discourse about black culture emerged that connected the concerns of the black community with the larger political struggles of the United States and British North America.