"An Act of Deportation": The Jamaican Maroons' Journey from Freedom to Slavery and Back Again, 1796–1836

Nova Scotia became a crossroads in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic World and African Diaspora. A sojourn of sorts for thousands of free and enslaved blacks, with some on their way to Africa, Nova Scotia emerged as a key site of contest where Euro-Americans, Africans and African-Americans challenged the meaning of race, citizenship, identity and blackness. The Trelawney Maroons – removed from Jamaica to Nova Scotia after a failed insurrection in 1796 – were a small contingent in this steady stream of exiles and émigrés in the African Diaspora who forced public officials to consider important questions regarding the extent of blacks’ political and social inclusion the Atlantic World. The Maroons revolted against land encroachment by the British. After a year’s worth of fighting, the Maroons were captured and promptly deported for fear of future revolts and their purported collusion with Haitian revolutionaries. Once in Nova Scotia, they continued a longstanding tradition of resisting European cultural influence and control by maintaining close community bonds and deflecting Governor Wentworth’s attempts to impose Christianity and civil education on them. Now in a state of quasi-slavery, the Maroons petitioned the British Parliament to be deported once again, but this time from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone. Once in West Africa, the Maroons would police the recently resettled – yet rebellious – Black Loyalists from America. The Maroons’ story depicts an Atlantic World in upheaval. As a tide of abolitionist sentiment began to wash aside the ships of the slave trade, British Atlantic officials faced the question of how to incorporate growing masses of free blacks. Not entirely free from the specter of the Atlantic Slave Trade, the Maroons reversed a centuries-old route of captivity, voyaging eastward across the Atlantic while reinventing themselves through intercultural encounters and exchange in the Diaspora.