Shelburne Riots

The Shelburne riots were a series of mob attacks in July 1784 by landless British Loyalist veterans of the American Revolution against Black Loyalists and government officials in the town of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, Canada and the nearby village of Birchtown. They are considered the first race riots in Canada and one of the first recorded race riots in North America.

The town of Shelburne was created in 1783 as a settlement for United Empire Loyalists, British soldiers, supporters and families who fought for the British in the American Revolution. Briefly the fourth largest city in North America and the largest British city in the continent, the city of 10,000 people included over 1,500 African Americans known as Black Loyalists who had escaped slavery during the American Revolution and joined the British side. Black Loyalists were given land in Birchtown six miles outside town but many also worked and lived in Shelburne. Tensions rose in Shelburne in the spring of 1784. Delays in awarding land grants created anger and frustration among many disbanded soldiers who sought jobs while they waited for grants promised for their military service. They found many Black Loyalists, who received even fewer land grants and smaller rations, were willing to work for smaller wages.

A popular Black clergyman David George became a lightning rod for racist anger. He founded a Baptist church in Shelburne and attracted many followers, both black and white. In the spring of 1784, as David George prepared to baptize a white couple, William and Deborah Holmes, a small mob of Deborah Holmes's relatives disrupted the service to stop her baptism. Shelburne magistrates were called and ruled that the couple were free to be baptised in a church of their choosing. The baptism went ahead but racial tension grew among landless white Loyalists.

On the night of July 25, the riot began as a large group of men attacked David George and the Black Loyalists in Shelburne.

Several of the black people had houses upon my lot, but forty (40) or fifty (50) disbanded soldiers were employed, who came with the tackle of ships, and turned my dwelling house, and every one of their houses, quite over, and the meeting house they would have burned down, had not the ringleader of the mob himself prevented it. But I continued to preaching it till they came one night, and stood before the pulpit, and swore how they would treat me If I preached again. But I stayed and preached, and the next day they came and beat me with sticks and drove me into the swamp. I returned in the evening, and took my wife and children over to the river to Birchtown.

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