The arrival of the English packet on 21st May furnished news of the fall
of Napoleon Bonaparte and the entry of the allied armies into Paris. It
being Sunday, the event was celebrated all Monday by a military review
with salutes, and the whole town was illuminated in the evening. A
military band performed during the evening on the flat roof of the old
market house, long since removed to make way for the present brick
structure, and the streets were crowded to a very late hour. The
merchants and many of the principal inhabitants met at the Exchange
Coffee House and other places, where hot suppers were consumed in honor
of the occasion.
Among the captures this year was that of the American privateer, Snap
Dragon, six guns and 70 men, brought in by H. M. Sloop, Martin on 5th
July, taken off Sambro Light, and on the 13th, the United States Sloop
Rattlesnake, 18 guns, by the Leander frigate, taken near Shelburne
Harbor. About the same time 340 British prisoners were brought to
Halifax in Cartels from Salem in Massachusetts. The Rattlesnake was
afterwards sold and fitted out as a privateer by merchants in Liverpool,
Queens County.
The British forces having captured Washington in August, 1814, a large
number of black slaves, of both sexes, from the plantations along the
Potomac and Chesapeake Rivers, who had deserted their masters, took
refuge on board the British men-of-war while they laid in Chesapeake
Bay. Sir George Cochran, the naval commander, sent them on to Halifax,
where many of them arrived in September, following in a transport ship
and the Brig Jasper. They were afterwards located at Preston and
Hammond's Plains. Many of the domestic slaves remained in the town as
servants, attaching themselves to the inhabitants. Those who went to the
country, being unused to cold and hard labor, were unable even with the
assistance of the Government allowance to make their living; soon became
paupers and a burden to the community, a condition in which their
children and grand-children largely remain. At the close of the war a
quantity of American soldiers' uniforms, taken at Castine, in Maine,
were served out to the Chesapeake negroes. Their grotesque appearance in
the blue and yellow coats, occasionally intermixed with the green and
red facings of the corps called the York Rangers, (at the peace
disbanded in Halifax,) must be within the recollection of many of our
old inhabitants.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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