The people Norfolk wanted back

On August 23, 1782, Thomas Newton Jr., a Norfolk merchant, wrote to Governor Benjamin Harrison. A flag of truce had come in from New York with word that owners who applied for their people might have them back. “Coll Godfrey lost 35, Mr Willoughby upwards of 90, Capt Barron 11, & many others in proportion,” Newton wrote, and asked whether the owners might send a vessel. A week later Harrison put the question to Virginia’s delegates in Congress, naming “Mr. Willoughby who had had ninety taken from him and is thereby ruin’d.” Eleven days after that, on September 10, James Madison moved the resolution that instructed the peace commissioners to seek compensation for “slaves and other property” carried off; it reached Paris in November, and the clause was written into the treaty on November 30. Follow the paper on the map.

The clause did not bring these people back. Between April and November 1783 the British clerks at New York wrote down twenty-nine people whose entries name the men in Newton’s letter, Newton himself, or the governor, as the enslaver they had left. Most had gone to the British years before: John Willoughby’s people in 1776, when Lord Dunmore held Norfolk; Col. Godfrey’s in 1778 and 1779, around the raid on Norfolk and Portsmouth by Collier and Mathew in May 1779. Every one of them was inspected, written down, and sailed. Hugh Walker, sent north with a list of 143 names for Virginia claimants, reported to Harrison in May 1783: “I was not allowed to take any slaves without their own consent, & they are taught not to come here.”

The names, ages and lines below are the clerks’ words, as transcribed by the Black Loyalist Heritage Society, with the ship and destination from the Nova Scotia Archives dataset. Click a name for the full entry. “Col. Godfrey” and “Matthew Godfrey of Norfolk” are taken here to be the same man, the Norfolk County colonel; Newton’s “Capt Barron” appears in the register as Robert Barron of Norfolk County. The matches are by the enslaver’s name and place, not proven identities. None of Harrison’s three can be matched with confidence to his list of fourteen of March 1783.