What is known
Mary was born about 1740 and enslaved by John Willoughby of Norfolk, a man of property on the point that still carries the family’s name. When Thomas Newton wrote to the governor in August 1782 that “Mr Willoughby” had lost “upwards of 90” people, and Harrison told Congress that Willoughby was “thereby ruin’d,” she was one of the ninety. The register’s “left him 7 years ago” puts her leaving in 1776, the year Lord Dunmore’s fleet lay in the Elizabeth River after Norfolk burned. The Willoughbys were Loyalists who took refuge on the British ships, and the account kept by Colonial Williamsburg has Mary and her daughter Patience aboard with them, surviving the smallpox that swept the fleet at Gwynn’s Island before it sailed for New York in August.
At New York she married Caesar Perth, who had also come in from slavery, and worked, it is thought, for the army. In 1783 the clerks wrote the family down for L’Abondance, the King’s storeship, inspected on July 31 with 425 people aboard: Mary, 43; Ceasar, 37; Patience, 18; and, a few lines away, Harry Washington, who had been George Washington’s. They landed at Port Roseway and settled at Birchtown, the Black town beside it.
In January 1792 the Perths were among the nearly 1,200 Black Nova Scotians who sailed for Sierra Leone with John Clarkson. Caesar built a house on Water Street in Freetown and died in 1793. Mary sold the farm, turned the house into a boarding house, and kept a shop; in 1794 she was one of the first settlers licensed to trade, and after the French attack on the town that year the governor, Zachary Macaulay, engaged her to keep his household and to care for the African children sent to the colony’s school. She went with the children to England, where her daughter Susan died, and came back to Freetown, where she is last recorded about 1813.
Sources
The register entries, Nova Scotia Archives dataset and the Black Loyalist Heritage Society transcription. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Slavery and Remembrance, “Mary Perth, 1740 to after 1813”. Mary Louise Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown: Black Loyalists after the American Revolution (2015). Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom (2006). Fiona Leach, Reclaiming the Women of Britain’s First Mission to West Africa (2018). Newton to Harrison, August 23, 1782, and Harrison to the delegates, August 30, 1782, in the Archive.