Black and British: A Forgotten History, from the acclaimed historian and star of 'Celebrity Traitors'

by David Olusoga

On 25 November 1783 George Washington, mounted on a grey horse, marched the Continental Army down the length of Manhattan. At 1 pm a cannon was fired to signal the departure of the last British soldiers. Among the very last to leave were the black auxiliaries of the Royal Artillery and the Wagon Master General’s Department. General Washington did not find his slave Harry Washington in liberated New York; he was among the three thousand who had sailed for Nova Scotia. Of the twenty thousand black loyalists who escaped, most were sent there, and Birchtown became, for a while, the largest free black settlement in the Americas. Some of the loyalists who settled there eventually moved again to a settlement just a few miles from Bunce Island; others were sent to the West Indies – Jamaica, Nassau and St Lucia. A few hundred who had mainly been evacuated from New York crossed the Atlantic to Britain.