Keeping the Loyalists Loyal in Post-Revolutionary Nova Scotia: The Preaching and Writing of Reverend Jacob Bailey

Abstract

The Reverend Jacob Bailey was a key figure in the early Anglican Church in Nova Scotia, as well as one of the first Loyalists to come to Nova Scotia from New England. Along with the first Bishop of Nova Scotia, Charles Inglis, Bailey was a formative influence in the Anglican Church; he was also a poet and a satirist, a supporter of the Crown, and an opponent of the revolutionary influences that spread through the Thirteen Colonies and less successfully in the Maritime provinces. Much has been written about Bailey – his personal story offers many insights into the Loyalist experience. His manuscripts were widely scattered, thus new Bailey materials still come to light. His surviving writings reveal a strong defender of both the faith and the Crown. Arguably, in the context of eighteenth-century America, the two could not be separated. While the revolution on one level may have seemed to be all about taxation, democracy, and an emerging colonial bourgeois society, it was also about continued ideological conflict in that part of postReformation Christendom that had not remained under the authority of Rome. The tensions between the vision of an Established Church headed by the sovereign and the competing Protestant faiths that came to predominate in the Thirteen Colonies were both cause and effect of the clash between classes and interests that resulted in the birth of the United States. At the same time, the exodus of Tory Anglicans that the revolution