John Marrant's Nova Scotia Journal Writes Displaced Communities

Abstract:

John Marrant was a Methodist missionary in Nova Scotia from 1785 to 1789, serving Black Loyalist refugees settled there by the British Empire after its North American defeat. His journal, published in 1790, records numerous occasions when he preached, as well as helping settlers petition the colonial government for supplies. Scholars have explored Marrant's theology as revealed in the Journal. I shift the focus toward communalism, examining the ways it incorporates traces of communities of displaced people in two genres: the extempore sermon and the petition. Each bridges the oral and the written and is grounded in a community or collectivity. Marrant noted his hearers' responses to his sermons in a shorthand, which I examine; I also draw from a published sermon he preached in Boston on his way back to England. Lacking the Nova Scotia petitions, I turn to surviving petitions by Black Loyalists who traveled to Sierra Leone, as well as Marrant's descriptions of his interactions with the petitioning Nova Scotia settlers.