This post is a part of the 2025 Selected Papers of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, which were edited and compiled by members of the CRE’s board alongside editors at Age of Revolutions.

By Patrick Callaway

The recent crisis of Covid-19 and the current war in Ukraine have brought the important role played by stable supply chains for essential food commodities into focus. For historians of the early republic, food scarcity- or the threat of scarcity- is often focused on the Caribbean and rarely extend to Nova Scotia.[1] An examination of the grain trade between the United States and Nova Scotia in the years following the American Revolution reveals a far richer and more complex story.  By expanding our geography to include province in our analysis of the revolution’s impacts, we see that the resilience of the accustomed patterns of trade- and the legal agility sometimes required to rebuild and sustain accustomed patterns of trade- parallels elements of our contemporary reality.

Halifax’s founding as an urban settlement and naval base in 1749 created new markets for colonial produce. Although surplus Acadian production from the Annapolis Valley existed in some quantity, it could not be easily transported to the new markets due to a lack of infrastructure. The waterway to New England was much easier and more expeditious than to Halifax.”^[2]  Conceived as a naval port city rather than as an agricultural settlement, Halifax itself produced little despite a system of bounties designed to increase local production of hay, roots, and grain.[3] Subsequent settlement in Lunenburg for the purposes of providing agricultural surpluses also failed. Beyond the human tragedy of expulsion, the Acadian expulsion had other, deeper impacts on any potential agricultural surpluses. The most productive farming in the colony prior to expulsion depended on a sophisticated network of dykes to protect low-lying farmlands from the extreme Bay of Fundy tides. Over the course of generations, the Acadien build a mixed farming economy focused on subsistence. Garden vegetables, livestock husbandry, and orchard crops combined with peas and wheat to form the basis of Acadian agriculture.[4] In the absence of the Acadien, the infrastructure collapsed. Whether or not production could have been increased to an adequate level without the deportation is unknown. What is clear is that the New England Planters that settled on Acadien lands were not able to reestablish the level of production reached by the Acadien.  

Julian Gwyn’s research on five townships within the Minas Basin argues that the Planters’ success as farmers was “mixed,” at best, as per capita output for wheat and grain products declined over time.[5]  Chester farmers “faced a harvest of stones wherever the plough cut furrow.”  Immediate starvation was staved off by one of the terms negotiated by the incoming planters.  The Nova Scotia Council agreed to supply each settler with two bushels of grain per month for the first year of the settlement.[6]  Chester set an important precedent as other new settlements also faced challenges to meet basic substance. Writing to the Provincial Council in April 1762, Lieutenant Governor Belcher brought attention to the plight of settlers in several townships, but “particularly those of Onslow, Truro, and Yarmouth for want of supplies for provisions and seed corn” that required immediate relief from the legislature on compassionate and humanitarian grounds.[7]

Having successfully eliminated one potential local source of foodstuffs and failing to find a nearby substitute the thirteen American colonies provided the necessary provisions. Many of the first entries in the port’s Naval Office Records note the arrival of tons of flour, biscuit, corn, livestock, and beer imported from Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other colonial ports.[8] This pattern remained in place as the colony grew as planter settlement in the early 1760s struggled to develop agricultural surpluses and indeed required provisions from the provincial government in the early stages of development.[9] 

The Colonial Office records for 1768-1772 reflect the continued reliance on external provisions in Halifax. Customs records record bread and flour imports into Halifax from 1768 to 1772 ranged between 637 tons and 831 tons per year in addition to quantities of other grain products, with the bulk of the imports from the coasting trade with the thirteen colonies.[10] Gwyn’s analysis of the economic impact on Nova Scotian agriculture outlines the collapse of provincial agriculture and the long-term effects of this political action: “It ensured the retardation of agricultural exports at least until after 1815.  In economic terms, it was doubtless one of the more destructive political decisions ever made in British America.”[11]

Under British rule, this coastal trading system was a stable and mutually beneficial relationship between provisions producing areas and a willing market.  The political upheaval caused by the American Revolution, however, officially severed this supply chain.  The new political reality created two parallel and contradictory crises for the empire that pitted two entrenched interests against one another.  The first was the idea of mercantilism and confining trade within the empire.  Lord Sheffield’ influential work Observations of the Commerce of the United States suggested that the US leaving the empire was a blessing in disguise.  Nova Scotia and Canada did not need American foodstuffs because the loyalist refugees, combined with available land resources meant that the remaining colonies would become self-sufficient and then produce marketable surpluses in little time.[12] Eventually Nova Scotia would be both self-sufficient and form the basis for a new supply chain linking Nova Scotia and other parts of the British Atlantic would form and exclude the US.  For imperial officials like Sheffield, this was an ideal solution for temporarily painful circumstances.  This cheerful assessment represented a theoretical rebuilding of the provisions trade that reflected the political goals of imperial officials in London.  Whether or not it was a realistic appraisal remained unproven.[13]

By December 1783, it was clear that Nova Scotia needed immediate external help. The tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the US after the end of the revolution required food, shelter, and other necessities that the province could not supply to survive the harsh Nova Scotian winter.  Abandoning the loyalists to their fate, however, was not a politically acceptable option.  This created a practical crisis parallel to but distinct from Sheffield’s ideals. Within Nova Scotia itself there was little question about its agricultural limitations.  Works by scholars such as Julian Gwyn, Neil MacKinnon, Maya Jasanoff, and James Walker have highlighted the challenges to settlers and, especially, the material and emotional difficulties of reconstructing a familiar society for the enormous number of loyalist refugees and decommissioned troops who sought refuge there in the 1780s.[14]  The challenges were voluminous.  Beyond securing shelter and daily bread, fashioning coherent land claims via surveys for government-distributed land proved controversial as decades of conflicting land claims and surveys had long since ground land sales in the province to a virtual halt.  Few palatable solutions existed.  Writing to Lord North in December, Lieutenant Governor John Campbell noted that with the introduction of disbanded regiments in the colony in need of assistance from the government, the colony required “a considerable supply of provisions….as early in the spring as possible.”[15]  The need was two-fold.  Beyond the humanitarian motive, the supply of provisions was directly linked to the peace and stability of the province.  Fears of discontent among loyalist settlers and demobilized soldiers were noticed even in Whitehall.  Writing in June 1784, Lord Sydney assured Governor John Parr that the British government was aware of the crisis facing the colony, and that a continued flow of provisions from His Majesty’s government to the afflicted would relieve their distress and reassure them of the Crown’s continued interest in their welfare.[16]

Writing to Lord Sydney in September 1784, Parr informed officials in Britain that due to dire scarcity and with the advice of the provincial Council, he had declared that “no scruple or difficulty should be made of admitting the people of New England to import fresh provisions” into the colony.  Further, “it was agreed that any restriction on such an importation might be attended with bad consequences.”[17] Parr’s stance was popular as communities throughout the province reported food shortages and fears of famine throughout the 1780s. A reliance on American provisions imposed other consequences. Immediately after recognizing the efforts on behalf of the material needs of loyalist settlers, he noted that relieving the wants of the new settlers “has been attended with immense expense” and that “issuing further supplies cannot now be a measure of necessity.” One of the key questions of integrating the newly arrived loyalists into Nova Scotia society was the reassurance that their past sufferings would receive just compensation from the British government.  Provisions were a down payment upon that promise, and thus took on a political quality in addition to its importance for subsistence.  Sydney noted that British policy aimed to make Nova Scotia “the envy of the subjects of the neighboring states” through the gracious intervention of the government in “relieving the wants of those who have become settlers in Nova Scotia.”[18] 

However, as early as March 1785 Sydney instructed Parr to ensure that “government in the future be put to the least possible expense.”[19] The need for practical frugality and political idealism uneasily coexisted, and the tension between the two was not fully resolved. Henceforth, Parr should ensure that “government in the future be put to the least possible expense.”[20]  A two-thirds provisions ration was promised until May 1786 to the approximately 15,000 loyalists spread throughout Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.[21] The scope of supplies required was immense.  Writing on 28 May 1785, Sydney informed Parr that the government reached an agreement with contractors to supply the estimated 3.8 million pounds of flour and 3.1 million pounds of pork that would be required for military use as well as to supply loyalist settlers for the next year.[22]  Although the source of these supplies was not specified, it is likely that most would be from external sources as this volume of surplus production in the colony itself did not exist.      

The December 1785 minutes of the Council and House of Assembly find a slightly more stringent attitude towards trade restrictions broadly. However even those that advocated for restrictions exempted grain products from prohibition.[23]  This remains a persistent pattern for the next several years. Each session of the Council would advise and consent to a proclamation by Parr allowing for the importation of American agricultural products for a specified period correlated to the timing of the sessions of the Assembly and Council.[24] This legal agility attempted to reconcile the fact of political separation with the pressing reality for continued economic ties between the US and Nova Scotia. The nature of grain products as both perishable and essential imposed a unique urgency to the debates. This necessity compelled the provincial assembly to be quite liberal with providing exemptions to sustain the commercial links necessary to sustain the flow of provisions into the colony. There were further consequences. Superficially, admitting American produce into the colony was an emergency response to a series of emergency circumstances.  This is in part true, however Graeme Wynn’s research on agriculture in the Bay of Fundy suggests a more complicated relationship between imported provisions, local production, and consumption within the colony.  In his analysis, “cheap, fine flour and other grains from the American states offered stiff competition to coarser Nova Scotian products, however, and marshland farmers soon concentrated on livestock for market production.”[25]   In practice, this rebuilt the pre-war provisions supply chain between the thirteen colonies/US and Nova Scotia in defiance of mercantilistic ideas while efforts to establish a more robust agricultural base failed. However, the tension between the imperial desire to rebuild the provisions supply chain excluding the US and the provincial need to sustain trade with the US remained.

A broader reading of Parr’s correspondence illustrates two points. First, the power to suspend imperial trade regulations still rested in the hands of colonial governors in emergency situations such as impending famine.  Second, the US was the only practical a source for needed provisions, especially given the enduring pattern of the colonial grain trade and expanding demand with the influx of settlers outpacing improvements in internal agricultural production. Whether there was an adequate increase in production of wheat to meet the local demand cannot be directly proven, but it seems unlikely. A memorial from settlers in Annapolis in April 1787, part of the best farming region of the province, for example, requested additional rations due to scarcity. Yet Lord Sydney informed Parr that the government must decline the application noting that

any additional favour shown to them would consequently produce other applications, which considering the immense expense already brought upon this country for supplies of provisions, and other articles issued to these people, could not be attended to.  I must, therefore, desire you to inform the petitioners that their application in the present instance cannot be complied with.[26]  

The case study of the Hessian and Waldeck settlements provides a clear picture of suffering as well as a remedy available to settlers if government relief was not forthcoming.  The community was unable to survive and warned that if outside assistance did not arrive soon the people would “fall under the unavoidable necessity to fly to some other country for the relief of their distressed families.”[27]  An exodus out of Nova Scotia was no idle threat.  Parr had recognized the phenomena two years prior.  Writing to an unidentified correspondent in July 1787, he complained that once the supply of provisions ceased, many loyalists had fled the province.[28]  Whether this was due to a lack of opportunities in Nova Scotia related to the still-creaky land dispersal process, the difficulties of establishing self-sustaining farms in the harsh Nova Scotian environment, the delays associated with the loyalist claims commissions, or the general cooling of wartime emotions in America cannot be decisively proven.  In a real way, the question of “why” was not significant. The need to find an immediate solution was essential, and the response was a variation on a familiar theme. Drawing on the provincial example of “temporary” exceptions to American imports, a July 1789 an Order-in-Council permitted the importation of bread, corn, and flour into all the provinces of Atlantic Canada as a response to a persistent drought.[29] In theory, this again represented a temporary suspension of trade regulations that could be reimposed at any time once the crisis was over. In reality, the Order-in-Council recognized the American provisions trade as an indispensable element of Nova Scotia’s economic and social wellbeing.

The outbreak of war with Revolutionary France in 1793 caused a more formal legal reassessment of trade policy between the United States and the British Empire. Protecting British trade while constraining the trade of France was an essential war goal for London officials. Further, attacking French possessions in the Caribbean formed the core of Britain’s early wartime strategy. This created enormous additional demand for provisions as contractors supplying British forces in the Caribbean required more than could be purchased in Nova Scotia, or the rest of British North America.  A May 1794 letter from John Wentworth, the new governor of Nova Scotia, to Archibald Mitchell, a commissariat contractor, outlines the only practical solution to this problem in a familiar manner.  Although Mitchell’s contract favored fulfillment in the colonies, this was only operative if His Majesty’s colonies “were capable of furnishing” the amount required.[30]  Wentworth allowed for the importation of provisions from Boston, “given that no other remedy existed.”[31]  The state of war also seemed likely to disrupt Nova Scotia’s agricultural supplies if (or when) its militia was need for defense.  By the end of the year a gloomy governor Wentworth sorrowfully reported to the Duke of Portland that “any diminution in cultivating lands would immediately cause such a scarcity of food as to induce numbers to remove to the U. States.” Still, he projected that a surplus in excess of local demand would undoubtedly exist in a few years and be available for export.[32] 

The political consequences of the American Revolution severed the vital provisions trade between Nova Scotia and the US.  Throughout the 1780s and into the 1790s, the provincial government permitted American trade out of necessity because the material reality of famine and the political reality of a newly divided empire could not be reconciled. Comparing the pre-war trade patterns found in the Halifax Naval Office records and the 1768-1772 customs records to the post-war negotiations over the provisions trade we see that the trade patterns linking Nova Scotia to the thirteen colonies remain remarkably intact after American independence. By the signing of Jay’s Treaty in 1794 that formally re-established Anglo-American commercial ties, the grain economy was fundamentally a story of continuity rather than one of revolutionary rupture. 

 Necessity for grain often makes the politically difficult possible when no other viable alternatives exist and the potential collateral damages from a rigid adherence to policies limiting trade are immense. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 posed a threat to Ukraine’s grain exports, causing significant concern over the availability of essential supplies of foodstuffs for the global market. After a significant spike in prices and well-founded fears of unrest caused by a shortage of food, a series of difficult negotiations between Ukraine, Russia, the United Nations, and other interested parties resulted in a July 2022 agreement allowing the resumption of the grain trade.[33]Although post-revolution Nova Scotia did not have the potentially global impacts of interdicting Ukraine’s trade, we see several familiar elements: a difficult political situation imperiling the accustomed trade of food supplies results in an urgent recalculation of priorities resulting in some level of compromise that allows the trade to continue even in the absence of a long-term modification of political policies that would legitimize the pre-existing trade on a more permanent basis. For Nova Scotia’s grain trade with the US, it took over a decade to enact a more enduring change in trade policy.    

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Dr. Patrick Callaway is an Assistant Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Maine-Presque Isle. He earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Maine in 2019, and was a Fulbright student at Dalhousie University in 2018-2019. His research focuses on the political economy of the grain trade during the late 18th-early 19th century and Canadian-American history. 

[1] See Broke Hunter, “The Prospect of Independent Americans: The Grain Trade and Economic Development during the 1780s” Explorations in Early American Culture, Vol. 5 (2001), 260-287; Andrew O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean. (Philadelphia:  University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), and Gordon Bjork, “The Weaning of the American Economy: Independence, Market Changes, and Economic Development” Journal of Economic History, Vol 24, No. 4 (December 1964), 541-560. Hunter and Bjork argue the volume and value of the US-British West Indies grain trade increased in the 1780s from the late colonial era.

[2] John Bartlet Brebner, The Neutral Yankees of Nova Scotia:  A Marginal Colony during the Revolutionary Years. (New York:  Columbia University Press, 1937), 145.

[3] Andrew Hill Clark, Acadia:  The Geography of Early Nova Scotia to 1760.  (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 356.

[4] Cole Harris, This Reluctant Land: Society and Space in Canada Before Confederation (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008),55.

[5] Julian Gwyn, “Shaped by the Soil: Were the Minas Basin Planters Successful Farmers?” The Nova Scotia Planters in the Atlantic World, 1759-1830. Ed. T. Stephen Henderson and Wendy Robicheau (Fredericton: Acadiensis Press, 2012), 82-3.

[6] Julian Gwyn, “Shaped by the Sea but Impoverished by the Soil: Chester Township to 1830” in ibid,102, 118.

[7] Lt. Governor Jonathon Belcher to the Nova Scotia Council and House of Assembly, 16 April 1762. Provincial Archives of Nova Scotia (hereafter PANS), RG1/286.

[8] “Halifax Naval Office Records.” PANS, 221/28.

[9] See CO 16/1 January 1768-January 1773; Lt. Governor Jonathon Belcher to the Nova Scotia Council and House of Assembly, 16 April 1762.  PANS, RG1/286.

[10] CO 16, January 1768-January1773. PANS, CO221/28. Quebec remained an uncertain source of grain surpluses. The CO/16 records reflect a variable pattern of small-scale imports and exports outside of the more serious shortages of 1769, but even the most productive years would not replace the volume of Nova Scotian imports from the thirteen colonies.

[11] Julian Gywn, Excessive Expectations:  Maritime Commerce and the Economic Development of Nova Scotia, 1740-1870.  (Montreal:  McGill-Queens, 1998), 27.

[12] Lord Sheffield, Observations on the Commerce of the United States with Europe and the West Indies; including the several articles of export and import. (Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1783), 18, 33. Sheffield was also optimistic about the potential for Quebec as a potential grain source, however the CO 16/1 accounts suggest that surplus production for export was uncertain.  

[13] See Brian Edwards, Thoughts on the late Proceedings of Government, respecting the trade of the West India Islands with the United States of North America.  The second edition, corrected and enlarged, to which is not first added a postscript, addressed to the right honourable lord Sheffield (London: T. Cadell, 1784); S. Hollingsworth, The Present State of Nova Scotia, with a Brief Account of Canada and the British Islands off the Coast of North America.  2^nd ed.  (Edinburgh:  William Creech, 1787); Tench Coxe, A Brief Examination of Lord Sheffield’s Observations on the Commerce of the United States (Philadelphia: Carey, Stewart and Co., 1791) for the broad trans-Atlantic debate on Sheffield’s premise.

[14] See Neil S. MacKinnon, This Unfriendly Soil: The Loyalist Experience in Nova Scotia, 1783-1791 (Kingston, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1986); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); James W. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783-1870 (London: Longman and Dalhouise University Press, 1976); Julian Gwyn, Excessive Expectations.

[15] John Campbell to Lord North, 18 December 1783. PRO, CO217/56.

[16] Lord Sydney [Secretary of State] to John Parr [Governor, Nova Scotia], 7 July 1784. PRO, CO 217/56.

[17] Parr to Sydney, 29 September 1784. PRO, CO 217/56

[18] Sydney to Parr, 8 March 1785. PRO, CO 217/56. 

[19] Sydney to Parr, 8 March 1785. PRO, CO 217/56. 

[20] Sydney to Parr, 8 March 1785. PRO, CO 217/56.

[21] MacKinnon, This Unfriendly Soil, 29-31.  The standard army ration during this era consisted of 1pound meat, 1pound biscuit or 1.5 pounds wheat bread, and 1 pint of wine or 1/3-pint spirits per man per day.  See S.P.G. Ward, Wellington’s Headquarters:  A Study of the Administrative Problems in the Peninsula, 1809-1814.  (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1957), 79.  

[22] Sydney to Parr, 28 May 1785. RG1/31.

[23] Richard Bulkeley and S.S. Blowers to Parr, 23 December 1785. CO217/58.

[24] See Proclamations for June 1786, April 1787, May 1787, and August 1787 for examples. CO217/58.   

[25] Graeme Wynn, “Late Eighteenth-Century Agriculture on the Bay of Fundy Marshlands,” Acadiensis, Vol. 8, No. 2 (Spring 1979), 80-89, 89

[26] Sydney to Parr, 5 April 1787. PANS, roll 15230.

[27] “Address of Anthony George Kysh, 13 March 1789.” PRO RG1/302

[28] Parr to “Dear Sir” [Unidentified], 13 July 1787. PRO RG1/301.

[29] William Wyndham Grenville to Parr, 25 July 1789. PRO CO217/60.

[30] John Wentworth to Archibald Mitchell, 11 May 1794. PRO CO217/51.

[31] Wentworth to John King, 2 July 1794. PRO CO217/51.

[32] Wentworth to Duke of Portland, 20 December 1794. PRO CO217/51. 

[33] United Nations Trade and Development, “Black Seas Grain Initiative Helps Stabilize Global Food Markets.” https://unctad.org/news/black-sea-grain-initiative-helps-stabilize-global-food-markets. Accessed 30 November 2025.