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Juneteenth and Other Lesser Known African-American Historical Culture

Khalid Elhassan June 15, 2020 34 min

Colonel Tye - American Revolutionary War — Colonel Tye as portrayed in a PBS documentary. PBS

34. A Fortunate Farmer

Former slaves resettled in Nova Scotia. Pintrest

British Freedom might have been a hardscrabble farmer barely making ends meet from poor soil. Still, he was better off by orders of magnitude where he was in Nova Scotia, as a free man, than he would have been if he had remained in America, as a slave.

He had title to 40 acres of land that, poor as it was, was nonetheless his private property, to do with as he pleased. He also owned one and a half town lots in Halifax – as yet a no-account town of cleared dirt and a few cabins, but one that was destined to grow, and with it, the real estate value of British Freedom’s lots.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.