Black refugee (War of 1812)

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Black refugees were black people who escaped slavery in the United States during the War of 1812 and settled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Trinidad. The term is used in Canada for those who settled in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. They were the most numerous of the African Americans who sought freedom during the War of 1812. The Black refugees were the third group of African Americans, after the Black Loyalists, to flee American enslavement in wartime and settle in Canada. They make up the most significant single immigration source for today's African Nova Scotian communities. During the antebellum period, however, an estimated 10,000 to 30,000 Black refugees reached freedom in Canada, often traveling alone or in small family groups.

Those who settled in Trinidad were generally from Virginia and Maryland, and Georgia and Spanish Florida, via Bermuda, where they were evacuated on British ships from the East Coast. Some were settled in Trinidad in 1815. Those African Americans who bore arms for the British in the second Corps of Colonial Marines, recruited from the younger of the total of 4,000 refugees, settled in Trinidad in 1816, where they became known as the Merikins (also spelled as Merikens).^[2]