After the defeat of the French and the British annexation of Canada, planners continued to see Nova Scotia as a space uniquely suited for direct imperial intervention. While the new leadership of the province and Board of Trade supported Halifax’s broad vision, they balked at its cost and chose to outsource the next phase of Nova Scotia’s transformation to private individuals and land companies. It was in this post-war context that some of colonial America’s most notable names became involved in the colony to their north. The Board of Trade’s open call for respectable land investors to take up and settle Nova Scotian land attracted no less a figure than Benjamin Franklin, and another company from Philadelphia hired a fresh-faced and not-yet-“mad” Anthony Wayne to survey their potential Nova Scotian lands. But this flurry of interest—one historian referred to it as a “veritable carnival of land grabbing”—was short. By the late 1760s, what had begun with great excitement had almost entirely ceased, and Nova Scotia now gained a new reputation: a money pit, emblematic of the worst excesses of the British Empire.
It is no accident that this downturn coincided with the imperial crisis. In his 1767/1768 Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, John Dickinson pitted the colonies that would eventually break away from the empire against the somewhat newer areas of British control, among which he included Nova Scotia. He rejected the attempts to settle Nova Scotia as damaging to the population levels of the older colonies, not to mention a colossal waste of money. Dickinson was far from the only one to articulate this argument. In his late 1760s and 1770s writings, Benjamin Franklin, no longer so enthusiastic about the province, also drew a strong line between the older colonies and Nova Scotia and Georgia, which also had a reputation as an imperial experiment. For example, in an angry marginal note in his copy of Josiah Tucker’s A Letter from a Merchant in London to His Nephew in North America, Franklin claimed that the older colonies had no obligation to the Crown, as they had never “received maintenance in any shape from Britain.” He contrasted this with Nova Scotia and Georgia, which he positioned as wasteful exercise in nepotism, done only as “mere jobbs for the benefit of ministerial favourites.”
In that light, Nova Scotia’s loyalism during the American Revolution perhaps makes more sense. The problem of why the province, peopled at that point mostly with recently migrated New Englanders, would remain loyal while the rest of the mainland colonies did not has long been a puzzle in historiography of the region. Historians have put forward theories which emphasized the (overstated) isolation of the province, its religious heterodoxy, and, most compellingly, its lack of the kind of seventeenth-century political traditions that colonists in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia drew on for support. Less examined is the fact that Revolutionary leaders simply did not try very hard to bring the province in. There were, in fact, more than a few Revolutionary sympathizers in Nova Scotia; some went so far as to lay siege to Fort Cumberland in 1776, and supporters of an American Nova Scotia semi-regularly petitioned the Continental Congress.