Chapter 1 Draft: Born Between Empires

New York, 1777 – A Child of War

Her son—our Anselme—was named Samuel, after his father. The elder Samuel Hatfield is recorded as his father, though what hopes or stories he might have passed to his son remain lost to history. Like so many of African descent in the colonies, they carried names passed down by enslavers, yet imbued them with their own quiet dignity.

We do not know who held title over the Hatfield family in New York. They may have served in a Loyalist household, one of those white families that remained loyal to the British Crown and later fled to Canada. Perhaps they worked in the city’s teeming port district, where enslaved boys and girls emptied barrels, cleaned fish, and stitched sails for ships they could never board freely. Samuel was born into a city aflame with ideas of liberty and revolution—ideas that rarely extended to children of his complexion.

It was a contradiction that the boy would carry in his bones: the land of freedom was his birthplace; but freedom was not his birthright.

The Great Exodus – Nova Scotia and Dugas' Household

In the years that followed the war, thousands of Black men and women made their way to the British. The promise was simple: escape your enslavers, serve the Crown, and receive liberty and land. While some fulfilled this dream and settled in Birchtown or Shelburne, many others—perhaps like Samuel—were swept into a second servitude in Nova Scotia.

Sometime before 1798, young Samuel Hatfield found himself in Sissiboo, a settlement in Digby County, Nova Scotia. The French name of the region belied the cultural collision at its heart: former Acadian settlers, British Loyalists, Mi’kmaq peoples, and Black migrants all jostled uneasily for space, dignity, and survival.

Here, Paul Dugas Jr., an Acadian farmer and community patriarch, took Samuel into his household. According to the later manumission record, Samuel was "under the care" of Dugas—“after the manner of slaves”. There was no pretense of apprenticeship. His labor, like so many others, was extracted without compensation. He likely tended crops, fetched water, chopped firewood, and hauled goods along the muddy roads between Clare and Sissiboo.

Winters in Nova Scotia were brutal. The cold gnawed through layers of wool. Fires had to be kept burning, and snow cleared from thresholds daily. Samuel, still a teenager, would have learned to split logs with precision and haul timber through biting winds. These were the years when muscle grew hard and silence grew deeper—when survival taught obedience, but also endurance.

And yet, for all the hardship, something had shifted. Nova Scotia was not New York. There were whispers here—of papers being signed, of people becoming free. Hope was no longer unthinkable. It was a flickering candle behind the eyes.

The Paper That Changed Everything – Manumission in Sissiboo

Then, on July 1, 1798, the unimaginable happened: Samuel Hatfield was legally declared free.

A document recorded in the township of Sissiboo confirmed that Stephen Jones, Esq., J.P., and John McCullough, Town Clerk of the Township of Clare, had witnessed the event. At age 21, Samuel was no longer a possession. He was a man, under law.

We can imagine him standing in a modest wooden room, the ink barely dry on the document. Did he understand every word? Did he tremble? Had he prayed the night before, asking for deliverance? Perhaps Dugas stood by, ambivalent or paternalistic, offering the paper as if it were a favor rather than a long overdue right.

This emancipation would have set Samuel apart. Few in his position could claim formal manumission. Most who escaped slavery in Nova Scotia did so through death, distance, or loophole. Samuel had received it in writing—a powerful thing in a world where Black freedom was often revoked on a whim.

With his new status, Samuel had choices to make. What name would he go by now? What faith would he declare? Where would he live, and whom would he love?

But perhaps more urgently: how would he survive as a free Black man in a land that barely tolerated his presence?

A New Name, A New Faith – The Baptism Ahead

Freedom brought no guarantees. Racism did not vanish. Work remained hard, and land scarce. But the soul needed tending as well. And so, on April 12, 1800, just shy of his 23rd birthday, Samuel Hatfield stood before Father Jean-Mandé Sigogne at the Catholic mission in Eel Brook, and received baptism.

He took the name Anselme—the name he would be known by in the years to come.

It was a symbolic rebirth. The ceremony marked not just his Christian initiation, but also his passage into community. It linked him to the Acadian faithful, who had once themselves been cast out and scattered across the continent during the Grand Dérangement. Though darker in skin and origin, Anselme now shared in their rituals.

Father Sigogne, who had ministered to Indigenous and Black converts alike, did not turn him away. This priest would later defend Anselme publicly, during a scandal that shook the region. But for now, he simply laid holy water on the head of a young man who had come through fire and was not yet done burning.

Chapter 2: A Scandal in Eel Brook – Love and Rebellion in a Small Parish (1800)

A Church Divided

The little church at Eel Brook was made of rough-hewn timber, no steeple, no stained glass—just a simple cross nailed to the door and a bell that rang clear over the Acadian coast. Inside, the air smelled of pine floorboards and candle wax, with pews scarred by a generation’s worth of boots and prayer.

It was here, on a crisp November morning in 1800, that the parishioners of St. Anne’s gathered to witness a union that would divide their community for years.

Anselme Hatfield, 23 years old, newly baptized, a free Black man formerly enslaved by a local Acadian patriarch, stood at the front of the church. Beside him stood Marie-Marguerite Mius d’Entremont, daughter of one of the oldest Acadian families in Nova Scotia. Her skin was pale, her heritage storied—her surname carried weight in these parts, linking her to landed settlers and French colonial nobility.

Their union was not just rare—it was incendiary.

Whispers had begun the moment their names were posted in the banns. Some claimed the priest had erred. Others accused Marie of shameful rebellion. A few elders reportedly refused to attend the ceremony at all. But Father Jean-Mandé Sigogne, their parish priest and spiritual authority, stood firm. He not only agreed to marry them—he defended them from the pulpit, rebuking those in the congregation who dared question the sanctity of their vows.

“You would cast stones at what God has joined?” we imagine him saying, eyes blazing beneath his heavy brow. “Then cast them also at Christ, who welcomed every man and woman into His house.”

This moment, so small on paper—a wedding on a November day—was an act of quiet rebellion. For Anselme, it was not only the affirmation of his manhood, but of his place in the world. No longer a property, no longer a servant, he now stood as husband, head of household, and equal in sacrament.

And for Marie-Marguerite, the choice was perhaps costlier still.

The Bride Who Broke the Line

Marie-Marguerite Mius was not the only young woman in Nova Scotia to challenge social norms, but she did so with unusual clarity. Her family, descended from Charles Mius d’Entremont—a former French nobleman turned Acadian settler—had endured the trauma of the Grand Dérangement, the expulsion of Acadians by the British in 1755. Her people had survived exile, re-settlement, and war. They held tight to their language, land, and bloodlines.

To some in her community, marrying a man like Anselme—a former slave, a Black man of no property, no formal schooling, and no pedigree—was a betrayal of that heritage.

We do not know her words, but we know her choice. And choices like that speak louder than any diary ever could.

Her sister, Marie Claire Mius, would later bear a child by Anselme as well—Joseph Quomino, his illegitimate son. That later affair only deepened the scandal around the family. But in 1800, it was Marie-Marguerite’s marriage that lit the first spark.

The Priest Who Stood Firm

Father Jean-Mandé Sigogne had arrived in Nova Scotia in 1799, sent by the Catholic Church to tend to the spiritual needs of Acadians scattered in remote villages. But he quickly became more than a shepherd of souls. He was their defender, social worker, and occasional judge—especially for Black and Indigenous converts, who were routinely treated as second-class Christians by both church and laity.

Sigogne’s journals show baptisms of Black children, his protection of “poor negroes,” and his willingness to speak against local prejudice.

So when the outcry began over Anselme and Marie’s wedding, Father Sigogne took to the pulpit with thunder.

A surviving record of that sermon notes how he reminded the congregation of biblical examples—Ruth the Moabite, Simon of Cyrene—and warned against racial hypocrisy. He acknowledged Anselme’s past, but declared it irrelevant before the eyes of God. In that moment, the priest offered more than a wedding blessing. He offered protection—spiritual, social, and symbolic.

A Home Built in the Ashes

After the ceremony, there was no lavish banquet. Likely just a small meal in a modest home: boiled potatoes, smoked fish, and a sweetened bread Marie had prepared. But to Anselme, it might have tasted like a king’s feast.

They began their life together not with land, but with tenacity. Over time, they built a family—twelve children in all, each a quiet miracle born in the shadow of controversy: Joseph, Samuel Anselme II, Jean Baptiste, Hilaire, Cyrille, Marguerite Wesley, Charles, Frank François, Genevieve Cromwell, Cecilia Cromwell, and Joseph Pierre Archambault Hatfield.

Their home became a gathering place for mixed-race Acadian descendants—children who straddled two worlds and belonged fully to neither. But within those walls, they belonged to each other. And that, Anselme seemed to believe, was enough.

It is late afternoon. The wind comes off the Bay, sharp with salt and early frost. Anselme opens the door to their one-room cottage, letting in a rush of cold air and the sound of gulls. Behind him, Marie is wrapping a baby in wool. A second child plays on the dirt floor with a carved wooden horse.

Anselme stoops, pulls off his boots, and watches his wife tend their child.

He has no fortune. No title. But he has a name, a home, and a woman who defied a village to be his bride.

And sometimes, that is the truest kind of victory.

Chapter 3: Blood and Saltwater – Family, Land, and Survival in Baie Ste-Marie (1800–1829)

The Coast of Memory

The sea was always close.

In Baie Ste-Marie, where Anselme and Marie Hatfield raised their children, the wind came from the Atlantic in long, salt-heavy gusts that shaped the lives of everyone on the coast. The bay’s gray waves curled into the rocks, and its tides marked time better than any church bell.

Here, in a clearing near what is now Clare, Nova Scotia, they built their life. One room at first. Then two. Later, a shed for tools. A smokehouse for fish. A coop. A cradle.

Anselme worked the land, but it was hard land—thin, acidic soil, often stony, barely enough to coax potatoes and root vegetables from the earth. He supplemented with work as a seasonal laborer, chopping timber, hauling goods, and—when needed—helping neighbors harvest crops before the first frost. In winter, when the work slowed and the light came late, he repaired tools and carved small toys for the children from driftwood. He whittled little horses and boats, painting them with berry juice and soot.

Marie kept the fire alive—both literal and figurative. She tended the home, bore child after child, and stitched blankets from scraps. She sang Acadian lullabies with verses passed down from the Mius matriarchs, though sometimes she hummed without words, letting the sound fill the silence.

They were a family of two bloodlines—one forged in freedom’s painful birth, the other in the sorrowed resilience of the Acadian exile. Together they raised children who were neither one nor the other, but entirely themselves.

Children of Two Worlds

By 1820, the Hatfield home echoed with voices—of children playing, arguing, laughing, and praying. Twelve children, born across the decades, each given names that reflected both French Catholic tradition and English influence:

• Joseph – likely named for the biblical father-figure
  
• Samuel Anselme II – carrying his father’s name, a clear sign of pride
  
• Jean Baptiste, Hilaire, Cyrille, Charles, Frank François
  
• Daughters: Marguerite Wesley, Genevieve Cromwell, Cecilia Cromwell
  
• And Joseph Pierre Archambault Hatfield, the youngest
  

Some of these names, like Cromwell and Archambault, suggest connection to neighboring Acadian or Black Loyalist families—perhaps signaling godparents, allies, or acts of symbolic respect.

The children learned to speak French at home, but also English in town. They knew how to pray in Latin, but played with driftwood swords and listened to Mi’kmaq hunting tales traded from traveling neighbors. Their racial identity—part Black, part Acadian—made them visible in every room, but fully accepted in none.

In the eyes of the census-takers, they might be marked with slashes, partials, “of color.” But in their mother’s eyes, they were whole.

The Weight of the Past, The Work of the Present

Though legally free, Anselme was never unmarked. Racism lingered like a cold fog in Nova Scotia—subtle but biting. Freedmen like him were sometimes denied access to land ownership, underpaid for labor, or offered the hardest jobs last. Yet he persevered.

He could not read or write, but he signed his name with an “X” on important documents—a cross that stood for both literacy denied and dignity claimed.

The family was poor. That was never in question. But theirs was a poverty tempered by love, structured by faith, and filled with meaning. The house smelled of boiled root vegetables, sea air, and woodsmoke. In the evenings, Anselme would sit near the hearth while Marie mended clothing by firelight. One child would practice their catechism aloud, another might play with a carved horse in the dust.

The Quiet Wisdom of a Man Reclaimed

Anselme aged early—most men who spent their youth in servitude did. By the late 1820s, his back had begun to stoop, and his hands—once strong enough to carry logs—were often swollen in the joints. He no longer worked in the fields full days, but he could still fix a fencepost, still cradle a grandchild.

When neighbors passed by, they tipped their hats. Some still whispered about the scandal, but most respected him now. A man who raised twelve children in a place that barely wanted him was hard to ignore.

He had no will, no title deed. But he had his children. And that, in the end, was his true estate.

The Final Winter

In the winter of 1829, the cold came early and stayed.

Anselme Hatfield died that year, in Baie Ste-Marie, Nova Scotia. There is no surviving obituary. No grand tombstone. Likely just a wooden cross, hand-hewn, planted in stony earth. His wife Marie and their children would have gathered around as the ground was broken, tears falling as snowflakes did.

A priest said prayers in Latin. Marie whispered a verse in French. One of the children—perhaps Charles, now grown—lowered the body into the earth with trembling hands.

Anselme had lived 52 years, nearly half of them as a free man. He died with his name intact, his family around him, and his dignity unbroken.