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To His Excellency

Lord Viscount Falkland &c &c &c

Lieut. Governor of Nova Scotia

      We the undersigned Inhabitants of the Township of Preston, beg 1eave respectfully to approach your Excellency with a statement of the hardships of our Situation, and to request your Excellencys aid to remove the disabilities under which we labour.

      Petitioners are Refugees, brought from the Plantations of the southern States, during the American War or their decendants , being placed by Government upon ten acre lots, of poor land, many of them including swamps and likewise entirely barren & unproductive, and none of them sufficient to yield subsistence for a family however skillfull and industrious, they have dragged on a miserable existence but few, if any of them, rising above the level of hopeless poverty. But few white men in this country seldom make a living upon ten acres of good land, and Petitioners believe that any number of them similarly placed to themselves in a strange country, and beneath a rigorous climate, after being recently relieved from the associations and pressure of slavery and the heat of a southern sun, would have for many years presented the same spectacle that the coloured people of Preston have exhibited.

      The object of this Petition is twofold

      1st To humbly pray your Excellency to allow grants to pass confirming our titles to the lands we