This wave of African American immigrants was labelled the 'Black Refugees', perhaps to distinguish them from the remaining Black Loyalists. They faced a Nova Scotia Assembly convinced that the province would not benefit from the arrival of 'a separate and marked class of people, unfitted by Nature to this Climate, or to an association with the rest of His Majesty's Colonists', as well as material destitution and an outbreak of smallpox (Winks, 2000, pp. 116-117). The changing policies to deal with the group included plans to settle them as small farmers; however, as had been the case with previous groups, the plots were too small, the soil was unproductive and their settlements faltered. Winks attributed the dire circumstances of the Black Refugees to their enslaved origins in the American South, their competition with White immigrants for employment, a series of natural disasters, their restricted access to land, their lack of leadership and attempts by White colonizers to manipulate them (Winks, 2000, pp. 114, 124-128). Whitfield challenges this interpretation and notes that there is evidence of the emergence of 'black self-assertion and agency', even in  
the archives of the colonial elite, and points to 'a group determined to make a place for themselves in colonial society' (Whitfield, 2002, pp. 31, 49).