BARRY, JOHN ALEXANDER, merchant and politician; b. c. 1790 in Shelburne, N.S.; m. first 20 June 1814 in Halifax Mary Black (d. 1833), daughter of the Reverend William Black*, a Methodist minister, and they had five children; m. secondly 30 April 1835 Eliza (Elisa) Ann (Anna) Mercein in New York, and they had two children; m. thirdly c. 1860 Sophia Pernette; d. 2 Oct. 1872 in La Have, N.S.

John Alexander Barry was the son of Mary Jessop and Robert Barry*, a Scottish sailor who fled his ship in New York, settled, and became a devoted Methodist. In 1783, near the end of the American revolution, he and other New York loyalists fled to Port Roseway (Shelburne), where he soon established himself as a successful merchant, trading goods from the West Indies and England. He operated several stores in Nova Scotia and one in New Brunswick; he also transported goods to Newfoundland. His shipping business and his efforts to encourage the spread of Methodism are detailed in the diaries of his friend, Simeon Perkins*.

John Alexander Barry, like his brothers, joined his father’s enterprise. He was elected to the Nova Scotia House of Assembly for the township of Shelburne in 1827. Two years later Barry was, briefly, a popular hero and the most talked-of Nova Scotian. After he had intimated that a fellow assemblyman, Colonel Joseph Freeman, had engaged in smuggling, Barry refused to submit to the assembly’s orders to retract and pursued a course so impetuous and uncompromising that eventually he was expelled as a member and imprisoned by order of the assembly for the rest of the session. When the assembly reprimanded the editors of the Acadian Recorder and the Free Press of Halifax for affording Barry an opportunity to defend himself, Joseph Howe, the owner of the Novascotian newspaper, warned that “if Editors are brought for offences to the Bar of the House, Legislators may depend upon this – that they will be brought, individually and collectively, to a bitter expiation before the bar of the public.”

Sympathy for Barry and the unpopularity of the assembly led to several of its members being “hooted and hissed along the streets, pelted with snow, mud, stones and other missiles, and assailed by every opprobrious expression that could be vented by a heedless and unthinking rabble.” The assembly quickly reasserted its authority, but the “Barry riots” became part of the folklore of the province. Upon his release Barry did extensive research in the Journals of the British House of Commons and published 25 letters in the Acadian Recorder seeking to demonstrate that British precedents could justify neither his imprisonment nor his expulsion. Having taken the Tory side in the celebrated “Brandy Dispute” of 1830 [see Enos Collins], Barry failed in his subsequent attempts to be elected to the legislature.

In 1847 Barry once more found himself in a legal entanglement when he became a central figure in a court battle. The case involved the custody of the daughter born during his second marriage, to Eliza Mercein, who had left Nova Scotia and returned to her native New York. Five years of “vexed and protracted litigation” followed. The case ultimately reached the United States Supreme Court, where it was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction. Although unsuccessful, Barry v. Mercein became an important precedent in shaping the boundaries of federal judicial authority in the domestic lives of Americans.

Thereafter Barry gained public attention only through his lectures, principally to Halifax audiences, on the customs, artifacts, and chiefs of the Micmac (Mi’kmaq) and of other North American First Nations. In this capacity he aroused none of the excitement that had surrounded him in 1829.

J. Murray Beck