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CHAPTER 1
"Wayward Humours" and "Perverse Disputings"
Exiled Blacks and the Foundation of Sierra Leone, 1787–1800
Ruma Chopra
Black exiles, refugees of war, became extraordinarily useful to an expanding British Empire during the late eighteenth century. An already uprooted people without means or patrons could be prepped for a second transplantation to British tropical settlements which whites found undesirable or fatal. Between 1787 and 1800, three groups of exiled blacks from England and Nova Scotia relocated to Sierra Leone to buttress British interests in the region. A geographically dispersed empire needed dependable settlers in new outposts amongst hostile African neighbors, subjects who had a stake in the British Empire. In an era of evangelical antislavery, a discourse of humanitarianism couched each subsidized migration. The strategic dispersal and concentration of exiles constituted empire.
The British government strategically promoted the settlement of black exiles in Sierra Leone. These exiles followed the trajectory established in the 1780s after the secession of the thirteen mainland American colonies. Following the War of American Independence, white and black loyalists fled to Nova Scotia to escape the enmity of the American patriots. They secured British interests by doubling Nova Scotia's population and precluding an easy conquest of the colony by the new United States to the south. British Nova Scotia was also intended to demonstrate the order of constitutional governance in contrast to the disorder of American republicanism. Sierra Leone's nascent settlement spoke to another group of strategic aims: it established a British foothold in West Africa, and it showcased a formal antislavery establishment to the rest of the world. Freetown advertised the British as crusaders against the sin of slavery. Imperial and humanitarian goals went hand in hand.
Sierra Leone emerged as a solution for multiple social problems confronting metropolitan visionaries and politicians in the late eighteenth century. Men with commercial vision and philanthropic friends hoped that new colonies in West Africa would replace the "old thirteen" lost in 1783 by exporting raw materials and becoming a new market for British manufactured items. The abolitionist Thomas Clarkson celebrated the benefits of colonizing West Africa. He listed the many items that could be procured: palm oil, ivory, gold, wood including mahogany, cocoa, and tulip, spices such as nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, black pepper, and cardamom, and staples such as rice, cotton, indigo, and sugar. Clarkson imagined "black persons and others going in a body into the interior country with camels or mules ... loaded with merchandize" and returning with exportable goods.
This chapter explores the resettlement of exiled former slaves to Sierra Leone, and their role in founding a colony that the British hoped would also serve as a beacon for uncivilized and unchristian Africans. By creating an example of a flourishing settlement based on the fruits of free labor in West Africa proper, this vision for Sierra Leone followed earlier schemes, including in the former colony of Georgia in 1732. Both were based on antislavery principles and imagined industrious, sober, and moral farming families who would set a model for a new kind of British settlement. Both establishments fortified imperial presence in strategic regions and received large infusions of British public spending to sustain them. Both involved the selection of immigrants who would best protect British geographical claims and promote the British antislavery vision. Protestant whites perceived as disciplined and deserving became the first settlers of Georgia while black exiles — many of whom had already shown loyalty to the empire — became selected as settlers of Sierra Leone.
These blacks were both revolutionary exiles and slavery's exiles. These displaced families became caught in the crosscurrents of the Atlantic world at a moment when the British were experimenting with antislavery and launching their claims to West Africa. Already uprooted blacks confronted a second migration from a perspective likely unavailable to other ex-slaves: the first exile burdened them with an awareness of imperial alternatives.
A British Vision for Sierra Leone
Zachary Macaulay, expansionist, evangelical antislavery crusader, and twenty-six-year-old governor of Sierra Leone, expressed British dreams for Africa. He idealized that the province would, with proper white supervision and an influx of black settlers, lead to new agricultural exports and, as importantly, create thousands of new consumers for British manufactured goods. Indeed, he imagined that Sierra Leone, with the most magnificent harbor in West Africa and free black workers, would soon outshine the slave colony of Jamaica. Macaulay's vision of empire is echoed in "African Prince," a moral fable about the slave trade written by abolitionist, Thomas Clarkson. Clarkson set Prince Zudor as a black Romeo and his wife Zera as a Juliet, who, with their infant son strapped to her back, drowned in grief in the Atlantic when Zudor was betrayed and sold into slavery. Shortly after, Zudor discovered her sacrifice and threw himself into the same ocean to reunite with her. Clarkson depicts the "sable and unlettered Kings of Africa" as awaiting humanitarian intervention to cease the destruction of their communities. British Sierra Leone would promise a happier ending for the prince and his bride. The mix of love, slavery, separation, and ultimately death appealed to sentimental reformers.
It was not accidental that a botanist, Henry Smeathman, suggested the peninsula of Sierra Leone for British explorations in West Africa. The eighteenth-century age of botanical exploration overlapped with the era of imperial expansion; both shared in the zeal for improvement and reform. The prevalence of botanical language with its focus on the right environment (soil and climate) for transplanted seeds would become convenient shorthand for discussions of transplanted people. Smeathman raved about the benefits of Sierra Leone for the average settler: "A man possessed of a change of cloathing, a wood axe, a hoe, and a pocket knife, may soon place himself in an easy and comfortable situation." He imagined white settlement and minimized high white fatalities in the region. He blamed the deaths on "unwholesome" and "rancid" provisions, "intemperate lives," and "ardent spirits." Despite Smeathman's assurances, it was widely known that many whites did not survive the diseases in the tropical region. The government ruled against sending white convicts to Sierra Leone even though it was sufficiently remote to preclude easy return to England. White convicts, some of whom had only committed misdemeanors or minor infractions, could not be sent wholesale to die.
Black exiles sent to Sierra Leone in 1787 set a precedent. Uprooted blacks would extend the empire's claims in regions deemed undesirable by white settlers, and settle regions where British interests exceeded British occupation. In comparison with West African communities, black settlers, many from the Americas, appeared marginally British. The blacks' complexion mattered less than their availability, their familiarity with British customs and laws, and their readiness to advance within and not outside the British Empire.
During the mid-1780s, when the evangelical lawyer Granville Sharp, who earlier became deeply invested in abolitionism through the Somerset Case, seized the opportunity to establish a free community in Sierra Leone, black emigration became irrevocably linked to British humanitarianism. It is not surprising then that the first candidates for the Sierra Leone settlement came from amongst the thousands of free black poor in London, numbered to be over fourteen thousand. In addition to domestic slaves, the influx of black refugees in England after the War of American Independence had further expanded the indigent black population. As their numbers fed class anxieties about unemployment and crime, Sharp, along with other Christian reformers, saw a chance to reduce England's burden and to launch the antislavery experiment in West Africa. Domestic order depended on expelling burdensome blacks.
Sharp's recruitment campaign invited blacks who suffered "the greatest distress" to make a home in Sierra Leone. In May 1786, widely circulated notices used Smeathman's language to emphasize the benefits of the new settlement for any hardworking emigrant: "It is found that no place is so fit and proper as the Grain Coast of Africa; where the necessaries of life may be supplied by the force of industry and moderate labour." The British government would supply transportation and clothing and provisions for three months, along with tools for the cultivation of the new settlement.
The first group of migrants who left from London for Sierra Leone faced terrible difficulties and doomed Sharp's efforts in Sierra Leone. Accompanied by a captain of the Royal Navy, the group of 439 English settlers arrived in Sierra Leone in May 1787. The group included the black poor and some white men, along with seventy white women. They landed in Sierra Leone during the wrong season. They faced torrential rains, inadequate housing, insufficient provisions, and the suspicion of nearby natives. Only two-thirds of those originally embarked lived beyond seven months. Some, both blacks and whites, joined the slave factories nearby; a few found employment on board slave ships. In desperation, Sharp sent more settlers in April 1788 along with "live swine" to keep the colony viable. But of the thirty-nine sent, only twenty-six survived. Little financial support was available for the abandoned settlers. In April 1790, when Sharp received news that the town was destroyed and the blacks had scattered, he lamented the fate of his "poor little, ill-thriven, swarthy daughter, the unfortunate colony of Sierra Leone." Paternalism went hand in hand with imperialism. Fortunately for Sharp, a larger group of black exiles would become available for a second transplantation.
A Rival "New" Jamaica?
The high mortality rate in Sierra Leone could not be ignored, especially by abolitionists who had drawn sustained attention to the lack of natural increase of slaves in the West Indies. As early as 1788, Granville Sharp created a rationale for why settlers had been reduced to just 276 people within the first year. At least thirty-four people, he wrote, died in crowded ships before they reached the African coast "so the climate of Sierra Leone is not to be blamed." Others died within the first four months because they "continued intemperate," lacked fresh provisions, and did not have time to build huts before the rainy season. Some remained missing not due to sickness or death but to emigration; they had fled the British settlement to live in nearby African communities. By whatever means he could identify, Sharp emphasized that the deaths were due to improper precautions, and were not inevitable in a tropical climate for whites and blacks who had not acquired immunities.
After the failure of Sharp's first venture, the Sierra Leone Company, founded by merchants as much as philanthropists, attempted to revive the settlement based on a more secure foundation. Its justification was simple: "Whereas the interior kingdoms and countries of the said continent have not hitherto been explored by Europeans, nor hath any regular trade ever been carried on therewith from these kingdoms nor can such undertakings be conveniently carried on or supported unless a considerable capital joint stock is raised for that purpose." The Company raised money to cultivate tropical crops and to identify useful commodities from the less-explored interior regions of West Africa. It received a monopoly to launch the settlement. In 1791, it raised £110,000 from five hundred subscribers.
The potential threat represented by the Sierra Leone Company was not lost on the planters in the West Indies who confronted a sustained attack against the slave trade. The abolition of the slave trade risked shattering the edifice of their sugar economy. Tropical crops produced in West Africa, they feared would compete for metropolitan consumers. Sugar would conceivably be cheaper in Africa than that manufactured in the West Indies because it would use free labor, one-third the cost of slave labor. 21 In addition, as West Africa was only twenty days by sea from England, such produce could likely be transported more cheaply.
Jamaica's hostility to the Sierra Leone Company was accompanied by a surprising enumeration of the island's advantages over West Africa. The British Empire would benefit by investing in Jamaica over West Africa. Jamaica was more easily fortified and defended because it was an island; it would be catastrophically expensive to defend a vast continent given the known volatility of the region. Sierra Leone's climate was "fatal" in comparison to Jamaica's healthier one. Jamaican slaves benefited from amelioration laws; free African laborers would receive no similar protection. Reverend Cooper Willyams ended his list of enslavement's benefits by emphasizing the greater possibility of Christian conversion in the West Indies: "It is better for them to be carried to a country where they have a chance at least of better treatment, and where many of them are instructed in their duty to their God, of which before they had no idea." Proslavery advocates recommended the formation of a trading company whose purpose would be restricted to commerce; a venture whose purpose was land cultivation and settlement served no commercial, military, or humanitarian purpose. But the prevailing political sentiments favored Sierra Leone.
In 1791, Sierra Leone's leaders believed that the abolition of the slave trade was imminent. Their immediate object was to establish a settlement based on three categories of colonists: a small white council with regular and permanent salaries, thirty to forty skilled craftsmen or "artificers" who would receive support from the Company to build the settlement, and large numbers of settlers to whom grants of land would be made. The first settlers would construct roads, cultivate crops, and build the infrastructure that would encourage a "good reputation" and invite respectable English people to seek commerce in Africa. In time, the English would cultivate connections as much as crops, build mansions, and showcase a new Jamaica in West Africa. The Company prepared to identify African commodities that would serve to replace the trade in slaves.
From Nova Scotia to West Africa
A second group of black exiles reached Sierra Leone in 1792. These individuals came from among the three thousand black loyalists who initially sought refuge in Nova Scotia after the War of American Independence. The British had promised the free blacks land in Nova Scotia in return for their loyalty; the blacks also expected to be treated as equal to whites. Instead, for eight years, between 1783 and 1791, the Nova Scotian blacks faced the hostility of white loyalists, the impossibility of sustaining themselves on barren land, and for many who never received land, a lifetime of servitude as black servants. Terrible conditions in the British colony, along with white prejudice, led over one thousand of them to seek a second relocation. They petitioned to leave the colony, for better treatment and for a better life for their families.
From the perspective of the Sierra Leone Company, the Nova Scotian blacks appeared ideal colony builders. The Company welcomed the acquisition of "free black colonists, acquainted with the English language, and accustomed to labor in hot climates." In October 1791, John Clarkson, brother of the evangelical abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, and a member of the Royal Navy, arrived in Nova Scotia to recruit settlers, offering each man twenty acres for himself, ten for his wife and five for every child, along with the promise of political representation. The Company trusted the Nova Scotian black loyalists with their devout Protestant faith, their high literacy, and their clear grasp of British laws and customs. As importantly, the blacks had already proven their attachment to the empire and could serve as subordinate partners to extend British reach into Africa.
Clarkson made note of the black Nova Scotians' desperate circumstances in a tiny notebook. The blacks were forced to work as day laborers, sharecroppers, indentured servants, and, in the case of children, apprentices. They told him that "whites seldom or ever pay for work done." The blacks feared their former masters would kidnap them and return them to the United States. Others never received land and tired of living on "white men's property." Some received lower wages than promised for their work. "It is a common custom in this country," they said, "to promise a black so much per day and in evening when his work is finished" to renege on the commitment. Their children received no pay when they worked in white households because whites insisted they obliged black parents by providing children with lodging and food. None of the blacks mentioned the climate of Nova Scotia.
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Excerpted from "Africans in Exile"
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