To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  In December 1786, 411 passengers—including 60 white women recruited as wives for the settlers—boarded three ships bound for Sierra Leone. Escorted by Captain Thomas Thompson of the British navy, the refugees at last reached what they hoped would prove their promised land on May 9, 1787. Thompson, who had been given temporary command of the colony, arranged a meeting with the local chief, known as “King Tom” to the British, and secured an agreement to purchase a tract of land along the Sierra Leone River for £59 in trade goods. The British, who had been trading in the area since 1562 and had eight trading posts in the vicinity, were not strangers to King Tom, though his decision to sell them land outright was unprecedented. African polities had long allowed Europeans to occupy their lands as tenants, but they had never before ceded territory in perpetuity. King Tom may not have fully understood the document he and Thompson signed, and the conflicting claims to the land would prove a source of continual friction between the colony and the local peoples for the foreseeable future.15

  The colony was intended to be self-regulating, with minimal British intervention after Thompson’s initial escort and diplomacy. As such, the settlers were to govern themselves democratically, and they selected Richard Weaver to be their commander and elected a range of officials and officers to run the colony and administer justice. For Granville Sharp and his colleagues, this had been a key aspect of the colony, providing proof against pro-slavery claims that Africans did not have the capacity for self-rule. For the refugees too, the prospect of political power was vitally important to their transatlantic search for freedom. In this spirit they named their new colony the “Province of Freedom,” and their first settlement Granville Town, after the man who had done so much to secure their independence.

  Such optimism was short-lived. After years of poverty and penury in London, many of the settlers arrived in Africa already ill. The sickness was further compounded by the timing of their arrival in Sierra Leone. Shortly after landing, the rainy season began, making planting impossible, construction difficult, and disease rampant. By the time Captain Thompson returned to Britain in September 1787, only 268 settlers remained. By the following April, the numbers had been further reduced to 130. Dozens had succumbed to disease—malaria, typhoid, dysentery—during the rainy season. Others, in despair, had abandoned the colony, forced in a cruel twist of fate to take refuge or employment with nearby slave traders, like those stationed on Bance Island. In addition, King Tom and other local chiefs, who had never granted permission for a permanent settlement, launched retaliatory raids on the already vulnerable settlement. Within months of their arrival, King Tom began to kidnap settlers and sell them into slavery as compensation for the unpaid tribute he felt was due. In December 1789, King Jimmy, a local Temne chief who likewise expected tribute for the colonists’ use of a watering hole in his territory, attacked Granville Town and razed the village to the ground in retaliation. The settlers, aided by local slave traders also at loggerheads with the local chiefs, fought back, but came out the worse. By 1790, the colony was almost completely abandoned, its remaining settlers having fled to nearby trading posts and slaving stations.

  To be sure, the failure of the first Sierra Leone settlement was troubling, but Granville Sharp and his colleagues were not about to give up on a cause near and dear to their hearts. Sharp, however, had already spent more of his own money than he could afford trying to prop up the ailing settlement. It had become clear that a fresh infusion of cash and energy was needed if the project was to be salvaged, and so, on February 17, 1790, a group of twenty-two men, including Sharp, Wilberforce, Clarkson, and Thornton, convened a first meeting of a new company, and petitioned Parliament for permission to incorporate. Eventually 500 proprietors would purchase shares at £20 a piece and appoint a twelve-man board of directors with Thornton as the chair. Sharp hoped the new company, soon officially christened the Sierra Leone Company, would continue his original mission, focusing on providing a free homeland, access to land, and self-determination for refugees of the American War. Most of the new members, however, had been recruited from the Committee for the Abolition of the African Slave Trade, and thus saw Sierra Leone primarily as a potential tool in the fight against African slavery. Indeed, newspaper announcements detailing the formation of the Company explicitly reported that it had been created “for the purpose of undermining the Slave Trade.”16

  The best way both to save the colony and achieve their higher aims, the directors concluded, was to adjust the economic basis of the settlement. Instead of a refuge of former slaves scratching out a meager existence from the African soil, they conceived of the new Sierra Leone Colony as an engine of free trade on the African coast, helping to create lucrative African markets and producers that the directors hoped would supplant and eventually eliminate the slave trade. If trade in local commodities, products, and handicrafts could be invigorated, and free trade between Britain and Africa expanded, Africans, so the directors believed, would see the benefits of legitimate trade and voluntarily cease selling slaves. At the same time, British merchants, like their African counterparts, would find this new trade more profitable, or at least more palatable, than buying and selling their fellow man, and willingly embrace free trade over the slave trade.

  From the first days of the abolitionist movement, advocates of emancipation had hoped to substitute a free trade in African commodities and manufactures for the trade in human beings. Thomas Clarkson had even purchased a range of such goods in the hope of convincing the public to support just such an exchange. In many ways, the American War provided the space necessary to contemplate such a drastic shift in the nature of the British Empire. Since the seventeenth century, British political economists and politicians had debated the merits of an empire based on conquest of land versus an empire based on free trade. The debate had formed an important part of the ideological conflict on both sides of the Atlantic in the lead-up to the American War and continued to be central to British attempts to recoup their losses when the war was over. After the war, with a large swath of the slave-based Atlantic economy now carved off, many in Britain saw the loss of the American colonies as an opportunity to remake the empire on the basis of free trade. This was all the more possible, all the more appealing, given Britain’s simultaneous gains in India. In the years after the war, campaigns were begun to replace slave-based economies with free trade economies, and to substitute commodities produced with slave labor—American and West Indies cotton and sugar—with commodities produced with free labor—Indian and Asian cotton and sugar. An imperial reorientation from slave labor to free labor would, its advocates believed, allow Britain to distance itself from the taint of the slave trade without undermining its prosperity, ushering in a moral transformation without economic sacrifice. In the years after the American War, as Britain remade its empire along more authoritarian, centralized lines, Britain’s imperial resources thus began to shift toward new markets and expanding interests in India, China, and perhaps, the abolitionists hoped, even Africa. An African market could help replace the loss of America, providing needed foodstuffs for Britain’s Caribbean colonies and potential buyers for British textiles and manufactured goods.17

  With Africa brought more firmly into the European market economy, advocates believed, there would be other benefits as well. Once Africans became familiar with all that Europe had to offer, commerce would bring with it “civilization,” and Christianity, a fundamental part of European civilization in the minds of the evangelical directors, trailing in its wake. “Commerce,” Ignatius Sancho had argued a decade earlier, “attended with strict honesty, and with Religion for its companion, would be a blessing to every shore it touched,” especially in Africa, where the British pursuit of slaves and “money, money, money” had destroyed the blessings of Providence. Thomas Clarkson, the indefatigable abolitionist, evangelical, and member of the board of directors, concurred and summed up the mission of the Sierra Leone Company thus: “the Abolition of the Slave-Trade, the Civ
ilization of Africa, and the Introduction of the Gospel there.” Others, including Thornton, echoed the sentiment, sure that abolition, civilization, and evangelization would all naturally and necessarily follow the introduction of commerce.18

  The directors were idealists, not fools, and they fully understood that all their lofty goals depended on the profit motive. They knew well enough that no merchant, British or African, would voluntarily abandon the slave trade or adopt a new legitimate trade unless the exchange proved profitable. Thus, despite their lofty rhetoric of equality, to ensure that the new colony succeeded where the first settlement had failed, the directors concluded that the government of Sierra Leone could not be left in the hands of the settlers themselves. “A respectable establishment” of white British administrators, educators, officials, and commercial agents would therefore replace the hard-won democratic self-government of the “Province of Freedom.” As its charter of incorporation, issued by Parliament in May 1791, stated, the land that had been purchased for the settlers would now be owned by the Company. Trade with Britain and with the rest of Africa would now be controlled by the Company as well. To ensure its efficient management, “all matters, civil, military, political and commercial,” would be entrusted to a superintendent and an advisory council of Europeans appointed by, and responsible to, the directors in London. Sharp abhorred this loss of self-determination, but feared the settlement would collapse without the new investors and bitterly bowed to the inevitable. “The Community of settlers,” he lamented, “are no longer the proprietors of the whole district as before . . . so that they can no longer enjoy the privileges of granting land by the free vote of their own Common Council, as before, nor the benefits of their own Agrarian Law, nor the choice of their own governor and other officers, nor any other circumstances of perfect freedom . . . all these privileges are now submitted to the appointment and control of the Company.” “I could not prevent this humiliating change,” he continued, “the settlement must have remained desolate if I had not thus far submitted to the opinions of the associated subscribers.”19

  All the new regulations and administrators in the world could not succeed without more settlers. Most of the original colonists had died or been driven out by hunger or violence. The few who remained were too few, too scattered, to carry on the thriving trade that the directors envisioned. Over a hundred white settlers, officials, soldiers, and craftsmen were selected to form the administrative and moral backbone of the colony, but many of the directors still hoped the settlement could serve as a place of refuge for former slaves. The more practically minded among them also thought that the work of civilization and Christianization would proceed more smoothly if it were directed by Africans. What they needed, then, was a population of black Christians willing to settle in Africa. As if directed by fate, at the very moment when the Sierra Leone Company was searching for new settlers, Thomas Peters arrived in London from Nova Scotia.

  Peters had been born in Nigeria, sold into slavery in Louisiana, and then sold on to North Carolina, where he escaped in 1776 to join the Black Pioneers in their fight against the Americans. A natural leader, Peters rose to the rank of sergeant, a high honor at a time when the ranks of commissioned officers were closed off to former slaves, and maintained his influential role within the refugee community after their evacuation to Nova Scotia. Like many Black Pioneers and their families, he settled at Digby, where he became a spokesman for the refugees and worked hard to ensure his neighbors were adequately clothed and fed. Throughout his forced tour of North America, Peters retained an indomitable spirit of independence, a stubborn streak that fed a lifelong quest for freedom and justice. When the promised grants of land failed to materialize, Peters, never one to shy away from action, took up the cause and peppered the colonial administrators with a steady stream of petitions. Three times, land was promised, even surveyed and parceled out, but each time the land slipped through the refugees’ desperate grasp, reassigned to other purposes or for other people. Peters had little quit about him, and reasoned that if the authorities in Canada would not see his people settled, he would take their grievances to London, the heart of the empire, and ensure that they were heard.

  He arrived in London at the end of 1790, clutching a petition on behalf of 202 refugee families in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. He hoped, as the petition read, “to procure for himself and his Fellow Sufferers some Establishment where they may obtain a competent Settlement for themselves and be enabled by their industries to become useful Subjects to his Majesty.” His plan was to present his petition to William Grenville, the Secretary of State, but had no idea how to manage the feat. Resourceful as ever, Peters made contact with Sir Henry Clinton, his former commanding officer. Clinton felt responsible for the plight of the refugees—it was in part his promises to them that were now going unfulfilled—and put Peters in contact with two of the men, Granville Sharp and John Clarkson, most likely to help. Sharp, Clarkson, and their abolitionist colleagues were moved by the accounts Peters brought detailing the ill-treatment of the refugees in Canada and helped Peters sharpen his petition. In conversation, Peters and the abolitionists arrived at a neat solution to all their problems: the star-crossed refugees of Nova Scotia would become settlers in Sierra Leone.20

  For Sharp and the Sierra Leone Company, the Nova Scotia refugees would provide just the infusion of westernized Christians of African descent they needed to jump-start their ambitious new colony. For Peters, after nearly a decade of frustration and failure in Canada, the prospect of a homeland back in Africa seemed, in the words of one supporter, “likely to afford him and persons of a like description, an Asylum much better suited to their constitutions, than Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.” To reflect this willingness to settle wherever the longed-for land was offered, a clause was inserted in the petition stating that “some part . . . of the said Black people [of Nova Scotia], are earnestly desirous of obtaining their due allotment of land and remaining in America, but others are willing to go wherever the wisdom of the Government may think proper to provide for them as free subjects of the British Empire.”21

  The government, led by Secretary of State Henry Dundas, was willing to back the plan and even provide the transportation for the new settlers. However, after the disaster of the 1787 colony, which many blamed on the deficient character of the settlers from London, the Company wanted an agent on the ground to assess the prospective colonists and the viability of the scheme. They found him in John Clarkson, already a committed member of the abolition movement, working with the most prominent anti-slavery advocates in Britain. Fired by Peters’ pleas for aid, Clarkson offered to sail to Nova Scotia on behalf of the Sierra Leone Company to assess the condition of Canada’s former slaves and recruit settlers for the new colony in Africa.

  Though he agreed to serve as the Company’s agent, he resolved not to solicit or cajole any refugee to accept the Company’s offer. He was personally unsure of the proposed colony’s prospects for success, and from the information he had gleaned about the 1787 settlement, he knew that disease, exposure, starvation, and hostile locals were all likely to take their toll. So rather than urge anyone to join the new colony, he decided to merely present the information—the Company’s offer, the potential risks, everything he knew about the proposed settlement—as neutrally as possible and let the refugees decide for themselves. He did so because he recognized the equal humanity of the refugees, “for I considered them as men, having the same feelings as myself and therefore I did not dare sport with their destiny.”22

  Clarkson left Gravesend aboard the aptly named Ark on August 19, 1791 and arrived at Halifax on October 7. After meeting with Governor Parr and ensuring the publication of the Company’s offer, Clarkson made his first recruiting stop at Preston on October 12, where he “called at the huts of several of the inhabitants and stated to them the offer of the Sierra Leone Company,” adding that “their situation seemed extremely bad . . .” As a minister and leader of the Preston refugee com
munity, Boston King was likely one of the first in Nova Scotia to receive a visit from John Clarkson. If so, Clarkson was fortunate in his choice, for Boston King had experienced fully the deferred dream represented by Nova Scotia and had already been contemplating the benefits of a British presence in Africa. According to King’s memoir, as early as 1787 he had begun to think about, and pray for, his “poor brethren in Africa.” Although thus far they had escaped slavery, King pitied them for not having been “brought up in a Christian land, where the Gospel is preached . . . what a wretched condition then must those poor creatures be in, who never heard the Name of GOD or of CHRIST.” When John Clarkson appeared on his doorstep four years later, King saw in his offer to settle Sierra Leone a chance to bring the Word of God, and the civilization of Britain to “the poor benighted inhabitants of that country which gave birth to my forefathers.” In many ways, King was an ideal settler. He was of good character, likely had some sway among his congregation, and his goals of “civilizing” and proselytizing the people of Africa were in line with the aims of the Sierra Leone Company. Within a week, perhaps with King’s endorsement, Clarkson received 79 applications from Preston and Halifax to join the proposed settlement, with the number rising to 220 within a month of his first visit. Boston King and his family were among them.23