To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  Clarkson did not remain in his post for very long, and in December 1792, he returned to London, leaving the governorship in the hands of William Dawes, one of the two councilors sent out by the directors to replace the unworkable eight-man council. Like many of the settlers, Dawes had seen action during the American War. As a marine officer he had fought against the French fleet at the crucial Battle of the Chesapeake in 1781, where he was wounded. After the war, Dawes volunteered to join the marine regiment accompanying the First Fleet to New South Wales. There he played a vital role in the construction of the settlement, using his skills as an engineer to help construct batteries and plot the first streets, and lots of what would become Sydney. A keen scientist, he helped construct an observatory, joined exploratory expeditions into the Australian interior, and became something of an authority on the languages of the local Eora peoples. He likely would have remained in New South Wales if not for a series of disputes with Governor Arthur Phillip, especially over the treatment of Aborigines. This breach convinced Dawes to return home to England in 1791, where he met William Wilberforce and became a member of his evangelical reforming group the Clapham Sect. Wilberforce thought highly of Dawes, and in August 1792 sent the former marine to Sierra Leone to join Zachary Macaulay on the new advisory council. When Clarkson left shortly thereafter, Dawes succeeded him as governor.

  Though committed to the mission of the colony, Dawes was less sympathetic to the plight of the colonists, less willing to address their grievances. Fully convinced of his own unwavering rectitude, Dawes’ overbearing rigidity made him immediately unpopular, especially with the colony’s Methodist faction. Most of the settlers still had not received their land, still worked for meager wages, still paid too much for provisions. What land had been distributed by Clarkson was taken back by Dawes, who required the settlers to move to new plots he himself had allocated. Many settlers came to see Dawes as a tyrant, the personification of the Company’s self-interest and broken promises. To them, the colony seemed to be designed to enrich the Company at the settlers’ expense.

  As a result, in October 1793 they sent two representatives, Cato Perkins and Isaac Anderson, to London with a list of grievances. The petition Perkins and Anderson presented to the directors detailed how the failure to distribute land, along with low wages and high prices, had made the settlers feel that though the Company had made promises “better than we ever had before from White People,” they were now “so oppressed that we are forced to trouble your Honrs so that your Eyes as well as ours may open.” Echoes of the American Revolution can be heard in the language the settlers employed time and again in their dispute with the Company. The 1793 petition spoke of “the Privileges of Freemen,” explained that the former slaves had “feelings the same as other Human Beings,” and “would wish to do every thing we can to make our Children free and happy.” A petition to the directors in 1795 detailed how the settlers had been “empressed upon with Tyranny,” but remained fixedly determined to “enjoy the privileges of Freedom.” Elsewhere, settler petitions spoke of the “oppression that King Pharoh where with oppressed the Egyptians” and claimed “we now find our Selves truly Opress.” The petitioners used the rhetoric of tyranny and enslavement for many of the same reasons as their former masters had in their dispute with Britain. But they were also savvy enough to understand that such language could be used to play on the sympathies of men they knew to be inimical toward slavery and hopeful that the colony’s success would undermine it.47

  The directors knew that all of Britain was watching their African experiment, weighing its results, and applying the lessons learned to the growing debate over slavery and abolition. News that the American refugees were angry and rebellious and that the colony of freed slaves was mired in chaos and failing to thrive threatened to sway public opinion against further experiments in emancipation. If their test case failed, the directors knew, it would prove a serious setback to the nascent anti-slavery movement in Britain. So in their response to the Sierra Leone petitioners, and in their published report to the Company’s shareholders, the directors did their best to mitigate the potential fallout. To the petitioners they replied with a condescending, paternalistic dismissal of the settlers’ grievances. The petition was “hasty” and based on “facts founded on mistake and misinformation.” The high prices complained of by the settlers had been caused by the war with France, and their “low wages” were still twice as high as those paid to native African workers. Other failures were blamed on poor lands, and a lack of industry among the colonists. “The unreasonableness of many settlers in estimating their own merits, and their very inadequate sense” of their obligations, combined with their “false and absurd notions . . . concerning their rights as freeman,” had undermined the success of the colony. As such, the directors urged the settlers “as freemen and Christians, to discourage all unreasonable discontent,” and “to pay respect and obedience to government.” After all, it was “on their obedience to governed,” that, “their happiness, their liberty, and perhaps their very lives, depend.”48

  And yet, the directors continued with an eye toward their British audience, the money and the headaches were “the price paid for the civilization that is now begun in Africa: it has been sacrificed to that cause, which the Sierra Leone Company have considered as their own, the cause of Christianity and Freedom and Civilization among the race of Africans.” The experiment, they insisted, was worth it. The blame for the fractiousness of the settlers should be laid at the feet of the institution of slavery, not at the former slaves. “Great allowance,” had to be made for the “various sufferings which some of them have undergone, and the very unequal measure of justice which they have formerly received, and are now habituated to expect, at the hands of whites.” As such, any deficiencies among the settlers were not the result of “any original fault in their moral character more than in any other men, nor any natural inferiority in their understanding,” but to the “system of servitude” and “all the enormities attending it.”49

  The greatest fear among the directors was that the failures of the colony would be used to argue against further emancipation. To forestall arguments that the troubled colony proved that Africans in general, and former slaves in particular, were not capable of civilization, or of being governed except by force, the directors reminded the public “how extremely unfavorable the circumstances through which they [the settlers] have passed into a state of freedom” had been. Future slaves “who might be emancipated on a prudent principle of discrimination; to whom liberty having been first held out in prospect, in order to prepare them for it, might be granted after a certain period of service, as the professed reward of industry and merit; or might perhaps be communicated by degrees . . . privilege after privilege being added,” would surely do better. If carefully, thoughtfully, intentionally, and gradually emancipated, the results, they promised, would prove more salubrious. Far from being evidence of the impossibility of emancipation, the Sierra Leone Colony instead proved its viability, if it was carefully managed.50

  By the time the directors had compiled their public defense of the colony, Governor Dawes had had enough, and returned to England in March of 1794. With him came Boston King, seeking further education. While still in Nova Scotia, King had been plagued by thoughts of the sad plight of his African kinsmen who had not heard the Word of God. He had, at least in part, joined the Sierra Leone Colony with the express intent of bringing the gospel to the people of Africa. It had not been idle talk. Within months of his arrival, after the rains ended and his illness receded, King began preaching to native Africans whenever he could. He asked to be given employment at the Company plantation at Bullom Shore so that he would have more regular contact with the local people, and even succeeded in gaining permission to move to an African town so that he could instruct the native children in reading and religion. But his early efforts were often stymied by his inability to speak African languages and by a lack of local interest in his school. This
initial failure of his mission had convinced King of the necessity of traveling to England in pursuit of the further education he was sure would help him to reach the native Africans.

  Unlike the Black Poor who had flooded into London after the war, King arrived in England with a broad network of connections. His role as a Methodist preacher meant that when he sailed up the Thames in June 1794, he was greeted by a Mrs. Paul, a Methodist acquaintance from America who ushered him into the capital’s Methodist community. From London he traveled to Bristol, where he met with Thomas Coke, a close associate of Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, a committed opponent of slavery, and a tireless traveler and missionary. Under Coke’s auspices, King entered Kingswood, the Methodist School outside Bristol founded by Wesley himself in 1748. Kingswood represented the pinnacle of Boston King’s desires, and he worked hard “to acquire all the knowledge I possibly could, in order to be useful in that sphere which the blessed hand of Providence may conduct me into.”51

  King arrived back in Sierra Leone in September 1796 to succeed James Jones as schoolmaster of Granville Town. When he had left two years earlier, the colony had been beset with anger and frustration, but he arrived in a colony on the precipice of revolution. The Company had spent huge sums getting the colony up and running, but as yet the hoped-for commercial development had failed to balance the ledger. The directors viewed the colony as an act of charity, but they were also certain that its success in the long run depended on its profitability. To make up the shortfalls of the first hard years, the Company thus instituted a new requirement—all settlers would be henceforth required to pay a fee of one shilling per acre on receipt of their land. Not only was this yet another expense for people who could ill afford to pay it, but it also signaled precisely what many of the settlers already feared. They were not to be the owners of their lands or the governors of their new home. The land, it was now clear, was owned by the Company, and the settlers were merely renters. “If the Lands is not ours without paying a shilling per acre,” they reasoned in a letter to the governor, “the Lands will never be ours, no not at all.” If the Company owned the land, as they were now informed, the Company was free to “take it if they think proper in so doing.” Bitter experience and the rhetoric of the American Revolution had taught the settlers that independence was only possible with access to land, but now that access was restricted. If they could not own their land, they could not be truly free.52

  As his fellow settlers protested quit-rents and adopted the motto “liberty or death,” Boston King remained aloof. King’s years in England had solidified his belief in the benefits of British civilization. While still in Sierra Leone in 1793, he had lectured native Africans who had rejected his offers of education on the value of European society. “It is a good thing that God has made the White People,” King told them, “and that he has inclined their hearts to bring us into this country, to teach you his ways, and tell you that he gave his Son to die for you.” His kind treatment in England reinforced this view, and as he reported, he “found a more cordial love to the White People than I had ever experienced before. In the former part of my life I had suffered greatly from the cruelty and injustice of the Whites, which induced me to look upon them . . . as our enemies.” He was now, however, “fully convinced, that many of the White People, instead of being the enemies and oppressors of us poor Blacks, are our friends, and deliverers from slavery, as far as their ability and circumstances will admit.” King was thus staunchly loyal to the colonial administration, and, as his letters back to England show, remained so even as his co-religionists took the lead in the deepening dispute between the settlers and the Company.53

  When Governor Macaulay, fed up with the constant quarreling, quit his post in April 1799, the settlers saw their chance to act on their own behalf. As they had stated in vain in petition after petition, they had done their part in the American War, had even “received a Proclamation from government for our good behavior in the last war,” but now, after a trail of broken promises leading from New York to Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, they found themselves “oppressed,” “shut out from government,” and “not used here as free men.” So in September 1799, before a new governor could arrive, they convened a meeting of settlers, elected their own officials, and resolved that they themselves were “the Propriatives of the Colenney, and no forenners shall com in as a right of making Lawes . . . nor shall they have a vote with ought their concent.” It was a bold declaration of independence. The former slaves, they declared, would rule themselves.

  Into this maelstrom of open rebellion came 23-year-old Thomas Ludham, the Company’s newly appointed governor. He brought with him a compromise. The Company had heard their just grievances and was prepared to abolish quit-rent, but the government formed by the settlers would have to be disbanded, and the officials they had elected dismissed. For many of the settlers, however, Ludham’s offer was too little, too late. Their faith in the goodwill of the Company and its agents had been completely eroded, and they were now certain that they could not “get justice from the White people.” In September 1800, 150 families, perhaps half the families in Freetown, thus gathered in the chapel of Cato Perkins and “resolved to persist in their appointment of judges to make and execute laws themselves.” Together they drew up a “Paper of Laws,” a quasi-constitution, and officially seceded from the Sierra Leone Colony. Isaac Anderson, a former slave originally from Angola, was elected governor of the breakaway colony, which now announced that “all that come from Nova Scotia, shall be under this law or quit the place.”54

  While Anderson and his followers barricaded the bridge between Freetown and Granville Town, Ludham gathered the remaining loyal settlers, the colony’s white employees and forty African sailors at Thornton Hill, and prepared for a fight. The rebels might well have been able to win the looming battle, or force a more advantageous peace, but before their stab at independence was even a month old, fate intervened. On September 28, Zachary Macaulay’s brother, Alexander, arrived at Freetown with 47 British soldiers and 550 Maroons from Jamaica. The Maroons were escaped slaves and their descendants who had formed free communities in the mountainous interior of Jamaica. The Maroons were a constant source of concern for the island’s British authorities, especially after the example of the American Revolution, leading to two wars between the Maroons and the British. The second war was a particularly bloody affair, charged with British fears that the radical ideologies of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions had infected Jamaica’s Maroons. The war ended in a negotiated peace, but despite promises to let the Maroons re-settle in Jamaica, the British deported nearly six hundred to Sierra Leone.55

  Like the Nova Scotia settlers, the Maroons had been promised land in Sierra Leone. The rebellion, Ludham informed them, threatened to deprive them of their rightful land. The Maroons thus promised to support the governor and crush the rebellion in return for their land. Ludham now had the upper hand, and demanded an unconditional surrender. Most of the separatists saw writing on the wall, and the rebellion quickly fizzled out. In the aftermath, fifty-five rebels were tried for treason. Two, Isaac Anderson and Frank Patrick, were executed as the leaders and instigators of the revolt. Thirty-three others, including Harry Washington, had their property confiscated and were banished to Bullom Shore. At almost the same time, a Royal Charter arrived transforming the colony from the private enterprise of the Sierra Leone Company into a crown colony, nixing any possibility that the settlers would be allowed to govern themselves. The Sierra Leone experiment was at an end.

  By the time the rebellion was at last suppressed, King was 100 miles south living among the Sherbo people. The settler rebellion had placed Boston King in a difficult position. The ringleaders of the secession movement were, after all, Methodists like King. What’s more, Isaac Anderson, the leader of the movement, and Cato Perkins, who acted as intermediary between the rebels and the governor, had both been residents of Charleston in the years before the American War set them all fre
e. King likely knew these men well, and certainly sympathized with their grievances, but his energy remained fixed on what he saw as a greater calling, his efforts to teach and convert Africa. The fate of the souls of the Africans had never left his mind, and so he had joined the growing flood of missionaries streaming out from Sierra Leone to Christianize and civilize the continent. In this, Boston King had placed himself at the forefront of British imperialism in Africa, the true legacy of Sierra Leone.

  In his eagerness to convert his African kinsmen, Boston King was, like Macaulay and the British missionaries, a conscious agent of British imperialism. Indeed, the whole colonial endeavor was an exercise of imperial expansion. Schooled in the ideas and language of the American Revolution, the refugees of the American War were relentless in their quest for independence, unceasing champions of liberty and self-determination. But they were also, especially committed evangelicals like Boston King, tools of European imperialism. Some were unwitting imperialists, but many like King himself, were fully cognizant of their role in bringing European culture, religion, and civilization to their “benighted” relatives.