by Simon Schama
What was John Clarkson to do? Without ever quite acknowledging it, or merely discounting it as the effects of “ignorance” or gullibility, he was witnessing, along with many other kinds of transformations of African-American slaves, the birth pangs of their politics. Avoiding yet another grand palaver, for his physical condition was deteriorating again, Clarkson took a short sail along the coast to try to clear his head. But he returned feeling only more uncertain about the path to follow in what were turning, in effect, into constitutional arguments with the blacks. Constantly wrong-footed by the irrepressibility of the arguments (and acknowledging the substance of many grievances), he was amazed that Abraham Elliott Griffith, the secretary-interpreter of the Naimbana, one of Sharp’s protégés and someone on whom he thought he could depend, seemed to have lined up with Peters’s “party.” For on the 15th of June a letter signed by both of them made concrete proposals for a twelve-man panel that would include the two of them, to be appointed to settle internal disputes among the settlers. This was, in fact, a modest and perfectly reasonable request, but it made the defensive Clarkson jittery.
Active involvement, he decided, was the only way to blunt the edge of these demands for self-government. In the absence of Gilbert, the minister, Clarkson himself, despite his frailties, took over the work of preaching at the Anglican services, and when he could, inserted some sort of homily that would help the state of the colony. But he also felt he had to attend the night meetings and religious services of the Baptists and Methodists, so that when Peters “harangued” the people he would in his turn ask for their ear and get it. In the end, he ran out of reasons why Peters’s jury panels of twelve ought not to be instituted. Indeed, he met with the twelve who had agreed, in the first instance, to serve, and found himself wholeheartedly agreeing with many of their complaints about the continuing obstructiveness of the surveying team, especially the engineer Cocks. Clarkson in fact went one better than Peters by suggesting that perhaps the captains of the black companies who had served so well on the voyage might be best for the jury, or that black males over twenty-one in each of twelve streets (presently named after the twelve directors of the company) should elect one of their number.
When he got back from another trip up-river to Bance Island to buy medicines from the slaving factory for the sick, including himself, on the 25th of June he was handed an extraordinary letter. It was signed by Henry Beverhout on behalf of his own company, but evidently spoke for many more.40 There were immediate, material, concrete issues to which Beverhout addressed himself: “the pepel of our Companey Consesents to the wagers that your honer proposul that is to work for two Shillens a day as long as we drowr our provisions.” They were happy to have a constable for each street “for to kepen pece.” And they took it hard to be told they should have to pay for provisions from the stores when, after all this time, they expected to have their own lands and be able to support themselves from its produce.
But the document of the 25th of June was not just a list of grievances, more a social and political contract. It was an assertion, the first of its kind, of the civil and political rights to which the blacks knew they were entitled. It was, in fact, the first African-American demand for representation—a proper share in British freedom. “We are all willing to be govern by the laws of england in full but we donot Consent to gave it in to your hands with out haven aney of our own Culler in it.” After listening to Clarkson threaten so many times to leave them should they not submit to everything he said, the blacks had clearly had enough of his emotional and political blackmail. They reminded him of what he had promised them in Wilkinson’s church at Birchtown, and even called his bluff over his often threatened departure: “ther is non of us wold wish your honer to go way and leave us hear but your will be pleased to rember what your honer told the piepel in a maraca [America] at Shelburn that is whoever Came to Saraleon wold be free and should have a law and when theur war aney trial thear should by a jurey of both white and black and all should be equel so we Consideren all this think that we have a wright to Chuse men that we think proper for to act for us in a reasonable manner.” It was their turn, gently, to make a threat: “we wish for pece if posable we can but to gave all out of our hands we cannot your honer know that we have laws and ragerlations among our self and be Consirent with the laws of England because we have seen it in all the parts whear eaver we have being Sir we do not mene to take the law in our hands by no meanes but to have your honer approbation for we own you to be our had and govener.”41
To think of Beverhout’s remonstrance as clumsy in its expression is to mistake patois for incoherence. It is, in fact, eloquent, both of deeply held grievances and of a budding understanding of political rights and remedies. More than that, it is impossible to read its conditional acceptance of Clarkson’s executive power and the repeated allegiance to the laws of England without seeing the document as a chapter in the long transatlantic history of liberty. It had been the animus of American Patriots in the 1770s that somehow the rights of self-representation, implicit in their allegiance to the king, had been set aside by his minions. The whole, tortured history of the black loyalists had turned that charge back on America, which had, in its Declaration of Independence, promised equality but protected slavery. Now, once again, they saw the promise of making their own free society betrayed, and were summoning Clarkson back to honour his Birchtown speech and what they still, loyally, took to be the promise of truly British freedom. The king, one of the blacks told Clarkson when he responded to the petitions at a palaver the next day, “we know he is our friend, neither do we blame those who took us to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick [such as Guy Carleton and James Paterson] for they behaved well to us but we blame those who told lies to the King about us [the white loyalists and the white councillors] so that we now not having got our lands…makes us very uneasy fearing we shall be liable to the same cruel treatment.”42 Whatever else would happen, they would not be slaves again.
It is impossible to read the little manifesto of the 26th of June, notwithstanding Clarkson’s paranoia about his rival, without seeing the hand of Thomas Peters in it. But Clarkson does not say this, and for the good reason that for a week now Peters had been ill, seriously enough for him not to make his usual appearances at the night services. When Clarkson gathered the blacks to talk about the petitions they had sent him, he was addressing a community in shock. For Thomas Peters, the “Speaker-General” of the blacks in all but official title, had died the previous night.
Astoundingly, Clarkson says nothing about this event other than to acknowledge that it had happened and that it had made for “agitation and confusion in the Colony.” Peters’s widow, Sarah, sent a poignant letter, not to Clarkson, whom she must have assumed would be unsympathetic, but to Alexander Falconbridge. Slightly ashamed that he must have become, to the Peterses, so much an enemy that the widow could not bring herself to address him directly, Clarkson copied that letter into his journal. Sarah begged Mr Falconbridge’s favour to have some wine, porter, rum, candles and a length of white linen (doubtless to bury Thomas in): “my husband is dead and I am in great distress…my children is all sick. My distress is not to be equalled. I remain aflicted.”43
Clarkson gave immediate orders to send Sarah Peters everything that she had requested. And when a small delegation, also nervous of what he might say, came to ask whether, contrary to regulations, he would allow a wooden coffin to be made for Thomas (normally coffins were allowed only if the wood could be supplied by friends of the deceased from their own supply of planking), he assented, if only so as not to be seen as vindictive. As for himself, recalling the absurdly extravagant obsequies for the drunken Dr Bell, Clarkson remained ostentatiously virtuous. Should he die in Sierra Leone (as seemed very likely), the council and settlers were under strict orders not to waste wood on his body. Let him sink, uncoffined, into the sodden soil. But Thomas Peters was buried in Freetown, as requested, in a solid wooden box—not solid enough, however, to impris
on his ghost, which a month later was said to be walking the village. Told about this, Clarkson wrote, unconvincingly, “I never listen to anything that may be said respecting him.”
AND THEN, magically, harmony appeared in Freetown. Or at least Harmony Hall, which is the name John Clarkson gave to a new, single-storey frame building completed in mid-August 1792, and which was intended in the first instance to be a congenial mess for the officers and staff of the company and their wives, but expanded to include quarters for the bachelor men. Clarkson saw it as the symbol of a new beginning, a place where people, black and white, could gather—whether dining, talking or listening to yet another of Clarkson’s inspirational homilies—and “draw together for the public good.” But the hall became multi-purpose, a place to receive African chiefs such as King Jimmy, who, having conquered his aversion to Freetown, made appearances flanked by boys with horse pistols; black captains whom Clarkson wanted to consult; and officers and men from the Sierra Leone packets. It housed a throng “from morning till…sometimes midnight, of black and white, known and unknown, busy and idle persons.”44
But harmony did not break out overnight. Even with the addition of the more pleasant and competent newcomers—the botanizing Swede Adam Afzelius, Isaac DuBois, and the new physician, Thomas Winterbottom—the white councillors and officials were not conspicuously more reconciled to each other or to their work. The surveyor Richard Pepys and his wife complained bitterly and endlessly to Clarkson about their neighbours, “those vile people” the Whites, in charge of the storehouse. Alexander Falconbridge, the sad sack of a “commercial agent,” had not only transacted no commerce whatsoever to date, but was now so drowned in alcohol that he was dismissed from his post. The dyspeptic Captain Wilson of the Harpy went from mad to madder. Reproached by Clarkson for not giving the visiting Naimbana the courtesy of a boarding and a salute, Wilson responded by banning Clarkson and anyone who agreed with him from the ship. Removed from command, Wilson then took control of the Harpy on his own authority, threatened bloodshed to anyone attempting a boarding and finally sailed off out of the bay before he could be stopped, taking with him some captive white passengers, many of them sick.
And yet, by the end of August, the chronically hag-ridden, frantic, melancholic Clarkson was feeling, if not exactly well, then somewhat better, and if not exactly happy, then modestly satisfied with the way things were now proceeding in Freetown. The rains were at last winding down. The occasional tornado came ripping and gusting along, but they were much fewer and less violent. The ants were still on the march, especially, and terrifyingly, in the dead of night, accompanied by swarming infestations of spiders and cockroaches. Clarkson and Anna Maria both noticed how the red ants would make war on the black ants, and were capable of carrying off live chicks, or even devouring doves while they were still perched in their dovecots. Leopards would occasionally stalk about the village at night seeing what they could pick up, one of them biting off more than it could certainly chew in the shape of David George’s pet Newfoundland dog, brought from Nova Scotia and which, though mauled, put up a good fight.
Notwithstanding these continuing trials, those who had survived the first six months were noticeably healthier. The wave of mortality was ebbing, especially amongst the blacks, although Clarkson admitted later in the year that he dreaded what the census would tell him. When the counting was done it was seen that 14 percent of the immigrants from Nova Scotia had perished. With the whites it was closer to 70 percent.
For the sick, there was now a hospital in Freetown: a substantial building, one hundred feet long, built from prefabricated parts and shipped over in one of the supply vessels that were now making more frequent stops in Sierra Leone. They also brought fresh provisions and tools, but of greater importance for Clarkson were the letters he received from his brother, Wilberforce and the other directors, giving him the power he had demanded to run the colony as he saw fit. Beside the official good news, and supplies of hair powder, chocolate, wine and pickles, there were affectionate letters, not least because Thomas Clarkson had heard, to his horror, that his brother had been murdered and the colony again wiped out. Flooded with relief when they got his letters from Nathaniel Gilbert and realized he was still alive, they had capitulated to John’s demands. “Take courage, my dear John,” Wilberforce had written, “I give you Health and Spirits to undergo all your trials—we shall here do all we can to render your Situation comfortable & you will constantly be remembered by me in those Moments when the Mind runs to those for whom it is most interested.”
So the lieutenant got what he wanted. The old council of eight in which he had been no better than a frustrated primus inter pares was abolished, replaced by a governor and just two subordinate councillors. Clarkson was so overjoyed by the change that he magnanimously commended the directors for their expression of Whiggish nervousness about seeming to deliver “arbitrary” power into the hands of a supreme chief. In his journal he decided that this August reformation should be thought of as the true foundation of the colony. Besides being governor, John Clarkson was now also Sunday pastor (for Gilbert’s replacement, the Reverend Horne, took some time arriving), military commander, omniscient supervisor of surveying and town planning, and chief magistrate, empowered to adjudicate and legislate as he saw fit for the best interests of Freetown.
Instead of alienating the blacks, Clarkson, with his new authority did what he could to co-opt them. Cases concerning settlers were now heard only by all-black juries. One of the earliest and most upsetting was the trial of John Cambridge, a survivor of Granville Town and one of the captains of the London blacks, who, shockingly to Clarkson, had been caught selling a slave to a Dutch slave ship. When Cambridge was tried and found guilty, Clarkson, noting how much “violent feeling” there was among the settlers towards the man, confessed that “this business has plagued me greatly for the crime was so novel and so unexpected that I did not know how to meet it.”45 He delivered a long, impassioned speech, half sermon, half harangue, on the effect that stories of the free blacks turning slave traders would have on the reputation of the colony among both blacks and whites, and the damage it would do to the British goodwill necessary if it was to survive and flourish. In the end Cambridge was clapped in irons aboard the Harpy (before the mad Captain Wilson piratically sailed it away), to be taken back to England.
Protective about the moral calibre of the colony, Clarkson had originally banned the “old settlers” of Granville Town from coming to Freetown in case what he took to be their indolent ways and partiality to rum should corrupt the Nova Scotians. But when he had heard, from Abraham Elliott Griffith among others, about the depths of their privations he relented and readmitted them as full citizens of Freetown. Like the rest of the settlers, on the 13th of August they voted for their constabulary and peace officers, who were sworn in on the same day by Clarkson. In a gesture to Granville Sharp’s original scheme, tithingmen had been elected from each unit of ten families, and hundredors from each group of ten tithingmen. It was hardly the system of devolved democracy that Sharp had envisaged; but it was nonetheless the first occasion on which African-Americans voted in any election, and the devolution of authority to the community’s own people worked much as Clarkson hoped. When a white sailor was caught robbing the general store, only the posting of the constables around town prevented bad feeling from deteriorating into a riot.
Clarkson himself now had the authority to defuse trouble before it got seriously out of control, often by ignoring or countermanding intructions he had received from the company when they contradicted prior guaranteees he had given to the settlers in Nova Scotia. Unbeknownst to Clarkson, the company had decided to levy a quit rent. Discovering this bad news from their letters, he simply decided not to pass it on. The company had commandeered the waterfront for its own wharves and warehouses, cutting off settlers’ lots from direct access to the water. This was precisely the obstruction that had aggrieved settlers at Digby and other places in Nova Scotia, and
when they found they were to be blocked again their representatives, such as Isaac Anderson, reproached Clarkson with such fierce language that he walked out of the meeting. Privately, however, he conceded the justice of the settlers’ complaints and decided, again unilaterally, to abandon company monopoly of the waterfront sites, allowing anyone lucky enough to draw a water-lot to take possession and, if they wanted, build their own docks and warehouses. To the directors in London he simply wrote that if they wanted the colony to succeed, “the Company must abide by my instruction.”46