by Simon Schama
And there were other important cargoes: the first seeds grown from Sierra Leone produce, destined for Sir Joseph Banks; one of Signor Domingo’s daughters, destined for an English, Christian education; and the one man John Clarkson could not bear to part with: David George. David, who had in his time lived with slaves, Indians and British soldiers, and who had tramped, run and slogged through swamps and creeks, snowdrifts and river ice, was now to be faced with the high hats, white bonnets and rosy cheeks of Home Counties Baptists.
And David George was carrying back to England something precious: a petition addressed to Henry Thornton, Thomas Clarkson and the rest of the directors, asking them to return their governor to them and setting out in their own words just what he had meant, what he had done and what he had given. Forty-nine of the settlers had signed it, including David George himself; Boston King; Hector Peters, who had been Baptist preacher at Preston; Richard Corankapone and Sampson Heywood, who had made the epic winter journey by land and water from New Brunswick to Halifax; John Kizell, the Sherbro Bullom who had been brought home; Joseph Leonard, the schoolmaster; and eight of the black women and widows (there had been so many who had lost their men)—Charity McGregor, Phyllis Halsted, Catrin Bartley and Lucy Whiteford among them. And this is what they said:
…we the humble pittioners we the Black pepol that Came from nova-scotia to this place under our agent John Clarkson and from the time he met with us in nova-scotia he ever did behave to us as a gentilmon in everey rescpt [sic] he provided every thing for our parshidge [passage] as wors in his pour to make us comfortable till we arrived at Sierrleon and his behaveor heath benge with such a regard to us his advice his Concil his patience his love in general to us all both men and women and Children and thearfour to the gentilmon of the Sierleon Companey in England we thy humbel pittioners wold desier to render thanks to the honorabel gentilmon of the Sierraleon Companey that it heth pleased allmighty god to put it into the hearts to think of them when we war in distress and we wold wish that it might please the gentilmon of the Companey as our governer is a going to take his leave of us and a goin to England thearfour we wold Bee under stud by the gentilmon that our ardent desier is that the same John Clarkeson Shold returen Back to bee our goverener our had Comander in Chef for the time to com and we will obay him as our governer and will hold to the laws of England as far as lys in our pour and as for his promis to us in giting our lands it is the people agree to take parte of thear land now at present and the remander as soon as posable and we pray that his Excelency John Clarkson might Be preserved safe over the sea to his frinds and return to us again and we thy humbel pittioners is in duty Bound and will ever pray witness our hands to the sine…
David George…et al57
XII
NEW YEAR’S DAY 1793. In the French Republic Citizen Louis Capet was on trial for his crimes as former king. But in Sierra Leone Isaac DuBois, the easy-going Carolinan cottton planter and vocal friend of the blacks was, all things considered, content. He was fashioning his wedding ring and had nuptials with the strong-minded Anna Maria, the widow Falconbridge, to look forward to. So he took up quill and ink and began his diary, “a fair and ingenuous statement of every thing as it happens.”1 Before departing, John Clarkson had asked his friend to keep a journal so that, in the interval before the governor’s expected return later in the year, there would be no break in the record of the colony’s history. DuBois was happy to oblige. Hit hard by the leave-taking (“spirits much more oppressed than usual”), he had sailed out into the ocean a few leagues with Clarkson before saying a final farewell in the watery darkness. The diary was an obligation as much to himself as to the governor, a bond between them.
Dejection cleared with the vanishing of the winter “smokes” over Sierra Leone. Although an unseasonable squall had blown through the colony on New Year’s Eve, rain coming right through Anna Maria’s thatched roof, afterwards the January sun shone from a clear equatorial sky. DuBois’s natural ebullience returned. King Naimbana—said to be grievously sick—had just presented the colony with a bullock and, like everyone else, DuBois looked forward to the slaughter. He spent his days directing the work of clearing the hillside for the new company storehouse or out at Thompson’s Bay setting out a cotton plantation. The evenings were for sharing a glass of wine with his handsome “neighbour” Anna Maria. Their relationship was never insipid, for Anna Maria had a vigorous mind and a tempestuous nature. Sometimes, so Isaac thought, she was apt to mistake his preoccupations with business as indifference towards her. Then she would get into a “pet,” one of the stormiest being on the eve of their intended wedding. But this one, like the others, passed and on the 7th of January the two lovebirds were married by the sonorous Reverend Melville Horne. Although Anna Maria was not in the least embarrassed by violating the convention of a twelve-month period of mourning, the bride and groom had asked the clergyman to keep the event secret for two weeks. But the “poor parson was not born to keep secrets, he carried it piping hot to the ears of every one he met but desired every one he told it to not to mention it to any one—however in less than two hours if was known over the whole Colony.”2
There was no honeymoon. As he busied himself with work on the stone storehouse, intended to replace the thatched, vermin-infested building that was forever falling down in heavy winds and rain, DuBois began to realize that the acting governor, William Dawes, was going out of his way to be unhelpful. Stonemasons whom DuBois could ill afford to lose were ordered to abandon work for him in favour of the fort that Dawes had decided was needed. A solemn young man, he had been, like Clarkson, a naval lieutenant, but prided himself especially on his expertise in artillery and engineering. In the event of a war with regicide France, Dawes had concluded, a proper fort would be indispensable. There was no time to lose. DuBois, however, thought otherwise. Surely the French republic, which advertised itself as the friend of liberty and whose Convention had abolished slavery, could be persuaded to treat Sierra Leone as neutral? DuBois was convinced that a solid warehouse and shop would be of infinitely more benefit to the colony than any fort. The “two engineers”—Dawes and the surveyor, Richard Pepys—he thought were “fort mad.” But the more he voiced this view, the cooler he noticed Dawes becoming. Before long DuBois understood that the very worst thing he could do was to mention to the acting governor that this or that project had been the special concern of John Clarkson. For Dawes seemed not to want to hear anything about his predecessor, even though Clarkson was expected to return after a leave of a few months. No more did Pepys, who, although embattled with the governor, had made an unctuous personal profession of admiration to him before he had sailed back to England. And from mid-January there was another figure to complete this severe trio: Zachary Macaulay.
Four years later, in 1797, when Macaulay, as governor, found himself in yet another knock-down battle with the black settlers, someone must have tactfully pointed out to him how many difficulties might have been avoided had he only been able to unbend just a little and offer the Nova Scotians something other than the countenance of the pious evangelical. All too conscious of the dour demeanour he presented to the world, he wrote on his twenty-ninth birthday to his fiancée Selina Mills that “I have laboured much to correct the unkindness of my look and manner, but I find this difficult.”3 Impossible might have been more accurate. With one congenitally blind eye, darkly beetling brows and a right arm made useless from an accident, Zachary Macaulay found it easy to despise vanity. Ingratiation at the cost of compromising principle was likewise to be abhorred as a corrupt emollient. He was chipped flint and saw no reason to disguise the fact. Macaulay had indeed come from a stony place—Inverary in the western highlands of Argyll; he was a descendant of clan chiefs, and one of thirteen children of an impoverished Presbyterian preacher. All his life he would remain stern, calloused by the demands he laid on himself and those that he knew an exacting God expected to be fulfilled.
Since his father, the pastor, had no money for a uni
versity education, the one-eyed boy taught himself Latin and Greek. In Glasgow, a hotbed of the new Scottish learning, he became, for a brief moment, dizzy with dangerous knowledge. He fell in with Advanced Thinkers who flaunted David Hume’s scepticism in the face of the kirk and, as often as they could, got tipsy on profane wit and strong liquor. Worse still, his guard down, Zachary allowed himself to be seduced by fiction: “When I was not draining the midnight bowl, I was employed in wasting the midnight oil by poring over such abominable but fascinating works as are to be found under the head of novels in the circulating library.”4 At sixteen, the sinner was packed off to Jamaica as the overseer of a sugar plantation. There, “in a field of canes amidst perhaps a hundred of the sable race, cursing and bawling while the noise of the whip resounding on their shoulders and the cries of the wretches, would make you imagine that some unlucky accident had carried you to the doleful shade,”5 Macaulay continued to thumb his Voltaire.
But then came the Awakening. He was twenty-one. In 1789, on board the ship returning him to England, the long-stifled Presbyterian in him came out for an airing on deck. Under the oceanic sky Macaulay swore to leave off the bottle and, in fair weather and foul, was true to his word. Then, he rusticated a little for God. His sister Jean had married a Leicestershire country gentleman called Thomas Babington, who himself had seen the Light and turned Evangelical, becoming one of the group centred on Clapham. When Zachary went to stay with his brother-in-law, he contracted his religion in the most irreversible way. Babington (whose name became preserved in the annals of English history when Zachary and Selina made it the middle name of their son Thomas) gave Macaulay more than a spiritual rebirth; he also got him a job. For one of Babington’s closest friends and a fellow “Saint” was Henry Thornton, the Evangelical banker and chairman of the directors of the Sierra Leone Company.
Although, as Evangelicals, they were committed to the abolition of the slave trade, neither Zachary Macaulay nor Henry Thornton was much interested in freedom. Looking askance at the monsters brought forth in revolutionary France by the abuse of liberty, their tepid enthusiasm became icy hostility. What stirred the Clapham Saints was commerce and Christianity, sustained in mutual nourishment, until they had converted the pagan continent into godly civility and prosperity. Granville Sharp’s Sierra Leone had been, they thought, the naive fantasy of a well-meaning but indulgent patriarch. If the venture was ever to thrive, it would require altogether less liberality and more government. Their own minds were attuned to obedience—unconditional surrender to the will of God. The sentimental passions of the black Methodists and the frantic, noisy paroxysms of the Baptists they thought repulsively childish. When Macaulay heard a black preacher in Sierra Leone cry out that God is love, he shrank from the exclamation with incredulous revulsion. God was not love. God was Truth and the Law and He was owed submission. This respect for authority, Macaulay believed—and evidently William Dawes shared the conviction—John Clarkson had signally failed to provide for the deluded blacks of Freetown. With the mawkish, histrionic lieutenant out of the way, it was time to begin a reformation.
It was announced by the Great Bell calling settlers to morning and evening prayer, as if at school—an innovation that Anna Maria thought ludicrous, instituted as it was in the most fervently Christian community she had ever encountered. Along with her husband, Isaac, and their amiable, learned friend the Swedish botanist Adam Afzelius, she conspicuously failed to attend the daily services—conduct that branded all three as shocking atheists. But Anna Maria was indifferent to what the “parcel of hypocritical puritans” thought of her and Isaac. She had already written them off as most un-Christian for charging the settlers four pence a pound for meat from the Naimbana’s slaughtered ox, which, after all, had been intended as a gift to the colony. Worse, acting governor Dawes had hardly waited for poor Falconbridge’s body to cool before demanding “his uniform, coat, sword, gun, pistols.”6 This kind of pettiness was the least of it. To his deepening dismay, DuBois became convinced that Dawes, Pepys and Macaulay were together bent on uprooting the delusions (as they saw them) with which Clarkson had won the settlers’ confidence. They set about this exercise in disenchantment in the most confrontational manner. Just before leaving, Clarkson had expressed his sincere regret to the settlers that not all their country lots had been laid out, but had faithfully promised them that the work would be swiftly completed so that the land could be occupied before the onset of the rainy season. To the settlers Clarkson’s word was gold. But hardly had he gone than the surveyor, Pepys, ordered an immediate and indefinite halt to the work, making it impossible for the blacks to provide for themselves on their own land. Survival depended on buying provisions from the company store, which, since it had a monopoly, could set prices much higher than the 10 percent mark-up over capital and shipping costs that Clarkson had held to be reasonable. As a result, the only way to afford necessities was to labour for the company—on the fort, for example—and at rates inflexibly determined by its officials. The Nova Scotian experience of debt peonage seemed to be repeating itself. For were they not, as many of the settlers bitterly complained, now the slaves of the all-powerful company?
DuBois was beside himself with exasperation, very much the worldly American loyalist embattled with the cold-blooded British Evangelicals. He came from Wilmington in North Carolina, and may well have known Thomas Peters. Although he had been one of the master class and the blacks had been slaves, DuBois mixed with them more easily, and listened to them more attentively, than the starchy Englishmen. John Clarkson, he thought, was cut from a different cloth: humane, generous and informal. He had grown to like him enormously, and now he took the systematic effort to undercut the man’s authority and reputation as a slight to himself. The governor should know just what had happened in his absence. In a memorandum for Clarkson’s eyes inserted into the journal he wrote, “If I am not to have the credit of finishing the works I have begun I shall quit the colony…Why does he [Pepys] not finish laying out the lotts of land that has already cost the Company upwards of two thousand pounds and which must cost as much more, besides the injustice done to the Nova Scotians in keeping them out of their lotts—should the compleating of them be postponed to next year?”7
The same night, the 6th of February 1793, that DuBois was penning his memorandum a “great palaver” took place in Freetown. The settlers were rowdy and angry, and no wonder. All Clarkson’s promises seemed to have been set aside. The ship York, which had brought fresh supplies and which Clarkson had directed should be a floating hospital, had been appropriated by the company officials for their own accommodation and entertainment. The last straw had come when black settlers who had occupied waterfront lots and built houses there had been summarily informed by Pepys that those holdings had been merely temporary and that they were now to be moved out to make way for company buildings. Fury burst from the gathered blacks. Anna Maria reported them as saying, “Mr Clarkson promised in Nova Scotia that no distinction should be made here between us and white men; we now claim this promise, we are free British subjects and expect to be treated as such; we will not tamely submit to be trampled on any longer.”8 Why had the allotment of country plots been stopped? Mr Clarkson would never have suffered such a thing!
Far from feeling defensive at the accusations, Richard Pepys went on the offensive, aiming a shocking broadside against Clarkson’s standing with the blacks. “Whatever promises Mr Clarkson had made them in Nova Scotia,” DuBois reports him as saying, “were all from himself…he had no authority whatever for what he said and that he believed Mr Clarkson was drunk at the time he made them.” This slander, DuBois went on, was repeated several times, Pepys adding “that Mr Clarkson seldom knew or thought of what he said—so it was not to be wondered why he should make extraordinary promises…besides many disrespectfull things.”9 He completed his tirade by attacking DuBois himself for allowing settlers to imagine they could ever occupy prime waterfront property.
A bellicose sou
nd—of chagrin, rage and consternation—went around the assembly. When it disbanded, nothing else but the outrage done to Clarkson and to themselves was talked of—nor anything else the next day, nor for days afterwards. Conferring among themselves, the settlers decided that, since they could not trust any record of what had transpired to be safely communicated to the directors, they had better draft a petition and have two of their own number take it to England to Mr Thornton and his colleagues, and let their benefactor Clarkson know personally just how his solemn promises were being violated. The object himself of an ad hominem attack, DuBois took their cause as his own. In a “Memorandum” to Clarkson, DuBois described Pepys as being as “black Hearted a Villain as this day exists.”10 And he resolved that if there should be a petition, he would show the blacks exactly what to say and how, in no uncertain terms, to say it. Then we should see.
WHAT HAD HAPPENED to John? Eighteen months earlier Henry Thornton and William Wilberforce had taken their leave of an amiable young fellow, high-spirited, but full of open-hearted modesty; a malleable man, receptive to counsel from his patrons. But the John Clarkson who now presented himself to the directors of the Sierra Leone Company, or rather who burst in upon them, was altogether changed: affability had turned to agitation, his pleasantly ingenuous enthusiasm to peevish storms of hectoring. To be sure, they owed him much—and took every opportunity, in private, to express their sincere gratitude for all that he had done in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone: for saving the West African colony, they doubted it not, from untimely extinction. Had they not shown their appreciation by promptly renewing—after a three-month leave—his governorship, and indeed by agreeing to ship to Freetown the makings of a substantial frame house for his residence? But whether this wholehearted endorsement gave Clarkson licence to be quite so free with advice on how to run the company—indeed, to berate the directors on their “strict adherence to nonsensical forms,” to castigate them for “their want of Method, want of Exertion” and the “oppressive” (as he supposed) economic demands imposed on the settlers, and then to register, with such vehemence, his displeasure with the quality of men they had sent for their administration—well this was quite another matter.11 They thanked him for his concerns and for the frankness with which he had set them before the directors. Mr Clarkson could be assured that they would be properly considered and that in due course they would be pleased to attend on him once more.