by Simon Schama
No one talked of famine any more. The “Nova Scotians,” as they called themselves, had put down roots; they knew exactly who they were, where they had come from, and what their place in the story of Africans and British and Americans was. They were a new Chosen People, God’s black “Ezraelites.” They sorely missed their “Mosis,” but like the first Israelites, they would make a place for themselves without him if that was God’s will. They clung to their epic exodus story, and dressed and ate and spoke with its memory always in mind. High animal skin or straw hats sat on the crown of the men’s heads; on the women, long checked and printed dresses of gingham or calico, with aprons, were worn over voluminous petticoats notwithstanding the African heat. Many of the women coiffed their hair into tight braids or wore them high in shapes “like some antique yew tree of a Dutch garden.” The men were even less inclined to go tropical, and were faithful to trousers, waistcoats and jackets. Both sexes sported handkerchiefs and, rain or shine, Jonas Hanway’s umbrellas were compulsory items in their get-up. They were partial to corn mush, and before long there was a new drink in their diet. For in February 1796, while burning some brush on the hillside, Andrew Moore, an escaped slave from Augusta, later a gardener at Preston, smelt the unmistakable aroma of coffee. The beans lay on the ground, inadvertently roasted. A little expedition with the botanist Adam Afzelius confirmed the existence of wild trees. By March there were enough beans for a tasting, which produced a cup not at all inferior, it was said, to the offerings of London coffee-houses. Two years later some three thousand trees were producing over three hundred pounds of beans a year, the first cash crop of the colony.
Their speech and song were a hybrid of African rhythms, American hymns and formal declaratory English—the kind they used in their petitions and letters. It flowered in the schools where their children were taught, so Sierra Leone was very quickly becoming a literate community, and of course in the seven churches where they gathered every day for hymns and prayers and storms of jubilant or lamentational piety. They were who they were, and increasingly resistant to taking orders. They would not hand over to the company the goods they had saved from the ruin of the French raid; they would not be forced to buy from its storehouse (in recognition of this, the monopoly was abandoned ) and bought instead from Sophia Small’s well-stocked shop. They had no intention of paying the punitive quit rent the company claimed it was owed—” a chain to bind us as slaves forever,” one of them said. They challenged the white officials to try to coerce it out of them. As far as they could see, the company needed them more than vice versa, a judgement confirmed by the setting up of companies of armed militia (in case of a return of the French) in many of which whites served under black officers; this was a prudent innovation since it was the latter, after all, who had the military experience going back to the American campaigns.
And they were certainly not going to be told how to order their private lives. The latest target of Macaulay’s zeal was the number of technically illegitimate children in Freetown, the product of what he considered iniquitous and unorthodox conjugal arrangements. But of course these children were not in any sense abandoned bastards like the pathetic foundlings deposited at Thomas Coram’s Home in London’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields. They were cared for in one or more homes, but it was precisely the lack of stigma that so irked the righteous governor. So did the shifting unions in which men and women both often took long-term lovers, and had children with them, without necessarily abandoning their spouses. There was in Freetown a surplus, not a deficit, of affection. These contingent unions were, of course, the product of a desperate and unpredictable history, going back to the plantations where they had been forbidden; to the dire necessity, during the odysseys of the war, of parting from loved ones in order to keep the children safe; to the breaking up of some families when the ships were waiting in Halifax harbour and both slaves and indentured family members had to be left behind; and to the terrible ravages of disease in the first year at Sierra Leone. All of this was quite beside the point for Zachary Macaulay, who had experienced none of this but had instead discovered the laws of God in an English country house. And he was scandalized by the fact that these irregular unions and their offspring were countenanced by the non-Anglican clergy. Taking the trusty David George up to his hilltop farm retreat, Macaulay proceeded to berate the unfortunate Baptist preacher on this iniquity along with other wicked habits of the Freetowners, such as their fondness for drink. George, who ran an ale shop, burst into tears, stricken with a crushing weight of guilt.
But there were some things that even the compliant George would not tolerate. When Macaulay declared any marriages other than those licensed and performed by the regular Anglican clergy to be illegal, he set off a storm of denunciation from the nonconformist ministers who had no intention whatsoever of having one of their most important pastoral functions taken away. George warned Macaulay that if he persisted, he would bring the colony to insurrection. But Macaulay went ahead with an attempt (later abandoned) to give the Anglican Church the monopoly over baptisms as well as marriages, succeeding only in alienating virtually the entire black community and causing uproar in the assembly of tithingmen and hundredors. But then Macaulay also thought he could manage the increasingly vocal and belligerent body that was simultaneously an embryonic legislature, court of law and administration. Every so often he would summon the settlers to listen to a tremendous dressing-down. Sounding remarkably like a British colonial governor in America in the 1770s or India a century later, Macaulay berated the blacks for listening “to every prating malicious designing tale-bearer, to every selfish and base deceiver who…would abuse or revile your Governors…you have often been made to see the folly of acting thus and yet you still return, like the sow to flounder in the same dirty puddle.”34 It was not surprising that the audiences for this kind of verbal abuse sharply dwindled. Instead of becoming more accommodating, the settlers became less so. Attempts to influence elections backfired, producing instead a militant opposition group whose members included Isaac Anderson, decisively radicalized by his humiliation in England. Much of their fractiousness Macaulay ascribed to women having the vote, so he did away with that in 1797 and hoped for a more manageable assembly. The next year’s election did indeed produce, for the first time, two white tithingmen—but no discernible accommodation from the black majority. Some, indeed, now ran on a platform of restricting tithingmen and hundredors to blacks. The notion that whites would actually be disqualified by virtue of their colour struck Macaulay as amusing.
In 1799 Macaulay left the colony for good to take up the job of secretary to the directors in London, from where he would assert his firm opinion from a distance. His governorship had been a marvellous paradox: both hectoring and liberating. For while Macaulay had taken every opportunity to ram unpopular policies down the throats of the Nova Scotians, he had also encouraged them in the practice of self-government, never threatening to shut down the assembly of tithingmen and hundredors nor to pull back any of their administrative or legal powers. They still appointed black juries and organized the “labour tax” by which settlers put in six days’ work a year on roads, bridges and the like—a Granvillian imposition to which no one objected, in contrast to the still uncollected quit rent. Only when some of the hundredors asked for the appointment of black magistrates and judges did Macaulay baulk, objecting to its “impracticality” given their lack of knowledge of English Common Law.
He had a point. But, of course, in the folk memory of Freetown their long journey had begun in the courts, with the news somehow spreading through the Southern plantations of Lord Mansfield’s ruling for “Uncle Somerset,” confirming that there was such a thing as British freedom, that in England the “air was too pure for slaves to breathe.” Ever since that time—in the lines of loyalist slaves herded on to the ships at the Charleston evacuation; in the deceits perpetrated in Nova Scotia; in the wickedness of the company store prices; in the dilatoriness that had kept them off their land
; in the abominable quit rent that in effect would make that landholding untenable—the blacks had believed that precious legal freedom had been set aside by those who had usurped the benevolence of the king, of their great patriarch Granville Sharp, of their personal saviour John Clarkson and of the true English courts and Parliament. Now they were determined to have their own and, if necessary, to make their own laws.
Paradoxically, then, what Thornton, Dawes and Macaulay had managed to do was to create, out of one of the most passionately loyal and patriotic people ever to follow the Union Jack, a contentious little America in West Africa: contentious and articulate, indignant over what they held to be illegitimate taxes, interference in their Churches, high-handed arbitrary governance and incompetent military defence. It had been a recipe for rebellion before. Now it would be so again. No wonder, in the months before he departed from Sierra Leone, Macaulay kept a candle burning all night in his bedchamber and loaded guns by his side.
MACAULAY HAD BEEN A ROD. His successor as governor, Thomas Ludlam, seemed a reed. He was twenty-three years old, slight where Macaulay had been rugged, constitutionally queasy, his intestines in chronic revolt against the discomfort of his position. The reed began by bending. The bar against children of dissident settlers being educated in company schools was lifted. Attempts to collect the quit rent (which had been accompanied by threats of disenfranchisement) were abandoned. Ludlam did his best to be gracious. But it was too late. The most militant of the tithingmen and hundredors—Isaac Anderson, James Robinson, a shopkeeper, and an erstwhile moderate called John Cuthbert, an escapee from Savannah—had, in their own minds, already crossed a line in which they repudiated the authority of the company altogether. They continued to insist on elected magistrates and judges, and when Ludlam and the directors predictably rejected the demand the assembly went ahead anyway and appointed Robinson as a judge and Cuthbert as Justice of the Peace. This was just the beginning. The black leaders wanted to redefine who was properly a voting citizen of Sierra Leone and who was not. A declaration issued by the tithingmen and hundredors stated that henceforth only the Nova Scotians “who came with Mr Clarkston” [sic] and Granville Towners were to be considered the true “proprietors” of the colony, entitled to vote, hold office and make laws for the colony. The white officials of the company were henceforth to be considered “forenners” and entitled only to concern themselves with trade. Overtures were already being made, at the end of 1799, to the Temne King Tom to re-negotiate a direct lease between the black settlers and the chief. In the summer of 1800 there was wild talk in the assembly that if the whites continued to deny their demands, they should be taken out into the ocean in boats and set adrift without sails, oars or compass. In London, Wilberforce was horrifed by the news. The Nova Scotians were, he hurrumphed, “as thorough Jacobins as if they had been trained and educated in Paris.”35
The directors ordered rigour. They had had quite enough of the nonsense of Sharp’s Frankpledge democracy. They would send a new charter to do away with such pretensions and make it abundantly clear that the company, and not the tithingmen and hundredors, governed Sierra Leone. They would also dispatch a frigate with enough guns and marines to make the counter-revolution in Sierra Leone a reality. And they decided to transport to Sierra Leone 550 Maroons—escaped Jamaican slaves who had created their own forest societies in the interior of the island, and who, in 1796, had waged war against the colonial government. The Maroon history (itself a strange, sad epic) was following, almost literally, in the footsteps of the black loyalists: escape from slavery; a testy relationship with the imperial power; removal to Nova Scotia where, for a while, they lived in villages such as Preston, which had been emptied by the departed Americans—though they made less pretence of ever being interested in farming. Now the Maroons were following their predecessors to Sierra Leone. They had developed a reputation for no-quarter ferocity as fighters, and the company evidently hoped they would arrive in Africa as auxiliaries. Ludlam was understandably nervous—uncertain whether, if called on, the Maroons would fight for the company or join forces with the rebel Nova Scotians.
But the reed had bent far enough and was not about to break. Governor Ludlam appointed new black constables, counted those settlers on whom he could rely (twenty-seven, including Corankapone) and prepared to arm them in defence of the company’s government. Then he warned the black leaders that, should they persist in their folly, a naval force would soon arrive and with it the means by which the company would make its will felt. The bluster had the reverse effect of what Ludlam had intended. Isaac Anderson believed that the radicals needed to act before the appearance of His Majesty’s ships carrying the Maroons. Most of the black settlers were sympathetic to their cause, but understandably apprehensive about moving to outright rebellion. Many of their most serious grievances—the quit rent and the interference in the chapels’ right to perform marriages and baptisms—had been effectively set aside. They had black juries; their men had the vote; they had their schools and dispensary back; they had their country farms and the right to trade on the rivers and sell in their stores. The more prudent of them worried about losing all of this for some sort of black republic.
But Isaac Anderson, Ansel Zizer, Nathaniel Wansey, James Robinson and the rest had the wind in their sails and thunder in their voices. When they spoke from Cato Perkins’s Methodist pulpit on the 3rd of September, they spoke like the founding fathers of a new black nation. It was their Philadelphia moment. They declared the authority of the governor to be overthrown. Henceforth government and the making and enforcing of laws was to be in the exclusive hands of their elected assembly of tithingmen and hundredors. With a speed that would have shocked the Founding Fathers in Philadelphia, the rebels announced that a new code of laws and a provisional constitution would be promulgated in a week, and then posted in public on the 25th of September. After that date the old administration no longer had their allegiance: “All that come from Nova Scotia shall be under this law or quit the place.” Anyone else (the whites) who obeyed the old government would be fined £20 for each transgression.
When published, the “new laws” were conspicuously free of highfaluting expressions of political theory and more concerned with the way the people of Sierra Leone led their daily lives. So price ceilings were set for comestibles—for butter, salt pork and beef ninepence a pound, for palm oil a shilling a quart. The company was required to buy produce from the settlers and to sell it or to export it without duties. Fines were established for, inter alia, keeping a “bad house” (£1), trespassing, theft, cutting wattles or timber without permission, pulling weapons (£2.10s), adultery, violating the Sabbath, and causing a sheep or goat to slink (£5). Men who left their wives for a mistress and women who left their husbands for a lover were fined equally (another first for Sierra Leone) the hefty sum of £10. Most optimistic of all was the law concerning the misconduct of children: recidivists were to be “severely corrected” by their parents if they wanted to avoid a ten-shilling fine. More decisively for their assumption of sovereignty, the hundredors and tithingmen reserved for themselves the right to issue writs and summonses. No debts could be collected until their magistrates had approved their legality.
As fast as the coup was going, it was not fast enough, for HMS Asia, with 550 Maroons and Macaulay’s brother Alexander as one of its officers, was under sail from Halifax. But Anderson evidently hoped that the boldness of their declaration would somehow persuade Ludlam to negotiate a peaceful transfer of power, and that he could rally the majority of the settlers to defend the new regime if called for. Neither of these things happened. On the 25th of September a broadsheet with the declaration and laws of the 3rd was posted on the shutters of the house of the cooper Abraham Smith, an ex-slave who, appropriately enough, had come from Philadelphia, where he had joined the British army in 1779. It was torn down, then put up again. The next morning crowds of settlers gathered on Smith’s doorstep, debating the placard. Not all of them were happy wit
h what it said.
But Ludlam had had enough of debate. Resolved on suppressing the rebellion, he summoned loyal settlers and the body of white company men to the Governor’s House on Thornton Hill, declared the rebels to be guilty of sedition and proceeded to distribute weapons. A warrant for the arrest of the leaders was drawn up. Corankapone and another of the loyal black marshals were sent to get four of them, said to be meeting at the house of a settler named Ezekiel Campbell. Two of them, Wansey and Robinson, were taken; others escaped. When he was brought to Thornton Hill, Wansey was bleeding from stab wounds. Corankapone’s story was that while attempting to arrest the leaders, he had been beaten by Robinson with the pelloon club used to thresh rice, and his companion marshal, Edmonds, had been knocked unconscious. At that point the loyalists had opened fire. Other witnesses told a different story; that fire had been directed from the start at unarmed rebels, who only then went outside and tore up fence railings with which they set about the arresting party.
For Isaac Anderson, who counted himself lucky not to have been at Ezekiel Campbell’s, blood had been spilt and there was no going back. He gathered as many of the radicals as he could—between fifty and sixty—armed them, and marched them to a camp at Buckle’s Bridge just outside Freetown on the road to Granville Town. From there Anderson, now the de facto leader of the revolt, rejected appeals from Thornton Hill to disarm and warned that his tiny army would itself attack the Governor’s House unless the prisoners taken on the 26th were released. The odds at that point were not in Ludlam’s favour. He had just forty whites and loyal blacks and another forty African sailors from the company fleet, loyalty uncertain. And he thought—with some reason—that Anderson could call on Temne warriors from King Tom to make his band into a serious force. But at this moment, as Ludlam later wrote, “a most unexpected intervention of providence completely changed the face of affairs.”36 On the 30th of September a square-rigged naval vessel sailed slowly into Freetown harbour. It was the Asia, with its transport of militarized Maroons and forty-five British regular troops, and Ludlam had never been so happy to see a ship in all his life.