by Simon Schama
The weather turned ominous, with saturated clouds massing high on the crests of the forested hills above the frail rebel camp. Down there at Buckle’s Bridge, besides Anderson, the abrasive Frank Patrick and the black Justices of the Peace Mingo Jordan and John Cuthbert, were a handful of others who had come all the way from New Jersey and South Carolina, from Preston, Birchtown and Little Joggin to this last fight. Somewhere, among the rebel band were two men who had decided to make their names mean something once more: Henry Washington and British Freedom.
The storm broke with a shattering detonation of the heavens, the worst that Sierra Leone could unload crashing down on three separate defiles of Maroon and white soldiers creeping towards Buckle’s Bridge with the aim of surrounding the rebels. With the trails turning into foaming slurry, the manoeuvre was halted as the soldiers tried to get some shelter and protect their weapons as best they could. On the bridge the rebels huddled under capes. Doubtless there was a Nova Scotian umbrella or two.
Afterwards, in the dawn sunlight, with the morning screeching of the parrots for accompaniment, the Maroons pounced. The surprise was complete, the rout total. A few shots were fired, for two of the rebels—names unknown—were killed. Many more, including Isaac Anderson, escaped into the forest, but two days later he was brought to Freetown by the local chief with whom he had hoped to shelter. The Maroons combed the forest and villages for fugitives and took thirty-one prisoners.
It was out of the question, Ludlam thought, to wait and send the rebels back to England for trial, or to take the chance of judging them before the colony’s black juries, which would be unlikely to convict. The new royal charter was on its way with its commission for white judges, duly arriving on the 12th of October, but getting rid of the insurrectionists was too urgent to be delayed. So Ludlam did what the authorities in reactionary England and revolutionary France had done when they decided they were in a state of emergency—he had the rebels tried under a specially created military tribunal. Three lieutenants from the Asia presided over the court, which made short work of its duty. Of fifty-five settlers declared to have participated in the sedition, thirty-three were permanently banished from Sierra Leone; some, including James Robinson, were sent to the British colony of Goree. Most were exiled to the Bullom shore. Should they attempt to return and be caught, they would receive three hundred lashes, effectively a death sentence. Isaac Anderson and Frank Patrick, one of Macaulay’s bitterest antagonists and long a thorn in the side of the company rule, were bound over as capital felons for the first quarter-session of the newly chartered regime. Patrick was charged with stealing a gun. Anderson was accused of sending an anonymous letter, the one that had demanded the release of the prisoners taken at Ezekiel Campbell’s house on the night of the 26th: “Mr Ludlow Sir we de sire to now whether you will let our Mends out if not turn out the womans and Chill Dren.”37 Both crimes warranted the death penalty, and Patrick and Anderson were duly convicted and hanged. In the usual way, their bodies remained on the gibbets for some days. Just two years earlier, Isaac Anderson had been delighted to send John Clarkson a barrel of rice from his first harvest. Now what was left of his corpse was being cleaned by the hyenas.
On the 6th of November the new royal charter of the company was formally inaugurated to the ceremonious booming of the Asia’s guns. Ludlam would not preside over its introduction, for his queasy stomach and delicate nerves had got the better of him and he had prematurely tendered his resignation. Perhaps, too—for he was no Zachary Macaulay, unaffected by twinges of doubt—Ludlam might have felt troubled by the liquidation of the extraordinary experiment in black self-government. No more tithingmen and hundredors; no more sententious speeches in the chapels. All that survived of Sharp’s Frankpledge democracy were black juries.
For some of the black settlers, the end of firebrand politics must have come as a relief. No one was trying to move them off their lots or collect quit rent (although the company still claimed the right to do so). No one was meddling with their Churches. Boston King could get on with his missionary teaching; John Kizell, who had been seized as a slave so many years ago in the Sherbro country and who now, as a free man, traded with his own people from his boat, the Three Friends, could get on with making money. Andrew Moore saw his discovery of wild coffee burgeon into Sierra Leone’s most important trade and profited from it. Sophia Small could open her shop again, turn it into the biggest retail concern in Freetown, buy more properties and marry her daughter to an English carpenter called George Nicol. When David George died in 1802, the preacher he had sent to Preston, Hector Peters, happily took over his ministry.
The embers of revolt were not quite extinguished. Some of those who had escaped from the Maroons at Buckle’s Bridge had found shelter with the Temne King Tom and in 1801, and again in 1802, marched on Freetown and Thornton Hill, this time with African warriors. But they faced the Maroons, who had been given the confiscated properties of the convicted rebels and were certainly not about to surrender them now. Most of the Nova Scotians stayed prudently neutral or, like the perenially dependable Corankapone, turned out for the government, in his case dying in a battle for the Governor’s House. The rains and the “smokes” rolled around the colony. Old names returned—among them Dawes and Ludlam for a spell of vindication, while Zachary Macaulay stayed in his company office in London writing instructions. Although Henry Thornton MP was nominally still the chairman, no one in or out of Parliament was in much doubt about who was really running Sierra Leone. But it was reluctantly concluded by 1807 that perhaps the company was running the colony into the ground. Local trade and a modest export in camwood, coffee, rice and sugar were doing well, but they were mostly in private hands and the company—without its quit rent revenue—was incapable of recovering the costs of defence or administration. When the bill that finally abolished the slave trade passed through Parliament that year, it was foreseen that Liberated Africans (as they were designated) taken from the slave traders by the Royal Navy or escaped from the factories would be bound to come to Sierra Leone. Freetown would inevitably become the station and headquarters of this great emancipation and it was evident to everyone, Thornton and the directors especially, that it needed henceforth to be under the direct protection of the Crown. In 1808 the company was wound up, its flag was run down and the Union Jack run up.
Who was watching? Some of the exiled rebels of 1800, despite the draconian penalty laid on them, had been allowed to come back to Freetown in dribs and drabs. Others may have smuggled themselves in and, once again, given themselves new names. But not, I think, British Freedom. Together with Henry Washington and some others he was out on the northern Bullom shore amidst the half-abandoned remains of Isaac DuBois’s cotton farms at Clarkson Plantation, at which point he disappears from our history. We can picture him surviving, perhaps as he had done at Preston, on a few acres, or more likely finding a way to do business with the local chiefs. And if he did indeed cling to that name, he could only do so by not crossing the river to Freetown. For he must have understood that he had had his day. Over there, no one had much use for British freedom any more. Over there was something different. Over there was the British Empire.
ENDINGS, BEGINNINGS
Histories never conclude: they just pause their prose. Their stories—like the one just told—are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat raggedly on into the future, into, in this case, an infuriated nineteenth century. But even as history is overtaken by events, it leaves behind it a wake of recollection, a thin skein of light on the murky ocean of time which jumps and dances like the fugitive flashes we apprehend when, at last, we close our eyes.
1802
THE COUNCIL OF STATE of the Consular French Republic, led by Napoleon Bonaparte, reintroduced slavery, eight years after its abolition.
1806
AFTER HIS BILL to abolish the slave trade had met with yet another defeat in 1799, William Wilberforce all but gave up hope of
Parliament. A French army was camped at Boulogne, and an invasion was in the offing. Few wished to hand the enemy any kind of economic advantage in the global struggle. After the battle of Trafalgar had ended that threat for good in 1805, the abolitionists became more optimistic. The union with Ireland in 1801 had brought into the House of Commons new members, many of whom made known their opposition to the infamous trade. In January 1806 William Pitt died and Charles James Fox, who had spoken for abolition in 1791, led the new government in the House of Commons. Sir Charles Middleton, the patron of James Ramsay and the mentor of Clarkson and Wilberforce, became First Lord of the Admiralty. After a bill stopping the import of slaves in conquered colonies, and forbidding British subjects from trading in neutral ships, passed in both houses of Parliament, Fox moved more boldly. On the 10th of June, a motion requiring Parliament “considering the Slave Trade to be contrary to the principles of justice, humanity and policy…[to] take effectual measures for its abolition” was passed, again in both Houses and by substantial majorities. Fox declared that if he should succeed in carrying through this measure, he should think his life “well spent.” Four months later he was dead.
IN THE UNITED STATES moves to end the slave trade were helped by fears that the ferocious insurrectionary war still raging in St Domingue might have an American counterpart if the demographic imbalance between black and white were allowed to become even more lopsided. President Jefferson gave public endorsement for legislation to end the trade. But the slave population in Louisiana trebled in the two years since its purchase from the French in 1804. In that same year South Carolina had reintroduced the slave trade it had earlier abolished, in a last-minute effort to beat the coming prohibition on imports.
In Virginia planters shaken by the slave rebellion of Gabriel Prosser in 1800 took steps to rid the commonwealth of trouble-making free blacks. At the initiative of Governor Benjamin Harrison they were forbidden to own firearms. Schools for the children of free blacks were closed. Manumitted slaves were required to leave the commonwealth after a year.
In Sierra Leone Harrison’s ex-slaves William and Anna Cheese and their descendants lived on peacefully in Freetown.
1807
IN MARCH 1807 Jefferson signed into law a bill outlawing the importation of slaves into the United States. After the 1st of January 1808 violators would be fined $20,000 and their ship and cargo forfeited.
Introducing a “Bill for the Abolition of the Slave Trade” in the House of Lords, Lord Grenville proclaimed that its enactment would be “one of the most glorious acts that had ever been undertaken by any assembly of any nation in the world.”1 In the Commons, with the bill’s passage a certainty, the Solicitor-General contrasted the guilty conscience of Napoleon Bonaparte as he retired to bed, with Wilberforce “in the bosom of his happy and delighted family” sleeping with a perfect conscience in the knowledge that he had preserved the life of millions of his fellow creatures.2 On the 10th of February, the bill was passed in the Commons by 283 votes to 16. On the 25th of March, George III gave the royal assent. After the 1st of January 1808, it would be unlawful for any British ship to carry slaves, nor could any be landed in other ships in the dominions of the British Empire.
IN MAY 1808, Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament was published. Four thousand copies were sold on subscription in advance of the publication date. After the “mild and genial dullness of the first three pages,” Samuel Coleridge wrote to his fellow poet Robert Southey, the book was “deeply interesting, written with great purity as well as simplicity of Language…and nothing can surpass the moral beauty of the manner in which he introduces himself and relates his own maxima pars in that Immortal War—compared with which how mean all the conquests of Napoleon and Alexander.”3 An abridged edition of the book was printed expressly for use in American Sunday schools.
The Sierra Leone Company having been wound up, Zachary Macaulay and Henry Thornton turned their attention to the foundation of the African Institution, by means of which they hoped to diffuse the blessings of Christianity and civility throughout the pagan continent. Thomas Clarkson, whose Jacobinical errors had been forgiven if not forgotten, was brought within its fold of guiding lights. Granville Sharp, it need hardly be said, was acclaimed its patriarch.
The Royal Navy took up station in Sierra Leone to pursue and capture slave traders and to liberate their live cargo. Many of the ships taken in the first decade of patrols were, despite Congress’s abolition, American and French.
1811
ONE OF THOSE who saw an American slaver, the Rebecca out of New York, apprehended by the Royal Navy at Freetown was Paul Cuffe, a fifty-two-year-old free black from Westport, Massachusetts, the son of a slave and a Martha’s Vineyard Wampanoag Indian. Cuffe was an American success: the owner of land, gristmills, whaling boats. But he was also a Quaker, and a reading of Thomas Clarkson’s History had made him an ardent abolitionist. He felt keenly the plight of slaves in the United States, but also the severe disabilities of his own free people in those states, including Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, which had abolished the institution. Through the transatlantic network of Friends he had heard of Sierra Leone and the African Institution, whose blessing he hoped to secure for a trading venture between the colony of free black Afro-Anglo-Americans and the United States. If all went well, he might even sponsor the settlement of American blacks in Sierra Leone. Cuffe was an American patriot who, forbidden by his Church from serving in the army or navy, spent the Revolutionary War running the blockade of the Royal Navy, a feat that still did not dispel suspicions that he was, at heart, a Tory. He would have been pleased if the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack could be reconciled in the noble cause of Emancipation.
But his timing was terrible. Cuffe sailed in late December 1810 with a crew of nine, all black, including his nephew, Thomas Wainer, and John Marsterns, who was married to his niece Mary. Thirty-two days out, in early February, the Traveller was hit by a violent squall. It began to leak and take on water. At three o’clock in the morning, on the second day of the gale, the ship was “struck on our beem end,” rolling so far over that its deck was perpendicular to the ocean. Before it could right itself, John Marsterns was washed clean overboard. Amidst the towering waves and screaming wind Marsterns found some rigging torn off the ship, and clung to it for dear life. Finally he managed to climb back aboard the ship. For three more days the Traveller was in grave danger of foundering, but somehow the little brig rode out the storm. Fifty-three days out, it was sailing under sunny skies and there was dolphin for dinner. On the fifty-eighth day Paul Cuffe saw the mountains of Sierra Leone rising from the sea.
In Sierra Leone the American dined with the British governor in his official residence on Thornton Hill. Cuffe prayed in the Methodist chapel and gave King Tom a Quaker Bible and an Essay on Wars, the substance of which, naturally, was their iniquity and futility—a message unlikely to make much of an impression on Tom, greybeard though he now was. On the Bullom shore, close to Clarkson Plantation, he met King George, who also got a Quaker Bible as well as an Epistle from the Yearly Meeting. Cuffe was impatient to begin trading with the likes of John Kizell, who shipped tons of camwood down-river in his fleet of big boats, but was obliged to await permission from the African Institution. The British government was gravely displeased—to the point of prohibiting American trade—with President Madison’s truckling, as it believed, to the economic blockade of the despot Bonaparte. Cooling his heels, Cuffe continued to admire Freetown, especially its schools, which currently taught 230 children. Another school instructed black adults. Books and paper, he noted, were all free. “If Commerce Could be Interduced in the Colony,” he noted in a letter sent to Quaker Friends in London, “it might have the good attendencey of keeping the young men at home and in Some future day Quallify them to become maneggers of themselves and when they become thus Quallified to Carry on Commerce I See no Reas
on why they may not become a Nation to be Numbered among the historians nations of the World.”4
The trading licence finally arrived and Cuffe was about to set sail, taking Sierra Leone cargo back to America, when he received an invitation to go to England. This proved irresistible. Naturally he ran into dirty weather on the voyage north: “Very trying for Sales.” Mid-voyage he spoke with a Captain Cates, sailing from Liverpool to Newfoundland, who gave Cuffe the “unhapey News” of an engagement between an American frigate and a British sloop off Sandy Hook, New York. This did not bode well for Cuffe’s mission of transatlantic commerce and goodwill. But on the 12th of July 1811 a crowd lined the dockside at Liverpool—until three years earlier the joint capital, with Bristol, of the slave trade—to see the Traveller, with its black captain in his Quaker hat, and black crew. His pleasure at being made instantly welcome received a severe knock when three of his crew were pressed into the navy. Two were released, but it took Cuffe months to secure the freedom of the third.
Nonetheless, he was overwhelmed with kindness and instantaneous fame. In the United States he had not been able to keep much company with white Quakers, even less any other whites. In England he was made welcome everywhere. The Times and the Edinburgh Review enthused over him; he did the sights of London with William Allen and his son (the Royal Mint, the Zoo); toured a Manchester factory, marvelling at the gaslight; went to Parliament and met Wilberforce and Zachary Macaulay. To the king’s nephew the Duke of Gloucester, who was also the patron of the African Institution, Cuffe presented an African robe, a dagger and a letter box, all from Sierra Leone. To his joy, through their friend and protégé Allen, Cuffe also made the acquaintance of Thomas and John Clarkson. He wrote optimistically to his brother John: “I am endeavouring to have a…road opened from England to America and to Sierra Leone…in order that some good sober correctors [characters] may find their way to that counterey.”5