Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia

B. Everill

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781349440016, 9781137028679
• eBook ISBN: 9781137291813
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

Bronwen Everill offers a new perspective on African global history, applying a comparative approach to freed slave settlers in Sierra Leone and Liberia to understand their role in the anti-slavery colonization movements of Britain and America.

Part I

Foundations

1

Transatlantic Anti-Slavery Networks

The early history of the anti-slavery colonization movement reveals both the extent and the limitations of the transatlantic networks involved in their founding. Although Freetown was founded thirty-five years before Monrovia, they faced similar problems in their early years: high rates of endemic disease and mortality; hostile relationships with indigenous groups; frequent clashes with slave traders in the region; and fraught relationships between the settlers, their leaders, and the metropolitan anti-slavery colonizationists. These similarities suggest that there was little communication between the anti-slavery organizers in Britain and in America, or between the settlers in Sierra Leone and those planning to settle in Liberia.

However, there were, in fact, numerous connections and networks of communication established throughout this period. Information about Sierra Leone was not easy to obtain, but it was available. African Americans travelled to the colony to report on its progress and potential as a site for emigration, and to conduct reconnaissance on the surrounding area. British emigrants to America became involved in colonization schemes and sought help from their humanitarian networks back in Britain. Not least, Britain turned to the loyalist African Americans who had resettled in Canada in order to repopulate the colony after the initial demographic disasters, thereby infusing the early colony with elements of American ideology and religious pluralism.

These colonies were part of a transatlantic exchange of ideas, people, and goods. But in an era of newly formed mass political movements, with a new relationship between Britain and its former colonies in America yet to be fully defined, individual connections and movements around the Atlantic World helped to secure relationships, spread ideas, and forge new leadership. The use of personal networks helped to shape the development of the transatlantic colonization movements of both Britain and America. The connections influenced the type of scheme that developed in the United States, the choice of location in West Africa, and the model for the American Colonization Society.

This chapter explores the ways that the founding of Sierra Leone and the colony’s early years did and did not influence the founding of Liberia and its early settlement, primarily through an exploration of the metropolitan plans and personal information exchanges in this period. The close association of key British humanitarians, colonizationists, missionaries, naval officers, and parliamentarians throughout the early years of Sierra Leone’s founding helps to illustrate the close connections and tight networks that controlled the colony’s establishment and economic prospects, as well as directed the type of civilizing mission that would later develop. Many of the Americans involved in the early colonization plans, in contrast, were no longer keenly involved by the time that Liberia was finally founded, contributing to a different type of network of influence in the metropolitan movements. The early years also provided hints that there would be less cooperation between the British and American anti-slavery movements than they continued to hope there would be. Sierra Leone and Liberia emerged from a competitive strategy that underlines their interconnection, their contributions towards anti-slavery, and their inherent rivalry.

Province of freedom

In 1787, three ships bearing a total of 459 passengers arrived on the Sierra Leone peninsula from London. The settlers had arrived as part of a new utopian plan put forward by Granville Sharp, a noted friend of London’s ‘Black Poor’, Henry Smeathman, a naturalist and adventurer, and with the support of anti-slavery campaigners Olaudah Equiano, Ottabah Coguano, and the Clapham Sect of evangelical reformers. It was a diverse group of supporters, and an equally diverse group of settlers, which included 344 black Londoners, as well as 115 white wives and artisans who joined the expedition.¹

Sharp’s plan for the Province of Freedom did not last long. The colony’s early governance was supposed to follow a model of idealized Anglo-Saxon democracy laid out by Sharp in the colony’s charter, with rotating representatives (hundredors) elected by tithingmen, who represented a group of ten households. The arcane system collapsed almost immediately as a result of the challenges facing the colonists: mortality was high; there were conflicts with Spanish, French, and African slave traders based in the vicinity; there was conflict with the Temne; there was dissention and debate amongst the settlers and those in charge of the colony. By 1791, only 46 of the original settlers remained. Many had died, and others moved to other parts of the peninsula or to Bunce Island, where they felt they had a better chance of making a living.²

Although the first settlement faced obstacles including disease and violent disputes with indigenous populations, the experiment was not abandoned. Instead, the Sierra Leone Company took over administration of Sierra Leone in 1791. The Company was run by a group of humanitarians including members of the Clapham Sect – William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Henry Thornton – but it combined humanitarian aims with the attempt to make the colony economically self-sufficient through the introduction of ‘legitimate commerce’. The hope was that the colony would demonstrate that tropical plantation crops of the sort grown in the West Indies could be grown without recourse to enslaved labour.³ The Company Directors declared ‘that all the most valuable productions of the tropical climates seem to grow spontaneously at Sierra Leone; and that nothing but attention and cultivation appear wanting, in order to produce them of every kind, and in sufficient quantities to become articles of trade’.⁴ During this period, the colony expanded with the settlement of the roughly 1200 Black Loyalists who fought with the British in the American Revolution, had been transported to Nova Scotia, and were brought to Sierra Leone by John Clarkson. In 1800, 500 Maroons, a group of free black Jamaicans, joined them.

Meanwhile, the anti-slave trade movement that had founded the colony continued to adapt and change throughout the 1790s and early 1800s, giving rise to new interpretations of what was taking place on the ground in Freetown and a new mix of pragmatism and utopianism that influenced the way American colonizationists later came to view the colony. In 1808, after the Sierra Leone Company proved unprofitable, the British government took over the running of the colony. The Sierra Leone Company’s successor, the African Institution, which dominated moderate anti-slave trade activism through the 1820s, maintained a similar governing body and membership. This organization provided the government with suitable candidates for the governorship of the colony (Thomas Perronet Thompson in 1808, replaced by Edward Columbine in 1810) and information suggesting how the colony should be governed.⁵

When the British government took control of the operation of the newly designated Crown Colony of Sierra Leone, Thomas Perronet Thompson was hand selected by William Wilberforce to be its first governor. Thompson was a fierce abolitionist and was disturbed when he found that the apprenticeship system of training new labourers in the colony was not as it seemed. He wrote home to his fiancée ‘that these apprenticeships have ... introduced actual slavery’.⁶ Slaves freed in the area or from slave traders trying to trade within the colony were sold to Sierra Leonean settlers as apprentices for twenty dollars or kept by the government to do improvement works. In response to Thompson’s repeated protests Macaulay, secretary of the Institution, replied that ‘I have always been of the opinion that the slave trade being abolished, the most likely means of promoting civilization in that country [Sierra Leone] would be by indenting the natives for a time not exceeding seven years, or till they attained the age of 21’.⁷ Because the anti-slavery activists in Britain saw apprenticeship as benefiting a long-term educating and civilizing mission, Thompson was recalled by the African Institution, who replaced him with a governor more amenable to the complex labour relations of the colony.

This was in part because, in the period after the abolition of the slave trade, William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect of reforming evangelicals continued to pursue an anti-slave trade policy. In order to combat the slave trade, the African Institution and others involved in the British anti-slave trade movement felt that legitimate commerce had to be introduced to compete with, and ultimately replace, the slave trade. The perception of the company’s failure to encourage legitimate trade encouraged the African Institution and later experimenters to pursue a more holistic course that would combine elements of Sharp’s plan with the commercial plan. At the time of the British government’s takeover of the colony, the African Institution declared that Sierra Leone would be the new British centre for growing cotton in case ‘circumstances arise to interrupt our commercial relations with America’.⁸ However, some moderate metropolitan anti-slavery activists had begun to believe that labour was needed, as were assimilated Africans, in order to ensure that the transition away from the slave trade took place smoothly. Those metropolitan anti-slavery activists who continued to shape the policies of Britain towards its new colony ensured that labour and the population was controlled and governed effectively by accepting the practice of apprenticeship.

But in addition to introducing legitimate commerce, the colony also had to deal with a growing settler population as slave ships were impounded by the Navy and the slaves on board – referred to as ‘recaptives’ or ‘Liberated Africans’ – were integrated into Sierra Leone society. Until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, humanitarian networks in British corridors of power lobbied for a strong naval presence off the coast of Sierra Leone, the designation of Sierra Leone as a Crown Colony and the home of the Courts of Mixed Commission for adjudicating slave ship captures. With the expansion of the anti-slave trade squadron and the establishment of the Courts of Mixed Commission for adjudicating slave ship captures, the Sierra Leone government had to respond to the increase in African subjects from outside the British Empire. Between 1808 and 1833, 55,533 slaves were disembarked in Sierra Leone.⁹ Of these, roughly 65 per cent were male and 35 per cent children.¹⁰

In order to accommodate the assimilation of these new arrivals, Governor Charles MacCarthy (1816–24) brought two strains of humanitarianism together in his parish plan for administering the colony in districts run by Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionaries. The CMS was founded in 1804 with the goal of promoting the spread of the Gospel in Britain’s colonial territories. The board of the CMS frequently overlapped with the African Institution and other anti-slavery organizations and MacCarthy saw this metropolitan cooperation as an opportunity to shape the colony. In MacCarthy’s plan, new recaptives were settled into a village, encouraged to marry local women, and expected to attend church on Sundays and mission schools throughout the week with their families, thereby promoting the development of ‘civilization’. MacCarthy expanded the colony into the interior, establishing a number of ‘parishes’ run by CMS superintendents responsible for administrative, educational, and religious duties. Each of these parishes would house a manager (provided by the CMS) who would oversee the apprenticeship of Liberated Africans in various necessary trades, while also providing for their religious and civil instruction through the establishment of government schools. MacCarthy wrote of the experiment that he conceived ‘that the first effectual step towards the establishment of Christianity will be found in the Division of this peninsula into Parishes, appointing to each a Clergyman to instruct their flock in Christianity, enlightening their minds to the various duties and advantages inherent to civilization’. He envisioned that this would make ‘Sierra Leone the base from whence future exertions may be extended, step by step to the very interior of Africa’.¹¹

MacCarthy’s tenure as governor was unusually long for the colony, allowing him to expand educational and commercial opportunities into the interior, court favour with the demanding settlers, and establish Freetown as a regional hub and the capital of the new British West African Territories, founded in 1821, combining the Gold Coast settlements and the Gambia under the Freetown government. Throughout this period, the colony’s anti-slavery activity was primarily aimed at ‘redeeming’ recaptive slaves and acting as a base for naval anti-slavery activity. As the Prince de Joinville summarized the European attitude in passing through the colony in the 1840s, ‘to have turned out these human cattle, swept up in distant raids, now far from home and country, would have been to cast them infallibly into the clutches of cruel and pitiless native masters, who would keep back what they could not sell for human sacrifices or cannibal banquets’.¹² The well-run CMS establishments in the Sierra Leone districts ensured that new waves of Liberated Africans received identical schooling in the habits and knowledge that Britons found important. The educations received at the parish schools allowed Liberated Africans to become socially mobile ministers, teachers, petty bureaucrats, and tradesmen, which would have a much stronger influence on the colony’s development than metropolitan planning in the 1830s and 1840s.

American initiatives

Americans were also growing interested in the potential for African colonization. Even before humanitarians like Granville Sharp were planning the settlement of the ‘black poor’ in Freetown, Anthony Benezet and other influential Quakers promoted resettlement of African Americans in areas less hostile to their freedom – for Benezet, the western parts of North America.

Exemplifying the connections between the burgeoning American and British plans for colonization, the Reverend Samuel Hopkins ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I   Foundations
• Part II   Interactions
• Epilogue: 1861 and Beyond
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index