To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  As part of their larger quest to disrupt and end the slave trade, the agents of the Sierra Leone Company sought out and recorded the accounts and grievances of the local people. These stories were part of a wider campaign by abolitionists to gather information about African civilization and the impact of the slave trade. Mostly confined to coastal trading posts, Britain knew remarkably little about Africa in the eighteenth century. To address this issue, a number of wealthy Britons, led by Captain Cook’s former botanist Sir Joseph Banks, founded the Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa in 1788. The Africa Association as it was known, had genuine scientific interests in the exploration of West Africa, and funded a series of expeditions led by men such as Daniel Houghton and Mungo Park, charged with locating the fabled city of Timbuktu and finding the source of the River Niger. The exploits of such doughty explorers captured the imagination of the British public, turning them into heroes of empire and Africa into a new stage for British endeavor. But knowledge was not the only reason for their wanderings. The membership and interests of the Africa Association closely overlapped with other contemporary groups such as the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and thus one of the Africa Association’s goals was to acquire evidence of the sophistication of African civilizations as a counterweight to the dangerously dismissive stereotypes of slavery’s defenders. Claims of innate African backwardness and barbarity had long been used to rationalize their enslavement, but first-hand evidence that such claims were convenient lies would go a long way to transforming the hearts and minds of the British public.

  The information about the deleterious effects of the slave trade collected by the Company’s officials served an allied purpose: to demonstrate that the admirable cultures the explorers documented were being destroyed by slavery. In letters and official Company accounts designed for public consumption, the British people heard of stinking slave ships filled with despondent, dispirited, suicidal slaves “filled with fears either of a horrid death or a cruel servitude; and without the most distant prospect of ever beholding the face of one of those friends or relatives from whom they were forcibly torn. Their cup is full of pure, unmingled sorrow, the bitterness of which is unalloyed by almost a single ray of hope.” They heard of brutal slave factors, “inhuman monsters” so corrupted by their violent trade that they murdered their white servants, drowned unsellable slaves, and eventually met their own gruesome end, murdered by their captives, “an end worthy of such a life.” Stories such as these flipped familiar scripts on their heads, humanized slaves and de-humanized their captors, helping to form the building blocks, the very ammunition, of the abolitionists’ case against the slave trade. During the parliamentary debate over the abolition bill of 1799, two former governors, Dawes and Macaulay, even offered expert testimony in support of the bill.36

  Other accounts sent from Sierra Leone for British consumption helped to undermine long-held myths about the nature of the slave trade. For instance, in May 1796, Zachary Macaulay, Sierra Leone’s governor from 1794, intervened on behalf of four slaves purchased by an American slave trader anchored just off Freetown. The victims were local, and included a 30-year-old man sold by a local chief, a 14-year-old girl captured by a second native chief on her way to visit a relative and sold for a cask of rum, and a girl named Maria who had attended the colony school run by Mary Perth, herself a former slave. Macaulay was appalled that this brazen human trafficking had taken place beneath his nose, and insisted that the American captain release his captives. The captain complied, and the almost-slaves were reunited with their relatives. Macaulay’s description of the scene is clearly intended to be didactic. The emotional reunion between the young victims and their families, he informs the reader, “was truly affecting,” a real life echo of the famous abolitionist slogan “Am I not a man and a brother?” “Shame on those,” he concludes, “who would strip these poor creatures of the feelings of humanity and of the claims of brotherhood.” But the account also serves to undermine the frequent justification of slavery apologists that the Africans purchased by European traders had been born slaves or were enslaved as punishment for crimes or unpaid debts. “I think this incident strongly marks the nature of the trade,” Macaulay argues. “No crime alleged, no plea of being born in slavery, no debt exists in any of the cases. But how is it possible to reason calmly on a business of such frightful enormity passing immediately before one’s eyes! May God stay this dreadful scourge which has given it birth!”37

  The leadership of the colony did its best to make good its claim to be an instrument of anti-slavery. In addition to their contributions to the publicity campaign in Britain, the governors encouraged European slavers and African chiefs to abandon the slave trade. Macaulay, unyielding and upright, engaged in heated, often rancorous debates with local slave traders about the morality of their professions. When Mr. Tilley, an agent posted to the slave factory at Bance Island visited the colony, Macaulay organized a performance of African children, many rescued from slavery, to demonstrate to the slaver “what might be expected from the hundreds he yearly consigns to that state [i.e. slavery].” Most of the men involved in the trade continued to rationalize their involvement, usually hiding behind pleas of their own poverty. “Would you have me starve?” one defensive slaver asked Macaulay. “I do no more than others, and rich men too have done. If they are satisfied that they do right, so may I. I am a poor man, and only strive to make a living.” An American slave ship captain responded more flippantly to the governor’s moralizing harangue, quipping that “religion is no doubt a very fine invention . . . But, sir, I am no Methodist, I have no intention of being righteous overmuch.” Macaulay did manage to convince some undecided visitors. He took a Captain Ball on a visit to Bance Island and Ball was so horrified by “the view of human wretchedness” that he later responded to one of the factors’ toasts with the cry, “Come, let us drink the speedy termination of a still more enormous evil, the Slave Trade.” When the factor opened his mouth to object, Ball interrupted him. “What can any man of common feeling allege on its behalf,” he interjected, turning to Macaulay, “It is indeed a cursed trade. I pray God that your friends’ [the abolitionists] labours to abolish it may at length meet the success they deserve.”38

  The Company and its agents understood that if the slave trade were to be undermined, they could not ignore the central role played by local African rulers. The colony’s neighbors had an ambivalent attitude toward slavery. Most of the chiefs were involved in capturing and selling slaves to some degree, as part of power struggles with their rivals, and out of a desire, increasingly a need, for European goods and manufactures. Many rulers realized the precariousness of their situation. They needed European goods as gifts and symbols of status to bind their followers to them, and guns and ammunition to defend their people from their enemies. However, the easiest way to secure these manufactures was to sell what the European traders wanted most, Africans themselves. Thus, many African rulers responded to the Company’s urgings that they abandon the slave trade with a sort of jaded resignation. When Macaulay visited Addow, paramount king of the Sherbo people living to the south of the Sierra Leone, to ask if he would allow Company merchants and missionaries to reside in his territory, the king admitted that he sometimes engaged in the slave trade, but nonetheless seemed to “rejoice in the prospect of its abolition.” Years before, his own village had been raided by a slaver named James Cleveland, and “many of his people carried away into slavery.” He had seen both sides of the trade, as trafficker and victim, and though he could not give up the trade unilaterally, he still hoped it would be brought to an end. Others felt the same. Signor Domingo, a Sherbo chief, told Macaulay he wished to embrace Christianity and abandon the slave trade. “What more have I to do with the Slave Trade? It is time I should leave it off, and settle my account with God. I am old; I ought to think only of heaven.”39

  The colony’s settlers and officials did not limit their interventions to w
ords alone. In June of 1793, Macaulay intervened to secure the release of seventeen “black mariners” who had been captured with a French naval vessel and sold to Bance Island by a British captain as prizes of war. Macaulay raged at the hypocrisy of selling black sailors while treating white sailors as prisoners of war. “Why were the French seamen not put up to auction?” he wondered caustically. “Is black and white to be permitted by Government to constitute the line that will separate the captive in war from the slave? These men were not only free, but some of them the sons of Chiefs.” The Sierra Leone Colony also became a beacon of freedom for slaves in the region. Runaways flocked to the settlements, convinced that their presence on colony soil would guarantee their freedom. Settlers regularly hid fugitive slaves within the colony, though on a few occasions runaways were re-sold by settlers themselves.40

  Macaulay was often called upon to shield fugitives from recapture, but the issue of harboring escaped slaves placed the colony’s officials in a delicate position. On the one hand, the slave trade was still legal under British law and, as such, actively interfering with the human cargo of British merchants could well bring lawsuits against the Company it could ill afford. “The very Act which incorporated the Sierra Leone Company,” one governor reminded the settlers, “had directly and explicitly prohibited them from injuring the rights of any British subject trading to Africa.” Likewise, alienating the nearby British slave factories at Bance Island and the Îles de Los would cut off vital sources of aid. In its early years, the colony was forced to beg the factors at Bance Island for needed supplies of rice and other supplies. The slave traders, as suppliers of highly desired European manufactures, also had considerable influence with the local African chiefs, who would not appreciate the disruption of their trade. Surrounded by potentially hostile chiefdoms, and after 1793 under constant threat of French attack, good relations with the slave factories also provided much-needed military aid. Though the relationship was often tense, colony officials cultivated a mutually beneficial relationship with Bance Island, exchanging visits as well as supplies and information.41

  The settlers did not always appreciate this attempt to balance morality and practicality. On one occasion in June 1794, Macaulay fired a dockworker for assaulting a slave trader who had antagonized the former slaves with taunts of “what manner he would use them if he had them in the West Indies.” The governor’s seeming breach of faith caused a riot as outraged settlers attacked his office and threatened to destroy his home. The turmoil was eventually quelled by the threat of a cannon and the promise to return to Nova Scotia any settlers dissatisfied with Sierra Leone. The settlers’ anger was more than understandable given their experiences, but Macaulay’s actions were informed by a wider strategy. The Company and its agents were first and foremost playing to a British audience. They knew that public pressure was the only way to secure parliamentary action, and that parliamentary action was the only way to end the slave trade. Seizing slaves from local traders or allowing settlers to assault them not only would not work—the problem was far too big to address in this ad hoc way—but it might well alienate the British population, convince them that the abolitionists and former slaves were thugs and extremists, thereby eroding the broad support necessary to effect change. It was a pragmatic strategy, if not always an appealing one in the moment. It must have been deeply frustrating for many of the settlers to see slavers operating on their borders with impunity and even hosted in Freetown, but men like Macaulay, Clarkson, Sharp, and Thornton sought to outlaw the trade entirely, not merely disrupt or inconvenience the few individual slave traders who interacted with the colony.

  Still, the colony’s officials took their mission to undermine the slave trade seriously, and were loath to hand back fugitives whose only crime, in the words of Zachary Macaulay, was “an attempt to regain their liberty, or rather to avoid being forced into slavery.” Macaulay thus adopted a clever stratagem born of the necessity of both appeasing local slave traders and advancing the moral basis for the colony. In a display of masterly inactivity, the governor responded to demands for the return of fugitive slaves by reiterating his commitment not to entice, encourage, or physically prevent the recapture of slavers’ legal property, while refusing to do anything at all to effect their recovery. He could not legally confiscate their slaves, but nor would he be compelled to aid in their return. Behind this mask of indifference, Macaulay frequently took further steps to obstruct the recapture of fugitive slaves. What this meant in practice was that slaves who fled to the colony, often aided and hidden by settlers, were protected from re-enslavement.42

  The region’s slave traders were quick to recognize the threat posed by the new colony, and did their best to undermine it. They had long and deep commercial relationships with the local peoples, and used this influence to set the chiefs against Sierra Leone. Signor Domingo, the reluctant African slave trader, warned Macaulay that though outwardly cordial and welcoming, the slavers of Bance Island had from the beginning “endeavored to convince the natives of our sinister designs, and had instigated them to oppose our landing by promises of a supply of arms and ammunition.” Later, when European goods became scarce and prices skyrocketed during the interminable war with France, slave traders did their best to convince the African chiefs that the colony and its abolitionism were to blame, while at the same time surreptitiously aiding French attacks on the colony.43

  In November 1792, Boston King, along with twenty-seven of the foremost settlers, signed his name to a petition to Governor Clarkson. The petitioners raised issues that would become perennial sources of disagreement between the settlers and the Company—low wages and expensive provisions—and suggested reasonable remedies “by which there will be no grumbling.” This was not the first petition composed by the settlers, nor the first supported by Boston King. King and his comrades had learned well the lessons of the American Revolution—the rhetoric of liberty and the power of collective action—and put them to use for the benefit of the colony from the moment they landed. As the colony’s first year progressed, the letters and petitions became more urgent, shifting from careful requests made by individual leaders, to self-confident articulations of rights signed by large swaths of the settler population. The November 1792 petition seems to have been a turning point in this process, and many of those who signed their names would go on to become leaders of the opposition to Company policy. Boston King, however, would take another path, as evidenced by his support for a more conciliatory message to Governor Clarkson a week later, wishing him a safe journey back to England. King was one of the few leaders to sign both letters, demonstrating his precarious position as both a leader of the more “ranglesome” Methodist faction and a loyal supporter of the Company’s greater mission. While many of his fellow settlers became disillusioned with the Company, King would never waver in his commitment.44

  The refugees had quite reasonably expected that their new colony would be self-governing, a republic of and for former slaves, but their hopes for independence and self-determination began to wither almost as soon as they arrived. John Clarkson had been tasked with gathering recruits from Canada and seeing them safely established in their new home, but who would lead the new colony and how it would be governed had not been established when the fleet left Halifax in January 1792. Thomas Peters, in so many ways the driving force behind the whole endeavor, was not alone in expecting that he himself would be given the command. When the convoy arrived at Sierra Leone, however, they found a letter from the directors waiting. The directors had decided to name John Clarkson governor, much to Peters’ chagrin, with a council of eight Europeans as advisors. Though the refugees would be represented by elected representatives, many were outraged that the colony’s highest posts had not been given to any of their number. Peters attempted to drum up support for his appointment as governor, visiting church services and prayer meetings to urge his comrades to throw their weight behind him, and even succeeded in compiling a petition to the directors in Lon
don signed by 100 settlers. But Clarkson was not unpopular among the settlers, and was able to outmaneuver Peters and secure the support of the majority of the colony.

  Peters died suddenly in June of 1792, but Clarkson’s problems with the settlers continued. That same month, he received a petition from Henry Beverhout on behalf of his Methodist congregation, demanding a change in the structure of Sierra Leone’s government. The settlers were “all willing to be governed by the laws of England,” the petition stated, but would not consent to be ruled by Clarkson or any other government without having “aney of our own Culler in it.” The petitioners reminded Clarkson of the promises he had made in Nova Scotia that all who came to Sierra Leone “wold be free . . . and all should be equal.” Clarkson could do nothing to alter the rule of governor and council, but he did see the merits of the petitioners’ broader argument and appointed black constables and instituted trial by settler juries.45

  For the moment, the issue of the colony’s administration had been settled, but the settlers had other grievances and did not hesitate to make their voices heard. In the first months after their arrival, the settlers sent a steady stream of petitions to the governor requesting the distribution of the promised grants of land. The work of surveying, clearing, and disbursing the plots was repeatedly delayed; by the rains, by the inefficiencies of the administration, and by the difficulty of processing so many claims. For the settlers, there must have been an eerie sense of déjà vu as the land that offered independence was once again withheld. Without land, the colonists were dependent on the Company for provisions, a grating dependence in its own right, but after the first couple of months the Company compounded the problem by insisting that supplies be bought rather than granted gratis. To pay for supplies, the settlers would work for the Company, clearing land and constructing houses, storerooms, and schools. Land, supplies, and wages would become the subject of numerous complaints and petitions in the first decade of the colony. As a preacher and a leader of a “company” within the colony, Boston King signed several of these petitions.46