Back to Africa’s First Wave in the Age of Revolutions

During the Atlantic revolutions, enslaved people emancipated themselves by organizing rebellions and escaping bondage. These actions fueled the abolitionist movement. As discussed in chapter 15, bondspeople led several revolts in the thirteen British colonies of North America during the eighteenth century.

Following the end of the American War of Independence, the British organized the exodus of approximately 75,000 men, women, and children to several regions of the British Empire, including Britain, the West Indies, Australia, India, and British North America (mainly to Nova Scotia but also to New Brunswick and to Quebec, which in 1763 had become a British colony). Most exiles were white people, but among them were Black loyalists who were either already free or freed after joining the British lines. In addition, 15,000 enslaved men, women, and children were also evacuated with their owners, most of them from the Southern colonies, who headed to Jamaica and the Bahamas.⁴ Already in 1782, when the armed conflict ended, the provisional articles of the peace treaty had established that the British were prohibited from transporting property, including enslaved people who ran away, outside the newly emancipated territory, a provision confirmed by the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which stated that the British must return runaway Black loyalists to their owners.

Among these Black exiles were loyalists who fought alongside the British Crown and who received freedom certificates before their departure, as well as enslaved men, women, and children owned by white loyalists. However, bondspeople who were owned by loyalists before the war remained in bondage after the end of the war.⁶ In some cases, enslaved children and wives of Black loyalists who did not join British lines within a period of twelve months were returned to their owners and were not allowed to leave the United States.⁷

Approximately 30,000 refugees migrated from the newly independent United States to Nova Scotia, including white loyalists who fled the United States between 1782 and 1783 and transported with them hundreds of enslaved persons. British officers compiled the names of nearly 3,000 Black men, women, and children, most of them freed and free people, who were assigned to board ships that left from New York bound for Nova Scotia.⁸ The poignant story of these emigrants is recorded in a ledger titled the Book of Negroes, today housed at the National Archives in Britain.⁹ The story inspired the award-winning novel The Book of Negroes (2007) by Canadian writer Lawrence Hill, published in the United States under the title Someone Knows My Name (2008) and adapted as a television miniseries that aired in Canada and the United States in 2015.¹⁰

The British promised to provide land to Nova Scotia’s settlers. But after waiting for five years, only 28 percent of Black emigrants received their lots.

Despite the rising abolitionist movement, the Atlantic slave trade was in full swing in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Freedmen born in Africa and British North America created several mutual aid organizations in New England and the mid-Atlantic that promoted emigration to Africa and elected Sierra Leone as the preferred territory in which to relocate.¹³ In 1787, Anthony Taylor, then the president of the Free African Union Society, a mutual relief society of free Black people in Newport, Rhode Island, supported emigration to Africa with hopes that emigrants would obtain land.¹⁴ Also in 1787, British merchants, politicians, and lawyers created the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor. The group led the creation of the St. George’s Bay Company, which aimed to relocate to London’s underprivileged Black persons to West Africa. The potential migrants were freedpeople from British colonies and nearly 1,000 loyalists who emigrated to London during and after the end of the American War of Independence.

Efforts like these, however, were not always motivated by goodwill. On the one hand, for British and US white people, relocation of Black residents to the Province of Freedom in Sierra Leone was a way to get rid of them. On the other hand, such an initiative was also part of a larger plan to “civilize” Africa through Christianization and European colonization.

In 1787, more than four hundred British settlers, a group mostly composed of poor Black persons, left London for West Africa. Once in Sierra Leone, the British made an agreement by paying tribute to the local ruler, King Tom, in order to establish Granville Town. But as in previous European and African agreements during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, in an area controlled by a West African state, the contours of this transaction remained ambiguous. Black settlers were foreigners and faced numerous obstacles, including rain, poor housing, lack of food, and hostility from the local populations. Seven months later, nearly one-third of the members of the immigrant group had perished. One year later, another group of thirty-nine additional Black settlers were sent to West Africa. But as the living conditions remained precarious, almost all of them died. In addition to the lack of resources and the climate challenges, these first efforts largely failed because this early settlement was based on an unclear arrangement with local rulers that to some extent reminds us of the early exchanges between Portuguese explorers and African rulers in the fifteenth century, as discussed in chapter 1. Ultimately, King Jimmy, who succeeded King Tom, violated the prior agreements. His men invaded the settlement, seized settlers, sold them into slavery, and eventually burned down Granville Town.¹⁷

Despite this dramatic initial failure, a few years later the British created the Sierra Leone Company, which replaced the earlier initiative.

Following the Second Maroon War in Jamaica, as briefly discussed in chapter 13, the British Crown passed an act in 1796 to deport Trelawny Town’s Maroons off the island.²⁰ Although their first destination was Halifax in Nova Scotia, the region’s inhospitable climate led the Jamaican Maroons to petition to relocate again, this time to Sierra Leone.²¹ Eventually, their demands were heard. In 1800, the British transported nearly six hundred Maroons from Jamaica to Sierra Leone. Unlike other Black migrants, they were not Christians, practiced polygyny, and could neither read nor write English.²² But this new relocation was not only aimed at fulfilling the Maroons’ demands to leave Nova Scotia. It was rather intended to employ them as soldiers to repress the rebellions of Black settlers transported to the region as part of the initiative led by the Sierra Leone Company. After the rebels were defeated, two were executed, and nearly thirty insurgents were relocated from Freetown to Bullom Shore and Gorée Island, in present-day Senegal, which by that time was under British control.

The British slave trade was abolished in 1807, just seven years after the suppression of the revolt of Sierra Leone’s Black settlers. In the years that followed, other Black migrants reached Sierra Leone as well. For example, Paul Cuffee, a freeborn Black man, Quaker, shipowner, and abolitionist from Massachusetts, was one of the earliest advocates of settling freedpeople in West Africa. After creating two organizations to promote the settlement of freedpeople in Sierra Leone, he successfully transported 38 Black men, women, and children from the United States to Freetown in 1816.²³ Britain signed treaties with Portugal, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Spain between 1815 and 1818 to prohibit the slave trade north of the equator. As the British Royal Navy patrolled the coasts of West Africa to suppress the illegal trade, at least 85,000 out of a total of 175,000 Africans liberated between 1808 and 1862 were brought to Freetown.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, politicians and white elite groups also debated the conditions under which slavery would be abolished in the United States. Fearing insurrection and relying on the assumption that Black people and white people should remain separated, they considered the possible relocation of freedpeople to other parts of the Americas and to West Africa. These discussions took on a more urgent tone following the unsuccessful slave rebellion led by bondsman Gabriel Prosser in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800. White clergyman and educator Robert Finley also promoted the relocation of freedpeople to the western coast of Africa.²⁴ In 1816, he created the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, later renamed the American Colonization Society. Led by slave owners and abolitionists, both endeavors relied on racist conceptions that following emancipation, Black people and white populations could not live in the same territory, and to rid the country of free and freed Black individuals, they should be relocated to West Africa. With this goal, the American Colonization Society sent delegates to present-day Liberia in 1821, where the society founded Christopolis (later renamed Monrovia after US President James Monroe) in 1822.

As in Sierra Leone, the creation of this new American colony on African soil generated conflicts with the local populations, who occasionally attacked the new settlement. Moreover, reports about diseases and difficult living conditions also discouraged Black Americans from embracing Liberia as a viable option for migration. But after Liberia became independent from the American Colonization Society in 1847 and received diplomatic recognition from the United States in 1862, Liberian representatives came to Washington, DC, to recruit Black American settlers.²⁵

In the years that followed, individually or in groups, African Americans ventured to cross the Atlantic Ocean to settle in Liberia. Historian Lisa A. Lindsay has elucidated the story of one of these men, who left the United States before the rise of the Civil War to relocate in West Africa. James Churchwill Vaughan was born in South Carolina. As his father, a formerly enslaved man, lay on his deathbed, Vaughan promised to migrate to Africa. For his father, as for many freedpeople, the continent of his ancestors’ land continued to be promise of redemption for Black people who remained excluded in the United States after emancipation. In 1852, under the auspices of the American Colonization Society, Vaughan sailed to Liberia on board the Joseph Maxwell, along with 149 other settlers. Upon arriving in Liberia in 1853, Vaughan was disappointed with the working and living conditions, and so he continued his journey eastward to settle in Lagos, in present-day Nigeria. There he was an active witness to the tumultuous period that marked the end of the Atlantic slave trade and the rise of British colonialism.²⁶ As we will see in the sections that follow, Vaughan was not alone. Like him, other descendants of enslaved people took similar Atlantic routes, expecting to start a better life on the African continent.