Freetown: Black Settlers and the Search for Freedom

A town built around a promise

For the people who crossed from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792, freedom was a practical question. Where could a family obtain land? Would work provide enough food? Who would make the rules, and would those rules protect Black people as securely as white people? These were questions formed through experience of enslavement, war and disappointed promises. The settlement they helped establish was named Freetown. Its name expressed an ambition that remained open to argument. ¹²

The preacher Boston King left an account of that ambition in his memoir. He had escaped slavery during the American Revolution, survived hardship in Nova Scotia and then chosen another Atlantic journey. His story connects a city’s foundation with work, marriage, religious conviction and loss. Read alongside the Sierra Leone Company’s written promises, it reveals settlers making decisions about their future within circumstances they did not control. Freetown’s beginnings were shaped by those decisions as well as by British money and administration. ²³

The earlier settlement from Britain

The 1792 migration followed an earlier British scheme. In 1787 a group of Black people living in Britain travelled to the Sierra Leone peninsula in an attempt to establish a free settlement. The project brought together philanthropic hopes, British government assistance and the needs of people facing poverty. Its failure did not end plans for colonisation. The Sierra Leone Company, chartered in 1791, sought to revive the undertaking on a commercial basis. ⁴

The earlier settlement, known as Granville Town, suffered serious disruption. When Anna Maria Falconbridge travelled to the region in 1791, her husband Alexander’s assignment included gathering scattered survivors and arranging their resettlement. Her published letters describe a project already entangled in disputes about land and authority. This chronology matters: the people arriving from Nova Scotia entered a history of previous settlement and conflict. They were not the first people to reach the peninsula, nor was the creation of Freetown the beginning of Sierra Leone’s history. ⁵

Land that already belonged to people

European descriptions of a new colony can make inhabited country appear empty. Falconbridge’s account provides evidence against that picture, even though her language often belittles the African people she encounters. She describes negotiations with the Temne ruler Naimbana, a political assembly, interpreters, established towns and trading connections. The newcomers required agreements with people who possessed their own institutions and interests. ⁵

In Falconbridge’s version of their discussion, Naimbana explained that he could not simply dispose of land without consulting others. Town leaders and inhabitants had claims that a bargain with one ruler could not erase. We should not treat her rendering of his speech as a recording of his exact words. Nevertheless, the episode shows that the meaning and authority of a land agreement were contested from the outset. A document accepted by British organisers did not necessarily settle the rights of everybody affected. ⁵

Her letters also place the settlement within a region of commerce, farming and slavery. Bunce Island, which she calls Bance Island, was part of the world through which the expedition travelled. This proximity is essential to understanding the experiment. A project associated with freedom existed alongside active systems of enslavement. Local African societies were themselves diverse, and neither cooperation nor hostility towards the newcomers can be reduced to a single African response. ⁵

From the American Revolution to Nova Scotia

Many of the 1792 settlers had gained freedom during the American Revolution by reaching British lines. Calling them Black Loyalists identifies their wartime alignment, but it should not obscure their own purpose: escaping enslavement and protecting themselves and their families. Boston King’s recollection of the war’s end captures their fear that an agreement between powerful governments might return them to former enslavers. British certificates and evacuation offered a route away from that danger. ³

Nova Scotia provided refuge without dependable equality. King described hunger, insecure employment and the difficulty of obtaining payment for skilled work. He made chests and boats, sold possessions to secure food and negotiated with employers. His account demonstrates how a legally free person could still face conditions that severely restricted independence. Freedom required resources as well as a change in status. ³

King also recalled religious meetings and the support of fellow believers. Those relationships were part of the communities migrants had already built before sailing to Africa. A relocation scheme therefore involved leaving neighbours, congregations and familiar places behind. The Atlantic crossing carried existing social networks towards another uncertain setting; it did not create a community out of people with no previous collective life. ³

Thomas Peters demands a better future

Thomas Peters became a leading representative of Black Loyalist grievances. Formerly enslaved in North Carolina, he had served in the Black Pioneers during the revolution. In Nova Scotia he pressed for the land and provisions promised to Black settlers. Small town plots could not provide the farmland families needed to sustain themselves. ⁶

In 1790, acting for more than 200 Black Loyalists, Peters travelled to London to seek redress. There he encountered the plans for settlement in Sierra Leone. He subsequently helped recruit people for the migration. His role places Black political initiative at the centre of the story: the project was partly an answer to demands carried across the Atlantic by a Black representative. Peters died in Sierra Leone later in 1792, but his campaigning had already helped make the journey possible. ⁶

What the company promised

The Sierra Leone Company’s notice of 2 August 1791 set out an attractive offer. It promised a male settler at least twenty acres, with ten for his wife and five for each child. It declared that Black and white settlers should have the same civil, military, personal and commercial rights and duties. It also reproduced the statutory prohibition on the company buying, selling or employing enslaved people. These provisions offered substantial grounds for hope. ²

The notice also contained qualifications. Company agents could approve or reject applicants after judging their character. Land would be subject to charges and obligations that the company would determine, and supplies from its warehouses required payment. The document combined promises of equality with considerable managerial discretion. Those clauses became especially significant when settlers and officials disagreed about what had been offered. ²

John Clarkson’s diary adds another layer. When recruiting in Nova Scotia, he explained that the charges should not be understood as annual rent, but as contributions towards needs such as care of the sick and children’s education. He promised to help secure the proper allotments. He also urged people to consider the risks, advising those already prospering to think carefully before leaving. The written terms, spoken assurances and listeners’ expectations did not necessarily amount to the same agreement. ⁷

Crossing with hopes and anxieties

The migration involved 1,196 Black settlers, who departed Nova Scotia in a fleet of fifteen ships in January 1792. Their arrival that year established the community commonly associated with Freetown’s foundation. The scale of the departure affected the places they left: congregations, schools and households in Nova Scotia lost a substantial part of their membership. ¹³

King’s memoir gives the voyage a more intimate shape. He described a prolonged storm that scattered the fleet and a man washed overboard, leaving a wife and children. His own wife, Violet, was seriously ill during the passage. He feared both her death and the prospect of burial at sea. Those anxieties sit alongside his religious confidence that the journey had a purpose. ³

Violet survived the crossing but fell ill again after reaching Sierra Leone and died. King’s description centres on her faith and the prayers and singing around her. Although we hear her largely through her husband’s account, her death prevents the migration from becoming an uncomplicated story of arrival and triumph. A settlement could represent political possibility while bringing devastating personal losses to the people who built it. ³

Building homes under company rule

Arrival required immediate work: finding shelter, clearing ground, securing food and coping with illness. Falconbridge’s letters describe shortages and quarrels within the colonial administration. She reported Black settlers’ anger that promised land had not been provided, alongside their dislike of the conduct of company officials. Her criticisms were shaped by personal disputes with the company, and her later defence of the slave trade makes her an especially troubling witness. Her account still records grievances that a celebratory company narrative might minimise. ⁵

The administrative conflict also reveals a difference between freedom and control over government. Settlers could be free from legal ownership while finding major decisions about their lives taken by a company council. Clarkson’s personal assurances did not remove that structure. The question became how residents could make their expectations binding upon those who governed them. ²⁵

Surviving correspondence preserves evidence of their efforts. The British Library’s catalogue of Clarkson’s papers identifies letters from Cato Perkins and Isaac Anderson, alongside a colonists’ petition of October 1793. The catalogue alone cannot supply the full arguments of those documents. It does establish the continued use of letters and petitions by settlers who sought to communicate beyond the immediate colonial administration. ⁸

Food and the right to make rules

Political participation developed around everyday needs. Historian Rachel B. Herrmann has traced how Black settlers made rules governing food prices and supplies during the 1790s. Some of that activity initially received support from white officials. It also produced friction with African traders and neighbours whose interests were affected by the settlers’ regulations. ⁹

In 1800, a struggle over law-making escalated into the confrontation usually described as a rebellion. Herrmann argues that understanding the dispute through food politics reveals a longer history of Black participation in government. The issue involved who could regulate trade and protect the community against hunger. The company’s suppression of the movement, with punishment and the removal of representative rights, sharply limited that participation. This interpretation helps recover an argument over authority beneath the official label of disorder. It also reminds us that settlers seeking justice could make rules that burdened other Africans. ⁹

The arrival of Jamaican Maroons

Another group reached Sierra Leone in 1800: Jamaican Maroons who had been deported to Nova Scotia after the Second Maroon War of 1795–1796. More than 500 travelled onwards after several years of petitioning for relocation. Their history differed from that of the Black Loyalists. They brought the experience of an established Jamaican community, warfare, negotiated agreements and enforced exile. ¹

Their arrival also brought conflict between Black groups. Maroons helped the colonial authorities suppress the settler confrontation of 1800. Shared African ancestry did not automatically produce shared political interests. The company could draw support from one displaced population while restricting another. Keeping these histories distinct explains more than treating every arrival as part of a single harmonious return to Africa. ⁴

Liberated Africans and constrained freedom

British Crown rule replaced company government in 1808, following the abolition of Britain’s slave trade in 1807. Freetown became a destination for Africans removed from intercepted slave ships. This was another kind of migration: people who had already endured capture and transportation were taken to a place that was often far from their own homes. ⁴¹⁰

The Sierra Leone Public Archives preserves registers recording these arrivals. Entries include names, estimated ages, sex, height and identifying marks, linking individuals to ships and the courts that adjudicated seizures. Such records can restore evidence of particular people to a history too often presented only in totals. They were also instruments of administration, shaped by what colonial officials wished to identify and manage. ¹⁰

Release from a slave ship did not guarantee the ability to choose one’s work or household. Richard Anderson’s research examines how apprenticeship became a principal response to the arrival of African children. Officials framed this as education and protection while organising labour and imposing guardianship. The language of liberation could therefore coexist with significant coercion. Freetown’s association with abolition must include the conditions encountered after a ship was condemned and its captives brought ashore. ¹¹

Recovering a city's many histories

Historians can connect registers with other documents to reconstruct parts of individual lives. Suzanne Schwarz’s work on Liberated African records demonstrates the possibilities of following people across sources rather than stopping at their first official registration. The gaps remain substantial: names may change, ages may be estimated and the record may describe an administrative decision without revealing how somebody experienced it. ¹²

Freetown’s developing society also exceeded the Christian settler model favoured in many British accounts. Gibril R. Cole’s research on Krio history places Islam, commerce and interaction with older African populations within the formation of new identities. People arriving from the Americas and Europe, those liberated from slave ships and neighbouring communities all contributed to an evolving social world. Their descendants cannot be understood simply as transplanted Europeans. ¹³

The history of Freetown is therefore a history of freedom repeatedly defined and defended: through escape, migration, bargaining, work, worship, petitions and disputes over government. Its residents carried memories of different places and built new relationships in West Africa. The promises that drew them there were significant, but so were their efforts to hold authorities to those promises. Taking those efforts seriously gives the city a history with Black and African decision-makers at its centre. ²³⁵⁷

Sources

[1] Parks Canada. Black Migrations to Sierra Leone (1792 and 1800) National Historic Event; Historical designation account.

[2] Sierra Leone Company; transcription by Encyclopedia Virginia. Free Settlement on the Coast of Africa — original notice; 2 August 1791.

[3] Boston King; The Methodist Magazine, reproduced by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Excerpts from Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a Black Preacher; 1798.

[4] University of New Brunswick, The Loyalist Collection. Sessional Papers: Sierra Leone (CO 270), 1792–1801 — historical background and catalogue; Undated catalogue.

[5] Anna Maria Falconbridge; digitised transcription hosted by Sierra Leone Web. Two Voyages to Sierra Leone during the Years 1791–2–3, second edition — original letters; 1794.

[6] Parks Canada. Thomas Peters (c. 1738–1792); Updated 10 October 2023.

[7] John Clarkson; Library and Archives Canada archived Black Loyalists project. Clarkson's Mission to America, 1791–1792, pages 53–62 — diary transcription; 1791–1792.

[8] British Library Archives and Manuscripts. Add MS 41263: Correspondence relating to John Clarkson and Sierra Leone — catalogue description; Documents dated 1792–1828.

[9] Rachel B. Herrmann, Slavery & Abolition; author manuscript in Cardiff University ORCA. Rebellion or Riot? Black Loyalist Food Laws in Sierra Leone; 2016; volume 37, issue 4, pages 680–703.

[10] Sierra Leone Public Archives. EAP443: Registers of the Liberated African Department, 1808–1848 — collection description; Undated digital collection.

[11] Richard Anderson, The English Historical Review; University of Aberdeen Research Portal. Abolition's Adolescence: Apprenticeship as ‘Liberation’ in Sierra Leone, 1808–1848 — published abstract; 2022; volume 137, issue 586, pages 763–793.

[12] Suzanne Schwarz, History in Africa, Cambridge University Press. Reconstructing the Life Histories of Liberated Africans: Sierra Leone in the Early Nineteenth Century — abstract and references; 2012; volume 39, pages 175–207.

[13] Gibril R. Cole, Ohio University Press; JSTOR. The Krio of West Africa: Islam, Culture, Creolization, and Colonialism in the Nineteenth Century — publisher description and chapter previews; 2013.

Sources checked on 22 October 2026.