David Olusoga’s Hidden Histories
During the American Revolution, the British made an extraordinary promise. They issued proclamations informing all slaves whose owners had joined the rebellion that, if they came over to the British lines, they would be freed. Thousands did exactly that. Some of these so-called ‘black loyalists’ were formed into special regiments and fought against the rebels wearing sashes or badges that read ‘liberty to slaves’.
But after the British defeat at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, these former slaves were put in a terrifying predicament. Their legal owners were determined to reclaim their human property once the last of the British forces withdrew. In 1783, on the eve of their evacuation from the US, the British did something remarkable. They created a list of the 3,000 former slaves in the British-held city of New York, putting their names into a register known as the Book of Negroes. Among them was Harry Washington, who had served in the Black Pioneers and whose owner had sent agents into the city to look for the slaves that had escaped from his Mount Vernon Plantation. That slave owner was future president George Washington.
But George Washington and Harry Washington never met one another again. Harry was one of thousands who were evacuated from New York and sent to a settlement in Nova Scotia, then in British-held Canada. Other black loyalists ended up in London. Fortunate to have been freed from slavery and to have survived the war, they were nonetheless destitute. Left starving and freezing on the streets, the suffering of black people who had fought for Britain became a highly visible national scandal.
A committee of wealthy men emerged to offer relief to these ‘black poor’. They arranged for the distribution of food and clothing – but a long-term solution was needed. That came from botanist and charlatan Henry Smeathman, who persuaded the committee, and then the government, to establish a new colony in which the black poor of London could build a free and prosperous settlement. However, the location that Smeathman recommended for this new settlement was the coast of Sierra Leone, a part of Africa to which he had previously led an expedition and which he knew was disease-ridden and dangerous. Smeathman’s aim was not to save the black poor, but to make money for himself.
In 1787 three ships – the Belisarius, the Atlantic and the Vernon – set sail with 456 men, women and children on board. They landed at the mouth of the Sierra Leone river, and set about establishing a community based upon instructions issued by the British anti-slavery campaigner Granville Sharp.
This was an idealistic, almost utopian community with its own rules that were based, bizarrely, on Sharp’s interpretation of ‘Frankpledge’ – an Anglo-Saxon social structure that had existed in England in the early Middle Ages. But the settlement had been sited on one of the major highways of the Atlantic slave trade, and, as the former slaves built their huts and tilled their fields, slave ships patrolled the waters around them.
Worse still, tropical diseases decimated their numbers, and tropical storms destroyed their crops. Yet this disaster did not prevent Sharp and his supporters in London from sending a second wave of colonists in 1792. This time, they were black settlers who had been sent from New York to Nova Scotia – and among those who now left for Sierra Leone was Harry Washington.
The new settlement was called Freetown. And, despite further deaths and further waves of disease, the settlers were able to build a bridgehead for what became the first British colony in Africa.