Sierra Leone History
Sierra Leone History: One of the first people to live in Sierra Leone were 411 black people who came on a British military ship on May 10, 1787. These people had been poor and out of work in Britain, where private charities didn’t help them much, and they usually couldn’t get “poor relief” because they didn’t have a parish of settlement.
They ended up moving to Sierra Leone because of the kindness of a group of British abolitionists, such as Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and Granville Sharp. These people who wanted to end slavery were part of the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, which cared about the suffering of black people in London after the American Revolution, in which many black people fought with the British.
Black people were thought to have a better chance of being free in Sierra Leone, which was a free community built on Christian values. The British government paid for the first voyage. Two more groups of refugees came to the Sierra Leone settlement. A group of about 1,200 black people went from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792.
It looked like safety, land, and freedom would be better in West Africa, so they moved there. The third group of black people who moved to Sierra Leone were maroons who had been sent away from Jamaica after the Maroon War in 1795. After the war was over, they were sent back to Nova Scotia, but they asked to be sent to Africa instead.
Because of this, in 1800, about 550 maroons were sent to Sierra Leone. The settlement in Sierra Leone started out with good intentions. Sharp wrote a constitution for the settlers in 1787. It said that they would follow the rules, traditions, and customs of Britain.
He set up a way for settlers to make rules through common councils and choose a governor and a governing council. He said that the government should be based on the old English system of frankpledge. These were the steps that the first settlers took.
They chose Richard Weaver to be their first governor and split the settlement into tithings, which were groups of ten families. Each tithing had a leader who was chosen every year and was known as a “tithingman.” Their first town was called Granville Town, after Sharp. Slavery and the trade of slaves were illegal.
But there were problems over and over again in the first few years of the Sierra Leone deal. More important problems, like staying alive and working the land, got in the way of plans for the government. Half of the first black residents of Britain died on the trip or in the first four months after they arrived. They died of different diseases, mostly dysentery.
The English seeds that were brought to Sierra Leone to start a successful farming business did not work out. Settlers and Africans who lived in the area got into fights over who could use the land. In 1790, Africans burned down a native village near Granville Town as a response.
Because of these issues, British abolitionists, who had helped start the St. George’s Bay Company, worked to spread Christianity, trade, and Western culture in Sierra Leone by 1790. In 1791, the company sent Alexander Falconbridge to establish the settlement.
He built a new town called Granville near Fourah Bay and helped the residents plant crops. He passed away in 1792. When the black followers from Nova Scotia came to Sierra Leone, things got even worse. The naval officer in charge of this group of people was John Clarkson, who was the brother of the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson.
In 1792, when the St. George’s Bay Company changed its name to the Sierra Leone Company, he was put in charge of it. But the people who moved to Sierra Leone weren’t as hardworking as he had thought. He also had to deal with unpleasant councilors and people stealing from stores. As governor of the Sierra Leone Company in 1792, he was given more power and worked hard to make the company work.
The owners of Sharp’s company, however, sent Clarkson back to Britain in 1793 because they disapproved of his proposal to give settlers free land in accordance with Sharp’s constitution. In 1794–1795 and again in 1796–1799, Zachary Macaulay was governor. He tried to rebuild Sierra Leone but had trouble. He had been a bookkeeper and manager on a Jamaican slave farm.
Britain sent too few rations and building materials. A French naval fleet attacked Sierra Leone for two weeks in September 1794 and destroyed the whole country. A new rule from the Sierra Leone Company, which said that settlers had to pay one shilling for every acre of land they used, caused arguments between the settlers and the government after 1796.
When Macaulay went back to Britain in April 1799, the British crown gave the Sierra Leone Company a new charter that gave the company and its manager back their power. Nova Scotians rose up against the Sierra Leone Company in 1800. They were angry that their democratic government was falling apart and that they had not been given the free land they had been promised.
The company chose not to send any more black people to West Africa after putting down the revolt. The company also got into fights with the Koya Temne, whose land had been sold to newcomers.
The Temne struck the company’s fort on Thornton Hill on November 18, 1801. In response, the company’s troops destroyed many Temne bases. The Temne gave up all rights to colony land when they signed a peace treaty with the British in 1807. Ghana was made a crown colony on January 1, 1808.
The British government wanted to build a naval base in West Africa and thought that a new constitution would fix some of the problems with politics and money that had been common in Sierra Leone for the first 21 years.
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