Black Loyalist Hunger Prevention in Sierra Leone

Chapter 8 Black Loyalist Hunger Prevention in Sierra Leone Cato Perkins and Isaac Anderson were hungry, and they were not alone. In October 1793 their hunger drove them from Free- town, Sierra Leone, to London, England. They had lived in Freetown for just over a year. Before moving to that small British colony on the upper Guinea coast, Anderson and Perkins had been enslaved in Revolutionary South Caro- lina, where they declared allegiance with their feet by running to the British during the war. Isaac Anderson threw in with the British as early as 1775, and in 1776 left for New York with Lord William Campbell. A man named John Perkins had enslaved Cato Perkins in Charleston, South Carolina—Perkins prob ably ran to the British during the siege of Charleston and possibly made it to New York with General Clinton. Thereafter the two men had lived free in Nova Scotia, before the Sierra Leone Company offered them the opportu- nity to migrate. In Freetown, Anderson, Perkins, and their fellow free black colonists distrusted the white people who now ruled them. In a move that by- passed the authority of their governor, the two men had traveled to England to directly petition the Sierra Leone Com pany. In London, they sent a draft of their petition to John Clarkson, their former governor in Sierra Leone, who now lived in England; they hoped he would listen to them and offer advice about approaching the com pany.1 Anderson and Perkins disliked their prospects in Africa. The Freetown colony was faltering, and although they hoped for “Land and [to] be able to make 178 BLACK LOYALIST HUNGER PREVENTION IN SiERRA LEONE 179 a Crop to support us” before the advent of “the rainy Season,” the com pany had not yet allotted land. This prob lem echoed their experiences in Nova Scotia. Then as now, “Health and Life” remained “very uncertain,” and the government was hampering their abilities to be useful to themselves and to the col- o ny. 2 Their petition would go unanswered; less than a month later they complained to John Clarkson that the Sierra Leone Company intended to ig- nore them without providing “any answer” and instead planned to send them “back like Fools” to Freetown. The Sierra Leone Com pany’s decision to treat Perkins and Anderson as powerless supplicants would fuel a swift campaign that convinced formerly enslaved black colonists to advocate for the right to prevent their own hunger as po liti cal insiders in Sierra Leone.3 From 1792 to 1800 Freetown’s black colonists—also referred to hereafter as “black Loyalists” and “Nova Scotians”— won several battles in the fight against black hunger.4 The Nova Scotians arrived in Africa in 1792 imbued with a sense of how to use food laws to exert dominance, and within half a decade they had learned to behave as British subjects entitled to enforce that power. Whereas in Nova Scotia white Loyalists’ food laws had controlled former bondpeople’s access to food, in Sierra Leone black colonists gained the right to enact their own antihunger rules, which white colonists uniformly approved, beginning in 1793. These Nova Scotians fought famine first by regulating their trade in alcohol, bread, fish, and meat.Later, the black Loyalists tried to regu- late the trade of Africans, particularly Susu and Temne. These laws enabled former victual warriors to try to become victual imperialists by altering Afri- can food sales while occupying African land. This attempt failed because violent Temne and Susu reactions to colonists’ price-fixing encouraged white councilmen in Sierra Leone to curtail black Loyalist lawmaking; those councilmen would later try to interfere with Africans’ trade. Black Loyalists won impor tant victories, but they lost the war, which was a shorter, more condensed affair than the conflict Native Americans had fought. Indians had been fighting the war against hunger before colonists arrived in North Ameri ca in the fifteenthcentury, preventing famine with ex- tensive crop production and seasonal hunting. The black colonists were latecomers to autonomous hunger-prevention efforts; during the colonial period their cash- crop production had fed white slave masters, who regulated when, what, and how enslaved people ate, and during the war self- liberated bondpeople’s roles as victual warriors largely focused on dealing with white hunger. Formerly enslaved people had witnessed the po liti cal power of food laws during the 1780s in Nova Scotia, but these Nova Scotians had not won the right to inde pen dently pass legislation. They gained that right in Sierra Leone. 180 CHAPTER 8 In the space of eight years, power waxed and waned as black Loyalists claimed, exercised, and lost their right to legislate against hunger at the end of the eigh teenth century— and suffered the dramatic, violent consequences. In September 1800 black colonists in Freetown engaged in an event that resembled early modern food riots, with one exception: black colonists pro- tested in 1800 not to urge the government to fix food prices, but to reclaim their right to fix prices and address hunger themselves. Their riotous actions in 1800 began with price- fixing, and this decision was not differ ent from the previous few years. But between 1796 and 1800— once tensions appeared between black colonists and Africans— white officials who had grown anx- ious about black colonists’ power had tried to limit black price- fixing. Other food riots began when officials could not protect the rights of ordinary people, but in Sierra Leone black colonists had already earned the politi cal and legal power to prevent hunger. The 1800 event was also notable because white officials misrepresented it as a significant break with past behav ior. They called it a “rebellion” rather than a riot, which made it seem as if the previous de cade of black Loyalist petitioning and lawmaking had been ille- gitimate. Black colonists lost power as white officials seized control of the historical narrative. This par tic u lar historical narrative has multiple beginnings and a sprawling chronology that stretches before and after the years of the Revolutionary War. It begins with enslaved people’s lack of access to food during the colonial period, their flight to the British during the Revolutionary War, their re- emergence as free victual warriors, and their escape from the former American colonies. It begins in Nova Scotia, where, during the late 1780s, British failures to apportion land, coupled with restrictive food laws, moti- vated discontented black colonists to leave Nova Scotia. It begins in London, where a group of British reformers examined their most recent failure to build an antislavery colony on the upper Guinea coast: the Granville Town colony settled by London’s Black Poor ( people of African descent who mi- grated to London in the last quarter of the eighteenth century). That last group of colonists had reckoned with hunger in London itself during the harsh winters of 1784–1785 and 1785–1786. Their experiences with food aid resembled David George’s: charitable bakers in London used private funding to bake quarter loaves of bread for them.5 It begins in Africa, on the upper Guinea coast itself. The Granville Town colonists there were victims of the same sort of bad planning that characterized settlement in Nova Scotia. Olaudah Equiano, the former slave and anti- BLACK LOYALIST HUNGER PREVENTION IN SiERRA LEONE 181 slavery writer, lived in London before the Granville Town colonists’ departure and worked as a government commissary. He reported “the flagrant abuses committed by the agent,” Joseph Irwin, who was in charge of making provi- sions arrangements for the emigrants. Such corruption impeded migration. The first Granville Town colonists sailed fromEngland to the upper Guinea coast in the spring of 1787. Once there they obtained land from an African subruler, a Temne man named King Tom (also known as Pa Kokelly).6 They died in huge numbers from disease. In 1789 they sealed their fate by goading a passing ship into burning the town of another leader named King Jimmy. Jimmy gave the colonists three days to vacate and torched the town to cin- ders, scattering the colonists.7 The first colonists’ experiences demonstrated the uncertain success of colonial proj ects and emphasized to the Sierra Leone Company that new colonists would require more government structure and careful planning to thrive. When a thousand black colonists, led by the Reverend John Clarkson, sailed from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in January 1792, they landed at the former Granville Town colony. They renamed it Free Town, which became Freetown. They built Freetown in the shadow of mountains that appeared “to rise grad- ually from the sea to a stupendous height, richly wooded and beautifully or- namented.” David George, who with the majority of his Baptist congregation, sailed on one of the ships in a voyage that took seven weeks, wrote that one of the mountains “appeared like a cloud to us.” Boston King also undertook the voyage with his wife, Violet, who caught “a putrid fever” and died at the start of April, less than a month after the couple arrived.8 During these early years, hungriness characterized colonists’ existence; they tried to avoid it but also came to expect it during certain months. The name “Sierra Leone” came from a Portuguese term meaning “lion mountain”—so named to denote the sound of thunder during the seasonal rains. The rainy season began in May or June, visited daily downpours on the colony until Au- gust, and decreased by September or October.

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