Founding of Freetown
British abolitionists founded a settlement for freed Black people at what became Freetown in 1787, and most of the first settlers were dead within four years. The origin was the Somerset judgment of 1772 and the American war. Slavery had been found unsupportable by English law, and several thousand Black people were living in poverty in London, among them men who had fought for the Crown in America on the promise of freedom and been abandoned. The Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, with Granville Sharp, proposed a colony of free settlers in West Africa. The first 400 arrived in the rainy season, on land bought from a local ruler in a transaction he did not understand as a permanent cession, with no shelter and no medicine, and were reduced to about sixty within three years; the settlement was burned in a local war. The second attempt was the durable one. Some 1,200 Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia, who had been given cold, poor land after evacuation from America, petitioned to leave and sailed in 1792 under Thomas Peters and John Clarkson, and founded Freetown. Jamaican Maroons followed in 1800. After abolition of the trade in 1807 the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron landed people taken from intercepted slave ships there, some 99,000 over sixty years, from all over the region. The Krio language and community come from that mixture. The colony was governed as a company venture until the Crown took it over in 1808.
- Year: 1787 CE
- Category: Social
