From Slavery to Freetown
From Slavery to Freetown

Author: Mary Louise Clifford

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2015-08-31

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1476607222

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During the American Revolution over 3,000 persons of African descent were promised freedom by the British if they would desert their American rebel masters and serve the loyalist cause. Those who responded to this promise found refuge in New York. In 1783, after Britain lost the war, they were evacuated to Nova Scotia, where for a decade they were treated as cheap labor by the white loyalists. In 1792 they were finally offered a new home in West Africa; over 1,200 responded and became the founders of Freetown in Sierra Leone. This history follows ten of these freed slaves from their escape from masters in Virginia and the Carolinas to their sojourn in wartime New York, their evacuation to Nova Scotia and finally their exodus to Freetown, where they struggled for another decade for not only freedom and dignity but the right to worship as they choose, make an honest living, and govern themselves.

Free Slaves, Freetown, and the Sierra Leonean Civil War
Free Slaves, Freetown, and the Sierra Leonean Civil War

Author: Joseph Kaifala

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-11-22

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1349948543

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This book is a historical narrative covering various periods in Sierra Leone’s history from the fifteenth century to the end of its civil war in 2002. It entails the history of Sierra Leone from its days as a slave harbor through to its founding as a home for free slaves, and toward its political independence and civil war. In 1462, the country was discovered by a Portuguese explorer, Pedro de Sintra, who named it Serra Lyoa (Lion Mountains). Sierra Leone later became a lucrative hub for the Transatlantic Slave Trade. At the end of slavery in England, Freetown was selected as a home for the Black Poor, free slaves in England after the Somerset ruling. The Black Poor were joined by the Nova Scotians, American slaves who supported or fought with the British during the American Revolution. The Maroons, rebellious slaves from Jamaica, arrived in 1800. The Recaptives, freed in enforcement of British antislavery laws, were also taken to Freetown. Freetown became a British colony in 1808 and Sierra Leone obtained political independence from Britain in 1961. The development of the country was derailed by the death of its first Prime Minister, Sir Milton Margai, and thirty years after independence the country collapsed into a brutal civil war.

Freedom in White and Black
Freedom in White and Black

Author: Emma Christopher

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres

Published: 2018-06-12

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 0299316203

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A gripping true account of African slaves and white slavers whose fates are seemingly reversed, shedding fascinating light on the early development of the nations of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Australia, and on the role of former slaves in combatting the illegal trade.

Abolition in Sierra Leone
Abolition in Sierra Leone

Author: Richard Peter Anderson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-01-30

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1108473547

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A history of colonial Africa and of the African diaspora examining the experiences and identities of 'liberated' Africans in Sierra Leone.

Freedom's Debtors
Freedom's Debtors

Author: Padraic X. Scanlan

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2017-10-24

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0300231520

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A history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone and how the British used its success to justify colonialism in Africa British anti-slavery, widely seen as a great sacrifice of economic and political capital on the altar of humanitarianism, was in fact profitable, militarily useful, and crucial to the expansion of British power in West Africa. After the slave trade was abolished, anti-slavery activists in England profited, colonial officials in Freetown, Sierra Leone, relied on former slaves as soldiers and as cheap labor, and the British armed forces conscripted former slaves to fight in the West Indies and in West Africa. At once scholarly and compelling, this history of the abolition of the British slave trade in Sierra Leone draws on a wealth of archival material. Scanlan’s social and material study offers insight into how the success of British anti-slavery policies were used to justify colonialism in Africa. He reframes a moment considered to be a watershed in British public morality as rather the beginning of morally ambiguous, violent, and exploitative colonial history.

Black Loyalists
Black Loyalists

Author: Ruth Holmes Whithead

Publisher: Nimbus+ORM

Published: 2014-04-25

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 1771080175

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“Engaging and steeped in years of research . . . a must read for all who care about the intersection of Canadian, American, British, and African history.” —Lawrence Hill, award-winning author of Someone Knows My Name In an attempt to ruin the American economy during the Revolutionary War, the British government offered freedom to slaves who would desert their rebel masters. Many Black men and women escaped to the British fleet patrolling the East Coast, or to the British armies invading the colonies from Maine to Georgia. After the final surrender of the British to the Americans, New York City was evacuated by the British Army throughout the summer and fall of 1783. Carried away with them were a vast number of White Loyalists and their families, and over 3,000 Black Loyalists: free, indentured, apprenticed, or still enslaved. More than 2,700 Black people came to Nova Scotia with the fleet from New York City. Black Loyalists strives to present hard data about the lives of Nova Scotia Black Loyalists before they escaped slavery in early South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, and after they settled in Nova Scotia—to tell the little-known story of some very brave and enterprising men and women who survived the chaos of the American Revolution, people who found a way to pass through the heart, ironically, of a War for Liberty, to find their own liberty and human dignity. Includes historical images and documents

Epic Journeys of Freedom
Epic Journeys of Freedom

Author: Cassandra Pybus

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2006-02-01

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 0807055182

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Cassandra Pybus adds greatly to the work of [previous] scholars by insisting that slaves stand at the center of their own history . . . Her 'biographies' of flight expose the dangers that escape entailed and the courage it took to risk all for freedom. Only by measuring those dangers can the exhilaration of success be comprehended and the unspeakable misery of failure be appreciated.--Ira Berlin, from the Foreword During the American Revolution, thousands of slaves fled their masters to find freedom with the British. Epic Journeys of Freedom is the astounding story of these runaways and the lives they made on four continents. Having emancipated themselves, with the rhetoric about the inalienable rights of free men ringing in their ears, these men and women struggled tenaciously to make liberty a reality in their own lives. This alternative narrative of freedom fought for and won is uniquely compelling; historian Cassandra Pybus's groundbreaking research has uncovered individual stories of runaways who left America to forge difficult new lives in far-flung corners of the British Empire. Harry, for example, one of George Washington's slaves, escaped from Mount Vernon in 1776, was evacuated to Nova Scotia in 1783, and eventually relocated to Sierra Leone in West Africa with his wife and three children. Ralph Henry, who ran away from the Virginia firebrand Patrick Henry in 1776, took a similar path to precarious freedom in Sierra Leone, while others, such as John Moseley and John Randall, were evacuated with the British forces to England. Stranded in England without skills or patronage during a period of high unemployment, they were among thousands of newly freed poor blacks who struggled just to survive. While some were relocated to Sierra Leone, others, like Moseley and Randall, found themselves transported to the distant penal colony of Botany Bay, in Australia. Epic Journeys of Freedom, written in the best tradition of history from the bottom up, is a fascinating insight into the meaning of liberty; it will change forever the way we think about the American Revolution.

The Book of Negroes
The Book of Negroes

Author: Lawrence Hill

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2009-02-01

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 1409080609

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'A beautiful, compelling artifice, spun from unspeakably savage facts . . . a fiction that faces the terrible truth about slavery' The Times WINNER OF THE COMMONWEALTH PRIZE FOR FICTION Based on a true story, Lawrence Hill's epic novel spans three continents and six decades to bring to life a dark and shameful chapter in our history through the story of one brave and resourceful woman. Abducted from her West African village at the age of eleven and sold as a slave in the American South, Aminata Diallo thinks only of freedom - and of finding her way home again. After escaping the plantation, torn from her husband and child, she passes through Manhattan in the chaos of the Revolutionary War, is shipped to Nova Scotia, and then joins a group of freed slaves on a harrowing return odyssey to Africa. What readers are saying: ***** 'Beautifully written ... an enlightening read' ***** 'Since reading, this has become my favourite book ever' ***** 'A powerful historical account of an incredible woman's journey'