The Vice-Admiralty Court

This chapter examines the Vice-Admiralty Court of Sierra Leone, the first court in the British empire with an explicit mandate to release enslaved people from slavery. In practice, the Court and its officers paid little attention to the people the Court called ‘captured Negroes.’ Instead, the Court became the hub of a brisk trade in seized slave ships, which were renovated and resold at auction for the coastal trade. British officers, sailors and soldiers received ‘prize money,’ shares of the auction value of property they captured. Many settlers and European merchants were engaged in trades related to the Court, from victualling and rum-selling to surveying and ship-building. The antislavery businessman Zachary Macaulay had a controlling stake in many colonial businesses. This chapter also examines the role of the Royal African Corps, a regiment of white convicts and former slaves, and their place in the colony.

Antislavery on a Slave Coast

Before the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 1807, colonial Sierra Leone was an experiment in free trade and free labour, founded by the Sierra Leone Company, a joint-stock company led by antislavery activists, and settled by African American Loyalists from Nova Scotia. This chapter explores the early history of the colony, and shows how antislavery was undermined by the routines of the transatlantic slave trade. Meanwhile, African American settlers were marginalised, and the arrival of 500 Jamaican Maroons in 1800 helped to cement the relationship between the leaders of the antislavery movement and the British armed forces.

The Absolute Disposal of the Crown

From 1810 until the Court’s powers were dramatically reduced in 1817, the Vice-Admiralty Court of Sierra Leone became the object of intense interest from the British armed forces. Royal Navy and Royal African Corps officers competed for prize money and cruising territory. More and more former slaves were enlisted into both the Royal African Corps and the West India Regiments, a group of regiments composed of black soldiers that fought principally in the Caribbean. The last Royal Navy Governor of Sierra Leone in the Age of Revolution, Edward Columbine, was replaced by Charles Maxwell, a Royal African Corps officer. Maxwell grasped the military potential of ‘captured Negroes,’ enlisting many in his regiment, and launching campaigns to attack local slave forts, a series of attacks deemed to be illegal at the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

Epilogue

Cape Coast Castle clung to the edge of West Africa like a barnacle, and like a barnacle it faced the sea, growing inland only enough to be anchored securely. The owners of the Castle, the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, were interested in African politics only insofar as it might affect the supply of goods and enslaved people and the security of the fort. By 1822, the fort was in precipitous decline. Joseph Dupuis, a British ambassador to Asante, called it a “gangrened member of the empire, from which all communication was cut off, to prevent the contagion from spreading.”...

The Liberated African Department

After the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, the Court of Vice-Admiralty at Sierra Leone lost its place at the centre of the colonial economy. Former slaves released from the slave trade by the Court, and by its successor, the Courts of Mixed Commission, became the focus of intense attention from colonial officials and missionaries. Governor Charles MacCarthy, in conjunction with the Church Missionary Society, established a network of villages, the Liberated African Villages, scattered around the colony. The villages were the site of a sustained civilizing mission, which helped MacCarthy and other colonial officials to organise labour in the colony, to attract investment from Britain, and to expand Britain’s territory in West Africa. Under MacCarthy, British antislavery transformed into colonialism, as ‘captured Negroes’ became ‘Liberated Africans.’ The chapter also explores the relationship between Sierra Leone and the American colony of Liberia.

Let That Heart Be English

In 1808, the laws abolishing the British slave trade came fully into force, and Sierra Leone became a Crown Colony, governed directly by a Crown-appointed Governor. The first Crown Governor, Thomas Perronet Thompson, was groomed by William Wilberforce for the post; Thompson was expected to follow the rules – including a tradition of very gradual emancipation through extended ‘apprenticeship’ – set by the Sierra Leone Company. He rebelled, and imagined that the hundreds of former slaves released by the Royal Navy from slave ships could be transformed into soldier-colonists, expanding the British footprint in West Africa.

Introduction

On 21 January 1824, in what is now Ghana, near the banks of the Pra River, between the British fort at Cape Coast Castle and the bivouacked Asante army at Asemkow, Sir Charles MacCarthy and a party of soldiers under his command were surprised by an Asante detachment. MacCarthy, governor-in-chief of Britain’s West African possessions, was shot twice in the firefight and bled out. His private secretary, J. T. Williams, was knocked unconscious and taken prisoner. Williams came to in the Asante camp, next to MacCarthy’s headless corpse....