Freetown's Founding: Black Loyalists Who Crossed the Atlantic Twice for Freedom

Sierra Leone’s first attempt at a permanent settlement was a product of British abolitionist ambition rather than African or American initiative. In May 1787, the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, backed by abolitionists including Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, and William Wilberforce, arranged for roughly 400 of London’s destitute Black residents, many of them formerly enslaved people who had ended up in Britain after the American Revolutionary War, to be resettled on the Sierra Leone peninsula. The settlement they founded, Granville Town, did not survive long: in late 1789, following a dispute between British ship crews and a local ruler known as King Jimmy, Granville Town was burned to the ground on his orders, scattering its surviving residents.

The settlement that actually endured came from a different, more circuitous migration. Thomas Peters, a formerly enslaved man born around 1738 who had fought for Britain as a member of the Black Pioneers during the American Revolutionary War, had been resettled along with thousands of other Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia after Britain’s defeat, a promised land that turned out to offer its Black settlers poor farmland, broken promises of provisions, and persistent racial discrimination from Nova Scotia’s white population. Peters traveled to London to press the Black Loyalists’ grievances and, working with the Sierra Leone Company that had taken over the abolitionist settlement project after Granville Town’s destruction, helped organize a second Atlantic crossing for those willing to try again in Africa rather than remain in Nova Scotia.

On January 15, 1792, Lieutenant John Clarkson led 1,196 Black Loyalists out of Halifax harbor aboard a fleet of fifteen ships, and the fleet reached Sierra Leone and founded Freetown on March 11, 1792, laying out the settlement’s original streets, named for the Sierra Leone Company’s directors, on the same peninsula where Granville Town had failed three years earlier. Thomas Peters died in Freetown on June 25, 1792, within months of the crossing he had helped make possible, before the settlement had time to take root. A further wave of roughly 550 Jamaican Maroons, exiled after the Second Maroon War, joined the settlement in 1800, and the descendants of all three groups, the original Black Poor from London, the Nova Scotian Black Loyalists, and the Jamaican Maroons, intermarried over succeeding generations to form Sierra Leone’s Krio community, whose language and culture still shape Freetown today, more than two centuries after a settlement built from two failed attempts finally took hold.