Abstract
Benjamin Coates, an American anti-slavery activist and international businessman, declared in 1851 that he hoped to spread American influence throughout Africa through the formation of the ‘United States of Africa’.1 This was not a new idea. It echoed the words of Liberian governor Jehudi Ashmun in the 1820s, who called for the creation of a new America in Africa. This theme was taken up again by American Colonization Society (ACS) advocate Elliot Cresson in the 1830s, who described his plans for the continent to become the ‘Empire of Liberia’. Anti-slavery, to these men, was a universal and expansionist idea. And if anti-slavery was a universal doctrine, and one supported by Christian theology, then was it not the responsibility of everyone to fight slavery throughout the world, regardless of national or imperial boundaries?
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Notes
Benjamin Coates to Frederick Douglass, 16 January 1851, in Emma J. Lapansky-Werner and Margaret Hope Bacon, eds., Back to Africa: Benjamin Coates and the Colonization Movement in America 1848–1880 (University Park, Pennsylvania, 2005).
Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols. (London, 1808); Reginald Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement (London, 1933);
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944);
Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1977);
David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford, 1987);
David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, 1975);
Richard West, Back to Africa: A History of Sierra Leone and Liberia (London, 1970), 79–81;
Joe A.D. Alie, A New History of Sierra Leone (London, 1990), 65;
Mavis C. Campbell and George Ross, Back to Africa: George Ross and the Maroons: From Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone (Trenton, NJ, 1993), viii.
This is an important distinction, as, while slavery was banned in both Sierra Leone and Liberia, their primary anti-slavery purposes were in hindering the slave trade. Slavery continued in the ever expanding territory of British Sierra Leone well into the twentieth century. Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge, 2000), 251–61.
A.G. Hopkins, ‘Economic Imperialism in West Africa: Lagos, 1880–92’, Economic History Review, 21 (1968), 580–606;
A.G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973), 124–66.
Robin Law, ed., From Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa (Cambridge, 2002), 23–6.
While there are numerous and ongoing debates about terminology in Sierra Leone studies, I will be using ‘Sierra Leonean’ throughout to refer to Nova Scotians, Maroons, ‘Black Poor’, Liberated Africans, and their descendents. This book’s scope does not extend into the post-partition period and therefore there should be no confusion about whether I am referring to the groups mentioned above or the indigenous groups integrated into the Sierra Leone protectorate. The same will apply for ‘Liberian’. The discussion of the difference between ‘Creole’, ‘Krio’, and ‘Sierra Leonean’ has frequently been contentious: See David Skinner and Barbara E. Harrell-Bond, ‘Misunderstandings Arising from the Use of the Term “Creole” in the Literature on Sierra Leone’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 47, 3(1977), 305–20;
Akintola J.G. Wyse, ‘On Misunderstandings Arising from the Use of the Term ‘Creole’ in the Literature on Sierra Leone: A Rejoinder’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 49, 4 (1979), 408–17;
Christopher Fyfe, ‘The Term “Creole”: A Footnote to a Footnote’ Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 50, 4 (1980), 422;
David Skinner and Barbara E. Harrell-Bond, ‘Creoles: A Final Comment’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 51, 3 (1981), 787;
Odile George, ‘Sierra Leonais, Creoles, Krio: La Dialectique De L’identité’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 65, 1 (1995), 114–32. For more on other West African creole societies, see
Philip Havik, Creole Societies in the Portuguese (Colonial Empire (Lusophone Studies 6 , July 2007), 41–63 and 127–53.
Hopkins, Economic History of West Africa, 151–3; Martin Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa (Cambridge, 1997), 23.
Humanitarians will be defined here as a loose group of missionaries, antislavery activists, and social reformers who frequently referred to their own motives as ‘humanitarian’. The rise of this ‘humanitarian’ ethos is described in Alan Lester, ‘Obtaining the “Due Observance of Justice”: The Geographies of Colonial Humanitarianism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20 (2002), 278–9;
Andrew Porter, ‘Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism’, in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume III (Oxford, 1999), 198–220;
Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988);
Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, 2006), 26–7.
Law, From Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce, 23; Howard Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa: The Anti-slavery Expedition to the River Niger 1841–1842 (New Haven, 1991), 141;
Michael J. Turner, ‘The Limits of Abolition: Government, Saints and the “African Question”, C. 1780–1820’, The English Historical Review, 112, 446 (1997), 334–5; Hopkins, ‘Britain’s First Development Plan for Africa’ in Law, From Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate Commerce’, 246.
Suzanne Schwarz, Zachary Macaulay and the Development of the Sierra Leone Company, c. 1793–4, Parts I &II (Leipzig, 2000; 2002); Brown, Moral Capital, chapter five.
The notable exception being Philip D. Curtin’s The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison, WI, 1964);
Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Anti-slavery Cooperation (Urbana, 1972);
Howard Temperley, British Anti-Slavery, 1833–1870 (Charleston, SC, 1972).
Arthur Porter, Creoledom: A Study in the Development of Freetown Society (London, 1963), 53.
Gustav Kashope Deveneaux, ‘Public Opinion and Colonial Policy in Nineteenth-Century Sierra Leone’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 9, 1 (1976), 45–67.
Charles Henry Huberich, Political and Legislative History of Liberia (New York, 1947);
Tom W. Schick, Behold the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settler Society in Nineteenth-Century Liberia (Baltimore, 1980).
Historians who have examined Liberia from the perspective of the ACS include P.J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816–1865 (New York, 1961);
James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York, 1996), 30–67;
Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 227–46;
Marie Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill, 2007);
James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (Oxford, 2007).
Leslie Alexander, African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784–1861 (Chicago, 2008), 77;
Nikki Taylor, ‘Reconsidering the “Forced” Exodus of 1829: Free Black Emigration from Cincinnati, Ohio to Wilberforce, Canada’, The Journal of African American History 87 (2002), 283–302.
Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002), 115.
A notable exception is Carl Patrick Burrowes, ‘Carl Patrick Burrowes, ‘Black Christian Republicanism: A Southern Ideology in Early Liberia, 1822 to 1847’, The Journal of Negro History 86, 1 (2001), 30–44; Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 30–44, which argues that the development of a coherent African American worldview in the South helped advance colonization and shaped Liberian society.
Bruce L. Mouser, ‘The Baltimore/Pongo Connection: American Entrepreneurism, Colonial Expansionism, or African Opportunism?’ The International Journal of African Historical Studies 33, 2 (2000), 313–33;
M.B. Akpan, ‘Black Imperialism: Americo-Liberian Rule over the African Peoples of Liberia, 1841–1964’, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 7, 2 (1973), 218–9;
Monday B. Abasiattai, ‘The Search for Independence: New World Blacks in Sierra Leone and Liberia, 1787–1847’, Journal of Black Studies 23, 1 (1992), 107–16;
Bruce L. Mouser, ‘Continuing British Interest in Coastal Guinea-Conakry and Fuuta Jaloo Hightlands (1750 to 1850)’, Cahiers d’Études Africaines 43, 172 (2003), 761–90;
Bruce L. Mouser, ‘Landlords-Strangers: A Process of Accommodation and Assimilation’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 8, 3 (1975), 425–40.
John Hargreaves, ‘African Colonization in the Nineteenth Century: Liberia and Sierra Leone’, in Jeffrey Butler, ed., Boston University Papers in African History (Boston, 1964), 73;
Amos J. Beyan, African American Settlements in West Africa: John Brown Russwurm and the American Civilizing Efforts (Basingstoke, 2005), 29; Shick, Behold the Promised Land, 53;
Lamin O. Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 238, 242.
A notable exception is Fladeland, Men and Brothers. Much of the focus of transnational histories of slavery and anti-slavery is on the eighteenth century, with a recent trend toward the study of the black loyalists who fought for the British in the American Revolution and were eventually relocated to Freetown: see Brown, Moral Capital; Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (New York, 2006);
Mary Louise Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown: Black Loyalists after the American Revolution (Jefferson, NC, 1999);
James Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870 (Toronto, 1992);
Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York, 1976).
Specifically with reference to Sierra Leone, Robin Law’s recent essay states that ‘the view that British policy toward Africa in the mid-nineteenth century was not imperialist rests on a narrow (and old-fashioned) understanding of imperialism as territorial annexation’. Robert Zevin, ‘An Interpretation of American Imperialism’, The Journal of Economic History 32, 1 (1972), 319;
Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005), 27;
Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists (Oxford, 2004), 7–13;
John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System 1830–1970 (Cambridge, 2009), 3;
Robin Law, ‘Abolition and Imperialism: International Law and the British Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade’, in Derek R. Peterson, ed., Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic (Athens, Ohio, 2010), 170 n.3.
John Gallagher, ‘Fowell Buxton and the New African Policy, 1838–1842’, The Cambridge Historical Journal, 10, 1(1950), 58.
Samuel Watson, ‘An Uncertain Road to Manifest Destiny: Army Officers and the Course of American Territorial Expansionism 1815–1846’, in Sam Haynes and Christopher Morris, ed., Manifest Destiny and Empire (College Station, Texas, 1997), 69.
Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London, 2001), 4–5.
C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2007), 10–11.
Cooper with Brubaker, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005), 59–90.
Catherine Hall, ‘Culture and Identity in Imperial Britain’, in Sarah Stockwell, ed., The British Empire (Oxford, 2008), 203;
Gil J. Stein, ed., The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters (Santa Fe, 2005), 17.
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Everill, B. (2013). Introduction. In: Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291813_1
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