Sierra Leone : Sierra Leone and the slaves who returned to Africa...

cherryblossom

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Founding of Sierra Leone:

Sierra Leone’s founding dates back to 1787 when several waves of freed black settlers originating from England, Nova Scotia, and Jamaica all arrived in the area. Utilizing some English government funding, The Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, an abolitionist group which included Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and Granville Sharp, established the colony with the settlement of 411 London blacks on the Sierra Leone peninsula in what is now modern-day Freetown in May of 1787.

That settlement was named Granville Town after Granville Sharp. Sharp also wrote a constitution based on the British legal tradition and on a framework of Christian principles. Two further waves of settlers came in 1792 and 1800 this included 1,200 blacks from Nova Scotia, and 550 Maroons who had been exiled from Jamaica following the 1795 Maroon War....

....Sierra Leone became a crown (British) colony in 1808. From that point virtually all of the new settlers were “re-captives,” slaves rescued from slave ships and emancipated by the Royal Navy. Sierra Leone became a base for the navy’s operation and the number of re-captives soon outstripped the number of original freed slave settlers. These re-captives eventually blended into the community, created by the first three waves of freed slave settlers. They formed a unique Krio culture and language with Christianity as its base.....

COMPLETE HERE:

http://www.blackpast.org/?q=gah/founding-sierra-leone
 
Cuffe, Paul, Sr. (1759-1817)


Paul Cuffe is best known for his work in assisting free blacks who wanted to emigrate to Sierra Leone. Cuffe was born free on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts (near New Bedford) sometime around 1759. The exact date of his birth is unknown. He was the youngest of ten children. His father, Kofi (also known as Cuffe Slocum), was from the Ashanti Empire in West Africa. Kofi was captured, enslaved and brought to New England at the age of 10. Paul's mother, Ruth Moses, was Native American. Kofi, a skilled tradesman who was able to earn his freedom, died when Paul Cuffe was a teenager. The younger Cuffe refused to use the name Slocum, which his father had been given by his owner, and instead took his father's first name..

...Cuffe, first a whaling ship captain, eventually became a ship owner, operating a number of vessels which sailed between ports along the coast of Massachusetts. By 1811 he was reputedly the wealthiest African American in the United States and the largest employer of free African Americans. Despite his commercial success, Cuffe became increasingly disillusioned with the racial status of African Americans, and believed the creation of an independent African nation led by returnees from the United States offered the best prospects for free blacks and for African modernization.

Inspired by British abolitionists who had established Sierra Leone, Cuffe began to recruit blacks to emigrate to the fledgling colony. On January 2, 1811, he launched his first expedition to Sierra Leone, sailing with an all-African American crew to Freetown. While there Cuffe helped to establish “The Friendly Society of Sierra Leone,” a trading organization run by African Americans who had returned to West Africa. Cuffe and others hoped the success of this enterprise would generate a mass emigration of free blacks to West Africa who, once there, would evangelize the Africans, establish business enterprises, and work to abolish slavery.

In 1815 Cuffe led 38 African American colonists to Sierra Leone. The colonists established new homes and integrated into the small community of former English residents and refugees from Nova Scotia. Cuffe hoped to organize larger groups of black emigrants. Cuffe’s efforts, however, were soon eclipsed by the larger and much better funded American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, which promoted a similar scheme that eventually created the colony of Liberia....

COMPLETE HERE:

http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/cuffe-paul-sr-1759-1817
 
The first organized immigration of freed slaves to Africa from the United States departsNew York harbor on a journey to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in West Africa. The immigration was largely the work of the American Colonization Society, a U.S. organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to return freed American slaves to Africa. However, the expedition was also partially funded by the U.S. Congress, which in 1819 had appropriated $100,000 to be used in returning displaced Africans, illegally brought to the United States after the abolishment of the slave trade in 1808, to Africa.



The program was modeled after British's efforts to resettle freed slaves in Africa following England's abolishment of the slave trade in 1772. In 1787, the British government settled 300 former slaves and 70 white prostitutes on the Sierra Leone peninsula in West Africa. Within two years, most members of this settlement had died from disease or warfare with the local Temne people.

However, in 1792, a second attempt was made when 1,100 freed slaves, mostly individuals who had supported Britain during the American Revolution and were unhappy with their postwar resettlement in Canada, established Freetown under the leadership of British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson.


During the next few decades, thousands of freed slaves came from Canada, the West Indies, and other parts of West Africa to the Sierra Leone Colony, and in 1820 the first freed slaves from the United States arrived at Sierra Leone. In 1821, the American Colonization Society founded the colony of Liberia south of Sierra Leone as a homeland for freed U.S. slaves outside of British jurisdiction...

...continued...
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/freed-us-slaves-depart-on-journey-to-africa
 
I. Resettling in Africa: Sierra Leone

...Britain formed the colony to be a home for freed slaves from North America. The first freed slaves returned to Africa from Canada in 1787. In 1808, the British government outlawed the slave trade.

In an effort to stop the Atlantic slave trade, the British navy intercepted slave ships from Africa which were heading across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. The slaves freed from these ships were taken to Sierra Leone.

Tens of thousands of freed slaves captured from slave
ships or groups who returned from North America (many coming from the West Indies), settled in Sierra Leone during the 19th Century...

...If you have seen the movie Amistad, you may remember that at the end of the movie the slaves freed from the ship Amistad were sent to Sierra Leone. .....

...complete here: http://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/students/curriculum/m15/activity6.php
 

2nd Middle Passage: Slaves Weren't Just Forced Across the Atlantic
www.theroot.com
100 Amazing Facts About the Negro: A second forced migration of slaves wasn't transatlantic.




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