The Diaspora of Sierra Leone’s Liberated Africans: Enlistment, Forced Migration, and “Liberation” at Freetown, 1808-1863

Between 1808 and 1863 the British Royal Navy liberated an estimated 164,333 Africans from slave ships in the Atlantic. The largest contingent was the over 99,000 landed at Freetown, Sierra Leone, while smaller numbers were emancipated in courts at St. Helena, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, and Luanda.² With the exception of St. Helena, most liberated Africans were settled within the immediate proximity of the courts that adjudicated the legality of their capture. In certain cases, this meant turning liberated Africans over to the governments of Brazil, Spain (in the case of Cuba), or Portugal (in the case of Angola).³ But most liberated Africans were landed in British colonies, or subsequently sent to the Anglophone Caribbean from Sierra Leone, St. Helena, Havana, and Rio de Janeiro.⁴

The legal process through which captives on board slave ships became liberated Africans was simultaneously an act of emancipation and colonization, as freed slaves were assigned new tasks designed to fulfill the labor and defense needs of Britain’s Atlantic empire.⁵ For many of the “liberated” this meant a future of forced migration and liminal freedom, but also lives of mobility around the Atlantic. This article traces the scale, origins and movement of Africans landed from slave ships at Freetown who were soon after assigned a role that took them outside of the colony. It considers enlistment and forced labor migration together and assesses how, indirectly, the slave trade continued to serve Britain’s imperial interests after 1807.

Some military histories of the West India Regiments have addressed enlistment in Sierra Leone, while the studies of liberated African migration from Sierra Leone actually outnumber the number of studies on liberated Africans in Sierra Leone. Moreover, liberated Africans sent to the Gambia have been central actors in that nation’s historiography.⁶ Yet these migrations have yet to be considered in tandem for what they reveal about the human consequences of British slave trade abolition.

Before assessing the impact of this out-migration, it is necessary to establish its scale. This article estimates that 24,322 liberated Africans, approximately one in four of those who landed at Sierra Leone and lived long enough after disembarkation to be legally emancipated, were assigned roles that took them outside of the colony (Table I and Appendix I).⁷ These figures refine and expand some previous estimates of migration, which were based primarily on incomplete or inaccurate published parliamentary sources.⁸ The analysis draws upon a previously underutilized series of liberated African registers contained within the Public Archives of Sierra Leone, as well as document series for Sierra Leone, the Gambia, and the West Indies in the British National Archives.⁹ These liberated African registers contain the names, sex, estimated age, and physical description of some 81,766 individual liberated Africans, or 82 percent of those landed at Freetown.¹⁰

The liberated African registers also list the form of settlement, termed “disposal” at the time, assigned to those landed after the court proceedings.¹¹ This disposal column often included the village in Sierra Leone to which liberated Africans were assigned, or the name of the master to whom children were apprenticed.¹² Yet for thousands of others, these documents provide information on the movement of individuals around the Atlantic. Suzanne Schwarz has employed the registers spanning the period 1808 to 1819 to trace the early pattern of settlement and apprenticeship among the earliest liberated Africans.¹³ This paper builds upon Schwarz’s work by employing the registers of liberated Africans in conjunction with other sources to piece together the experiences and subsequent movements of those liberated Africans sent beyond the colony’s borders.

For historians of Sierra Leone, this information on migration is also vital in assessing the size and ethno-linguistic composition of liberated African society. Recent work by David Eltis and the African Origins Project team has produced an estimate of 99,466 Africans liberated at Freetown, a figure revised in Appendix I to 99,752. What is less clear is how many were actually settled in the...