"Here in the Queen's Territory, Every Man and Woman are Free": Slavery and the Lives of the Enslaved in Late Nineteenth Century Sierra Leone
In the late eighteenth century, the British colony of Sierra Leone was founded as a settlement for self-emancipated slaves from the American South via Nova Scotia. Yet, the practice of slavery persisted in the colony and its hinterlands throughout the entire nineteenth century. Since colonial administrations were unable or unwilling to eradicate slavery, the responsibility of emancipation often fell to the enslaved themselves. This dissertation concentrates on the records of over 1100 fugitive slaves who fled their masters and claimed their freedom in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. This documentation is found in the Sierra Leone Registers of Escaped Slaves for 1874 to 1894, which features the largest, most comprehensive, and longest continued record of self-liberated slaves from the regions of Sierra Leone during the entire nineteenth century. Drawing on the Registers of Escaped Slaves, this study foregrounds the identities and experiences of hundreds of formerly enslaved people to emphasize how vast, impersonal processes, like slavery and slave trading, were transformed, endured, and lived by real human beings. My analysis of these ledgers addresses three major concerns. First, using the Registers records of the names, ages, ethnicities, origins, families, previous owners, resettlement patterns, and testimonials of hundreds of runaway slaves, I provide the first comprehensive accounting of the enslaved population in Sierra Leone during the late nineteenth century. My findings demonstrate how the individual identities, lives, and migrations of the enslaved in Sierra Leone are indeed recoverable with considerable precision and at a sufficiently large scale. Second, I rely on these subjects accounts of mistreatment and forced labour to argue that slavery in Sierra Leone was significantly more exploitative and violent than we previously understood. I not only identify the principal forms of abuse suffered by enslaved people, but I also uncover the specific work they conducted to reveal the centrality of slave labour in Sierra Leones urban, rural, and interregional economies. Lastly, this project contributes to the re-emerging biographical trend in the study of slavery in Africa, the African Diaspora, and the modern Atlantic World by emphasizing the strategies, movements, and overall resolve of individual survivors of slavery.
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