Freetown is the capital and largest city of Sierra Leone. It is a major port city on the Atlantic Ocean and is located in the Western Area of the country. Freetown is Sierra Leone's major urban, economic, financial, cultural, educational and political centre, as it is the seat of the Government of Sierra Leone. The population of Freetown was 1,055,964 at the 2015 census.
United Empire Loyalists is an honorific which was first given by the 1st Lord Dorchester, the Governor of Quebec, and Governor-General of the Canadas, to American Loyalists who resettled in British North America during or after the American Revolution. At the time, the demonym Canadian or Canadien was used to refer to the indigenous First Nations groups and the French settlers inhabiting the Province of Quebec.
The Gullah are African Americans who live in the Lowcountry region of the U.S. states of Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, in both the coastal plain and the Sea Islands. They developed a creole language, the Gullah language, and a culture rich in African influences that makes them distinctive among African Americans.
Paul Cuffe or Cuffee was born free into a Native American—African American family on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts. He became a successful businessman, merchant, sea captain, whaler, and abolitionist. His mother, Ruth Moses, was a Wampanoag from Harwich on Cape Cod and his father an Ashanti, captured as a child in West Africa and sold into slavery in Newport about 1720. In the mid-1740s the father was manumitted by his Quaker master, John Slocum, in Massachusetts and his parents married in 1747 in Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
A Black Loyalist was a person of African descent who sided with the Loyalists during the American Revolutionary War. In particular, the term refers to men who escaped the enslavement of Patriot masters and served on the Loyalist side because of the Crown's promises of freedom.
The Back-to-Africa movement took the view in the 19th century that Americans of African ancestry should return to the continent of Africa. In general, the movement was an overwhelming failure; very few free slaves wanted to move to Africa. The small number of freed slaves that had—some under duress—initially faced brutal conditions. As the failure became known in the United States in the 1820s, it spawned and energized the abolitionist movement. Liberia and Sierra Leone became independent black countries following Haiti on January 1, 1804, becoming the second and third of only three countries founded by former slaves. United States Ambassador to Liberia was a coveted position. In the 20th century, Marcus Garvey, Rastafarians and some other African Americans espoused this concept, but few actually left the United States.
Thomas Peters, born Thomas Potters, was a veteran of the Black Pioneers, fighting for the British in the American Revolutionary War. A Black Loyalist, he was resettled in Nova Scotia, where he became a politician and one of the "Founding Fathers" of the nation of Sierra Leone in West Africa. Peters was among a group of influential Black Canadians who pressed the Crown to fulfill its commitment for land grants in Nova Scotia. Later they recruited African-American settlers in Nova Scotia for the colonisation of Sierra Leone in the late eighteenth century.
Lieutenant John Clarkson (1764–1828) was a Royal Navy officer and abolitionist, the younger brother of Thomas Clarkson, one of the central figures in the abolition of slavery in England and the British Empire at the close of the 18th century. As agent for the Sierra Leone Company, Lieutenant Clarkson was instrumental in the founding of Freetown, today Sierra Leone’s capital city, as a haven for chiefly formerly enslaved African-Americans first relocated to Nova Scotia by the British military authorities following the American Revolutionary War.
Harry Washington was known as a slave of Virginia planter George Washington, later the first President of the United States. He served as a Black Loyalist in the American Revolutionary War when the war was lost the British then evacuated him to Nova Scotia. In 1792 he joined nearly 1200 freedmen for resettlement in Sierra Leone, where they set up a colony of free people of color.
The Book of Negroes is a document created by Brigadier General Samuel Birch that records names and descriptions of 3,000 Black Loyalists, enslaved Africans who escaped to the British lines during the American Revolution and were evacuated to points in Nova Scotia as free people of colour.
Daniel Coker (1780–1846), born Isaac Wright, was an African American of mixed race from Baltimore, Maryland who gained freedom from slavery and became a Methodist minister. He wrote one of the few pamphlets published in the South protesting slavery and supporting abolition. In 1816 he helped found the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first independent black denomination in the United States, at its first national convention in Philadelphia.
Edward Jones (1807–1865) was an African American missionary to the colony of Sierra Leone. Jones was a prominent missionary and figure in the colony of Sierra Leone; he was the first naturalized citizen of Sierra Leone. Jones was the first principal of Fourah Bay College. He was the first Black American to graduate from Amherst College in Massachusetts. Edward Jones was the brother of Jehu Jones, a prominent African-American preacher.
Cline Town is an area in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The area is named for Emmanuel Kline, a Hausa Liberated African who bought substantial property in the area. The neighborhood is in the vicinity of Granville Town, a settlement established in 1787 and re-established in 1789 prior to the founding of the Freetown settlement on 11 March 1792.
The Davis family was one of the last of the Nova Scotian settler families and though the family has descendants in the United States and Europe, the Davis family was one of the original African American families of Sierra Leone, thus part of the Sierra-Leone Creole population.
Moses "Daddy" Wilkinson or "Old Moses" was known as a Black Loyalist who gained freedom from slavery in Virginia during the American Revolutionary War, was a Wesleyan Methodist preacher in New York and Nova Scotia, and migrated in 1791 to Sierra Leone. There he established the first Methodist church in Settler Town and survived a rebellion in 1800.
Birchtown is a community and National Historic Site in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, located near Shelburne in the Municipal District of Shelburne County. Founded in 1783, the village was the largest settlement of Black Loyalists and indeed, the largest free settlement of ethnic Africans in North America in the eighteenth century. Birchtown was named after British Brigadier General Samuel Birch, an official who helped lead the evacuation of Black Loyalists from New York.
The Nova Scotian Settlers, or Sierra Leone Settlers were Black Americans who founded the settlement of Freetown, Sierra Leone on March 11, 1792. The majority of these black American immigrants were among 3000 Blacks who had been in enslaved in North America, who had sought freedom and refuge with the British during the American Revolutionary War, leaving rebel masters. They became known as the Black Loyalists. The Nova Scotian settlers were jointly led by African-American Thomas Peters, a former soldier, and English abolitionist John Clarkson. For most of the 19th century, the Settlers resided in Settler Town and remained a distinct ethnic group within the Freetown territory, tending to marry among themselves and with Europeans in the colony. Indigenous tribes in the region included the Sherbro and Mende.
John Ball was an African-American Methodist preacher in Shelburne, Nova Scotia. John Ball is recorded in the Book of Negroes as one of the 3,000 African Americans who escaped to the British lines during the American Revolution.
Edna Elliott-Horton was the second West African woman from a British colony to receive a university degree after the Nigerian physician, Agnes Yewande Savage who received a medical degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1929. A Sierra Leonean, Elliott-Horton became the first West African woman to complete a BA degree in the liberal arts, after graduating from Howard University in 1933. where Dr. Edward Mayfield Boyle, her maternal uncle, had graduated as a medical doctor. Elliott-Horton was a political activist who challenged the colonial authorities in Sierra Leone through her participation in the West African Youth League which was formally established in her living room.
The Sierra Leone Creole people is an ethnic group in Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone Creole people are descendants of freed African American, West Indian, and Liberated African slaves who settled in the Western Area of Sierra Leone between 1787 and about 1885. The colony was established by the British, supported by abolitionists, under the Sierra Leone Company as a place for freedmen. The settlers called their new settlement Freetown. Today, the Sierra Leone Creoles are 1.3% of the population of Sierra Leone.
