Life in Nova Scotia was not what John Kizell, Boston King, and nearly three thousand other former slaves had hoped for. Having left the United States for Nova Scotia under British flags to ensure their freedom, they found the climate of their new home inhospitable, the soil unsuitable for farming, and the reception from the local residents less than welcoming. Slavery in the south was replaced by discrimination, neglect, and destitution in Nova Scotia.
Across the Atlantic, in London, England, the largest African-descended population outside of Africa had been growing, supplemented by migration of black refugees from America and the Caribbean. High unemployment and poverty among London’s “Black Poor ” were finally met in 1786 with a proposal from English businessmen, philanthropists, and bankers to create a settlement in West Africa. The next year, four hundred formerly enslaved black people from London arrived in Sierra Leone and established the Province of Freedom.
Three years later, in 1791, John Clarkson, a British abolitionist, was sent to Nova Scotia to encourage blacks to immigrate to Sierra Leone. Eleven hundred former American slaves accepted the offer and arrived at the settlement in Sierra Leone in February and March 1792. Among them were John Kizell and his wife Phillis, Boston King and his wife Violet, and Harry and Jenny Washington. In 1776, Harry had run away from his owner, George Washington, and served in the Loyalist Black Pioneers. Among those who had settled in Nova Scotia, Harry and Jenny now turned to Sierra Leone for a life better than the ones from which they had fled.
Both Kizell and King documented their experiences, Kizell through letters and reports to British authorities and King through his autobiography, Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, A Black Preacher. From them we learn of the continued hardships and troubles in Sierra Leone. We also learn that King was a Methodist minister, traveled to England for further education, and became a Christian missionary to the people of Africa as well as a founder of Freetown. Kizell opened a trading post, engaged in farming, became a Baptist minister, and worked with the American Colonization Society. Harry Washington was later banished from Freetown after being convicted by a military tribunal for protesting against a “quit rent” tax imposed by the Sierra Leone Company which essentially kept farmers in a perpetual state of indebtedness.
For Kizell and fifty of those who boarded the ships to the Province of Freedom (later called Freetown), the voyage was a return trip to the lands of their birth. Kizell had been kidnapped from his people on Sherbro Island, just across the Sherbro River. At last, he was going home.
In 1754, about six years before Kizell was born in Sherbro, a British ship’s captain and slaver, John Newton, had quit the slave trade. Years later, in his Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade, he wrote, “I confine my remarks on the first head to the Windward Coast and can speak most confidently of the trade in Sherbro, where I lived.” Newton went on to describe in detail the nefarious effects of the slave trade on the sailors and traders themselves as well as on the people who were enslaved and treated to the most horrific of conditions, including death. Consulting his journal, he noted that “we buried sixty-two on our passage to South Carolina.”
In 1788, as Newton recalled the voyage to South Carolina in his Thoughts, forty-three percent of the population of South Carolina were slaves, more than any other State. Virginia came in second with just over thirty-nine percent of its population enslaved. Although slavery has existed for almost the entirely of man’s existence and endemic to nearly all cultures at one time or another, there have always been those who sought to extinguish it. In the eighteenth century, abolition societies were active in both Great Britain and America.
The leader of the abolition movement in Great Britain was William Wilberforce, a young politician and confidante of Prime Minister William Pitt. In 1785, Wilberforce wrote a private letter to John Newton, his mentor and close friend, confiding that he was torn between remaining in Parliament or entering the ministry. By now, Newton was sixty years old, an ordained minister in the Anglican Church, and had long ago repented of his involvement in the slave trade, When the two met in December, the nervous, twenty-six-year-old listened intently to his friend and chose to take his advice to stay in politics where he could continue to serve God as a Christian statemen. Before long, Wilberforce became the acknowledged leader of the movement in Great Britain to abolish the slave trade.
In England, publication of Newton’s Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade in January 1788 had been an instant success with the public. The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade sent copies to every member of both houses of Parliament. For his part, Newton refused to accept any royalties for sale of the book. Months later, on May 9, Wilberforce introduced a motion in the House of Commons“ that the House will, early in the next session, proceed to take into consideration the circumstances of the slave trade.”
Coincidentally, three days later a convention convened in Charleston, South Carolina, to consider whether the State should ratify or reject the newly proposed Constitution. Its delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia had played an active role defending the State’s interests, including slavery and the slave trade. Although the term “slavery” does not appear in the Constitution, its provisions deferred any action prohibiting the slave trade for at least twenty years, required the return of fugitive slaves, and counted three-fifths of the slaves for purposes of representation in Congress. John Rutledge, Charles Pinckney, and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney had unabashedly defended slavery at the Constitutional Convention and lauded these provisions during South Carolina’s ratification convention. Others would disagree.
For nineteen years, Wilberforce suffered many legislative defeats before the Slave Trade Act was finally passed by a vote of 283 – 16 on February 23, 1807. It would be another twenty-six years before slavery itself would be abolished in the British Empire, one week before Wilberforce’s death on July 29, 1833.
Had John Newton not persuaded William Wilberforce to remain in politics, the history of the slave trade and slavery in Great Britain might have taken a different course and most certainly a longer one. As for John Newton, he chose to express repentance for his involvement in the slave trade by composing one of the most well-known and beloved of all Christian hymns, “Amazing Grace,” which he described as the “sweet sound that saved a wretch like me.”