Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series General Editors: Megan Vaughan, Kings’ College, Cambridge and Richard Drayton, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge This informative series covers the broad span of modern imperial history while also exploring the recent developments in former colonial states where r esidues of empire can still be found. The books provide in-depth examinations of empires as competing and complementary power structures encouraging the reader to reconsider their understanding of international and world history during recent centuries. Titles include: Tony Ballantyne ORIENTALISM AND RACE Aryanism in the British Empire Peter F. Bang and C. A. Bayly (editors) TRIBUTARY EMPIRES IN GLOBAL HISTORY James Beattie EMPIRE AND ENVIRONMENTAL ANXIETY, 1800–1920 Health, Aesthetics and Conservation in South Asia and Australasia Roy Bridges (editor) IMPERIALISM, DECOLONIZATION AND AFRICA Studies Presented to John Hargreaves Kit Candlin THE LAST CARIBBEAN FRONTIER, 1795–1815 Hilary M. Carey (editor) EMPIRES OF RELIGION Nandini Chatterjee THE MAKING OF INDIAN SECULARISM Empire, Law and Christianity, 1830–1960 Esme Cleall MISSIONARY DISCOURSE Negotiating Difference in the British Empire, c.1840–95 T. J. Cribb (editor) IMAGINED COMMONWEALTH Cambridge Essays on Commonwealth and International Literature in English Jost Dülffer and Marc Frey (editors) ELITES AND DECOLONIZATION IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Bronwen Everill ABOLITION AND EMPIRE IN SIERRA LEONE AND LIBERIA Ulrike Hillemann ASIAN EMPIRE AND BRITISH KNOWLEDGE China and the Networks of British Imperial Expansion B.D. Hopkins THE MAKING OF MODERN AFGHANISTAN Ronald Hyam BRITAIN’S IMPERIAL CENTURY, 1815–1914: A STUDY OF EMPIRE AND EXPANSION (Third Edition) Iftekhar Iqbal THE BENGAL DELTA Ecology, State and Social Change, 1843–1943 Brian Ireland THE US MILITARY IN HAWAI’I Colonialism, Memory and Resistance Robin Jeffrey POLITICS, WOMEN AND WELL-BEING How Kerala became a ‘Model’ Gerold Krozewski MONEY AND THE END OF EMPIRE British International Economic Policy and the Colonies, 1947–58 Sandhya L. Polu PERCEPTION OF RISK Policy-Making On Infectious Disease in India 1892–1940 Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre IRISH AND INDIAN The Cosmopolitan Politics of Alfred Webb Ricardo Roque HEADHUNTING AND COLONIALISM Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870–1930 Michael Silvestri IRELAND AND INDIA Nationalism, Empire and Memory Aparna Vaidik IMPERIAL ANDAMANS Colonial Encounter and Island History Kim A. Wagner (editor) THUGGEE Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–333–91908–8 (Hardback ) 978–0–333–91909–5 (Paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia Bronwen Everill Assistant Professor of Global History, University of Warwick © Bronwen Everill 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-02867-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-1-349-44001-6 ISBN 978-1-137-29181-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137291813 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 Contents List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgements vii List of Abbreviations ix Maps x Introduction 1 Part I Foundations 1 Transatlantic Anti-Slavery Networks 17 2 An African Middle Class 33 3 Americans in Africa 55 Part II Interactions 4 The Abolitionist Propaganda War 81 5 Slave Trade Interventionism 107 6 Commercial Rivalry and Liberian Independence 128 7 Arguments for Colonial Expansion 148 Epilogue: 1861 and Beyond 173 Notes 181 Bibliography 206 Index 223 v Illustrations Figures 2.1 Five major wage categories 44 2.2 Price index for Sierra Leonean consumption goods 45 3.1 Jane Roberts 72 3.2 Joseph Roberts 73 4.1 Revenue and expenditure in Sierra Leone, 1824–61 88 6.1 Liberia Packet 134 6.2 Liberia Packet interior 134 7.1 Immigration sponsored by the ACS 151 7.2 Sierra Leone’s per capita export growth, 1831–61 160 7.3 Sierra Leone palm oil exports to all ports, 1824–54 168 Table 4.1 Sources of slaves, 1808–63 84 vi Acknowledgements I am grateful to many people for helping to make this book a reality. I would like to acknowledge the University Press of Florida for permission to use the tables adapted from Eric Burin’s The Peculiar Solution in figure 7.1, the Indiana University Liberian Collections, Bloomington, Indiana, for use of the Liberian Packet images, and the Library of Congress for use of the Map of the West Coast of Africa. The map of Sierra Leone is reprinted with permission from the Parliamentary Archives, and con- tains parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v1.0. I would also like to acknowledge the Journal of Transatlantic Studies, the Journal of Global History, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History and the Journal of the Oxford University History Society, where some of this material has appeared previously. I am grateful for the financial support of the Economic History Society and the Royal Historical Society, which provided the funds to con- duct research in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Thanks as well to the King’s College History Department and School of Humanities for additional funds for travel to archives in the United States and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and King’s College London partnership for creating a vibrant transatlantic exchange of ideas. Thanks to the Huntington Library, whose Mayers Fellowship allowed me to access the Macaulay papers. Finally, thanks to the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the University of Oxford – particularly St Cross and Nuffield Colleges – for giving me the time and inspiration to finish this project. Many thanks to the Transatlantic Studies Association and Liberian Studies Association for their encouragement of my research. Special thanks also go to those who provided feedback at the Institute for Historical Research, the African History Seminar at SOAS, the Wilberforce Institute for Slavery and Emancipation, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Columbia University History Department, York University History Department, and the American History seminar at Oxford. David Killingray, Suzanne Schwarz, Lisa Lindsay, Jay Sexton, Silke Strickrodt, Sarah Stockwell, Jan-Georg Deutsch, Paul Lovejoy, Catherine Hall, Christopher Brown, and John Oldfield provided valu- able comments at various stages of the project. My examiners, David Richardson and Tom McCaskie, provided valuable insights into how to vii viii Acknowledgements get from the thesis to the book. Richard Drayton has helped guide this book along, providing both intellectual and practical support. This project was a global undertaking in more than simply the histor- ical sense, requiring trips to archives in the United States, Britain, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. At the Freetown Archives, I would not have been nearly as successful without the help and company of Abu Koroma, Edna Thomas, Damaris Grosvenor, the Newman-Samuels family, Padraic Scanlan, and Richard Anderson. And in Monrovia, I would have spent the entire research trip on the beach with Claire Schouten, Gama Roberts, and Eric Hubbard were it not for the help of the archive staff of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The helpful staff at Rhodes House Library, Oxford, at the Library of Congress, and at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania made my transatlantic archive trips run smoothly. Special thanks to James Sidbury for his help with the Coker and Burgess papers as well as the staff at Reader Services at the Huntington Library for their help with the Macaulay papers. This project would never have been completed without the help of Verlon Stone and Jeremy Kenyon at the Liberian Collections Project at Indiana University, Bloomington. I would like to thank Emily Manktelow, Lindsay Doulton, Mary Wills, Richard Huzzey, Dalila Scruggs, John Wess Grant, Randy Brown, Nadia Gill, Chris Ferguson, Dan de Kadt, Josiah Kaplan, and my colleagues at Warwick for their input and encouragement. Andrew Porter has always been a supportive supervisor, enthusiastic about my ideas, my research trips, and my career. I would especially like to thank my parents for instilling in me a love of history from as early as I can remember, and Jonnie Gorrie, who must know more about West African history than he ever anticipated. Abbreviations ACSP American Colonization Society Papers, Library of Congress DM Skipwith Family Letters, in ‘Dear Master’: Letters of a Slave Family, ed. Randall Miller (Athens, GA, 1990). HSP Historical Society of Pennsylvania LA Liberian Archives at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs LCP Liberian Collections Project, Indiana University Bloomington LOC Library of Congress NAUS The National Archives (US) PP Parliamentary Papers RHO Rhodes House, Oxford SLA Sierra Leone Archives SNM Letters from Slaves No More: Letters from Liberia 1833–1869, ed. Bell I. Wiley (Kentucky, 1980). TNA The National Archives (United Kingdom) UVA University of Virginia Special Collections, MSS 10595, 10595-a, Samson Ceasar Letters to David S. Haselden and Henry F. Westfall. Available online from the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ subjects/liberia/index.html UK U niversity of Kentucky Special Collections and Archives, Box 39, Wickliffe-Preston Family Papers. Available online from http://legacy.bluegrass.kctcs.edu/LCC/HIS/scraps/libe- ria.html WM The College of William and Mary ix