Epilogue

When the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, their West Indian colonies confronted a severe labor shortage. Caribbean elites knew that slaves despised fieldwork and would not be ready to voluntarily perform the labor they had endured as slaves. Unprepared to forgo the profits of sugar plantations, the British government looked to Africa and Asia for new sources of dependent labor. The Maroons of Trelawney Town unexpectedly found a route to return home.

Accommodation

Over time, the Maroons separated themselves from the indigenous Africans and allied with the Nova Scotian Loyalists. Some found military and civil service roles in the British establishment of Sierra Leone. They benefited from knowing English, and understanding British manners and customs, including Christianity. As British Africa grew in scope, and as Sierra Leone became a Crown colony by 1808, some Maroons rose to positions of privilege.

Bloodhounds

By December 1795, the Maroon war had not ended. Planters worried that the dry season would encourage slaves and Maroons to set fire to cane fields and burn down the island. In desperation, the Jamaicans turned to renting Cuban bloodhounds to hunt the Maroons. The bloodhounds terrified the Maroons and led to their surrender. But a few months later, the Jamaicans unexpectedly found themselves defending the use of canine warfare to a Parliament determined to ameliorate the severe treatment of slaves in the West Indies.

Winter

The Maroons evaded blaming Jamaica or Nova Scotia for their perilous situation. Strategically, they focused on the inappropriateness of the severe climate in Nova Scotia: they, as black people, could not live, they wrote, where there are no yams, pineapples or cayenne pepper. The Maroons found a sympathetic audience in abolition advocates who worried that blacks were constitutionally unfit to survive the winters of Canada. A people born in the tropics, they believed, could survive best in another tropical region. Reports on black Americans who had migrated and perished in Sierra Leone in 1787 and 1792 were ignored.

War

By the late 1730s, the Jamaicans had grown weary of battling with the Maroons. The shortage of white militia and British regulars, along with the Maroons’ proficiency in guerrilla warfare and their knowledge of the terrain, led to high white casualties and heavy expenses. In the treaties of 1738-39, the Jamaicans granted autonomy to the Maroons. In return, the Maroons agreed to live in isolated reservations and serve as slave catchers for the whites. They would preserve white freedom and black slavery. But in July 1795, the turmoil by the Trelawney Town Maroons in the northern mountains caught the colony by surprise. The St. Domingue rebellion, just a day’s sail from Jamaica, created paranoia. The Jamaican elite did not worry unduly about a few hundred Maroons in the distant northwest village of Trelawney Town, far from the urban centers of Spanish Town and Kingston. Rather, the fear loomed that the uprising would “corrupt” the slaves who comprised 90 percent of the population. This chapter describes the exigencies that led the island to instigate war against the Maroons.

Crisis

Choosing a settlement site for the Maroons in Sierra Leone was no easy task. The Nova Scotian blacks, settled in Freetown since 1792, demanded legal and property rights and were perceived by the small British elite as a “troublesome” people. The elite worried that the Nova Scotian Loyalists would corrupt the Jamaican Maroons. They discussed whether a “Maroon colony” would provide a check on the rebellious Nova Scotian loyalists as well as advance the cause of abolitionism. As it happened, the Maroons landed in Sierra Leone just in time to suppress the rebellion of the Nova Scotian black Loyalists. They joined British regulars to execute and banish Nova Scotian rebels. They immediately won for themselves a prized place as loyal newcomers.

Resistance

Once aware of the possibility of relocation, the Maroons launched a determined campaign to leave Halifax. They refused to work and threatened to punish other Maroons who conceded to Nova Scotians’ demands. They sent petitions to Parliament. Unable to force a military community to convert to handymen-laborers, Nova Scotia’s government made arrangements for them to permanently leave the colony. The British government subsidized the Maroons’ relocation to Sierra Leone. The military-trained Maroons were viewed as potential colonizers, collaborators in British claims to West Africa.

Introduction

This chapter sets the context for the Maroon relocations to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone. It describes the reconfiguration of the British Empire in the aftermath of the American Revolution, and the importance the British placed on colonizing under-populated zones with loyal subjects. It explores the importance of laborers and settlers—voluntary and involuntary, white and black—for the security of faraway settlements. Second, it examines how the growing abolition movement in England affected the West Indies and shaped utopian visions for Sierra Leone. Last, it explores how the Maroons survived slavery, and benefited from abolitionism and an expanding British Empire. Three successive ex-slave migrations – of the London poor in 1787, of the Nova Scotian loyalists in 1792, and of the Jamaican Maroons in 1800 –established British claims in West Africa. This work describes the circuitous route taken by the last group of free blacks who entered West Africa before the end of the slave trade in 1807.

Conversion

Sir John Wentworth, Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia, welcomed the Maroons for his own ends. He compared them to the Mi’kmaq (First Nations people) and became personally involved in their welfare and their Christian education. He wanted to end their polygamous practices, their consumption of rum, and their enjoyment in cockfighting. He hoped to make them industrious laborers, to substitute them for the black Loyalists who had left for Sierra Leone in 1792. Fearing a potential French invasion, he also saw potential in using them – like the Native Americans - as military backup.

Deportation

The Maroons had been promised that they would not be deported from Jamaica, but the colonial government betrayed them. The Jamaican colonial government, comprised of wealthy sugar planters, had hoped to avoid metropolitan meddling with their affairs. But in an era of abolitionism, the deportation of the Maroons captured attention, and the Jamaicans had to justify the forced relocation of a free people a “humane” measure.