Cato Perkins and Isaac Anderson were hungry, and they were not alone. In October 1793 their hunger drove them from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to London, England. They had lived in Freetown for just over a year. Before moving to that small British colony on the upper Guinea coast, Anderson and Perkins had been enslaved in Revolutionary South Carolina, where they declared allegiance with their feet by running to the British during the war. Isaac Anderson threw in with the British as early as 1775, and in 1776 left for New York with Lord William Campbell. A man named John Perkins had enslaved Cato Perkins in Charleston, South Carolina—Perkins probably ran to the British during the siege of Charleston and possibly made it to New York with General Clinton. Thereafter the two men had lived free in Nova Scotia, before the Sierra Leone Company offered them the opportunity to migrate. In Freetown, Anderson, Perkins, and their fellow free black colonists distrusted the white people who now ruled them. In a move that bypassed the authority of their governor, the two men had traveled to England to directly petition the Sierra Leone Company. In London, they sent a draft of their petition to John Clarkson, their former governor in Sierra Leone, who now lived in England; they hoped he would listen to them and offer advice about approaching the company.¹

Anderson and Perkins disliked their prospects in Africa. The Freetown colony was faltering, and although they hoped for “Land and [to] be able to make a Crop to support us” before the advent of “the rainy Season,” the company had not yet allotted land. This problem echoed their experiences in Nova Scotia. Then as now, “Health and Life” remained “very uncertain,” and the government was hampering their abilities to be useful to themselves and to the colony.² Their petition would go unanswered; less than a month later they complained to John Clarkson that the Sierra Leone Company intended to ignore them without providing “any answer” and instead planned to send them “back like Fools” to Freetown. The Sierra Leone Company’s decision to treat Perkins and Anderson as powerless supplicants would fuel a swift campaign that convinced formerly enslaved black colonists to advocate for the right to prevent their own hunger as political insiders in Sierra Leone.³

From 1792 to 1800 Freetown’s black colonists—also referred to hereafter as “black Loyalists” and “Nova Scotians”—won several battles in the fight against black hunger.⁴ The Nova Scotians arrived in Africa in 1792 imbued with a sense of how to use food laws to exert dominance, and within half a decade they had learned to behave as British subjects entitled to enforce that power. Whereas in Nova Scotia white Loyalists’ food laws had controlled former bondpeople’s access to food, in Sierra Leone black colonists gained the right to enact their own antihunger rules, which white colonists uniformly approved, beginning in 1793. These Nova Scotians fought famine first by regulating their trade in alcohol, bread, fish, and meat. Later, the black Loyalists tried to regulate the trade of Africans, particularly Susu and Temne. These laws enabled former victual warriors to try to become victual imperialists by altering African food sales while occupying African land. This attempt failed because violent Temne and Susu reactions to colonists’ price-fixing encouraged white councilmen in Sierra Leone to curtail black Loyalist lawmaking; those councilmen would later try to interfere with Africans’ trade.

Black Loyalists won important victories, but they lost the war, which was a shorter, more condensed affair than the conflict Native Americans had fought. Indians had been fighting the war against hunger before colonists arrived in North America in the fifteenth century, preventing famine with extensive crop production and seasonal hunting. The black colonists were latecomers to autonomous hunger-prevention efforts; during the colonial period their cash-crop production had fed white slave masters, who regulated when, what, and how enslaved people ate, and during the war self-liberated bondpeople’s roles as victual warriors largely focused on dealing with white hunger. Formerly enslaved people had witnessed the political power of food laws during the 1780s in Nova Scotia, but these Nova Scotians had not won the right to independently pass legislation. They gained that right in Sierra Leone.

In the space of eight years, power waxed and waned as black Loyalists claimed, exercised, and lost their right to legislate against hunger at the end of the eighteenth century—and suffered the dramatic, violent consequences. In September 1800 black colonists in Freetown engaged in an event that resembled early modern food riots, with one exception: black colonists protested in 1800 not to urge the government to fix food prices, but to reclaim their right to fix prices and address hunger themselves. Their riotous actions in 1800 began with price-fixing, and this decision was not different from the previous few years. But between 1796 and 1800—once tensions appeared between black colonists and Africans—white officials who had grown anxious about black colonists’ power had tried to limit black price-fixing. Other food riots began when officials could not protect the rights of ordinary people, but in Sierra Leone black colonists had already earned the political and legal power to prevent hunger. The 1800 event was also notable because white officials misrepresented it as a significant break with past behavior. They called it a “rebellion” rather than a riot, which made it seem as if the previous decade of black Loyalist petitioning and lawmaking had been illegitimate. Black colonists lost power as white officials seized control of the historical narrative.

This particular historical narrative has multiple beginnings and a sprawling chronology that stretches before and after the years of the Revolutionary War. It begins with enslaved people’s lack of access to food during the colonial period, their flight to the British during the Revolutionary War, their reemergence as free victual warriors, and their escape from the former American colonies. It begins in Nova Scotia, where, during the late 1780s, British failures to apportion land, coupled with restrictive food laws, motivated discontented black colonists to leave Nova Scotia. It begins in London, where a group of British reformers examined their most recent failure to build an antislavery colony on the upper Guinea coast: the Granville Town colony settled by London’s Black Poor (people of African descent who migrated to London in the last quarter of the eighteenth century). That last group of colonists had reckoned with hunger in London itself during the harsh winters of 1784–1785 and 1785–1786. Their experiences with food aid resembled David George’s: charitable bakers in London used private funding to bake quarter loaves of bread for them.⁵

It begins in Africa, on the upper Guinea coast itself. The Granville Town colonists there were victims of the same sort of bad planning that characterized settlement in Nova Scotia. Olaudah Equiano, the former slave and antislavery writer, lived in London before the Granville Town colonists’ departure and worked as a government commissary. He reported “the flagrant abuses committed by the agent,” Joseph Irwin, who was in charge of making provisions arrangements for the emigrants. Such corruption impeded migration. The first Granville Town colonists sailed from England to the upper Guinea coast in the spring of 1787. Once there they obtained land from an African subruler, a Temne man named King Tom (also known as Pa Kokelly).⁶ They died in huge numbers from disease. In 1789 they sealed their fate by goading a passing ship into burning the town of another leader named King Jimmy. Jimmy gave the colonists three days to vacate and torched the town to cinders, scattering the colonists.⁷

The first colonists’ experiences demonstrated the uncertain success of colonial projects and emphasized to the Sierra Leone Company that new colonists would require more government structure and careful planning to thrive. When a thousand black colonists, led by the Reverend John Clarkson, sailed from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in January 1792, they landed at the former Granville Town colony. They renamed it Free Town, which became Freetown. They built Freetown in the shadow of mountains that appeared “to rise gradually from the sea to a stupendous height, richly wooded and beautifully ornamented.” David George, who with the majority of his Baptist congregation, sailed on one of the ships in a voyage that took seven weeks, wrote that one of the mountains “appeared like a cloud to us.” Boston King also undertook the voyage with his wife, Violet, who caught “a putrid fever” and died at the start of April, less than a month after the couple arrived.⁸

During these early years, hungriness characterized colonists’ existence; they tried to avoid it but also came to expect it during certain months. The name “Sierra Leone” came from a Portuguese term meaning “lion mountain”—so named to denote the sound of thunder during the seasonal rains. The rainy season began in May or June, visited daily downpours on the colony until August, and decreased by September or October. During that time it became tricky to produce crops and shelter animals. That summer of 1792 was said to be “One of the wettest rainy seasons in West African history.” In addition, colonists worried about the aggressive predators surrounding the colony. It was not uncommon for large leopards to carry off livestock, such as goats, but small insects also posed huge problems. When he was governor in 1796, Zachary Macaulay awakened at two in the morning to find that “an army of black Ants … had Spread over the whole room, blackening the walls, the floor & the bed Curtains.” These pests wreaked havoc on poorly constructed structures for storing food, and two of the colonists burned their house down after a failed attempt to eradicate them.⁹ Unstable relations with Africans, council corruption, and storage issues resulted in additional provisioning problems.

By the eighteenth century the upper Guinea coast was populated by Limba, Bullom, Temne, Baga, Loko, Susu, Mandingo, Koranko, and Fula peoples. Beginning in 1727 the Fula extended their dominance from Fouta Djallon coastward, subjecting the peoples of the Nunez River and the Susu of the Pongo River to a tributary alliance. This expansion was driven by a jihad, which started as a reaction against the slave trade and as an attempt to spread Islam but gradually became bound up in the economies and politics of slavery. Mande and Fula marabouts, or learned men, also spread Islam peacefully throughout Sierra Leone.¹⁰

By 1792 Freetown’s colonists interacted most frequently (and sometimes aggressively) with the Temne. The Koya Temne lived along the coast of Freetown and further inland, where they ran into the Masimera Temne. To the north of the Masimera were the Marampa Temne, and to the south were the Yoni Temne. Many Susu intermarried with the Temne and settled peacefully among them. The Bai Farma was the top Temne ruler and governed at Robaga. The Naimbana, whom the British called King Naimbana, ruled from Robana and was next in the hierarchy. The Sierra Leone Council obtained land from him, which Naimbana viewed as a rental but which Sierra Leone councilmen believed was a permanent purchase.¹¹ These obstacles blocked black colonists’ abilities to grow crops and fueled resentment against Africans.

At first a few white men were responsible for the colony’s internal and external policies and relations. The colony’s all-white council not only struggled with the Temne but fought among themselves. British-Temne relations were often tense and characterized by mutual suspicion. At one point Temne leaders even accused a British sailor of poisoning one of Naimbana’s sons, Henry Granville Naimbana, with a cup of chamomile tea. Alexander Falconbridge, a white slave ship surgeon turned abolitionist, complained that the Sierra Leone Company chose John Clarkson over him as superintendent. Falconbridge likely died of alcoholism. Falconbridge’s wife, Anna Maria, remarked that of the remaining councilmen, “never were characters worse adapted to manage any purpose of magnitude.”¹²

Upon landing in Africa, Clarkson discovered that Governor Henry Dalrymple had defected to found a rival colony at Bulama, so he took charge. As superintendent, however, Clarkson possessed no further power over fellow council members Dr. John Bell (physician), James Cocks (surveyor), Richard Pepys (works engineer), Charles Taylor (doctor), John Wakerell (storekeeper), and James Watt (plantation manager). Bell drank heavily and died in mid-March; Cocks possessed little practical experience; Pepys was a poor planner and unwilling to accept advice; and Taylor proved uninterested in tending to the sick. Councilmen allowed themselves extra food and liquor while the rest of the colonists ate reduced rations, and they sold ship’s stores to Africans instead of distributing them. By March 1792 provisions were slim, and in April colonists were eating half rations. In May, Clarkson, with dismay, reported people “dying for want of food.” Only in mid-1792 did John Clarkson convince the Sierra Leone Company to name him governor.¹³

Other hunger-prevention initiatives in the colony relied on inconsistent shipping patterns, which were sometimes inhibited by the maritime activities of noncolonists. From 1792 to 1801 the Sierra Leone Company sent at least sixty-seven ships to obtain produce along the coast, and between 1795 and 1801 at least ten vessels brought produce into Freetown, but over half of the outgoing voyages took place early on, in 1793. When corrupt officials could procure supplies, they possessed no place to put them. Ships struggled to land on the rocky shore. When American vessels provided beef, molasses, and pork, the casks washed away in the tide. John Clarkson complained that careless storage of “damaged cheese and biscuits, with other articles in a state of putrefaction” created “a stench” around the shoddily built storehouse that mingled with the slurry of rot “allowed to lie and soak into the ground.” The French assaulted Freetown in September 1794 (a result of the French Revolutionary Wars), uprooted crops, killed one person, and wounded four. This strike was significant on its own merit for destroying supplies, but during the attack the Bai Farma also captured several colony ships, which further impeded oceangoing capabilities. Fishing may have become dangerous after the French attack, and colonists who had witnessed the circumscription of fishing activities in Nova Scotia would have found the situation familiar. Freetown’s officials, by taking an antislavery stance and harboring runaways, also risked conflict with the African headmen who supplied the colony with food.¹⁴

Colonists traded with Africans through coastal, riverine, and overland routes but had little control over what they received. The caravan trade linked to the interior brought cattle, gold, ivory, and enslaved Africans to the coast; the trade on the coast exchanged salt and kola nuts for meat and interior trade goods; and the one across the ocean required enslaved African bodies in exchange for guns and manufactures. The landlord-stranger relationship undergirded trade in the region. Landlords were African elites, and strangers were European, Euro-African, or African foreign residents. Landlords lodged and fed caravans, served as brokers, and provided commercial information and credit. Trade alliances were bound up in other networks of kinship, age groups, royal redistribution circuits, and secret societies (or power associations: the Poro for men and the Sande for women), which the Fula established in Temne territory. The Sierra Leone Company had, since 1791, tried to enter the currents of riverine trade, which supplied goods to the Nunez and Pongo traders. This strategy took two approaches: officials tried to open negotiations with the Fula in Fouta Djallon to get them to divert commerce from the Pongo and Nunez to Freetown, and they tried to set up trading settlements at caravan terminals and to manipulate prices, which would give them control of legitimate commerce (trade in goods not associated with slavery).¹⁵

These trade networks yielded various provisions from the Africans who remained in control. Crucial upland-variety rice came via merchants from the Sherbro and Fouta Djallon, kola nuts from between Cape Mount and the Sierra Leone estuary, and salt (for preserving meat) from tide pools in the region north of Freetown. The Bullom Shore, on the northern estuary of the Sierra Leone River, provided rice and sugar for a limited time, before a wage disagreement between the Sierra Leone Council and the Bullom ended the arrangement. By October 1792, as many as 150 people “of the Timmany nation” came daily bearing bananas, cassava, limes, oranges, pineapples, and plantains. “Timmanies, Bullams, [and] Mandingoes” also provided rice, yams, and livestock.¹⁶

Because food from Africans arrived via distant networks and required daily replenishing, colonists also tried to avoid scarcity by consuming Sierra Leone Company rations and eventually growing their own produce. The Sierra Leone Company had planned for colonists to receive “full Provisions for three, and half Provisions for three other Months.” The British government had promised the white Loyalists who went to Nova Scotia six months of full provisions (and six months of half provisions for children), so it seems probable that colonial planners thought that people of African descent were somehow engineered to survive on less food. They were not. During the colony’s first two and a half years, the Sierra Leone Company said that it spent £20,000 on provisions.¹⁷ Although it is difficult to find precise descriptions of black Loyalists’ rations, partial data can be compared to other contemporary figures, such as those for the white Loyalists in Nova Scotia, returns for the British military, and settlement plans for the Jamaican Maroons who arrived in Sierra Leone in late 1800.

Consumption estimates changed with the weather. In the middle of the rainy season, August 1793, Zachary Macaulay said that colonists could consume half a ton of rice per day. By September, when the population stood at 1,052 (995 black men and women and 57 whites), he thought that slightly more than a third of a ton of rice was eaten daily. Using the higher figure, each member of the population would have eaten .95 pound of rice per day; using the lower estimate, each would have consumed two thirds of a pound.¹⁸ This quantity of rice was commensurate with rations for British soldiers and the Maroons who arrived from Nova Scotia in 1800, suggesting that additional similarities probably existed in the quantities of meat, flour, and alcohol that black Loyalists received. From the Maroons’ rations one could guess that black Loyalist children received no meat in their ration despite the fact that the company had originally planned that they would. When John Clarkson reduced rations, meat supplies decreased, and men lost their flour, but women and children retained it. People grew supplemental fruits and vegetables on the land they were able to obtain from the Temne.

Once the 1792 rainy season passed, the surviving colonists produced and stored beans, cabbages, cassava, cresses, ground nuts, maize, pumpkin, purslane, rice, tropical fruits, sweet potatoes, and yams. They raised fowls and hogs and hung “beef and pork” for smoking. John Clarkson described their craze “for building boats” and their intention to fish. By 1795 the Sierra Leone Council was trying to encourage black colonists to grow certain crops and raise certain animals—cabbages, cassava, Guinea, Indian, and Barbary corn, sugarcane, yams, pigs, and cattle—but colonists themselves also retained a say in how they fed themselves.¹⁹

Colonists’ efforts to build a better food system began with personal negotiations with John Clarkson during his superintendency and then governorship. The Nova Scotians pushed Clarkson to regulate the sale and distribution of foodstuffs. Thomas Peters, who had successfully petitioned for the colonists’ relocation from Nova Scotia and for the 1791 distribution of Christmas beef, became a vocal critic of Clarkson and tried to put himself in charge. Peters lost the authority to challenge the provisioning situation after someone accused him of stealing food—“Some hams & other articles of Diet”—from a dead man who had owed him money. This confrontation resolved itself when Peters died of a fever in June of 1792. Although some colonists, like Peters, sometimes clashed with John Clarkson, their negotiations were characterized more by accommodation than by conflict. “The people are full of complaints at the method of serving their provisions; some of them getting too much, others too little, and some nothing at all,” Clarkson observed in April 1792. “The applications to me from such people are very distressing, for I have not the comforts they require,” he worried.²⁰

Colonists urged Clarkson to consider ways to ameliorate the situation. In August, Nova Scotians again petitioned Clarkson and complained “of the extravagant charge made by the fishermen”—their fellow colonists in Freetown. They made this complaint before the French attack in 1794, at a time when the fishing was good. Clarkson solved the problem by meeting with one Robert Horton, making him promise to lower prices and to sell fish within the colony “before he offered them for sale to other people.”²¹ This compromise established migrants’ ability to challenge prices, led to additional regulation in distribution patterns (sales to colonists now took precedence over sales to outsiders), and enabled the Nova Scotians to broaden access to fish harvests. It also increased black migrants’ political participation by giving them some say in colonywide food regulations, which in turn opened the door to additional interventions in Freetown’s food system.

Clarkson was willing to address black Loyalists’ complaints by instituting fixed prices, but he decried the Sierra Leone Company’s rationing. He argued that “vice and every species of wickedness and discontent are spreading in the colony from so many people living together, having nothing to do, and their provisions found them.” He thought it wrong that lazy colonists knew they could expect provisions, though he admitted that the problem existed because land distributions had stalled. Boston King might have agreed with Clarkson, who seemed to be saying that people should work to receive charitable food assistance. Clarkson changed the company’s provisioning structure by requiring people to labor for food. In May 1792, at a time when people were dying from hunger, he set wages at two shillings per day. Everyone had to work two days out of the week, and colonists bought full rations for six pence or half rations for three pence.²² Because it was difficult to obtain money from anyone except company officials, Clarkson’s decision meant that those who refused to work could not buy rations, and even those who did work were still expected to pay to feed themselves.

The Nova Scotians seized the first opportunity to refine Clarkson’s system of exchanging labor for rations; their actions signaled more readiness to institutionalize their food-related rights. When in November 1792 Clarkson halved rations, Nova Scotian John Strong proposed that if Clarkson did not possess enough stored provisions, he and others would “work one day for the half raisions” rather than the two days originally mandated. Clarkson could pay the remaining wages in company credit, Strong said. Other black Loyalists argued that if Clarkson decreased their provisions he should reduce their workload and warned that a failure to do so would create conflict. They indicated that Clarkson had commodified their labor by fixing a price for food, and that a change in work conditions mandated an adjustment to the cost of provisions. Clarkson, who worried that extra pay would encourage drunkenness, compromised by crediting each Loyalist’s account.²³

These agreements in 1792 established significant standards. People learned that their abilities to fight hunger fluctuated with the rainy season, the availability of ships, trade with Muslim merchants and the Temne, Susu, and Bullom who provided provisions, and Nova Scotians’ abilities to produce and store meat and vegetables and to fix prices for fish and labor. Although colonists sometimes critiqued John Clarkson’s policies, he was willing to work with them to modify the food system. Together they fixed food prices, managed distribution networks, and readjusted rates of working for food. Colonists also requested the right to sit on juries. Clarkson sailed for London in December 1792, planning to return, but the Sierra Leone Company fired him—shortly before his wedding—when he was in England. Governorship would pass back and forth between several new officials. From afar, Clarkson received word that by January land surveying had ceased, and “there [was] neither beef, Pork, flower or any kind of provision sufficient to last the colony a week.”²⁴ When Cato Perkins and Isaac Anderson approached Clarkson in 1793, he may have possessed the desire to help them, but he had no authority to do it. Nevertheless, his governorship had taught colonists to demand freedom from scarcity.

When food shortages continued, the Nova Scotians traveled to London, wrote letters and petitions, and then pushed for greater representation.²⁵ In 1792, the Freetown government changed to include elected positions that came with the right to legislate against hunger, and representatives began doing so in 1793. The act of fixing prices became one of colonists’ most effective hunger-avoiding strategies, which offered the additional benefit of enlarging colonists’ political rights. Given the fact that humans must eat to survive, laws about food would have pervaded political participation in the colony on a daily, visceral level. These regulations, which granted more freedom to black Loyalists, also created conflict with the Temne and Susu by interfering with their food system. Black Loyalists, in trying and failing to become victual imperialists, precipitated conflict with Africans, clashes with the white Sierra Leone Council, and, ultimately, a riot in 1800.

After John Clarkson left Freetown, William Dawes became governor. Even some white colonists thought that this leadership change boded poorly. Anna Maria Falconbridge contrasted his “austere, reserved conduct” with Clarkson’s “sweet manners,” and his “rigid military education” left little room for flexibility. Dawes was not widely liked, and colonists lost faith in his ability to represent them. When in October 1793 the colonists went over Dawes’s head and sent Isaac Anderson and Cato Perkins to London to make their petition, the men talked about political economy.²⁶

In addition to highlighting the absence of land and their inability to grow crops, the colonists complained about their lack of control over prices. They associated this disorder with debt and slavery, just as they had in Nova Scotia. The company store charged “extortionate” prices, they complained. Perkins and Anderson stated that Governor Dawes dishonestly “put thirty Gals. of water into a Peck of rum … & then [sold] it to us for a Shilling a Galln. more than we ever paid before.” Anna Maria Falconbridge confirmed that Dawes was exerting his control over “almost every kind of provisions in the neighbourhood.” “We must either get into debt or be starved,” Clarkson recorded the Nova Scotians saying. In 1794 the colonists wrote that in Clarkson’s absence they had dubbed Freetown “A town of Slavery.”²⁷ The black Loyalists accused Dawes not only of withholding their right to set prices, but also of setting unfair prices himself. Falconbridge’s observations suggested that this tendency extended beyond rum to encompass other edible commodities. Black colonists argued that they faced an unwelcome choice: they could go into debt by paying exorbitant prices, or they could go hungry. Their petition foreshadowed new efforts to legally combat famine.

Various white leaders disliked many of the would-be famine fighters. But Freetown was an antislavery colony, and even if white officials complained about some black migrants, they had to reconcile their feelings with reformers’ mission to establish a home where formerly enslaved peoples could become self-governing—thus convincing observers that freed slaves would not become useless. At one point in 1796 Zachary Macaulay might have written a thesaurus entry on disagreeable people. He described elected black representatives as “artful,” “busy, bold, & blind,” “disaffected,” “factious,” “hot,” “ignorant,” “irresolute,” “noisy,” “passionate,” “pestilent,” “Selfish,” “timid,” and “void of principle.” These men came to office because abolitionist Granville Sharp, in discussions about the first Sierra Leone colony settled by the Black Poor, had proposed a system of colonial self-governance. After 1792 Governor Dawes and Zachary Macaulay implemented a similar system by encouraging colonists to elect representatives. These men, called Hundredors and Tythingmen, appear in council minutes in December 1792. Every ten householders formed a tithing, every ten tithings formed a hundred, ten freeholders elected a Tythingman, and every ten Tythingmen elected a Hundredor. Collectively, the Hundredors and Tythingmen proposed regulations that the Sierra Leone Council usually approved, even in 1793, when Anderson and Perkins petitioned the Sierra Leone Company, and throughout 1796, when Macaulay complained about elected legislators.²⁸

As the black Loyalists continued to experience scarcity, they bound the legal system more firmly to the food system. Evidence of black colonists’ intervention became visible in the courts, where colonists had won the right to sit on juries. By 1793, when three white sailors came on shore and “killed a duck belonging to one of the Settlers,” the thieves were tried “by Judge McAuley and a Jury of twelve blacks.” The jury sentenced one man to a lashing and imposed fines on the other two. Although the master of the sailors’ ship dubbed the court “a mockery on all law and justice,” one of the sailors was nevertheless “whipped by a black man.” Had the black Loyalists remained in the United States, they would have been disallowed from holding office or serving on juries.²⁹ In Freetown, they enjoyed both of these rights. The incident’s focus on poultry was significant, first, because it punished an attack on edible poultry, and second, because it played out in the sort of legal space that had previously worked against black colonists in Nova Scotia.

Less than a year after taking office, in 1793, the Hundredors and Tythingmen enacted food laws that regulated the prices of black Loyalist–produced commodities, and they tried to control Africans’ abilities to sell meat in the colony. These legislators were not reacting to or battling the state; they were working with and helping to constitute the government. Having witnessed Clarkson and then Dawes fixing prices during their governorships, the black Loyalists asked their Hundredors and Tythingmen to set colonywide prices for bread and meat, and to control alcohol distribution, just as white colonists had done when fighting hunger in Nova Scotia. In 1793, the Hundredors and Tythingmen, with the Sierra Leone Council’s approval, proposed laws that standardized prices for beef, goat, pork, and sheep mutton. Zachary Macaulay had conducted experiments with colonist Pompey Young to price bread at three pence in 1794, but a 1795 resolution of the Hundredors and Tythingmen introduced additional regulations that raised the price to four pence half penny per pound. When the Hundredors and Tythingmen proposed fining anyone in the colony convicted of selling liquor or wine without a license, the governor and council went so far as to deem their resolution “highly proper & expedient” before passing it. By this point in time, black Loyalists and white councilmen were collaborating to build the colony’s food system.³⁰

By 1795 black Loyalists’ food laws also aimed to control the prices of edible goods that Africans brought into the colony, thus prompting conflict—despite initial good relations.³¹ In 1795, the Hundredors and Tythingmen recommended that the governor and council “issue an order to prevent strangers selling Meat in the Colony by Retail.” Susu men had brought “some fine Cattle” into Freetown but refused to sell them unless the Nova Scotians allowed them “to kill them and sell them out by the Pound.” The Nova Scotians did “not think that is proper” and requested “that no strangers or People that doth not belong to the Colony should bring live stock here and kill them.”³² In this context, “by Retail” meant sales of prebutchered meat—likely cattle and goats slaughtered according to Muslim dietary laws. Colonists wanted the Susu to sell only live animals because it became difficult to regulate prices for butchered meat.

The Nova Scotians’ use of the word strangers evoked and also revised the landlord-stranger relationship. Within Sierra Leone, Temne elite offered protection as landlords of British and Nova Scotian strangers. At the same time that Freetown’s residents were strangers, early Muslim immigrants in Freetown were also strangers. Africans initially implemented the landlord-stranger relationship to allow foreigners to influence African social structures in ways that fostered accommodation and assimilation rather than control.³³ By calling Susu traders “strangers,” the Nova Scotians claimed landlord status over them, but in passing a regulation that ignored strangers’ food practices, they refused to compromise. It is clear that the council voiced no objections.

It is difficult to know what Loyalists intended by enacting these laws. Maybe they meant to try to exercise power by claiming the legal muscle denied to them in Canada, and maybe they only wanted to avoid hunger. So much of their intentions remains unrecoverable from the archival record; historians can only turn to African reactions to understand the laws’ effects. In the late 1790s Temne words and actions indicate dissatisfaction. In 1798 a ruler named King Tom—likely a different leader than the first King Tom associated with Granville Town colonists—appeared at a palaver (or meeting) and claimed that Zachary Macaulay “had spoiled the Country … by lowering the Price of Produce.” He cited the decreased cost of rice and argued “that if Mr. Macaulay wished to do good to the Country, he must again give the same.” Macaulay refused and was told that he had to agree or leave the country. Macaulay “could not do the one, nor yet would he do the other,” and so King Tom “departed in great Anger.” It is unclear whether prices really had decreased. The colony could not have retained much control over prices outside of Freetown, given their dependency on African trade networks for food. In 1802, Freetown suffered because slave ship captains were demanding high prices for produce.³⁴ Macaulay’s interaction with King Tom thus becomes difficult to explain, but the important point is that King Tom held the colony responsible for shifting prices.

Other incidents indicate additional, more widespread conflict between colonists and Africans. In 1797 Macaulay reported a great “Mortality among the Settlers hogs.” No one could detect a cause until an unidentified “Native was caught in the very act of laying Ratsbane enclosed in Cassada near some Hogs, evidently for the purpose of killing them.” Macaulay speculated that had the man succeeded, “the Natives wd. have … begged the dead body of the owner, and thus have had a Supply of fresh meat at very little expence.” It is possible that the poisoner planned to sell the carcass back to the colonists. In 1798 a storekeeper in Freetown reported “that Several of the Company’s cattle had recently disappeared.” He conjectured “from various circumstances it was probable they had been drawn into the woods by Natives & there Slaughtered.”³⁵ Africans drew suspicion when domesticated cattle went missing, suggesting a larger history of animal theft and reciprocal mistrust. Perhaps colonists wanted to disallow Temne sales because they possessed no way to identify stolen animals if the animals were already dead, and perhaps fears about contaminated produce prompted regulations about meat sales.

Black Loyalists aimed these food regulations at Africans during a time when they sought Temne land, which raises the question of whether their reform of Freetown’s food system involved victual imperialism. Africans’ poisoning and theft of animals certainly counted as victual warfare. In Nova Scotia victual imperialism limited black colonists’ access to food and land; in Sierra Leone those migrants tried to become victual imperialists themselves. Black Loyalists in Freetown prevented their own hunger by controlling access to food, which involved self-regulation—but it also involved attempting to regulate African food distribution while living in Temne territory. As Nova Scotians became dissatisfied with their lands on the coast of Freetown and built into the mountains, they encroached on Temne lands. As late as 1798 the Nova Scotians complained that because “the land allotted to them” was “Still the Subject of dispute with King Tom, they were wholly deprived of the means of engaging in cultivation.”³⁶ Therefore it might be said that the Temne resisted black Loyalist victual imperialism by maintaining control of land, while both Temne and Susu people used victual warfare to push back against black Loyalists’ animal regulations. The Nova Scotians struggled to be effective imperialists not only because the Susu and Temne objected to black Loyalists’ food laws, but also because the Sierra Leone Council began to ignore them too.

When Temne-Nova Scotian conflict became obvious in the late 1790s, the Sierra Leone Council stopped approving of the Hundredors’ and Tythingmen’s laws and scaled back the self-governance that legitimized black Loyalists’ hunger prevention. An encounter in December 1796 presents one of the first instances of a white official challenging an elected black Loyalist’s policies. Zachary Macaulay described his discovery of Hundredor Ishmael York “Selling rum to the Natives at … a Sixpence more [per] Gallon from Natives.” York argued that “He did not See why any one Shd. interfere in his trade with the natives.” Macaulay, unmoved by York’s logic, revoked his liquor license.³⁷ York was implying that colonists should enjoy more preferential prices than Africans. In his meeting with Macaulay York specifically averred his right to fix his own prices—though he did not attempt to introduce this price differentiation as a colonywide law. York would join the group of men who in 1800 became protestors.

Not only did the Sierra Leone Council curtail black Loyalists’ abilities to set prices; it also stopped enforcing Nova Scotian animal codes. “Many cattle belonging to the Colony were killed by the Natives” in 1799. When some of the culprits had been identified, “a serious complaint was made to King Tom, who promised redress.” Before he could remedy the matter, however, “another Cow … was stolen in the same manner.” In an act of Nova Scotian–imposed justice, the colonists “armed themselves, went in to King Tom’s Territory,” and seized several suspects. Governor Thomas Ludlum reported that King Tom gained “an advantage” by capturing three colonists and then arguing that the council’s lack of consent for colonists’ actions negated his obligation to pay for the animals. Councilmen sought no reparation, and indeed Ludlum’s report of the incident indicated a growing divide between the council and the Nova Scotians with respect to their ideas about government.³⁸

It seems likely that colonists used extralegal violence to solve the matter because they doubted the council’s willingness to administer their laws. This was not just an episode of one white councilman forbidding a Nova Scotian politician to charge what he wanted; it was a record of disintegrating cooperation between black citizens and the council. The most persuasive explanation for this reversal in policy is that councilmen deemed it expedient to acquiesce to elite landlords’ power in order to avoid more serious violence.

In 1798 the black Loyalists again asserted their political rights. They appointed Methodist preacher Mingo Jordan as judge, and Isaac Anderson and John Cuthbert became justices of the peace. These actions were not radical; they merely built on the government that the Hundredors and Tythingmen established after 1792. Jordan, Anderson, and Cuthbert assumed elected positions because of a precedent in the appointment of an all-black jury and in the formulation of Hundredor- and Tythingmen-conceived (and council-approved) laws. In 1800 it was their positions as officeholders and their history of lawmaking that should have legitimized the Hundredors’ and Tythingmen’s revived attempt to fix food prices during the so-called rebellion.³⁹

In September 1800 elected black Loyalists in Freetown posted laws that fixed prices. But those laws provoked a much different response: by December the men had been accused of rebellion and banished, bayonetted, sentenced to hard labor, or hanged. According to the Sierra Leone Council, on 10 September elected leaders Isaac Anderson, James Robertson, Nathaniel Wansey, and Ansel Zizer revealed a document that has come to be known as the “code of laws”—which fixed prices for foodstuffs—at the house of Abraham Smith. The men encouraged others to join them, reposting a revised code on the 25th. The laws set prices for butter, cheese, salt beef, salt pork, rice, rum, and sugar, and declared that anyone who refused to sell foodstuffs to other black Loyalists and who was then “found carrying” such commodities “out of the Colony” would incur a fine. The document also delineated punishments for adultery, stealing, and Sabbath breaking, denied the white governor and Sierra Leone Council the authority to interfere in domestic affairs, and warned that black Loyalists had to abide by the code or leave Freetown.⁴⁰

When Governor Thomas Ludlum learned of the laws, he accused the elected men of rebellion. He armed company employees and amenable black Loyalists and sent them after the “rebels,” which precipitated a scuffle. David Edmonds, who had once joined Thomas Peters in petitioning John Clarkson for Christmas beef, was wounded in the head. Robertson was captured, Zizer surrendered, and Anderson and Wansey (though stabbed with a bayonet) escaped to rally about fifty of the three hundred colonists. By the 27th “intelligence was received that the Hundredors & Tythingmen … were in a state of open rebellion.” Posted at a bridge, they “cut off all communication between Freetown & the Country … and were receiving hourly supplies of men & provisions from both.” They stole one gun, as well as shot, powder, money, mats, hides, liquor, sugar, tea, and clothing from councilmembers’ houses. King Tom may have suggested that he would become involved. After a weeklong standoff the British ship Asia arrived, carrying forty-five British soldiers plus Jamaican Maroons from Nova Scotia, who captured enough black Loyalists to force a peace between black colonists and the councilmen in October. By December, armed with a new royal charter, the Sierra Leone Council convened a military tribunal, meted out punishment, and revoked all black colonists’ rights to elect representatives.⁴¹

On the one hand it could be argued that the event was a rebellion. It was the culmination of a fight—evident throughout the 1790s in disagreements over a quitrent tax—over land. White leaders certainly disapproved of many of the black Loyalists who won office in the 1798 elections. The black Loyalists were armed, and their pilfering from the houses of white councilmen resembled the victual warfare of the Revolutionary War. King Tom’s willingness to lend support implies black Loyalist–Temne cooperation rather than friction. The council suggested that many colonists denounced their fellow black Loyalists’ actions by recording the “general indignation at the power assumed by the Hundredors and Tythingmen in pretending to bind them by new laws.” In executing and banishing the Loyalists, and in the language used in post-September accounts, the white council treated the event as a rebellion. It must also be admitted that eighteenth-century people did not always distinguish between riot and rebellion.⁴²

Yet previous black Loyalists’ political involvement, the actions of those colonists in 1800, and the delay between land fights and the 1800 event should make readers pause before accepting that the 1800 event was a rebellion. This protest was an act of hunger avoidance that represented continuity with the early 1790s rather than a sudden departure from the past. The Nova Scotians had spent most of the 1790s claiming their right to fight hunger as British colonists. “If we are his [King George III’s] subject[s],” they had reasoned in 1798, they possessed the “right to appleyed to government to see ourselves righted in all the wrongs which are Done to us here.” In 1800 the black Loyalists were restrained in the face of Ludlum’s reaction to their price-fixing, probably because they maintained faith in their ability to use the government to obtain redress. They attacked no towns, burned no farm buildings or plantations, and killed, decapitated, and maimed no whites. The men were armed, but it is unclear how many guns they possessed and whether the middle-aged rioters could commit physical violence. The elections took place in 1798, and the council resolved to abolish the quitrent in 1799, meaning that colonists—who were allowed into office—would have waited almost a year to rebel over land or political issues that had seemingly been resolved. Although the authors of the code did not obtain unanimous support, it seems odd that colonists would object to the idea of the code of laws because lawmakers had been legislating for seven years. With respect to King Tom, descriptions of his willingness to intervene are varied—the Sierra Leone Council claimed that “intelligence was received” that the colonists obtained assistance from the interior, but did not state who supplied the information or where the assistance originated.⁴³

A real rebellion close to Freetown and the biases of the Sierra Leone Company and Council provide additional support for refusing to call the event a rebellion. Nearby events in the years before the Loyalists’ arrival were perhaps more appropriately dubbed rebellions. Between 1783 and 1796 a slave uprising of Temne, Baga, and Bullom people had occurred in the Mandingo and Muslim state of Moria, to the north of Freetown. Those rebels had set fire to crops. The black Loyalists did deny the white Sierra Leone Council the authority to intervene in domestic affairs, but they did not seem to expect white officials to vacate their positions as mediators between Crown and colony. To call the event a rebellion is to replicate the language of the white councilmen, who may have obscured details. An 1802 report stated its intention to explain the Sierra Leone Company’s financial failures, and the council and company needed a scapegoat to avoid blaming themselves for poor management.⁴⁴

Although the word riot carries problematic connotations today, understanding food riots on their own terms makes apparent the similarities between food riots and the Freetown event. Between 1550 and 1820 two-thirds of all riots in England were food riots. Between 1776 and 1779 protesting crowds in America gathered on more than thirty different instances. In eighteenth-century English riots, price-fixing was the most noticeable unifying factor, constituting 35 percent of riotous behavior between 1782 and 1812. A spate of English food riots occurred at the exact same time as the one in Freetown—154 from 1800 to 1801. As in Sierra Leone, many began in September of 1800. Hunger-fighting black Loyalists were similar in these ways to many other eighteenth-century British subjects, and similar, too, to other nonwhite communities that drew upon European influences in their nation-building efforts.⁴⁵

The 1800 protest fits into patterns of riotous behavior—the entrave or blockage; the agrarian demonstration; the price riot or taxation populaire; and the market riot. In the entrave, people prevented the export of grain from a rural area, whereas in an agrarian demonstration farmers destroyed their produce before it could depart. In the price riot, people seized food, set what they deemed a “just” price, and sold it. In a market riot, urban crowds acted against local magistrates, commercial bakers, butchers, or millers to force a price reduction. Nova Scotians tried to prevent food from leaving Freetown, as in the entrave; they set prices, as in the price riot; and they criticized government officials, as in the market riot. Black Loyalists, in regulating prices and preventing foodstuffs from leaving the colony, demanded political rights by behaving like food rioters, even though the council called them rebels.⁴⁶ When hunger was concerned, price-fixing could be a legally sanctioned action, or it could be an act of political protest.

The black Loyalists resembled other food rioters, but they also differed from them because they rioted not to push for new rights but to reclaim old ones: life, liberty from a state resembling bondage, and freedom from want. The commodities the rioters targeted, the composition of participants, and the punishments they incurred also make Freetown unusual. Nova Scotians, like Europeans, tried to regulate prices of staple commodities, but they also policed meat, alcohol, and butter consumption, and in 1800 they did not try to fix bread or flour prices. In many riots women started things because they remained unlikely to face capital punishment. Women in Freetown do not seem to have participated in the riot, possibly because they were excluded from voting for Hundredors and Tythingmen in 1797. They do appear in the records as shopkeepers, and riot leaders requested protection for their women and children. Most food riots were leaderless and carried out without arms.⁴⁷ At least according to the council, the Sierra Leone riot had leaders, some of whom possessed arms.

The riot also differed from those in England in the severity of its repercussions—death rates were higher in Freetown. Cato Perkins survived by offering to negotiate between the council and the rioters, the majority of whom came from his Huntingdonian Methodist congregation. Isaac Anderson was hanged.⁴⁸ The 1800 event was remarkable not only because the protestors had already learned what it was like to be granted the authority to legislate against hunger, and not only because they were fighting to win back that right, but because the white Sierra Leone Council was so determined to use a different word to erase those efforts from history.

“Whites live better perhaps than you do,” Governor Zachary Macaulay admitted to the black Loyalists in 1795. To colonists who asked, “why should not we have the same[?]” Macaulay responded that when black colonists could “Write as well, figure as well, Act as well, think as well as they do … you shall have a preference.” That year, however, he thought there was not “an office in the Colony filled by a white, which a Black could fill with any propriety.”⁴⁹ By initially establishing prices for alcohol, bread, and fish, and regulating the sale of meat, free black Loyalists did what they could to claim authority using the lower political offices granted to them. They privileged their ability to fight hunger over their relationships with Africans—and despite Macaulay’s reservations about black politicians, at first they did so with the blessings of the Sierra Leone Council.

John Clarkson and then the Sierra Leone Council opened the door to changes in government by approving the creation of black-Loyalist politicians, price-fixing, jury service, and legislation. Only in the late 1790s did whites question these decisions. Colonists did not riot just because they were hungry. During and after the Revolutionary War, black people had ignored, caused, and embraced scarcity. Their food-related protest in 1800 was a political, organized act that gave shape to black colonists’ anger and quest for British subjecthood. Even if readers wish to call the 1800 Freetown incident a rebellion, considering its similarities to food riots contextualizes the laws that black Loyalists enacted to avoid hunger. They lost the fight against hunger not because the laws were ineffective, but because a lifetime of enslavement had slowed their abilities to pen their own history.

Hunger-prevention attempts altered victual imperialism in Sierra Leone, which began as a black-Loyalist effort to change the food system while infringing on land use and transformed into white leaders’ attempts to change food production while interfering with trade. Black Loyalists, like their contemporaries in Britain and the American colonies, sought more control of their local economy through price-fixing. While eyeing Temne land, they favored laws that regulated the edible commodities that they daily produced, bought, and sold. The political authority to fight hunger became just as crucial as the ability to actually do so. The Sierra Leone Council overruled them. Councilmen called protestors rebels and executed them, likely because they thought it more strategic to privilege good relations with Africans. In August 1808 the British Crown assumed formal rule of Freetown. After the Crown took control, the colony shifted its position on victual imperialism by trying to change the state of trade in the region. Officials focused their efforts on convincing Africans that commercial cash crops, rather than the slave trade, presented a profitable alternative.⁵⁰

At the very end of the eighteenth century, the fight against hunger became nearly inseparable from the intellectual and political questions that peopled asked when they crossed the Atlantic. In making and then unmaking black victual imperialists, the white Sierra Leone Council first legitimized and then erased a decade of black-Loyalist lawmaking. The council’s description of the 1800 “rebellion” becomes a significant contradiction, because it was not a deviation from the colony’s history. Calling the 1800 event a riot recognizes that the Loyalists were acting not as rebellious slaves but as emancipated political participants. Although these colonists gained only transient freedoms through their food laws, their narrative offers an opportunity to look forward and backward in time to consider how hunger prevention in Sierra Leone brought people together—and drove them apart.