The African American Odyssey of John Kizell by Kevin G. Lowther

Author:Kevin G. Lowther [Lowther, Kevin G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Military, Biography & Memoir
ISBN: 9781611171334
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2012-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

Coastal Sierra Leone in the early 1800s. John Kizell established his village at Camplar (also spelled Campelar). Courtesy of Oxford University Press

The Methodists furiously refused to pay and again charged the company with breach of faith. On August 5 the tythingmen and hundredors reminded Macaulay that “we have left Lands to come here in expectation to receive Lands in the same condition as we received them in Nova Scotia. But we find…that the Company says the Land is theirs. Sir if we had been told that, we never could come here.” They then threatened to apply directly to the British government for redress or negotiate with the local Temne chiefs to obtain land to farm without encumbrance.70

Macaulay responded two weeks later with a long diatribe to a gathering of householders. He declared that they had known all along of the quit rent provision. “You still return like the sow to flounder in the same dirty puddle,” he mocked. When Anderson asked to reply, Macaulay stalked out, leaving printed copies of his address to salt their wounded pride.71

Where Clarkson would have listened, reasoned, and sought common ground with the settlers, Macaulay was obtuse and unbending. He preferred dealing with his malleable children. He had no patience for adults such as Anderson and the recalcitrant Methodists, always jealous of their “rights” and freedom. A few of the Methodists had already determined to escape the company's hegemony and Macaulay's dictatorial management. Boston King, recently returned from religious training in England, persuaded some to remain in the colony. However, thirty families moved a few miles to the west, on Pirate's Bay, to establish their own settlement under the “pestilent” Nathaniel Snowball.72

Following an angry confrontation in August with Anderson and his people, Macaulay sniffed insurrection. He warned the company's white servants and George's loyal Baptists to be ready to defend the governor's house. Macaulay almost seemed to relish challenges to his authority, even to his life. Warned several months later of a plot to murder him, he shrugged off the threat. He wrote smugly in his journal that the informer was “chagrined at my indifference.”73

No one attacked Macaulay's house or tried to kill him, but through his intransigence and his animus toward Anderson and others, Macaulay was seeding bloodshed to come after his departure. Far from plotting rebellion, Anderson's faction simply wanted to resolve once and for all the issue of their lands and the quit rent. This was their litmus test for freedom. Refusing to pay the quit rent, they surrendered their titles and began negotiating with the Temne for land to settle outside the colony.

They also appealed, as British subjects, for guidance from the king. When an English warship appeared in the harbor in January 1798, Anderson, Ishmael York, and Stephen Peters sent the captain, in his capacity as a royal official, a letter on behalf of the hundredors and tythingmen. The letter briefly rehearsed their grievances and asked whether they were indeed the king's subjects. For if they were, they wished to apply “to government to see ourselves righted in all the wrongs which are Due to us here.

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