Page:An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans.djvu/104

90 from their own body. They led a harmless life, and gained the character of an industrious and honest people from their white neighbors. A few years afterwards, the land in Nova Scotia being found too poor to answer, and the climate too cold for their constitutions, a number of them, to the amount of between thirteen and fourteen hundred, volunteered to form a new colony which was then first thought of at Sierra Leone, to which place they were accordingly conveyed. Many hundreds of the negroes who had formed the West Indian black regiments were removed in 1819 to Sierra Leone, where they were set at liberty at once, and founded the villages of Waterloo, Hastings and others. Several hundred maroons (runaway slaves and their descendants,) being exiled from Jamaica, were removed in 1801 to Sierra Leone, where they were landed with no other property than the clothes which they wore and the muskets which they carried in their hands. A body of revolted slaves were banished from Barbadoes in 1816, and sent also to Sierra Leone. The rest of the population of this colony consists almost entirely of negroes who have been recaptured from slave ships, and brought to Sierra Leone in the lowest state of misery, debility and degradation: naked, diseased, destitute, wholly ignorant of the English language, in this wretched, helpless condition they have been suddenly made free, and put into possession at once of the rights and privileges of British subjects. All these instances of sudden emancipation have taken place in a colony where the disproportion between black and white is more than a hundred to one. Yet this mixed population of suddenly emancipated slaves—runaway slaves—criminal slaves—and degraded recaptured negroes, are in their free condition living in order, tranquillity and comfort, and many of them in affluence."

"During the last American war, 774 slaves escaped from their masters, and were at the termination of the war settled in Trinidad as free laborers, where they are earning their own livelihood with industry and good conduct. The following extract of a letter, received in 1829 from Trinidad by Mr Pownall, will show the usefulness and respectability of these liberated negroes. 'A