African academy—Clapham 1799–1806

Four published sources comprise the foremost sources for this reconstruction: [H. Venn], ‘Providential Antecedents of the Sierra Leone Mission’, The Christian Observer, no. 419 (1872), 801–9; A. Haldane, Memoirs of the Lives of Robert Haldane of Airthrey and of his Brother, James Alexander Haldane (New York: Robert Carter, 1854); Viscountess Knutsford, Life and Letters of Zachary Macaulay (London: Edward Arnold, 1900); and R. Philip, The Life, Times, and Missionary Enterprises of the Rev.[erend] John Campbell (London: John Snow, 1841).

The American Philosophical Society (1999) provided funding for research in Britain. I am indebted to Christopher Fyfe and Paul Edwards for reading a draft produced several decades ago, and Suzanne Schwarz and Victoria Coifman for helpful suggestions on later versions.

Philip, Life, Times, and Missionary Enterprises, 160–1; italics are used here as they appeared in the original. The chronology as illustrated in Philip's work is somewhat confusing, especially since it appears to come from an earlier unpublished autobiography written by Campbell. Philip uses quotations to signify those paragraphs that he took directly from Campbell. While the list of events appears to follow logically in sequence, the original correspondence provides somewhat different dates and perhaps a different ordering, suggesting that Campbell may have remembered events in the wrong order. This reconstruction is an attempt to reconcile Philip's account (Campbell's autobiography) and letters found in Duke University, Special Collections Department, William R. Perkins Library, Durham, North Carolina, USA, John Campbell (1766–1840) Papers (hereafter cited as Campbell Papers). For establishment of the Edinburgh Missionary Society in 1796, see G. Smith, Short History of Christian Missions (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1904), 174.

Philip, Life, Times, and Missionary Enterprises, 160. See also D.J. East, Western Africa: Its Condition, and Christianity the Means of its Recovery (London: Houlston & Stoneman, 1844), 277, for the effects of ‘sickness and dissension’.

Philip, Life, Times, and Missionary Enterprises, 161. By his own account (ibid., 166–7), Campbell was already on speaking terms with Macaulay. In 1794, after the French had attacked and sacked Freetown, Macaulay had returned to report to the company managers, and during that visit, he travelled to Edinburgh where Macaulay's four sisters were living. Macaulay met Campbell during that visit, and he commissioned Campbell to assume some responsibility for his sisters' financial matters. Campbell noted in his autobiography that he served as bridegroom's man to three of Macaulay's four sisters.

Philip, Life, Times, and Missionary Enterprises, 161.

Ibid., 161–3; Letter, Wilberforce to Campbell, 23 September 1796, Campbell Papers; Letter, Grant to Campbell, 1 May 1797, Campbell Papers.

Letter, Grant to Campbell, 1 May 1797, Campbell Papers. Haldane, Memoirs, 190. Philip, Life, Times, and Missionary Enterprises, 170–1, mentioned that Campbell also was Secretary of the Edinburgh Magdalen Society which was active in ‘lessen[ing] the number of prostitutes’ whom Campbell called ‘pests of society’.

Hannah More, in Considerations on Religion and Public Education (Boston: Weld & Greenough, 1794), staunchly defended education for the masses, but not at a cost of diminishing faith, belief in God or adherence to a religion. In particular, she believed that the French Revolution was godless and clouded by notions of ‘reason’. For a more detailed view of More's sentiments regarding the French Revolution, see H.C. Knight, Hannah More; or Life in Hall and Cottage (New York: American Tract Society, 1862), 151–68. H. Silver, English Education and the Radicals 1780–1850 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 18, noted that: ‘Once the debates about the French Revolution had taken shape, however, the reaction saw the Sunday school movement as one of the English sources of subversion, given the spread of Methodist Sunday Schools in particular. The Bishop of Rochester, to take an extreme example, described them as “schools of Jacobinical rebellion and Jacobinical politics … schools of atheism and disloyalty”’.

Philip, Life, Times, and Missionary Enterprises, 164, 166–7. Macaulay (Letter, Macaulay to Campbell, 20 June 1798, Campbell Papers) mentioned letters dated 30 March and 4 April. For more on Bance Island and the Anderson brothers, see D. Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 215–16.

Knutsford, Life and Letters, 201. Knutsford's interpretation of this correspondence is probably incorrect, because it fails to correlate with versions found in either Philips, Life, Times, and Missionary Enterprises, or Haldane, Memoirs. This letter of 1 June 1798, Macaulay to Campbell, has not been located. In Thornton to Campbell, 28 September 1798, Campbell Papers, Thornton mentioned that Macaulay had received from Campbell ‘a Commission for 30 African boys & 5 Afr.ⁿ Girls’.

Letter from John Matthews, James Penny, and Robert Norris to John Tarleton, 16 April 1788, in Report of the Lords of the Committee of Council … relating to Trade and Foreign Plantations (1789), Privy Council, United Kingdom. In this letter of 1788, students listed included John and James Cleveland of Bananas Island; John Holeman of Bance Island, Forékariah, and Iles de Los; William and John Bottle of Bance Island and Rio Grande; James Payne of Iles de Los; Emanuel Gomez of Rio Pongo; Andrew White Conta of Bereira in Moria; Thomas Williams of Iles de Los; William Jelloram Fernandez of Bouramaya in Konkouré River. Those not mentioned here but known to have studied in Britain included David Lawrence of Rio Nunez and Rio Pongo; Fantimani of Canofee in Rio Pongo; Betsy Heard of Bereira in Moria; and Naimbanna, son of ‘king of Sierra Leone’. For more on Bance Island, the Iles de Los, and Liverpool activities along this coast, see Hancock, Citizens of the World, Chapter 6; and B.L. Mouser, ‘Iles de Los as Bulking Center in the Slave Trade, 1750–1800’, Revue Française d'histoire d'outre‐mer, 83/313 (Dec. 1996), 77–90. For the story of Henry Granville Naimbanna, see E.G. Ingham, Sierra Leone After a Hundred Years (London: Seeley, 1894), 168–83. For requests from local indigenous rulers to send boys to Freetown for education, see ‘Diary of Lieutenant Clarkson, R.N.’, Sierra Leone Studies, old series (March 1927), p. 93.

B.L. Mouser, ‘The 1805 Forékariah Conference: A case of political intrigue, economic advantage, network building’, History in Africa, 25 (1988), 228, 240.

Knutsford, Life and Letters, 202; Letter, Macaulay to Campbell, 20 June 1798, Campbell Papers; [Venn], ‘Providential Antecedents’, 805–6. Sierra Leone Company, Substance of the Report … of the Directors … 1798 (London: James Phillips, 1798), 51, noted that there were 300 children attending school in 1794, with ‘many [40] of them the sons of Chiefs’. See also Sierra Leone Company, An Account of the Colony of Sierra Leone, 1795 (London: James Phillips, 1795), 209–10, for an invitation extended to indigenous local political leaders to send sons to Freetown, which ‘has been uniformly received with expressions of satisfaction’. The author, ibid., 211, indicated that 20 ‘sons of Chiefs’ were in Freetown in 1794, with another 20 located on Bullom Shore. C. Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 69, noted that chiefs who sent children to attend school in Freetown were charged nothing for that education, and these children ‘were lodged in Macaulay's house where he led them daily in family prayers and catechized them on Sundays’, in effect following closely the model used in Sunday schools prevalent in England.

The most complete discussion of Macaulay's difficulties with missionaries/teachers and Nonconformist Sunday schools is found in S. Jakobsson, Am I Not a Man and a Brother? (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1972), 104–30.

A. Roberts, editor, Letters of Hannah More to Zachary Macaulay (London: James Nisbet, 1860), 1–3, 10–12; C. Booth, Zachary Macaulay: His Part in the Movement for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and of Slavery (London: Longmans, Green, 1934), 114–16. One of the children of this marriage was named Hannah More Macaulay (1810–73), who married Sir Charles Trevelyan.

L.P. Fox, ‘Hannah More, Evangelical Educationist (a study of the education ideas of the Evangelicals)’, MA thesis, McGill University 1949, 94. See also M.A. Hopkins, Hannah More and Her Circle (New York: Longmans, Green, 1947), 146–59, for More's relationship to the Evangelicals.

Macaulay's correspondences with Ms Mills during this period are amply described in Knutsford, Life and Letters.

Letter, Macaulay to Campbell, 20 June 1798, Campbell Papers. Campbell (letter of 6 October 1798, Campbell to Haldane, printed in Haldane, Memoirs, 207–8) reported the contents of this letter to Haldane and proposed in that letter that there might be a further provision that would allow for the addition of ‘ten or twelve following every year, to make a regular rotation and keep it up’.

Letters, Thornton to Campbell, 28 September 1798, 26 October 1798, 14 February 1799. In his autobiography, Campbell claimed to have ‘heard not a syllable of intelligence from Africa’ in the two years after his sending the letters of 30 March and 4 April 1798. Macaulay's reply to Campbell, dated 20 June 1798, Campbell Papers, is in significant variance to this assertion. Smith, Short History of Christian Missions, 174–7, noted that Haldane had attempted to establish a mission to Benares, India, along narrow Calvinist lines, and that the East India Company (Charles Grant, Chairman) had charged that plan with promoting discord within India. In effect, Campbell may have presumed that any scheme supported by Haldane would be opposed by many members of important societies in the London/Clapham area.

Fyfe, History, 60, 101–2, identified Mary Perth as a Nova Scotian who had been a slave in Norfolk, Virginia, before crossing the British lines during the American rebellion. Arriving in Sierra Leone, Perth was one of the first women to operate a store within the settlement. Fyfe noted that she also ‘managed Macaulay's household, [and] looked after the children sent to school in the Colony’. Campbell, in Philip, Life, Times, and Missionary Enterprises, 175–7, described her store as ‘an ordinary [eating‐house], where the clerks and servants of the Company dined’. E.G. Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: Putnam, 1976), 354–55, wrote that Perth kept a ‘boardinghouse, for company staff and took care of their laundry’. The Reverend Melchior Renner took meals at Perth's ‘ordinary’ in 1805 (CMS number, CAI/El/17, Renner to Pratt, Sierra Leone, 18 October 1805). I am indebted to Suzanne Schwarz, who is editing the journals/diaries of Zachary Macaulay for the period during which he was governor of Sierra Leone, for the reference to the Mary (Captain Estill) as the ship that carried Macaulay and the Africans, leaving Freetown on 4 April 1799 and arriving off the coast of Britain 48 days later. In Macaulay's journal (4 April 1799), he mentioned only 25 children as sailing from Sierra Leone.

Much of this information was contained in letters from Macaulay to Selina Mills, 1 June 1799 and 5 June 1799, printed in Knutsford, Life and Letters, 220–3. The children were already in residence at St Pancras by 5 June 1799. See also Philip, Life, Times, and Missionary Enterprises, 167–8. The debate over inoculation which would require residence at St Pancras Smallpox Hospital and vaccination which was perhaps safer but unknown to Macaulay when he was in Sierra Leone is discussed fully in Haldane, Memoirs, 230–1. For Hannah More, see J. Telford, A Sect that Moved the World (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1907), 137.

Philip, Life, Times, and Missionary Enterprises, 172.

Ibid., 172–3, 177. Philip commented (177) that ‘it would be easy to throw much light upon this painful issue of a favourite plan, by introducing here the letters of Mr. R. Haldane and Mr. Macaulay; but no good purpose could be answered by doing so, except to prove that Mr. Campbell's patience was well tried, between the cool calculation of the governor [Macaulay] and the warm anticipations of the philanthropist [Haldane]; and this will be readily believed without proof’. Only one of the above mentioned letters has been located (see below).

In the Christian Observer, 1 January 1802, 53, the author described dissenters in Scotland as: ‘A new sect of Independents, to whom no proper name has been yet assigned, but who are generally known by the name of Haldanites and Circus people. A society, composed principally of persons of this description was formed four years ago, under the name of the Society for propagating the Gospel at home; which employs its funds in procuring men to itinerate both in Scotland and Ireland, and in educating young men for the office of itinerant preachers. There is in England a society somewhat similar to this, chiefly supported by the Independents and Calvinistic Methodists.’

Knutsford, Life and Letters, 224–5. Haldane, Memoirs, included a letter from Haldane to Campbell dated 18 June 1799, in which Haldane wrote: ‘I must say that this is a very extraordinary business. However, I am satisfied. The Lord seems to intend a different plan for the children. His will be done! I am sure my intentions were right in the business. … I distinctly meant, from the first, that I should have sole management, and in consequence pledged myself to the sole expense. … Mr. Thornton, Mr. Grant, and Mr. Hardcastle knew this, and there was time enough for Mr. Macaulay to have known it too, and I rather think he did know … and if he had entertained any suspicion, he should have stated his objections before he left Africa, and inquired more minutely into it’. Macaulay's response (Knutsford, Life and Letters, 225) was similarly simple: ‘At last my children are rescued from the grasp of Mr. Haldane!’

Knutsford, Life and Letters, 225. T.S. Johnson, The Story of a Mission (London: Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, 1953), 23, wrote that the African children were supported ‘from funds of the Sierra Leone Company’.

M. Hennell, John Venn and the Clapham Sect (London: Lutterworth Press, 1958), 242.

C. Hole, The Early History of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East (London: CMS, 1896), 48; CMS G/Cl, minutes for 4 November and 2 December 1799 and 6 January 1800.

Sierra Leone Company, Substance of the Report … of the Sierra Leone Company … 1801 (London: W. Phillips, 1801), 22, 49–50, 52. This notice also indicated that ‘Donations and Annual Subscriptions are received at the Sierra Leone [Company] Office, Birchin Lane, Cornhill, and by Messrs. Down, Thornton, Free and Corwall, Bankers, Bartholomew Lane, near the Bank, London’. See also Johnson, Story of a Mission, 23. Hole, Early History, 49, stated that the Africans were ‘received into the patronage of the Sierra Leone Company’ and that it was the company that promoted the subscription for their maintenance and was a guiding force in the origins of the Society for the Education of Africans. See also Knutsford, Life and Letters, 237.

For More, see Fox, ‘Hannah More, Evangelical Educationist’, 94; Hopkins, Hannah More and Her Circle, 146–59. Thomas Babington was married to Macaulay's sister, and Lord Teignmouth lived next to the school in Clapham.

[Venn], ‘Providential Antecedents’, 806. See also Sierra Leone Company, Substance of the Report … of the Sierra Leone Company … 1804 (London: W. Phillips, 1804), 35–6; Telford, Sect that Moved the World, 137–8. In CMS G/Cl, minutes for 4 November 1799, Venn introduced a proposal to educate African children to become missionaries.

Hole, Early History, 49. Details of the education provided for the females unfortunately is missing in the record. The prevalent style of school available for girls was known as ‘dame school’, and these tended to be day schools where girls received training in household tasks such as spinning, darning, cooking, midwifery and child rearing. In the instance of the Africans, however, the females would have required residence, unlike those who attended traditional dame schools, Sunday schools, or charity schools. In particular, Hannah More, who may have exercised considerable influence in determining the type of education made available for the African boys, was dissatisfied with the minimalist approach of dame schools, and in her boarding school at Bristol had attempted to provide girls with a more advanced style. It was her belief (H. More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education [London: T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, 1799], 107) that ‘[t]he profession of ladies, to which the bent of their instruction should be turned, is that of daughters, wives, mothers, and mistresses of families. They should be therefore trained with a view to these several conditions, and be furnished with a stock of ideas, and principles, and qualifications, and habits, ready to be applied and appropriated, as occasion may demand, to each of these respective situations: for though the arts which merely embellish life must claim admiration; yet when a man of sense comes to marry, it is a companion whom he wants, and not an artist. It is not merely a creature who can paint, and play, and dress, and dance; it is a being who can comfort and counsel him; one who can reason, and reflect, and feel, and judge, and act, and discourse, and discriminate; one who can assist him in his affairs, lighten his cares, sooth his sorrows, purify his joys, strengthen his principles, and educate his children.’ While it is unlikely that all such sentiments guided the girls' education at Battersea Rise, it is probable that sponsors hoped that these girls would return to Freetown as practising Christians, with trades that would serve the settlement, perhaps as persons who could operate dame schools for the growing number of Nova Scotian and Maroon settlers who made up the majority of the settlement's population. For more on dame schools, see I. Morrish, Education Since 1800 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970), 4–9; M. Baker, ‘The Lady Hastings' Charity Schools: Accounting for eighteenth‐century rural philanthropy’, History of Education, 26/3 (1997), 255–65. For more on Hannah More, see Hopkins, Hannah More and Her Circle. Hopkins mentioned (172) that the More sisters maintained a short‐lived Cheddar School of Industry after 1789, in which girls from lower classes were taught housekeeping skills for employment as domestics in the homes of well‐to‐do families.

For such schools, see M.G. Jones, The Charity School Movement: A Study of Eighteenth Century Puritanism in Action (London: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 12–14, 81–2.

The standard treatment of such schools is provided in N. Hans, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 23, 63–5, 117–18, 181–93. H. C. Barnard, A Short History of English Education (London: University of London Press, 1947), 34–5, 62, described such academies as catering to particular social class needs and providing a basic education with additional specializations tailored for specific persons, such as the boat‐builders mentioned below. For more on such academies, see M. Mercer, ‘Dissenting Academies and the Education of the Laity, 1750–1850,’ History of Education, 30/1(2001), 35–58.

[Venn], ‘Providential Antecedents’, 806. Wilson, Loyal Blacks, 375, suggested that these students were brought ‘to England to be trained for missionary work’.

[Venn], ‘Providential Antecedents’, 806; Public Record Office, War Office (WO) 1/352, attached a copy of a ‘Report from the Committee on the Petition of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company’, printed 25 May 1802, 30; Hennell, John Venn, 241.

WO 1/352, ‘Report from the Committee on the Petition of the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company’ (printed 25 May 1802), 30.

Hole, Early History, 49–50.

LML, Clapham Register (CR), Burial & Baptisms, 1792–1803, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1801, No. 94.

LML, CR, Burials & Baptisms 1792–1803 (Folio P95/TRI1/91/1), Burial for 1802, No. 56. Fyfe, History, 62, identified John Kizell [Kizzell, Kezell] as a Sherbro who had been enslaved and carried to Charleston, Carolina, in his youth. By the mid‐1790s, Kizell had returned to the Sherbro where he engaged in trade. Wilson, Loyal Blacks, 376, identified Kizell as one of the Nova Scotian boys who attended the African Academy. WO1/352, List of Nova Scotians [1802], listed John Kezell as having a son in England.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1792–1803, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1802, No. 72; ibid., Burial for 1802, 15 July 1802, No. 67. See also LML, Folio P95/TRI1/91/1, p.100, burial No. 66. This is probably the son of Fantimani mentioned by Zachary Macaulay, in Sierra Leone Company, Substance of the Report of the Sierra Leone Company (London: James Phillips, 1798), 43.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1792–1803, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1802, No. 82.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1792–1803, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1802, No. 83. Wonkapong was the political and commercial centre of Sumbuya, an indigenous state ruled by non‐Muslims but dominated by Islamized Susu. The Dumbuya family was a prominent Susu lineage in Sumbuya, and Dala Modu Dumbuya maintained a valuable and important commercial outpost on the edge of the Freetown settlement.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1792–1803, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1802, No. 84.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1792–1803, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1802, No. 85.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1792–1803, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1802, No. 86. Kacundy was the indigenous name for the upper Nunez River where important trading entrepoots linking interior commerce and Atlantic maritime trade were located. Kacunda/Kacundy was also the name of one of the largest towns located in the Nunez. For more on the Rio Nunez during this period, see B.L. Mouser (ed.), A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Log of the Sandown, 1793–1794 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1792–1803, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1802, No. 130. Fyfe, History, 100, wrote that Wilson became apothecary at the settlement on his return.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1804, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Burials for 1804, 8 January, No. 2.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1805, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1805, No. 58; Johnson, Story of a Mission, 23. Fantimani Sr had acted as Peter Greig's host from 1797 to 1800.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1805, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1805, No. 59. The identity of Duke Gelorum is uncertain, but this may have referred to Jellorum Fernandez who was the head of an important Luso‐African lineage at Bouramaya in the Konkouré River at approximately this time. For more on the Fernandez lineage, see B.L. Mouser (ed.), Journal of a Missionary Tour to the Labaya Country (Guinea/Conakry) in 1850, by John Ulrich Graf, University of Leipzig Papers on Africa, History and Culture Series, no. 1 1998, 7–11. It is likely that the person identified in baptism records as Lory was the same as the person named Sory, leader of the Fernandez lineage in 1850.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1805, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1805, No. 66. Hennell, John Venn, 242, wrote that Zachary Macaulay, Henry Thornton, William Wilberforce, Charles Grant, Thomas Thomason, Admiral Gambier and Lord Muncaster attended these baptisms on 12 May 1805. [Venn], ‘Providential Antecedents’, 807, includes the names listed here as numbers 13 to 20.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1805, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1805, No. 67.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1805, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1805, No. 68.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1805, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1805, No. 69. Fyfe, History, identified ‘King George Bann’ as King George of Kafu Bullom.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1805, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1805, No. 70.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1805, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1805, No. 71. WO1/352, List of Maroons, 1 April 1802, listed Samuel Thorpe who had two male children. Whether this was the same as the John Thorpe mentioned in Baptism records is unclear.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1805, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1805, No. 72.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1805, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1805, No. 73.

London Metropolitan Library/Archive (hereafter cited as LML), Census Returns, Clapham Population Returns, Folio P95/TRI1/73, p. 6.

LML, CR, Burial & Baptisms, 1805, Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common, Baptisms for 1805, No. 96, and Burials for 1805, No. 57.

Wilson, Loyal Blacks, 356.

WO 1/352, ‘Report … 1802’, 31. In Hull University, Thomas P. Thompson Collection, DTH/l/2, Zachary Macaulay to Ludlam, 4 August 1806, Macaulay mentioned that four Maroon boys were then in London. These were John Thorpe, Thomas Smith, Gray and Murray; the latter two were not identified elsewhere. Fyfe, History, 100, mentioned two other boys whose names were not found in baptism records; these were James Wise, a Nova Scotian, who became government printer; and David Edmonds Jr, who returned to Sierra Leone as a skilled boat‐builder. Wilson, Loyal Blacks, 376, identified seven other African or Nova Scotian students: James Edmonds, William Pitcher, Scipio Lucas, Joshua Cuthbert, Nathaniel Snowball Jr, and sons of Abraham Hazeley and Sophia Small. Wilson (p. 374) noted that Abraham Hazeley had sent a daughter, Phillis, to England in 1794 with former governor Dawes and that she had received an education there. Phillis Hazeley later married the Reverend Gustavus Nylander, one of the earliest missionaries sent to Sierra Leone by the CMS.

WO 1/352, ‘Report … 1802’, 28, 30–1, noted that 25 students were attending the African Academy in 1802. For Brunton, see Hole, Early History, 63, 67–8; C.P. Grove, The Planting of Christianity in Africa (London: Lutterworth Press, 1948), Vol. 1, 213; P.E.H. Hair, ‘Susu studies and literature: 1799–1900’, Sierra Leone Language Review, 4 (1965), 38–53 (especially the list of six tracts in Susu on 50–1); P.E.H. Hair, ‘Notes on the early study of some West African languages (Susu, Bullom/Sherbro, Temne, Mende, Vai and Yoruba)’, Bulletin de l'Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, sér. B, 3–4 (1961), 683–95; C02/1, Macaulay to Sullivan, 4 September 1802. Two additional works by Brunton in English were printed in 1802: Fourth Catechism: Advantages that would arise to the Susoo People, from their learning to read and write their own language (Edinburgh: J. Richie) and Fifth Catechism: The absurd notions that the Susoos entertain concerning religion (Edinburgh: J. Richie). For Harrison, see P.E.H. Hair, ‘A West African in Tartary: Story of Jellorum Harrison’, West African Review (March 1962), 45–47. Hair described Harrison as a possible descendant of ‘William Jellorum, a black, son of Mr. Jellorum … in the River Dembia [Konkouré]’.

H. Brunton, A Grammar and Vocabulary of the Susoo Language, to which are added, the names of some of the Susoo towns, near the banks of the Rio Pongas: a small catalogue of Arabic books, and a list of the names of some of the learned men of the Mandingo and Foulah countries, etc. (Edinburgh: J. Ritchie, 1802). For Church Missionary Society enthusiasm for Brunton's early writings and his focus on Susu, see CMS, G/Cl, General Committee Minutes, 4 January 1802, 1 March 1802, 5 April 1802; and CMS, G/AC 3/1/84, Cardale to Steinkipf, 3 March 1801; Johnson, Story of a Mission, 127. In his Fourth Catechism, 25, Brunton argued that once the Susu language had been ‘reduced’ into written form, the Susu people would no longer send their children to be educated in Mandingo Country (Moria), nor would they need to import teachers from upcountry. Instead, Brunton fancifully suggested that Mandingos would send their children to Susu Country for an education. Whether this argument was considered by the CMS is uncertain. For a listing of Brunton's publications and numbers of tracts printed by 1802, see the Christian Observer, August 1802, 537–8.

Johnson, Story of a Mission, 23. Grove, Planting of Christianity, Vol. 1, 213, noted that the CMS had asked Brunton to prepare ‘materials’ for a mission to the Rio Pongo. Macaulay and Thomas Ludlam, both of whom had served as governor of Sierra Leone, confirmed that books/tracts had been prepared in two languages and had been sent out to Sierra Leone by 1802. For the latter and Macaulay's belief that Susu was the principal language for commercial expansion, see WO 1/352, ‘Report … 1802’, and C02/1, Macaulay to Sullivan, 4 September 1802. For plans to place Hartwig and Renner in Clapham and near the African Academy, see CMS, G/AC, 3/1/118, Pratt to Jaenicke, 24 December 1802. The African Institution, Second Report … African Institution (n/p, 1808), 24, emphasized that Susu was an important language for commercial penetration of the continent, claiming that Susu was understood by most Fula and Mande nations. In CMS, CAI/El/l, Macaulay to Corresponding Committee, 10 June 1803, Macaulay wrote that the missionaries' studies were ‘proceeding in this country under the care of Mr. Greaves at the African Academy’. For more on Hartwig and Renner, see B.L. Mouser, with N.F. Mouser, Case of the Reverend Peter Hartwig, Slave Trader or Misunderstood Idealist? Clash of Church Missionary Society/Imperial Objectives in Sierra Leone, 1804–1815 (Madison: University of Wisconsin African Studies Program, 2003); and B.L. Mouser, with N.F. Mouser, The Reverend Peter Hartwig, 1804–1815: A Sourcebook of Correspondence from the Church Missionary Society Archive (Madison: University of Wisconsin African Studies Program, 2003).

Hennell, John Venn, 242.

[Venn], ‘Providential Antecedents’, 808–9. Venn erroneously called the African Academy by the name ‘African Seminary’. He did recognize that student mortality was an important reason for the school's closing. Unfortunately, the history of this school and the fate of its students continues to be clouded with misinformation and error. Only recently, J. Hanciles, Euthanasia of a Mission: African Church Autonomy in a Colonial Context (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), wrote that the Clapham‐based educational ‘experiment lasted only five years and had a most disappointing outcome: the children were capable students, and eighteen of the number were baptized in Clapham Church, but, unable to acclimatize, their health deteriorated and they died, one after the other, before the program finished’. A few years earlier, W.R. Shenk, Henry Venn—Missionary Statesman (New York: Orbis Books, 1983), had written: ‘The experiment ended pathetically as the Africans, unable to adapt to the climate, died one by one.’

C.J. Shore, Second Baron of Teignmouth, Reminiscences of Many Years, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1878), 2–3. See also J. Pollock, Wilberforce (London: Constable, 1977), 183–4; T. Pinney (ed.), The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 5, and 30n; J. Clive, Macaulay, The Shaping of the Historian (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1974), 21–3. In The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London: Longmans, Green, 1876), 29, G.O. Trevelyan wrote that Henry Macaulay was educated at the school originally established by William Greaves for the education of Africans brought to Britain in 1799. Trevelyan noted (43) that ‘the poor fellows [Africans] had found as much difficulty in staying alive at Clapham as Englishmen experience at Sierra Leone’. An excellent survey of Claphamite views about education and the responsibility of parents to raise children correctly is found in N.L. Wentzel, ‘The Claphamite Fathers and Sons: a study of two generations’, MA thesis, College of William and Mary in Virginia, 1981. L.T. Gelb, ‘Educating an Evangelical Family 1798–1833’, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 1984, 121–2, commented that ‘Here, side by side with these black children, sons of the ‘saints’ got some schooling from a Yorkshireman. … With no thought of any kind of a pioneering venture, the school educated the black and the white boys together. Naturally, they all played together after school as well.’ The identity of the two remaining Africans in 1806 is unclear. In African Institution, Second Report …African Institution (n/p, 1808), 5–6, two African ‘youths’ were mentioned as being educated by the Sierra Leone Company, and the African Institution indicated that it had undertaken responsibility ‘of having them fully initiated in Dr. Bell's [monitorial‐ and faith‐based] system of Education’. For period commentaries of Bell's system, see Quarterly Review (October 1811), review of J. Fox, A Comparative View of the Plans of Education as detailed in the Publications of Dr. Bell and Mr. Lancaster (London: Darton & Harvey, 1811), 264–304 and Quarterly Review (September 1812), review of First Annual Report of the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church (London: Murray, 1812), 1–27. For a succinct description of Thomas Babington Macaulay's experience at the school, see ‘Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–59)’, in Dictionary of National Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1893).

CMS, CAI/El/116b, P. Hartwig's Journal, Freetown, 25 November 1805 to 29 December 1805, entry dated 6 December 1805. In 1805/1806, J. Corry, Observations Upon the Windward Coast of Africa … 1805 and 1806 (1807/London: Frank Cass, 1968), 80–2, an apologist for the slave trade, condemned the Sierra Leone Company and the abolitionists for not establishing a ‘seminary’ in Africa that would focus on ‘the rudiments of letters, religion, and science, and the progressive operation of education adapted to the useful purpose of life’. Corry was particularly critical of the notion of taking Africans to Britain for education. Jakobsson, Am I Not a Man and a Brother?, 142–3, noted that the Church Missionary Society had accepted the idea of a seminary at early as 1809, but observed that Josiah Pratt preferred that it be located in the centre of former slave‐trading country ‘as a means of repaying the debt that Britain owed to this continent on account of the greediness of the English’. The first such seminary would be established at Bouramaya in 1814 and be called the Gambier Mission.

CMS, CAI/El/93, P. Hartwig to Pratt, 27 January 1807.

Fyfe, History, 100, 139, 162–3. Fyfe wrote that a David Edmonds Jr returned from Britain with skills in boat‐making, that a James Wise worked as government printer and later publisher of the Sierra Leone Gazette, and that several others became clerks at the settlement. The names of Edmonds and Wise were not located in baptism records. Wilson, Loyal Blacks, 376, noted that a James Edmonds worked in the apothecary shop.

Hull University, Thomas Thompson Papers, DTH/1/48, Hartwig to Thompson, 20 February 1810.

Mouser, Journal of a Missionary Tour, 8–11.

Wilson, Loyal Blacks, 376.

B.L. Mouser (ed.), Account of the Mandingoes, Susoos, & Other Nations, c. 1815, by the Reverend Leopold Butscher, University of Leipzig Papers on Africa, History and Culture Series no. 6 (2000), 23–4. Butscher continued his observations in like fashion, concluding with: ‘In my humble opinion it will be far better, to train up School masters in the country where they are born, & to send thither pious & able men for that purpose.’