Paul Cuffe and the Question of Sierra Leone, 1795–1817

In April 1811, Paul Cuffe sailed along the coast of Sierra Leone, imagining a prosperous and free African-American settlement. The venerable merchant – self described as Musta – had left Massachusetts four months earlier, crossing the Atlantic to determine the viability of settling West Africa with free African-Americans, and the likelihood of developing a legitimate triangular trade between the region, England, and America. Expecting to encounter moral and sober individuals at work building a free black nation, Cuffe described a motley population of transplanted Jamaican Maroons, Black Nova Scotians, and native Africans who seemed to care little about the fledgling colony. A Quaker, Cuffe believed Sierra Leone could be resurrected if it was organized under a “Civilized power.” The attempted “civilization of Africa” by African-American emigrationists such as Paul Cuffe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was built on the foundation of earlier imperial expansion in the Atlantic world. Citing the “success” of Europe's Christian missionaries amongst Native Americans, Paul Cuffe sought to convert native West Africans into Christians in order to teach them the Jeffersonian virtues of self-government, free labor, and legitimate trade. He predicted that civilizing West Africans would aid abolitionists' attack on the illegal transatlantic slave trade, convincing African slave brokers of the immorality of their business. Cuffe's benign imperialism led him to remark on numerous occasions that he wished for native Africans to follow him “into the light of the Lord.” Scholars often view this era as the origin of pan-Atlantic black nationalism that would come to dominate black political thought in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, when reconsidering this era in the history of the Atlantic world it is clear that Cuffe and others worked to create a new nation in West Africa that would be infused with American values.