Black Loyalists' Constitutionalism in Freetown, Sierra Leone

Friday, January 4, 2019: 10:50 AM
International South (Hilton Chicago)
James Sidbury, Rice University
Black loyalists left Nova Scotia in 1792 for Africa, where they lived under the Sierra Leone Company. In 1800 they rose against Company rule and composed a brief code of “settlers’ laws” to govern themselves. The laws that they wrote shed interesting light on constitutionalism in the Age of Revolution.