Enslavement, Emancipation, Enlistment: The West India Regiments and Military Recruitment in Colonial Sierra Leone

When Great Britain abolished its slave trade in 1808, the British government dispatched a small portion of the Royal Navy to stop the slave trade at its source. Naval cruisers intercepted slave ships carrying human cargo from the African coast to the Americas and escorted hundreds of these vessels to Freetown, Sierra Leone. In Freetown, the ships were tried and condemned; the enslaved Africans on board were nominally liberated and placed under government control. Waiting to plunder this pool of Liberated Africans were officers of the West India Regiments. These recruiting parties aggressively pursued potential conscripts and forced over 2,000 Africans “liberated” in Sierra Leone to serve in the West India Regiments.

Britain’s practice of purchasing enslaved Africans in the Caribbean to fill these regiments is well documented, yet historians know far less about Britain’s process of turning enslaved people into West India Regiment soldiers in colonial Africa. Drawing on service records and biographical vignettes, this paper traces the odysseys of conscripted Africans from the slave ships on which they arrived in Freetown to the companies in which they served. West India Regiment recruiters awaited the arrival of recaptured slave vessels in Sierra Leone and pressured groups of Africans to enlist. Officers led new recruits to the local regimental depot for basic training, and soon after, forced them aboard transport vessels which carried them to the West Indies to join their regiments. By following the journeys of Africans conscripted into the West India Regiments in Sierra Leone, this paper demonstrates how British officials in Freetown used slave-trade abolition as a means of forcing Africans to serve in the British military. Further, it shows that for conscripted Africans themselves, “liberation” in Sierra Leone meant a life of military service to the British empire.