Sierra Leone and Other Sites in the War of Representation over Slavery

Abstract

The controversies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries over the Atlantic slave-trade and slavery itself can be usefully understood as a ‘war of representation’ fought between abolitionists and their opponents. This war took place over a variegated terrain and focused on different subjects. In this paper it is the sites and spaces of this war that are examined – from those of the individual pages of pamphlets, to real-world places in and beyond the Caribbean. Sites such as the West African colony of Sierra Leone were more or less explicitly compared with the West Indian colonies and thus the war of representation was a multi-theatre conflict. As a contribution to mapping the ‘cartography’ of the slavery controversy, the paper examines a series of exchanges that took place over Sierra Leone in the mid to late 1820s between former plantation-overseer and geographer of Africa, James MacQueen, and Kenneth Macaulay, cousin of the prominent abolitionist, Zachary Macaulay. The paper begins by locating the MacQueen/Macaulay exchanges in relation to Sierra Leone’s long-standing place in the war of representation. It then introduces the two protagonists and examines how they claimed their authority to represent the colony. The paper goes on to consider the two main substantive themes that characterized their exchanges: the healthiness, or otherwise, of Sierra Leone; and the suitability of its location on the West African coast. By tracing the various strategies and tactics employed in these exchanges, the paper examines how the sites of the page were connected to different worldly sites beyond, and how the war of representation over slavery was fought out at both scales simultaneously.