Colonial Government
In accordance with the constitution drawn up by Sharp for the original settlers of the Province of Freedom, the Black Poor and Nova Scotians had expected to rule themselves. Sharp had stipulated that in ancient Anglo-Saxon style ten families would be grouped together to elect a representative called a tythingman and each 100 families would elect another called a hundredor. The tythingmen and hundredors were to form the province’s governing council.
The introduction of company rule, however, blocked any such arrangement because it concentrated ultimate authority in the company’s London-based board of directors; control in the Colony was in the hands of the governor and his councillors, all white company employees. The settlers, having been promised equal rights with Englishmen, expected and occasionally demanded more control over their lives.
John Clarkson — the liberal-minded first company governor, who had accompanied the people coming from Nova Scotia — arranged for tythingmen and hundredors to be elected to serve as a form of local government below the level of the council. By 1798 they had formed two chambers that were intended to cooperate with the governor in writing the Colony’s rules and regulations. However limited and short-lived, this was the first introduction of Western-style democratic traditions into black Africa.
After the arrival of the Maroons in 1800 the British government’s long-delayed grant of a charter had the effect of returning all authority to the company and its governor, leaving no features of representative government. His all-white council continued in existence but had only consultative powers. The governor and councillors were also made the colony’s criminal court judges. The settlers retained the right, however, to serve on the juries required for indictment and conviction.
Freetown was granted municipal status, although the mayor and aldermen were to be appointed by the governor, who invariably selected a white mayor. They in turn constituted the judges of the civil courts, appeal from their judgments going to the governor and council or in major cases to the Privy Council of the House of Lords in London. Although there were no racial requirements for office, the settlers were by practice restricted to the role of jurors; there were occa- sional appointments to the posts of alderman, sheriff, and justice of the peace.
After the establishment of direct rule as a Colony of the British crown, which took effect in January 1808, there was very little change: the secretary of state appointed the governor, and the settlers were liable to military service outside the colony’s boundaries, a power of draft never used. The charter granted to the Colony in 1811 merely confirmed the existing system.
What direct rule did do was improve the Colony’s economic cir- cumstances. Budget support was assumed by the home government. In addition new opportunities for business were created by stationing the naval patrol there and by opening the patrol's vice-admiralty court, which tried the captured slave traders and auctioned their ships and trade goods. After several other European nations agreed to support the British effort, the court became one of the world’s earliest international judicial bodies. Later a British military unit, called the Second West Indian Regiment but actually composed of locally recruited men, added further to the inflow of British government funds.
In 1821 another advantageous step was taken when Freetown became the seat of government for all Great Britain's West African possessions, a position it retained with variations in duties until 1874. British interest in its only West African colony was limited, and responsibility for the Sierra Leone government was frequently avoided. After 1824 the major objective of the home government was to avoid expenditures by making the Colony support itself.
The British lack of interest was compounded by the poor health record of Europeans on the West African coast. For example, half of the Anglican missionaries sent to the colony died within a decade. Both the rapid loss of life and the lack of interest had other, indirect effects on the Colony. For example, between 1801 and 1851, with one exception, the average tenure of the governors was less than a year, resulting in a turnover that was certainly not helpful to the Colony's development.
The one exception was Governor Charles MacCarthy, who during his ten-year period in office (1814-24) brought about important advances for the Colony, particularly for the recaptives. His major effort was to place the recaptive villages throughout the peninsula under the joint administration of the government and the (Anglican) Church Missionary Society (CMS). The government built up the villages by funding the cost of constructing village schools as well as churches and paid the missionary teachers’ salaries. It was at this point that the major improvements in the lives of the recaptives began.
The settlers had placed great importance on schools from the beginning — they were one of the attractions the company had held out to the Nova Scotians — and the first school was opened in 1792. For the recaptives the CMS had opened the Christian Institution in 1815. Upgraded in 1820, it became a center for training teachers for the village schools; it was moved to a new site at Fourah Bay in 1827. In 1876 it became a university-level institution.
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