The Full Story
In 1787, British abolitionists founded a city on the West African coast as a home for freed slaves and for Black loyalists who had fought for Britain in the American War of Independence. They called it the Province of Freedom. When they named its first capital, they called it Freetown.
When Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, Freetown became the forward base of the West Africa Squadron of the Royal Navy. For the next sixty years, British ships patrolled three thousand miles of African coast hunting slavers. Captured slave ships were brought to Freetown, where courts condemned them and the people aboard were set free. Over those decades, sixteen hundred slave ships were captured and around a hundred and fifty thousand people were freed, with tens of thousands landed at Freetown itself; published figures vary. Around two thousand British sailors died doing it, most from disease.
The liberated people settled in Freetown and built a city. They built schools, churches, printing presses, a college. They gave the streets British names. They named their children after British abolitionists. They called themselves Krio. Their descendants live in Freetown today. The city is still called Freetown.
Why This Matters
No other port in the world was founded for this purpose. Freetown was a landing place for conscience, the physical answer to the question of what to do with the people you had just set free. The West Africa Squadron was the longest sustained military operation ever mounted for a moral cause. It cost Britain a generation of sailors, a sea wall of capital, and sixty years of effort. The reason it worked at all is that it had somewhere to land them.