January 1792

Alarmed by the Haitian Revolution, South Carolina's legislature temporarily banned the importation of enslaved people from the West Indies and, intermittently, from Africa between 1792 and 1803, fearing revolutionary ideas would arrive with Caribbean captives. The ban reflected how profoundly the Haitian Revolution disrupted the logic of American slavery — and how desperately slaveholders sought to quarantine its influence.

After years of broken British promises, land shortages, and racial violence in Nova Scotia, approximately 1,196 Black Loyalists sailed to Sierra Leone in January 1792 under the auspices of the Sierra Leone Company. Led in part by Boston King and David George (Baptist preacher), they founded Freetown. The community had been organized partly by British abolitionist Granville Sharp. The settlers named their streets after British abolitionists. Their departure effectively ended the Birchtown communi