Freetown is the capital, principal port, commercial center, and largest city of Sierra Leone.  The city was founded by British Naval Lieutenant John Clarkson and freed American slaves from Nova Scotia.  Freetown was part of the larger colony of the Sierra Leone which was founded by the Sierra Leone Company (SLC) in 1787. The SLC, organized by British businessman and abolitionist William Wilberforce, sought to rehabilitate the black poor of London and former slaves of North America by bringing them to the settlement in Sierra Leone where they would stop the African slave trade by spreading Christianity through the continent.

The first groups of blacks, about 400 Londoners, arrived in Sierra Leone in 1787 and established Granville Town, named after British abolitionist Granville Sharp.  When the settlement was destroyed by the indigenous inhabitants in 1789,  British abolitionists sent a second, larger party of 1,100 former American slaves who had been resettled in Nova Scotia at the end of the American Revolution.  These settlers established Freetown in 1792.  In 1800, 500 Jamaican Maroons were landed by the British.

The surviving Londoners, the Nova Scotians, and Jamaican maroons, intermarried to create the Creole population of Freetown.  The Creoles banded together partly because of their Christian background and western culture but also because they lacked the tradition of native law and custom which dominated the lives of the indigenous people.  Creoles also had important connections with British colonial officials who administered Sierra Leone from 1808 when they assumed control over the SLC colony, to 1961 when Sierra Leone gained its independence.   Those connections allowed the Creoles, always a tiny minority of the colonys populace, to become the most powerful and influential group, after the colonial administrators, in the city and colony.  

From 1808 to 1874 Freetown was the headquarters for the Royal British Navys West African Squadron which captured slave ships headed for the Americas and