Happy stories from "Bury the Chains"

The Sierra Leone Company in England, known as The Company among its associates, was striving to establish a colony for freed slaves in Sierra Leone, on the continent of Africa.  One problem was that it was an active place for the capturing and selling of slaves.  The Company was undaunted, however, and a colony was begun with both whites and blacks living side by side.  There were some troubles, but here are three sweet stories from that time.

In 1792, Thomas Clarkson's younger brother, John, escorted more than 1,100 former slaves from Nova Scotia, Canada, to Sierra Leone.  These stories from the book really touched me as I imagined what it would be like for them to return to the place where their slavery began.  This is a direct quote from the book.

"The immigrants Clarkson accompanied to Sierra Leone from Canada included several who had been taken into slavery from this very river mouth.  Thirty-year-old Frank Peters, a former slave in South Carolina, found the precise spot were he had been captured  to be sold to an American slave ship, fifteen years before. Then one day, in the words of a Company official, an elderly local woman showed 'very peculiar emotions' when she saw Peters; 'she ran up to him and embraced him: she proved to be his own mother.'  He resettled for a time in his own village.

"John Gordon, a lay Methodist leader in North America, had been sold from Bance Island when he was about fifteen.  Four years after arriving back in Sierra Leone, he would meet the man who kidnapped him.  He gave his captor a present and told him, 'Your thoughts were evil, but God meant it for good -- I now know God and Christ.'

Another black settler, Martha Webb, recognized her mother in a chain of slaves being led into captivity and, with a gift of wine, persuaded a local chief to let her go."

Now you have heard something interesting.