User:TheFirstOfFebruary/sandbox

Henry Washington from Mount Vernon had taken refuge in New York was a certain Henry Washington. Once Carleton's officials put him on the list for evacuation in the "Register of Negroes," he started his age as forty-three and said that he had fled Mount Vernon in 1776,much earlier than 1781 with the slaves on the Savage. Under General Sir Guy Carleton's policy, Henry Washington took a British ship to Nova Scotia (as did two other former Mount Vernon slaves, a man and a women) and from there continued to Sierra Leone, where he planned to begin a farm making use of the scientific farming techniques he learned at Mount Vernon. In 1800 Washington was among several hundred settlers who rose up in a brief rebellion against white rule there .The precipitating issue was one familiar from the American Revolution: taxes. The settlers were required by the Sierra Leone Company, which ran the colony for the British government, to pay taxes, or quitrents, for the use of their land; the land itself remained the property of the company. The settles formed a provisional government and wrote up a set of laws, which they nailed to the office door of a company administrator. The company responded by sending a corps of recently arrived Jamaican blacks against the rebels. In the trails that followed the defeat of the rebellion, Henry Washington was among the rebels sentenced to banishment to another location in Sierra Leone, where he became one of the two leaders of a new settlement.