 By the time of Thomas Caulker's birth, his family had aligned with the 19th-century abolition movement.His father, Richard Canreba Caulker, Chief of Bompey, was working with colonial officials and some other chiefs of the Sherbro country (including his relative, Thomas Stephen Caulker, Chief of the Plantain Islands), to suppress the slave trade in this territory.They came to agreement with the Governor of the British colony of Sierra Leone in 1853, and the abolition of the trade was enacted into British law two years later by an Act of Parliament dated 14 August 1855.