By the early nineteenth century, Sierra Leone had developed as one of the world’s first post-slavery societies with a population comprised of diverse migrant groups of African origin and descent. Following the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the population of Sierra Leone expanded rapidly as an estimated 100,000 recaptives or Liberated Africans were released from slave ships intercepted by Royal Navy patrols deployed off the coast of West Africa. According to the Registers of Liberated Africans held in the Sierra Leone Public Archives, approximately one-third of the recaptives were classified as children. These registers provide a systematic record of the names, ages, gender, height and physical characteristics of the African men, women and children released at Freetown. The process of classifying a recaptive as an adult or a child underwent far-reaching changes after abolition. In the period of the slave trade, height was used to gauge a captive’s age, and British slave traders considered children to be under four feet four inches tall. Analysis of who was understood to be a child after the abolition of the slave trade has received little attention in recent historical scholarship on West Africa. The vast majority of those classified as children were orphans and were allocated to apprenticeships in a system criticized by contemporary commentators as another form of enslavement. This paper explores the identities and experiences of recaptive children released in Sierra Leone and analyses changes in the process by which individuals were classified as children in the nineteenth century.