He was one of the first African-Americans to participate in the antebellum American Back-to-Africa movement under the auspices of Captain Paul Cuffe's 1815 voyage to Sierra Leone.
[4] The emigrants, mainly Bostonians,[2] were the first black Americans to immigrate on a large scale directly from the United States to Africa.
Cuffe wrote to the African Institution in London's William Allen on April 1, 1816, to inform him that homesteads had been acquired for the settlement.
[2] 29 people that were going to work the 10 acres together included:[2] Another settler was David George, a Baptist preacher who had escaped enslavement and then traveled to Nova Scotia before emigrating to Sierra Leone.
[5] The same year, Gwinn's daughter Nancy married George Davis, the African-born son of African American parents who had immigrated via Nova Scotia (under the auspices of John Clarkson) to found Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1792.