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The Many-Headed Hydra

The following extract is from the introduction to the section devoted to Robert Wedderburn, and has been reproduced with the kind permission of Peter Linebaugh, co-author. Those wishing to purchase this work, which also contains the fascinating stories of a number of other multi-ethnic rebels on both sides of the Atlantic, please click on the link at the end of this extract.

Robert Wedderburn and Atlantic Jubilee

"ROBERT WEDDERBURN was born in Jamaica in 1762., just after Tackys Revolt, to an enslaved woman named Rosanna and a slavemaster named James Wedderburn, a doctor whose estates in Westmoreland (Mint,Paradise, Retreat, Endeavor, Inverness, Spring Garden, Moreland, and Mount Edgcombe) were worth precisely �302.,628 I4s. 8d. at his death. His father "insulted, abused and abandoned" his mother, as Wedderburn wrote in his autobiography. "I HAVE SEEN MY POOR MOTHER STRETCHED ON THE GROUND, TIED HANDS AND FEET, AND FLOGGED IN THE MOST INDECENT MANNER THOUGH PREGNANT AT THE SAME TIME!!! her fault being the not acquainting her mistress that her master had given her leave to go to see her mother in town!"~ When his father sold his mother in 1766, Robert was sent to Kingston to live under the care of his maternal grandmother, who worked on the waterfront selling cheese, checks, chintz, milk, and gingerbread and smuggling goods for her owner. Wedderburn would later recall, "No woman was perhaps better known in Kingston than my grandmother, by the name of ' Talkee Amy" When Wedderburn was eleven, he watched in horror as the seventy-year-old woman was flogged almost to death. Her master had died after he and one of his ships, smuggling mahogany, had been captured by the Spanish in 1773. Before the voyage, he had liberated five of his slaves, but not Talkee Amy; his nephew (and heir), convinced that she had bewitched the vessel, punished her savagely in revenge. What Wedderburn witnessed was discipline typical of the era. The factory overlooker carried a stick. The plantation overseer brandished a whip. Schoolmasters and parents wielded the birch against children. The master and boatswain used the cat or the rattan cane on sailors; indeed,  to be whipped around the fleet was a pageant of cruelty. Soldiers were flogged by officers, drummers, and sometimes even other soldiers. The

triangle (a tripod composed of three halberds upon which the person to be flogged was bound) was notorious as a means of imperialist repression in Ireland. Disciplinary violence was carefully studied: a surgeon in the British army, whose duty it was to keep torture victims alive, published seventy pages on the subject in 1794. Haiti, meanwhile, a manual on the theory and practice of female flagellation appeared in 1804. Cutting, bruising, penetrating, tying, squeezing, holding, and lacerating were all techniques applied by the powerful in the formation of labor power. When William Cobbett complained about the five hundred lashes administered to soldiers protesting for bread ("Five hundred lashes each! Aye, that is right! Flog them, flog them; flog them!" Cobbett cried), he was imprisoned in Newgate.

The terror visited upon his mother and upon Talkee Amy would stay with Wedderburn for the rest of his life. At the age of seventeen (in 1778), Wedderburn joined the Royal Navy during the American Revolution. He took part in the Gordon Riots of 1780, led by the African Americans Benjamin Bowsey and John Glover. Years later, in 1797 he would be connected to the naval mutiny at the Nore. Between these two events, Wedderburn, along with thousands of other workers, joined the Methodist Church. In the early years of the nineteenth century he would meet Thomas Spence and, with other veterans of the London Corresponding Society, enlarge Spence's circle of revolutionists. He also knew the struggles of poor craftsmen; though he had acquired the skills of the tailor, these were dishonored by the prohibition against trade-union activity in the Combination Act (1799) and would be sweated by the repeal of the apprenticeship clauses in the Elizabethan Statue of Artificersn (1814). He did time in Cold Bath Fields, Dorchester, and Giltspur Street Prisons for theft, blasphemy, and keeping a bawdy house. He saw many of his comrades hanged, and he himself lived much of his life as "though a halter be about my neck." Wedderburn thus knew the plantation) the ship, the streets, the chapel, the political club, the workshop, and the prison as settings of proletarian self-activity.

Wedderburn has been a neglected figure in historical studies, or at best a misfit. He has not seemed a proper subject for either labor history or black history. In the former field he appears, if at all, as a criminal and pornographic character, and in the latter, as a tricky and foolish one. In contrast to such views, we argue that Wedderburn was in fact a strategically central actor in the formation and dissemination of revolutionary traditions, an intellectual organic to the Atlantic proletariat. We shall explore his major notion for freedom, the biblical jubilee, in the context of a remarkable correspondence he carried on with his half-sister Elizabeth Campbell, a Jamaican maroon. We shall also consider his understanding of history and his analysis of the people and forces that would, in his view, make a transatlantic revolution. We shall see how Wedderburn overcame the dualities of religion and secularism by synthesizing radical Christianity and Painite republicanism, combining both with a proletarian abolitionism. Wedderburn continued the liberation theology that had originated in the English Revolution, then spread west to the plantation and African America, and finally returned to London in the 1780s and 1790s........................."

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