Robert Wedderburn, abolitionist

Ancestor of the scalemaking Wedderburn line, Robert was one of several illegitimate children fathered by James Wedderburn of Inveresk, Jamaican plantation owner. Robert was a grandson of Sir John Wedderburn of Blackness, whose family fled to Jamaica after defeat at Culloden in 1746. Sir John himself was captured, tried for treason, then hung, drawn and quartered by the English.

Author of the abolitionist autobiographical work "The Horrors of Slavery", ostracized by the Wedderburns who for many years claimed he had no right to the Wedderburn name, a contemporary and acquaintance of Wilberforce (to whom his autobiography is dedicated), a strategic player in fomenting popular unrest in the cause of republicanism, whilst remaining faithful to his West Indian roots and promoting the case for the abolition of slavery, he was to be imprisoned and sentenced to hard labour for his outspoken radical views.

Source: Robert Wedderburn in 1824. Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery, 1824, (British Museum).

Some disturbing extracts from 18th century works on the slave trade, by Olaudah Equiano, a former slave and abolitionist campaigner, and Alexander Falconbridge, surgeon aboard the slave ships.

Slave ship conditions - Equiano's passage - Equiano's arrival in Bridgetown - Sale of slaves - slave trade history

You can discover Robert's ancestors back to the 1400s, and his descendants today, in the database - just click on this link

"The Horrors of Slavery", consists of a collection of tracts and autobiographical accounts which had considerable impact in Robert's era. He dedicated this work to Wilberforce, who visited him in prison. He also criticised the Anglican Church, was accused of blasphemy, sentenced to hard labour and imprisoned once more. Even from prison he managed to have the last word, succeeding in having the trial transcript published as a radical tract. The Wedderburns by this time were firmly part of the establishment once again, Robert's half-brother James was the Solicitor-General for Scotland, and Robert's activities were severely embarrassing to the family. It was little more than half a century after Culloden, a period when the Blackness Wedderburns, largely committed Jacobites, had hardly endeared themselves to the English.

The account of his life in the "Horrors of Slavery" is very convincing. He states that his father was Dr. James Wedderburn of Inveresk. Robert's mother, Rosanna, was the slave house-keeper of a Lady Bassilia Douglas, a distant cousin of the Duke of Queensbury, before being acquired by James Wedderburn. Lady Douglas was Robert's godmother at his baptism. In his pamphlet Robert maintains that he and his brother James were made 'free' from birth' and that his father James registered them as such 'as was the custom'. "Doctor" James Wedderburn of Inveresk (he practised as a surgeon on arrival in Jamaica after Culloden in 1746) was the third son of Sir John Wedderburn of Blackness, 5th Baronet. Dr. James returned to Scotland in 1773, purchasing Inveresk Lodge and property in Banffshire with the profits from his Jamaican estates. Sir John's line was to become extinct, and the Balindean baronetcy was inherited by the direct "legitimate" descendants of Dr. James, the current 7th Baronet of Balindean being Andrew John Alexander Ogilvy Wedderburn.

Quotes about Robert:

"This colorful, disreputable character is important to the African-American tradition. He became a leading proponent not only of abolition, but of what would be termed today a black theology of liberation, and a major figure in England's republican underground of the Georgian and Regency periods. He was at once a witness and victim of West Indian slavery. His autobiography is a vivid indictment of an execrable system; its accounts burn themselves into the reader's mind like the sting of the slaver's whip." (Publishers Weekly)

"His publications had an enormous impact in his time. They are now collected for the first time in book form and provide a vivid record of the movement to abolish slavery in the West Indies"

"Wedderburn provoked and endured the repressive wrath of the British Government and helped to convince London's artisan ultra-radicals of the affinities between black West Indian and British working-class revolution" (Iain McCalman)

"The closest he came to receiving help from his wealthy Scottish family was a cracked sixpence and some small beer dispensed by a kindly servant at a time when the mulatto and his pregnant wife were close to starvation" (Iain McCalman, Introduction to "The Horrors of Slavery")

The editor of Bell's found Robert Wedderburn's story (of his origins) convincing....... Most modern readers will agree" (Iain McCalman, Introduction to "The Horrors of Slavery")

"I thank my God, that through a long life of hardship and adversity, I have ever been free in both mind and body: and have always raised my voice on behalf of my enslaved countrymen" (Robert Wedderburn "The Horrors of Slavery")

"Wedderburn was a popular Spencean lecturer, the son of a Jamaican slave mother and a Scottish planter who disowned him" (Michael Scrivener, "The Discourse of Treason, Sedition, and Blasphemy in British Political Trials, 1794-1820")

Andrew Gray - "Robert Wedderburn, born of a Jamaican slave and her oppressor, offers a unique insight into the Atlantic system. In an extraordinary life he was an intimate witness to the horror of colonial slavery, British naval life, the London labouring poor, the decline of the independent artisan (he was an elite tailor), and early 19th century British radicalism....." (full text)

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Professor Iain McCalman

Professor Iain McCalman, FRHS, FASSA, FAHA was appointed Director of the HRC (Humanities Research Centre) at the Australian National University in 1995. He has degrees from the ANU and Monash University and has held previous appointments at the ANU, Monash, Melbourne, Macquarie, University of Canberra and Charles Sturt University.

His book "Radical Underworld: prophets, revolutionaries and pornographers in London, 1795-1840" was published by Cambridge University Press in 1988 and re-published in a Clarendon paperback by Oxford University Press in 1993. His edition of "Horrors of Slavery: the life and writings of Robert Wedderburn" was published in 1992 by Edinburgh University Press & by Martin Wiener Press in Newhaven, USA. He is currently general editor of "The Age of Romanticism and Revolution: An Oxford Companion to British Culture, 1776-1832" and is completing for Oxford University Press a monograph, "Grub Street in Revolution: romanticism, popular politics and culture, 1780-1848", and a jointly-edited collection, "Axe to the Root: an anthology of popular political satire, 1789-1822".

He has held visiting fellowships at Manchester University, Oriel and All Souls Colleges, Oxford, the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh University, Washington University at St Louis, and the Research School of Social Sciences, ANU. In 1992 he received the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence (ANU).

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Radical Underworld

Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840

`[A] brilliant success' London Review of Books
`It is impossible to conceive of any scholar doing a more thorough job than McCalman has in uncovering the non-traditional by-ways of London radicalism ... Every aspect of popular culture becomes a potential source of enlightenment for McCalman as he leads the reader on an unpredictable, sometimes harrowing , journey through the radical underworld.' Joel H. Wiener, Journal of Modern History
`Beautifully researched and crafted book ... It is a model for the cultural history of politics and popular movements.' American Historical Review
`McCalman vividly evokes the milieu and culture which revolutionary artisans shared with the celebrated engraver-poet William Blake ... the radical mouthpieces of a rich, fascinating, and too little known underground radical culture of the world we have lost. Roy Porter, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences

This is a paperback edition of a highly acclaimed study of English popular radicalism during the period between the anti-Jacobin government `Terror' of the 1790s and the beginnings of Chartism. Challenging conventional distinctions between `high' and `low' culture, Iain McCalman brilliantly reveals the links between the political underworld and literary culture, poverty, crime, and prophetic religion.

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Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age

'Under the General Editorship of Iain McCalman, with associate editors Jon Mee, Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, Oxford provides a handsome, erudite and robust Companion to the Romantic Age to accompany us into whatever Age we are fast approaching ... The whole is immaculately cross-referenced ... the Oxford Companion tells us, with verve and authority, why the story of Reactionary/Liberatory Romanticisim will no longer do, particularly as an account of British Culture between 1776 and 1832.' -Esther Schor, Times Literary Supplement

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Wilberforce, William (Oxford Encyclopedia)

(1759-1833)

British politician and social reformer. An MP and close associate of Pitt the Younger, he was a prominent campaigner for the abolition of the slave trade, successfully promoting a bill outlawing its practice in the British West Indies (1807). Later he pushed for the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire, his efforts resulting in the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.

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Andrew Gray

".....Robert Wedderburn, born of a Jamaican slave and her oppressor, offers a unique insight into the Atlantic system. In an extraordinary life he was an intimate witness to the horror of colonial slavery, British naval life, the London labouring poor, the decline of the independent artisan (he was an elite tailor), and early 19th century British radicalism.

He synthesised Afro-Jamaican and British evangelical religion, British radical republicanism and agrarian utopianism, and traditions of slave resistance and rebellion into an aggressive revolutionary theory and practice.

At a time when the British state was vigorously hunting radicals and the movement to abolish slavery was very active - and even in the face of a visit in prison from the mythical saviour of slaves, William Wilberforce - Wedderburn refused to reduce his political activism to the single issue of abolition.

At the centre of his theory was the recognition that the liberation of the slaves of the Americas and the labouring poor of Britain were inseparable ....."

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Contact me: Peter Garwood