Robert Wedderburn, abolitionist 2

 

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 ROBERT WEDDERBURN....2

ROBERT WEDDERBURN - back to main page

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The following extract is a quote from "Black writers in Britain 1760 - 1890"

 

....Robert Wedderburn was the mulatto son of a wealthy Scottish Jamaican and one of his slaves. Wedderburn's father, James Wedderburn of Inveresk near Edinburgh, exchanged the comparatively unprofitable profession of medicine for the rich rewards of planter and slave-owner, for which his son detested him enthusiastically:

 

"I never saw my dear father but once in the island of Jamaica, when I went with my grandfather to    know if he meant to do anything for me, his son. (He) giving her some abusive language, my grandmother called him a mean Scotch rascal, thus to desert his own flesh and blood. This was the parental treatment I experienced from a Scotch West-India planter and slave-dealer."
 
His grandmother, a small trader with a line in smuggling, brought him up after his mother was sold as a troublemaker when five months pregnant with Robert. He never forgot seeing his grandmother whipped publicly by a white youth she herself had reared as an infant. In 1778 Robert came to England, seving as a gunner in the Navy, then sailing as a privateer (virtually as a licensed pirate). Later he settled ashore as a jobbing tailor, and after being deeply moved by a passionate Wesleyan preacher in 1786, and having read Thomas Paine's "The Rights of Man", took out a licence to practice as a Unitarian preacher................
 
At his 1820 trial, Robert concluded his speech in his own defence as follows:
 
"Gentlemen of the jury, - it is customary for persons in my situation to flatter you, and to say everything they can, to court your verdict in their favour; but all I shall say is ................... that if there is among you but one man, who thoroughly understands and respects the religion of Jesus, one sincere friend to religious liberty, and the universal right of conscience, I shall be acquitted; but if, on the contrary, the spirit of bigotry and religious persecution prevails over you, I shall have this satisfaction, that I suffer like Christ and his disciples, for boldly asserting what I deem to be true; and as nature has blest me with a calm and tranquil mind, I shall be far happier in the dungeon to which you may consign me, than my persecutors, on their beds of down."

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

UNITARIAN : one who asserts the unity of the Godhead as opposed to the Trinity, ascribes divinity to God the Father only, and who believes that each congregation should have independent authority: one who believes in the unity, freedom and tolerance of the differences in religious beliefs......, 

 

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