Robert Wedderburn, abolitionist 2
ROBERT
WEDDERBURN....2
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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