A re-examination of attitudes to the Slave Trade in Scotland with particular reference to records pertaining to The Royal Burgh of Cromarty and its surrounding districts
THE PHD THESIS OF PETER MACAULAY
INTRODUCTION
Estate owners in the colony of Guyana were in the habit of transferring the names of their home settlements to the Guyanese areas they held jurisdiction over. Scottish names were also given to many people who were brought to these estates to work without payment. Strong connections with the estate owners’ home regions in the United Kingdom were thus maintained. This might help to explain why the burgh council of the trading port of Cromarty opposed the abolition of slavery. It is interesting to set this clearly recorded standpoint against the background of wealth and culture still visible in that burgh, a significant seaport at the time. It is also very tempting to make comparisons with other administrations in which the most repressive of edicts were issued from the most refined examples of balanced, neo-classical architecture.
The mercantile architecture of Cromarty has still a high degree of integrity. In this thesis we will be examining the declared written opinions of senior members of that community with reference to the Parliamentary Bills which eventually made participation in the slave trade illegal within Great Britain.
Those who voted for such declarations, at the level of the burgh council, were by definition (according to the franchise at the time) those with wealth and so with vested interest. There is of course no record of how farm workers or dock workers or serving girls thought. This thesis begins with full acknowledgement of that limitation. However we will look at one particular life-story, not because it is typical but because detailed records of its circumstances still exist.
One Hugh Junor brought a daughter and a son back from that coast of Guyana. He did not bring their mother. The children were called William and Eliza. They were half-casts, in the terminology of the time. Both attended school on the Black Isle. Eliza is still there. She was buried in Rosemarkie. Her brother left that area. He did not go home. Who could say where home was for William Junor? But it seems very likely, from surviving records, that he might have found somewhere more welcoming in Buenos Aries.
The case-study of his sister will be studied more closely. Her father married. Her father died. Her stepmother married again. Her new husband was the Reverend Archibald Brown. We might well expect that support and protection would have been offered Eliza, from that man of the church, now her legal guardian.
The Reverend was a pamphleteer and activist but one who supported the slave trade. He is described as clutching a drawing – elegantly done but for a practical purpose. It showed how best to pack the hold of a ship with live cargo, for the maximum profit.
Eliza was forced to leave the area of the Black Isle, for a time. Later, she and her own daughter returned to Fortrose, where they were to make their living as seamstresses. They marked out their own will to be there, on that peninsula. This was a woman who had once being taken over oceans by her own father, leaving her natural mother behind.
This is a story but it has been gleaned from a range of extant documents and records. These have suggested a line for further research. The following thesis will attempt to gather and present a wide range of recorded statements and comments, not previously collated and all relating to the trade in slaves, with links to Scotland, prior to the legislation to free all ‘owned’ slaves in 1833. The various Acts of Parliament, to abolish the trade, driven initially by William Wilberforce, were of course passed in a series of gradual measures. The conclusive Act only completed its passage three days before the death of the principal instigator of the process.
In a Scotland now entering the second decade of a new millennium, it is all too easy to take a fabled liberal consensus for granted. This thesis will give documented evidence of attitudes to one single issue, close scrutiny. The study will be limited to one small part of Scotland during the period 1800 to 1833. We will examine recorded statements, minutes, letters and published texts with a view to summarising an accurate record of local opinion, for and against abolition of the trade and freeing of slaves in the regions under the British Empire, at the time.