When the gang members had been rounded up and introduced earlier than the magistrates, Wedderburn was the chief witness for the prosecution. A journalist for The Star, hanging across the courts in search of a narrative, famous that “the witness having betrayed a lot violence of mood, throughout his cross-examination, was reprimanded by the courtroom”. That, too, was typical of the person who grew to become a frontrunner in London’s working-class radical underworld.
It’s simple to see why Wedderburn had an issue with authority. Born in Jamaica within the early 1760s, he gained his most essential life classes from the rebellious black girls in his life, notably his mom, Rosanna, and grandmother, Amy. His mom had been a women’ maid till his father, the Scottish planter James Wedderburn, had bought her, as Robert later put it, “for functions of lust”.
James abused his authorized standing because the ‘proprietor’ of this stunning and achieved girl to attempt to compel her right into a consensual relationship. She did bear not less than two of his kids however loathed her captor, and was not shy about exhibiting it. Rosanna made James’s life such a distress that he finally bought her on; he additionally signed manumission papers granting freedom to their sons, Robert and James Jr.
That was lesson one: by being obstinate and troublesome, and never shying away from confrontation, even apparently powerless individuals may negotiate a change of their circumstances and safe a greater life for his or her kids.
Robert was despatched to Kingston to be raised by his maternal grandmother, Amy. She was reputed to be an Obeah girl – a healer and religious information with the ability to speak with spirits, therefore her nickname, ‘Talkee Amy’. Wedderburn himself had no time for mysticism, leaving superstition to “foolish Europeans”.
However he all the time remembered that Amy’s ‘proprietor’, a person she had cared for when he was a baby, whipped her mercilessly below suspicion of bewitching his father’s smuggling ship and inflicting him to be captured by the Spanish. That scene – a younger man brutally beating a defenceless previous girl accused of witchcraft and dealing with no repercussions – was seared into the younger Wedderburn’s reminiscence.
Right here was lesson two: he would by no means accede to the ‘respectable authority’ of both faith or legislation – two means utilized by the highly effective to justify trampling on the powerless.
Working-class insurrectionary
Wedderburn labored as a millwright, a sailor and a soldier earlier than crossing the Atlantic and forging a profession as a tailor in England. In 1813, he was implicated in a rip-off involving pilfering extra cloth from the manufacturing of army uniforms. He escaped conviction partly as a result of tailors had been a notoriously tight-knit group, and prosecutors may discover nobody keen to tell on their brother tradesmen.
It was in all probability by means of his commerce membership that Wedderburn first bought into radical politics. Mentored by the famend radical polymath Thomas Spence, he surged to the forefront of London’s militant political scene, rabble-rousing in smoky pub again rooms and setting the world to rights. By the tip of the 1810s, Wedderburn was publishing pamphlets and working his personal debate membership, the notorious ‘Temple of Sedition’ at a chapel in Hopkins Road, Soho.
Some of the distinctive issues about Wedderburn’s politics was his capacity to see the working-class battle in world perspective. Most radicals of his era had been fixated on Britain: how one can enhance situations for British staff, how one can reform the British parliament, how one can save the kids of the British poor from the factories.
Wedderburn addressed all of those points, but in addition noticed the reason for exploited white staff in Britain as inextricably entwined with that of enslaved black staff within the Caribbean and Africa. As he requested his predominately white readership in 1816, “ought to the receivers and stealers of Africans turn into wealthy, and purchase a kind of seats within the Home of Commons, which is bought at noon-day, ought they to be referred to as the consultant of a free individuals? Ought they to be obeyed, when there is a chance to oppose with success?”
He even went as far as to encourage enslaved individuals to stand up and kill their ‘masters’, calling to thoughts the profitable rebellion that led to the institution of the free black nation of Haiti within the former French colony of Saint Domingue: “Put together for flight, ye planters, for the destiny of St Domingo awaits you,” he wrote. “O ye planters, you understand this has been performed; the trigger which produced former bloodshed nonetheless stays – of necessity related results should happen.” No different British abolitionist had beforehand been so daring as to recommend that the enslaved ought to take their freedom for themselves.
Such sizzling rhetoric about rise up within the empire was alarming for the House Workplace, more and more paranoid in regards to the rise of all types of radicalism in the course of the bitter recession that adopted the Napoleonic Wars. However Wedderburn’s home politics had been what actually landed him in sizzling water.
At a debate in 1819, he proclaimed that the Prince Regent deserved to die for failing to guard his topics, shouting: “My motto is assassinate stab at midnight.” He had already made a reputation for himself and, his actions reported by a number of authorities spies, got here below the unforgiving scrutiny of the very highest ranks of the British institution.
In August 1819, the house secretary, Lord Sidmouth, personally wrote to the Prince Regent about “a person of the title of Wedderburne, a infamous firebrand”, reassuring the long run George IV that the troublemaker would quickly be arrested. In February 1820, Wedderburn was convicted of seditious blasphemy for one among his Hopkins Road speeches, and served two years in Dorchester Jail.
Radical abolitionist
Jail proved extraordinarily exhausting for Wedderburn. His hypervisibility as a black man, in addition to his notoriety as an enemy of the state, meant that he was singled out for particularly harsh remedy by the guards at Dorchester. After his launch, Wedderburn’s life was marked by a gradual decline into destitution and vice, together with a number of convictions associated to working brothels.
But Wedderburn remained dedicated to the abolition of slavery. In 1824, he wrote his most well-known textual content, The Horrors of Slavery, wherein he described the injustices confronted by his mom and grandmother. He wrote one other anti-slavery tract, An Deal with to Lord Brougham and Vaux, from a jail cell in 1831.
When he died within the winter of 1834–35, Wedderburn left behind a few of the most uncompromising anti-slavery and anti-racist writing of the nineteenth century. Regardless of each conceivable drawback in life, he led the vanguard of the battle for staff’ rights throughout the empire, no matter color or creed. At its most utopian, his work dared readers to think about a world wherein solidarity, not revenue or self-interest, may decide the course of historical past.
Wedderburn’s remaining descent into criminality and vice varieties a bitter coda to a grittily inspiring story, however in his remaining 12 months he did not less than get to see one among his cherished desires turn into a actuality. On 1 August 1834, after years of uprisings within the Caribbean and activism in Britain, the enslaved celebrated the primary day of their authorized freedom.
Amongst them had been a number of members of Wedderburn’s instant household. He might need derived some satisfaction from realizing that – although he additionally would have understood that authorized emancipation was solely step one. The battle for equality was simply starting.
Ryan Hanley is a senior lecturer on the College of Exeter, and creator of Robert Wedderburn: British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist (Yale College Press, 2025).
This text was first printed within the April 2025 difficulty of BBC Historical past Journal