One autumn day in 1786, an surprising parcel arrived at Carlton Home, the London residence of George, Prince of Wales. The sender was Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, a free Black man dwelling in London, one in every of roughly 4,000 folks of African descent within the metropolis on the time. Contained in the package deal had been pamphlets describing the horrors of the transatlantic slave commerce and the brutal therapy of enslaved folks in Britain’s Caribbean colonies. The accompanying letter, signed “John Stuart,” Cugoano’s alias, urged the inheritor to the British throne to learn the “little tracts” enclosed and to “contemplate the case of the poor Africans who’re most barbarously captured and unlawfully carried away from their very own nation”.
Africans, Cugoano warned, had been handled “in a extra unjust and inhuman method than ever identified amongst any of the barbarous nations on the earth”.
On the time, Cugoano was employed as a home servant by the trendy painters Maria and Richard Cosway, whose residence stood simply two blocks from Carlton Home. Richard Cosway had just lately been appointed principal painter to the Prince of Wales, and his residence at Schomberg Home on Pall Mall had turn into a gathering place for artists, aristocrats and politicians. Weekly salons and live shows drew members of the very best society – occasions sanctioned by the prince himself. By this employment, Cugoano gained one thing uncommon for a former enslaved man: common, direct proximity to Britain’s elite and to the royal household.
Cugoano used it to full benefit.
Schomberg Home was a monument to social ambition. Its grand drawing rooms opened on to gardens that stretched virtually to the sting of Carlton Home’s personal grounds. Cosway, newly elevated by royal favour, stuffed his residence with lavish furnishings and dressed his Black servant in flamboyant bespoke livery – crimson silk or velvet trimmed with lace and gold buttons. In Georgian Britain, Black servants had been trendy equipment, seen symbols of wealth and imperial attain. Kings, princes, admirals and aristocrats employed them. In portraits of elite households, Black attendants hovered on the margins, holding trays, opening doorways, silent witnesses to English life.
Cugoano, nevertheless, was not silent.
Born round 1757 in a Fante village on the coast of what’s now Ghana, his childhood ended abruptly when slave merchants raided his group. At 13, he was kidnapped, marched in chains to the coast, and compelled onboard a slave ship. He later described the Atlantic crossing as a passage of terror, a “state of horror and slavery”. The ship delivered him to Grenada, the place he was offered and compelled to labour in a plantation slave gang.
After practically two years, his enslaver introduced him to England in late 1772 – simply months after Lord Mansfield’s well-known ruling within the Somerset case, which declared that enslavers couldn’t forcibly take away enslaved folks from England. Although slender in authorized scope, the choice despatched shockwaves throughout Britain. Many believed, mistakenly however hopefully, that touching English soil meant freedom.
Cugoano quickly claimed his liberty. Whether or not he fled or was forged out is unclear, however freedom in London was precarious. Previously enslaved folks had been susceptible to kidnapping and resale. On the recommendation of “some good folks”, Cugoano was baptised at St James’s Church, Piccadilly, adopting the title John Stuart in order that he “may not be carried away and offered once more”. An Anglo-Christian title didn’t assure security, however it supplied camouflage.
Over the subsequent decade, Cugoano discovered to learn and write, turned a religious Anglican, and embedded himself in London’s small however vibrant free Black group. By the mid-1780s, he had joined a gaggle of Black activists calling themselves the Sons of Africa – former enslaved males, sailors and Black loyalists who had supported Britain and George III throughout the American Revolutionary Conflict. Collectively, they wrote letters, printed pamphlets, lobbied MPs and challenged the unlawful seizure of free Black folks in Britain.
One such intervention saved a person named Harry Demaine, who had been recaptured by a Jamaican planter and dragged onboard a ship certain for the Caribbean. Appearing swiftly, Cugoano and one other Son of Africa alerted the abolitionist lawyer Granville Sharp, who secured Demaine’s launch simply minutes earlier than the ship sailed. Demaine later stated that he had deliberate to leap into the ocean slightly than be returned to slavery.
These had been acts of resistance carried out within the shadow of royal energy.
Cugoano understood that abolishing the slave commerce would require greater than rescue missions. It might require the assist – or at the very least the acquiescence – of the monarchy. For generations, enslaved folks throughout the British empire had petitioned the king, believing him to be a distant supply of justice, able to overriding colonial cruelty. Abolitionists, too, recognised the symbolic energy of royal endorsement.
From his publish at Schomberg Home, Cugoano watched the Prince of Wales up shut. He noticed his vainness, his urge for food for reward, his obsession with legacy. And so, when Cugoano lastly wrote to him, he tailor-made his enchantment accordingly.
If the prince used his future energy to finish the “iniquitous visitors of shopping for and promoting males”, Cugoano promised, his title would “resound with applause from shore to shore” and be held “within the highest esteem all through the annals of time”. It was a calculated enchantment to ambition: historical past, glory, immortality.
The next yr, Cugoano despatched the prince a replica of his newly printed e-book, Ideas and Sentiments on the Evil and Depraved Visitors of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. It was the primary anti-slavery treatise written by a previously enslaved African in Britain. He reminded the prince that enslaved Africans had no ambassadors, no formal representatives. Their solely hope was to “lay our case on the toes of your Highness”.
The Prince of Wales saved the e-book, and it nonetheless sits within the royal assortment. He did nothing else.
Cugoano additionally despatched his e-book to George III, adopting a distinct technique. To the king – head of the Church of England – he appealed to Christian responsibility and ethical accountability. Justice and humanity, he wrote, had been the motives behind his work, and certainly a sovereign can be happy to assist the pure liberties of males.
But Cugoano’s e-book didn’t flatter monarchy. It indicted it.
For hundreds of years, he argued, European kings had sanctioned, defended and profited from the shopping for and promoting of African captives. In Britain, the transatlantic slave commerce had not emerged by chance or on the margins of energy. It was formally established by royal authority when Charles II granted a monopoly constitution to the Royal African Firm. Successive monarchs and their households benefited from that funding in slaving. To assert royal innocence now, Cugoano insisted, was a fiction.
The king and his relations occupied essentially the most exalted place in British society. But because the descendants and beneficiaries of England’s first main buyers within the slave commerce, George III and the royal household set a corrupt instance for the nation to comply with. Monarchy didn’t merely preside over slavery; it normalised and legitimised it.
Christian justifications for bondage, Cugoano continued, collapsed beneath scrutiny. Enslavers routinely denied spiritual instruction to the folks they claimed to civilise. Plantation slavery was not benevolent guardianship however a regime of terror. If kings and nations possessed the facility to stop such injustice and refused to behave, how may they count on God’s favour – or escape his judgment?
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