Black slaves in 18th-century Scotland

From a Sunday Times review of James Robertson's Joseph Knight , to be released by Fourth Estate on April 7:

. . . the massive campaign for abolition, in which Scots would be prominent, did not gather real pace until the 1780s. Slavery, out of sight, thousands of miles away in the Caribbean and North America, could also be conveniently out of mind in the coffee houses of Edinburgh. It took one black man’s appearance in 1778, at the Court of Session, in Parliament House right at the heart of the capital, to bring the Scots face-to-face with their own involvement in the trade in humans. We do not know his original African name, but he is immortalised in the legal records as “Joseph Knight, A Negro of Africa”. . .

Joseph Knight was born about the year 1750, and at the age of 10 or 11 was taken by slave ship to Jamaica, where he was sold by a Captain Knight (from whom he got his new name) to a Scottish planter called John Wedderburn. In 1768, Wedderburn brought him to Scotland as his personal servant.

We know very little about Joseph, but he must have been of determined character: after two or three years he had had enough of being another man’s chattel. Having got one of the housemaids pregnant, he married her against his master’s will, then demanded a living wage to keep his new family. When this was refused, he set off for Dundee to find himself a job. Wedderburn, through his friends the local justices of the peace, promptly had him arrested. . .

In spite of the ups and downs of his own life, Wedderburn considered Joseph an ungrateful Negro whom he had treated well, had educated and Christianised, and who lived a relatively easy life, of which many white Scots could only dream. Among these were the colliers and salters, still held in a state of serfdom, bound for life to the landowners whose coal or salt they worked.

Partial emancipation for these people would come in 1775, but the motivation was not altruistic: the coal field proprietors needed to open up the labour market so the costs of extracting coal could be driven down. In comparison with the backbreaking work of the colliers, or of the Africans he had left behind in Jamaica, Joseph Knight might have been thought a lucky man.

Clearly he did not accept this notion. Supported by lawyers who waived their fees, he appealed successfully against his arrest to the sheriff of Perthshire. When Wedderburn took the case to Edinburgh, Knight refused to give in.

After five years of wrangling, the case was heard before the “haill Fifteen”, the Court of Session, which was then composed of some of the greatest names of Scottish legal history. Among them were Lords Kames and Hailes, both significant figures among the Enlightenment literati, Lord Gardenstone who kept a pig in his bedroom, Lord Monboddo the eccentric philosopher who held, against all contemporary opinion, that humans and apes were related, Lord Braxfield the so-called “hanging judge” on whom Robert Louis Stevenson based his character Weir of Hermiston, and Lord Auchinleck, James Boswell’s father.

Posted by David on April 4, 2003 4:18 PM