Update on the Historical Research of the Rev. Richard Price, The Newington Green Meeting House and connections to the Atlantic Slave Trade (by David Walter)
I was asked to do some research for a project on the Rev. Richard Price’s Abolitionism and the Atlantic Slave Trade (A.S.T.), I was introduced to three articles by my Project Supervisor Amy Todd. Two of the articles was written by Anthony Page, and one by Katie Donington.
In my research between the CLR James Library, the Metropolitan London Archives (M.L.A.), and the British Library, I found the name of Reverend Richard Price signed at the end of a letter written to John Walsh Esq. The name of John Walsh took me beyond the context of the Atlantic Slave trade and crossed the boundaries into the history of India, the British Empire and back to the evolution of British Society through the rise of the Middle Classes in the 18th Century.
This letter is the only solid evidence, of the Rev. Richard Price’s association with British imperial expansion, corporate colonial exploitation and the exploitation of common land across the British Isles.
The Rev. Richard Price was appointed as Minister of the Newington Green Meeting House in 1756 or 1758 to 1770. The Rev. Price's other talents included his role as an Actuary, and Economist, a respected Mathematician and Statistician, a pioneer in life insurance and a Fellow of the Royal Society who as a contemporary of Thomas Bayes, both were pioneers in Conditional Probability.
However, Richard Price's role as an Actuary, was most probably sorted after for his skills in determining risks and assessments in the lucrative land sales and overseas trade, when dealing with Merchants, as well as his position as a Unitarian Minister, for reasons of prestige, as most of these Squires and Merchants were also pillars of their societies in their Rural and Urban communities.
I suspect that the Rev. Richard Price may have helped Sir John Walsh in acquiring land and property in Worcestor and Pontefract in England, and in Radnorshire in Wales, to own some 'Rotten Boroughs', in order to cement his power as an M.P., but there needs to be more research.
Therefore, Price’s Roles as Minister, Abolitionist, and as a Professional Financial Advisor, was not just historically connected to the Meeting House, but also to the economic power of the British Empire in the West, he was also involved in perpetuating the rise of a powerful and politically savvy population of Landed Gentry.
Newington Green had become a powerhouse of not just the Merchant Class but also a financially influential Squirearchy, financed by the wealth from the international expansion of the British Empire, and therefore the Rural Country Gentleman such as Sir John Walsh Esq., would rise to political power in the British Parliament to influence legislation.
The 18th Century is very much a man’s world. Before Mary Wollstonecraft, Feminist thought in any form, never had widespread political influence amongst the consciousness of wider populations because of illiteracy and the structure of rural society. Most feminist philosophy was written by Aristocratic women, who wrote for their clichés and the privileged literal classes.
Displayed in the small hallway of Newington Green Meeting House is a photograph of a legal document handwritten in ink on a parchment on behalf of Rebecca Harrison in acquiring land from Richard Lyford.
The 18th Century society was a mixed bag of class privileges and legal restrictions for women, depending on her Class or social status, it was not unusual for a countess to outweigh the privileges of a country gentlemen when it came to getting single rooms or getting a seat at the Theatre. But nevertheless, the dangers of destitution, violent marriages (domestic violence), mental ill health, and death from childbirth, across class and ethnic lines were of a great concern in Women’s lives, as the lives of Anna Letitia Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft attest.
The difficulties of connecting earlier congregants of the Newington Green Meeting House (N.G.M.H.) to the Atlantic Slave Trade (A.S.T.), especially in the context of Slavery Compensation Payments, is that members of the Newington Green congregation may have died before claiming any compensation so won’t be recorded in the compensation lists. The Women in the Newington Green Congregation were not necessarily plantation or slave owners and because of high mortality rates, may not have necessarily mean they would be registered on the compensation lists if they died before receiving their payments.
In the context of the British involvement in the Atlantic Slave Trade, the Black presence in the UK and Hackney specifically, can be best described as incidental, But Joanna Vassa, the daughter of Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa), Self-emancipated Abolitionist, and Author of ‘The Interesting Narrative Of The Life Of Olaudah Equiano’ published in 1789 , and Dido Elizabeth Belle, the Niece of Lord Mansfield (William Murry, 1st Earl of Mansfield), who made his historic judgement in The Somersett Vs Stewart case in 1772, were both famous examples of Black Women who lived in the vicinities of N16, N4, and NW3.
Even though Mary Wollstonecraft was an editor for Olaudah Equiano’s Autobiography, I have yet found no evidence that Olaudah and his Wife Sarah Cullen was ever invited to the Meeting House, or his daughter Joanna Vassa paid any visit to Newington Green Meeting House despite living in the same vicinity in Stoke Newington and the Meeting House itself.
In Katie Donington’s ‘Local Roots/Global Routes: Slavery, Memory, and Identity in Hackney’ she states that
‘One of the most surprising results of the analysis of the compensation records is the fact that approximately 40 per cent of the 46,000 claimants were women. The practice of using enslaved people in settling annuities on unmarried women, as part of marriage settlements and direct inheritance, meant that female slave ownership was common.’ Katie Donington, Local Roots/Global Routes: Slavery, Memory, and Identity in Hackney, p.188.
She identified Sarah Grey, Ann Harvey, Mary Burman, Anna Maria Lucas as women who received compensation by way of inheritance from their deceased father, male sibling, or husband, and continued to propagate their wealth by continuing to invest in the British plantations in the Caribbean to maintain.
The problem with researching the names of ordinary people, is the inconsistency of listing people’s names especially those of Women Children or enslaved People.
There is also the historical context of legal restrictions put on marginalized people in Britain in the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, which allows institutions to neglect the listing of people’s names, because of class, gender, race or marriage status.
I am currently widening my scope by visiting the National Archives in Kew, but I will go back to the British Library, the Metropolitan London Archives, and the CLR James Library.
The Problem of connecting the NGMH with the Atlantic Slave Trade is the lack of a paper trail, administrative or financial, that directly connects to ordinary congregant’s business dealings with plantation owners, Merchants or Institutions dealing with processes of enslavement or the running of plantations or trading in good produced from those Caribbean plantations.
Unfortunately, it took me a while to realize that the documents that are most important in connecting NGMH Congregants to the Slave trade is through their Last Wills and Testaments.
Last Wills and Testaments was a way a person (Testator) who created a will to distribute wealth as well as settle debts after their death. The person who was chosen to bear witness and/or distribute the wealth according to the deceased wishes was known as the Executor (or Executrix), as both men and women could be delegated on behalf of the deceased.
In the list I have compiled, I have made a list of women who attended the NGMH. Two I have found from my research is Mrs. Russell and Mrs. Heggs who had bequeathed money to the Meeting House through their Executors in the 1740. I will assume that the Meeting House received the donations after they had passed away.
My research has told me more about what was absent as to what was there to find:
That as stated to me by a very helpful member of staff at the Metropolitan Archives, that Wills and Testaments made by British women in the 18th century is a very rare occurrence, despite female slave ownership being common across the U.K.
Because of the Property laws in 18th Century Britain, it was men who had the power to dictate whether women could inherit money and property after their deaths. And because 40% of 46,000 slave owners were women, both married and unmarried women had access to the lucrative Atlantic Slave Trade and the British Plantations in the Caribbean.
There are 13 women who lived in Hackney, who had dealings with the Atlantic Slave Trade, most likely as Claimants or Beneficiaries.
Despite, Rev Richard Price’s Abolitionism, together with his pro revolutionary principles, he continued to work with Merchants who were involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade, and continued to deal with the increasingly powerful Squirearchy, a rural middle-class aristocracy, that built its wealth from the colonial ventures around the world.
In my research on the women who attended the Newington Green Meeting House, the laws made it very difficult for women to make legal wills and testaments, so it was very difficult to prove whether, any of the female congregation gave funds to the Meeting House itself, if they did, it was on an unofficial basis.
The Atlantic Slave Trade, was one of the foundations for imperial world economy, and the engine and fuel for the economic and military power of the British Empire and a singular letter written by the Rev. Richard Price R.S. to Sir John Walsh, proves that abolitionists were not just successful in making British participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, obsolete, it also changed the outlook of the British Merchant class and Gentry who were dealing in economics of Slavery when trading on the West African coast and the British Caribbean plantations, and turned their gaze to South Asia, specifically India, after the British Victory over Napoleon Bonaparte and the loss of the British American Colonies in the American War of Independence in 1776.
We can bring together Asian and African history in the context of the gradual decline of the Atlantic Slave trade and the increasing needs of the abolitionist movement in spreading their Protestant Christian faith through the expansion of British Colonialism especially in the 19th century.
This blog is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It was made by New Unity and David Walter. Find out more: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.