Mary Prince

“Did one of the many by-standers…think of the pain that wrung the hearts of the negro woman and her young ones? No, no! ... Oh, those white people have small hearts who can only feel for themselves.”

Mary Prince (c. 1 October 1788 – after 1833) was a British abolitionist and autobiographer, born in Bermuda to an enslaved family of African descent. After her escape to London, she wrote The History of Mary Prince (1831), which was the first account of the life of a black woman to be published in the United Kingdom. This first-hand description of the brutalities of enslavement, released at a time when slavery was still legal in Bermuda and British Caribbean colonies, had a galvanising effect on the anti-slavery movement.

Mary Prince was born into enslavement at Devonshire Parish. She was one of 6 children born to enslaved parents.  When her father died in 1788, Mary, her mother and siblings were sold as household servants to Captain Darrell. He bequeathed Mary and her mother to his daughter, and Mary became the companion servant of his young granddaughter.

Aged 12, Mary was sold for £38 (Around £4484 today) to Captain John Ingham. Her two sisters were also sold to different masters. Ingham and his wife were cruel and brutal towards their slaves, often beating them for minor offences.  

In 1806, Mary was sold again to an enslaver on Grand Turk in The Turks and Caicos Islands, who owned salt ponds. Although still a child, Mary was forced to work in abysmal conditions in the salt ponds, knee-deep in water. She and her fellow slaves were often forced to work up to 17 hours straight. Women packaged the salt while the men raked the salt themselves - exposed to the sun and heat, as well as the salt in the pans, which ate away at their uncovered legs.

Mary was returned to Bermuda in 1810, where her master had moved with his daughter. While here, she was physically abused by her master, and forced to bathe him under threat of further beatings. On two occasions, Mary stood up to her master’s abuse: once, in defence of his daughter, whom he also beat; and secondly, defending herself from her master when he beat her for dropping kitchen utensils. After this, she left his direct service and was hired out for a time, where she earned money for her master by washing clothes.

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In 1815, Mary was sold a fourth time, to John Adams Wood of Antigua for $300 (now $4600). She worked for him as a domestic slave. However, she began to suffer from rheumatism, which left her unable to work. When her master travelled abroad, she earned money for herself by taking in washing and by selling coffee, yams and other provisions to ships.

In Antigua, she joined the Moravian Church, where she also attended classes and learned to read. She was baptised in the English church in 1817 and accepted for communion, but she was too scared to ask permission to attend. In December 1826, she married Daniel James, a formerly enslaved man who had bought his freedom by saving money from his work. He worked as a carpenter and cooper. According to Mary, her marriage increased her floggings because her masters and his wife did not want a free black man living on their property.

“I have been a slave myself—I know what slaves feel—I can tell by myself what other slaves feel, and by what they have told me. The man that says slaves be quite happy in slavery—that they don't want to be free…is either ignorant or a lying person. I never heard a slave say so. I never heard a Buckra (white) man say so, till I heard tell of it in England.”

In 1828 Adams Wood and his family travelled to London. They agreed to take Mary along as a servant. The 1772 case of Somerset v Stewart ruled that it was illegal to transport slaves out of England. That, however, did not make slavery illegal in England, as was commonly believed. Even if she could leave her master’s household, however, she had no means to support herself alone in England. Unless formally emancipated, she could not return to her husband in Antigua without being re-enslaved there.

Despite ten years of service for the Woods, tensions increased during their time in England. Four times Wood told her to obey or leave. They gave her a letter that nominally gave her the right to leave but suggested that no one should hire her.

Nonetheless, she left the household and sought shelter with the Moravian church. She soon began working intermittently for Thomas Pringle, an abolitionist writer, and Secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society, which offered assistance to blacks in need. She worked for a while in a different household until that cooupe left England in 1829. The same year, the Woods also left England, but refused to free Mary, or allow her to be bought out of his control. This meant that as long as slavery remained legal in Antigua, Prince could not return to her husband without being re-enslaved to Wood. After trying to arrange a compromise, the Anti-Slavery Committee unsuccessfully proposed to petition Parliament to grant Prince's manumission. At the same time, a bill was introduced to free all slaves from the West Indies in England whose owners had freely brought them there; it did not pass but was an indication of growing anti-slavery sentiment.

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‘It was night when I reached my new home. The house was large… the stones and the timber were the best things in it; they were not so hard as the hearts of the owners.’

In December 1829, Pringle hired Prince to work in his own household. He encouraged her to tell her story and she arranged for her life narrative to be transcribed by Susanna Strickland. Pringle edite the book and it was published in 1831 as The History of Mary Prince. The book caused a commotion as it was the first account published in Great Britain of a black woman's life; at a time when anti-slavery agitation was growing, her first person account touched many people.

When Prince's book was published, slavery was still legal in England. Parliament had also not yet abolished it in the colonies. There was considerable uncertainty about the political and economic repercussions that might arise if Britain imposed an end to slavery throughout the empire, as the sugar colonies depended on it for labour to raise their lucrative commodity crop. As a personal account, the book contributed to the debate in a manner different from reasoned analysis or statistical arguments. Its tone was direct and authentic, and its simple but vivid prose contrasted with the more laboured literary style of the day. Prince wrote of slavery with the authority of personal experience, something her political opponents could never match.

Her book had an immediate effect on public opinion, but provoked controversy. A Glasgweigan with a personal business stake in the slave trade in the colonies published an article slandering Prince as a woman of low morals who had been the "despicable tool" of the anti-slavery clique, who had incited her to malign her "generous and indulgent owners." He attacked the character of the Pringle family, suggesting they were at fault for accepting and encouraging Mary’s work.

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In 1833 Pringle sued MacQueen for libel, receiving damages of £5. Not long afterwards however, John Wood sued Pringle for libel as editor of Prince’s book which he claimed generally misrepresented his character. Wood won his case and was awarded £25 in damages. Prince was called to testify in both these trials, but little is known of her life after this.

Prince is known to have remained in England until at least 1833, when she testified in the two libel cases. That year, the Slavery Abolition Act was passed, to be effective August 1834. In 1808, Parliament had passed the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which outlawed the slave trade but not slavery itself. The 1833 law was intended to achieve a two-staged abolition of West Indian slavery by 1840, allowing the colonies time to transition their economies. Because of popular protests in the West Indies among the freedmen, the colonies legally completed abolition two years early in 1838. In Bermuda, which was not dependent on the institution of slavery, emancipation took place immediately on the law going into effect in 1834. If Prince was still alive and in good health, she may then have returned as a free woman to her homeland to reunite with her husband.

If the recent BLM activism has taught me anything, it’s that the British public is often quick to forget its own legacy of and historical dependence on slavery. So often Britain is hailed as a leader of the abolitionist movement and as a progressive nation without racism – both of which are evidently false. Stories such as Mary’s remind us of Britain’s complicity in the slave trade. Her harrowing personal narrative is also a testament to the intelligent and indignancy of black women across the globe who have historically been possibly the most oppressed of all peoples owing to their double prejudices of racism and sexism. For me, it is Mary Prince and those like her whose statues should decorate Britain’s streets and her voice that should be heard in the curriculum and in popular memory, not those who contributed to her abuse.