By Elizabeth Lawal
Mary Prince was born into slavery in Brackish Pond, Bermuda in 1788. Mary and her siblings were raised by her mother until she was twelve, when she was sold for £38 to a new master. She married Daniel James, a slave who had bought his freedom, in 1826. This marriage angered her abusive fifth master John Woods and his wife. In 1828, they brought her to England. After three months of further abuse, Prince left Woods’ household, and sought refuge in the house of her new employer, the abolitionist, Thomas Pringle in 1831. Susanna Strickland wrote her life narrative, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself. It was edited by Pringle. Strickland omitted Mary Prince’s accounts of sexual exploitation before her marriage from the narrative. Nevertheless, when it was published, the public were shocked by Prince’s accounts of flagellation of pregnant slaves, and of her own experience of savage beatings at the hands of her owners.
In Antigua, Mary Prince was a slave. In England, her freed status was less certain. In Smith v Brown and Cooper (1705), Chief Justice Holt ruled that “as soon as a negro comes into England, he becomes free: one may be a villein in England, but not a slave.” Slave owners like Woods who brought their slaves with them to England retained the right to their services, but did not own them as property. Famously in Somerset’s Case in 1772 Lord Mansfield had held that there was no positive law in England permitting slavery. This also meant that a slave’s master could not compel them to return to slavery in the colonies. However, people like Mary Prince, who could no longer be enslaved in Britain, but who did not have the means to support themselves without their ‘masters’, could effectively be controlled by them. James Woods wrote Mary Prince a bad character reference when she left his employment, making it difficult for her to find work elsewhere. In addition, Mary would lose her new status if she returned to her husband in the colonies. In The Slave Grace (1827), Lord Stowell had held that once a slave returned to slave territory, she lost the limited status achieved in England.
Gregson v. Gilbert (1783) (the Zong Case) confirmed that outside of England, slaves remained insurable property. Even after the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act 1807, slavery was not abolished as a status. The new legislation only prevented British ships from entering the slave trade. Butler notes that Britain paid plantation owners millions in compensation because “[t]he British people… should bear the expense of correcting this national wrong by providing slave owners with substantial compensation.” The payment of compensation confirmed that enslaved Africans remained products regulated by the government, rather than people who deserved liberty. Illegal trafficking of Africans continued for many years after 1807, despite the £100 fine for each slave found on ship. Eventually, the 1833 Act abolished the status of slavery throughout the Empire. It was only with that Act that former slaves living in England were free to return to the countries of their birth. The Anti-Slavery Society had unsuccessfully petitioned Parliament for Mary Prince’s freedom (she was the first woman to present such a petition to Parliament), in an effort to change the law that re-enslaved people like Mary Prince on their return to the colonies. The petition failed because of the Woods’ opposition. When the petition failed, it was decided to publicise her life story.
Mary Prince came into contact with the Birmingham Ladies’ Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves while being cared for during an illness. She was living with Thomas Pringle, the Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. The Birmingham Ladies’ Society had been founded in 1825 by Lucy Townsend and Mary Lloyd. It was independent from men’s anti-slavery societies including the national Anti-Slavery society. The Society’s activities were controversial for two reasons. First, as Dabydeen argues, “Birmingham armed the slave trade.” The city was used alongside Liverpool, London and Bristol in the buying and selling of slaves and became key suppliers of trade goods of high importance from guns to shackles which effectively policed the slave trade. Due to the economic power Birmingham gained and the influx of merchants trafficking Africans, the population of Britain began to consider the ill treatment of Africans, and ideas and values began to clash. Slavery became a national debate, not to question the morality of slavery, but to ask the question: “Our ancestors and forefathers have pushed and ultimately died for liberty of all men, why are we now partaking in this inhumane act?”
Second, female abolition activism was controversial. The abolitionist William Wilberforce stated their actions were “unsuited to the female character”, because women were not to be heard or seen in the political sphere. He strongly disapproved of female anti-slavery activists stating that: “for ladies to meet, to publish to go from house to house stirring up petitions – these appear to me proceedings that unsuited to the female character…” Despite his opposition, the controversial topic of slavery mixed with the activists’ lack of political power as women, shocked people and brought attention to their cause. Thomas Pringle’s wife Mary wrote to the Birmingham Ladies’ Society asking for support with her case, describing how she and two other White women had examined the scars of repeated flagellation that ‘chequered’ Prince’s body. It is important to note that the Society requested this examination, to verify that Mary Prince’s narrative was true before they would send any money. Once they were satisfied, they donated money to Prince’s cause and encouraged their members to buy her book. Prince also worked for members of the Ladies’ Society, including Lucy Townsend, before she returned to London, thereby gaining a better reference. It is not known whether Prince ever returned to Antigua.
Mary Prince’s experience can tell us many things about the relationship between gender and the law. The first is that one must be a “good” victim for one’s truth to be verified under the law Mary Prince’s narrative led to two libel cases. The first was brought by Thomas Pringle against a pro-slavery propagandist, who had libelled Pringle and Prince in a letter to Earl Grey, protesting that Mary Prince’s narrative was a humiliation of the Empire. In the second, Wood v Pringle Prince was a witness. Prince’s former employer John Woods successfully sued Pringle for libel; it was held that Thomas Pringle had not properly verified Prince’s story. Correspondence from West Indian slave owners “represented the Woods family as benevolent and liberal owners.” The judge held that “the testimony of Prince was exaggerated.” It is important to remember that members of the judiciary were White, higher class men from rich families (many of whom benefited from the enslavement of Africans), sitting in judgment over the narrative of an uneducated Black female slave. These two groups were on opposite sides of the hierarchy of power. The judge could not possibly understand Prince’s position as a female slave who may have been harassed, raped or otherwise abused. Misogynoir is where sexism and racism meet. Mary Prince dealt with two forms of oppression; the judgment was an exercise in misogynoir.
During the libel trial great emphasis was placed on Prince’s relationships before her marriage. Collins states that slaves were often subjected to “White imaginations of Black hyper-sexuality” often forcing the “Black Jezebel” stereotype upon women. Prince was cross-examined to determine whether there was truth to her “sexual depravity” and “unfaithfulness” to her husband in Antigua – an idea concocted by Woods. It seemed that to be a good victim one must be virtuous, White and under the supervision of a man (either husband or father). The court had to check whether Prince fulfilled the notion of black hypersexuality, to see if she was a ‘good’ victim.
Prince’s story is often omitted from the narrative of emancipation from slavery, in favour of the stories of men like Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho and William Cuffy. Prince’s dialogue, according to Thomas, was “highly controversial” not only because it led to two separate libel cases but also because it showed how enslaved black women interacted with legal institutions. Prince was an activist who resisted the oppression of Black people. However, even within the narrative written by Strickland she is presented as a victim of slavery who needed to be rescued by White saviours like Thomas Pringle.
Sue Thomas points out that Prince did actually relay her sexual experiences to Strickland but these were omitted from the published narrative. This could have been for many reasons, from being too graphic and indecent for the readership of the time, or because Strickland and Pringle needed to present her as virtuous and obedient for her to be believed and for the abolitionist movement to advance. Clare Midgely also points out that Prince wasn’t added to any anti-slavery organisation as a member. “Black agency” in resisting slavery was ultimately “devalued” among abolitionists: formerly enslaved women were not presented as the agents of their own liberation. This is mainly because the activists wanted to “leave class relations undisturbed”. In the book Mary Prince’s narrators make Englishmen the heroes of slave emancipation: she says that she wants Englishmen to understand what slavery is “so that they may break our chains and set us free”. If abolitionists truly understood difference and agency Prince would have been made a member of the Society, she would have been provided with the education needed to forward her cause, and her narrative of sexual oppression would have been published.
Further Reading
Butler KM, ‘The Economics of Emancipation: Jamaica & Barbados’ (1st edn University of North Carolina Press 1995)
Collins Hill Patricia “Black Feminist Thought” (1st edn Routledge 2009)
Harris Clive Dr “Three Continents, One History: Birmingham and the Transatlantic Slave Trade” (1st edn Afro-Caribbean Millennium Centre, 2008)
Hochschild A, ‘Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery’ (Macmillan, 2005)
Gleadle Kathryn & Richardson Sarah “Women in British Politics, 1780-1860: The Power of the Petticoat” (1st edn Palgrave Macmillan 2000)
Prince Mary, “The history of Mary Prince”, Moira Ferugson, The history of Mary Prince, a West Indian slave: Revised Version, ( 1st edn University of Michigan Press 1997)
Prince Mary, “The history of Mary Prince”, Sara Salih, The history of Mary Prince : a West Indian slave, ( 1st Penguin, 2000)
Clare “Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780-1870” (1st edn Routledge 1992)
Oldfield J.R. “Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion against the Slave Trade, 1787-1807” (1st edn Routledge Publishers, 1998)
Articles:
Thomas S, ‘Pringle v Cadell and Wood v Pringle: The Libel Cases over the History of Mary Prince’ (2005) 1 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Theses:
Thomas Alexandra “Agency, Gender, and the Law in Slave Narratives” (Honors Theses, Florida State University Libraries 2014)
Websites/Blogs:
Anyangwe Eliza ‘Misogynoir: where racism and sexism meet’ (Guardian, 5th October 2015) <https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/05/what-is-misogynoir > accessed 12th October 2017
BBC Inside Out ‘Abolition’ (BBC, 7th March 2007) <http://www.bbc.co.uk/birmingham/content/articles/2007/03/03/soweto_feature.shtml > accessed 11th October 2017
Maddison-Macfadyen Margôt ‘Mary Prince’ (N.A) < https://www.maryprince.org/the-slave-narrative > accessed 15th October 2017
N/A “Mary Prince: The Impact of Women in the Colonial Atlantic World” (N/A) < https://womeninthecolonialatlantic.wordpress.com/tag/birmingham-ladies-society-for-relief-of-negro-slaves/ > accessed 15th October 2017
Thomas Sue ‘Libel Cases over; The History of Mary Prince‘ [2005] 40 (1)JCL < https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989405050668 > accessed 15 October 2017