The Irish lord who broke the slaves’ chains
Barry O’Brien, Jamaica’s Honorary Consul to Ireland, writes about the part played by Howe Peter Browne in the fight against slavery
BEFORE I relocated to the Caribbean in 2008, I, like most Irish people, knew little of the connections between Ireland and Jamaica.
Then I gradually learned interesting facts such as the Irish were first brought to Jamaica in large numbers under the rule of Oliver Cromwell following the capture of Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655.
When I first arrived I was amazed to discover that approximately 25pc of the 3m population of Jamaica has some Irish ancestry. Even knowing this, I still found it strange driving around the capital Kingston to see such place names as Sligo Road, Munster Road, Irish Town and Ulster Road, and to meet many Jamaicans with surnames like Roche, McLaughlin, Crowe, Morrison, Maloney, Harris, Chambers and Garvey. These are legacies of our shared history.
Similarly, I had noticed a small town called Sligoville and wondered about the connection. I knew nothing about the town’s origins or its significance in the fight against slavery in the West Indies until the recent publication of Anne Chambers’s book The Great Leviathan, a biography of Howe Peter Browne, 2nd Marquess of Sligo, 1788-1845.
Sourced from some 15,000 original manuscripts and papers scattered in archives, public and private, around the world, this eight-year mammoth undertaking brings out of the shadows of history, not just the origins of Sligoville but the extraordinary life of the Irishman after whom the town is named.
From Regency rake to liberal abolitionist and reformer, as a youth Lord Sligo lived life at a frenetic pace in Ireland, England, Greece, France, Turkey and numerous places in between.
His story moves from Westport House in County Mayo through wild student days at Cambridge with Byron and the libertine world of Regency London, to the sophisticated salons of Paris. It ranges from horse racing at Newmarket and the Curragh (he was a founder member of the Irish Turf Club) to treasure-seeking and travel with Byron and Lady Hester Stanhope in Greece and Turkey; and takes in a sensational trial at the Old Bailey in 1812 that led to his imprisonment in Newgate. There is a hint of doubleespionage about his life at the court of Joachim Murat, King of Naples and with Napoleon Bonaparte on the island of Elba.
Sobered by his sojourn in jail and by his marriage in 1816 to Catherine de Burgh, with whom he had 14 children, Sligo settled down to the responsibilities of his estate in the west of Ireland. A passionate advocate of Catholic Emancipation, multidenominational education and legal reform, he did his best to alleviate the desperate circumstances of his tenants, aggravated by a rapid rise in population and the ‘curse of sub-division’.
In 1834 Sligo was appointed Governor General of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. As owner of two plantations, which he inherited from his grandmother Elizabeth Kelly, who was the daughter of Denis Kelly, of Galway, a former Chief Justice of Jamaica, the new governor was expected by the planters to be on their side. Sligo’s objective, however, ‘to establish a social system absolved forever from the reproach of slavery’ set them on a bitter collision course.
His voluminous correspondence as governor makes it clear that Sligo found slavery abhorrent. From the flogging of field workers with the dreaded cart-whip, to branding with hot iron and the whipping of female slaves, he ordered the Jamaican House of Assembly ‘to put an end to conduct so repugnant to humanity’.
To restrain the worst excesses, Sligo kept a close eye on the activities of the 60 special magistrates appointed to investigate charges of brutality in the 900 plantations throughout the island.
Much to the derision of their masters ‘he gave a patient hearing to the poorest Negro who might carry his grievance to Government House’. He advocated the building of schools for the Negro population, two of which he built at his own cost on his property. He was the first plantation owner to initiate a wage system for black workers and later, after emancipation in 1838, to divide his lands into farms leased to the former slaves.
The planter-dominated assembly accused Sligo of ‘interpreting the law in favour of the Negro’ and, as he wrote, ‘set out to make Jamaica too hot to hold me’. They withdrew his salary and started a campaign of vilification against him in the Jamaican and British press which resulted in his removal from office in September 1836.
To the black population, however, Sligo was their champion. On his departure from Jamaica they presented him with a magnificent silver candelabrum inscribed: ‘In grateful remembrance they entertain of his unremitting efforts to relieve their suffering and to redress their wrongs…’
On his return from the West Indies, Sligo became an outspoken campaigner for emancipation both in Parliament and in the press: ‘It is treason in Jamaica to talk of a Negro as a free man. The black and coloured population are viewed by the white inhabitants as little more than semi-human…’
One of his anti-slavery pamphlets, discovered by Chambers, Jamaica Under the Apprenticeship System, influenced the ‘Great Debate’ on emancipation held in February 1838 in the British Parliament.
On March 22, 1838, being as he wrote, ‘well aware that it would put an end to the [slavery] system’, Sligo announced in the House of Lords that, regardless of the outcome of the government’s deliberations, that he would free all the black workers on his estates on August 1, 1838, thereby leaving the government with no alternative but to implement full emancipation for all on the same date.
Howe Peter Browne, 2nd Marquess of Sligo from Westport earned an honoured place in the history of Jamaica where he is acknowledged as ‘Champion of the Slaves’ and the town of Sligoville, the first free slave village in the world, bears his name. The Great Leviathan — The Life of Howe Peter Browne, 2nd Marquess of Sligo, 17881845 by Anne Chambers (New Island)