Warped history

I was astonished to learn that the City of Edinburgh Council had restored the controversial Dundas Plaque in St Andrew Square. For whatever reason, the council has chosen to ignore the opinions of leading academic historians and made the elementary mistake of taking a historical event and creating a narrative that simply is out of step with the historical context.

Those attacking Henry Dundas have to address the question as to how a slave-supporting Parliament at that time was ever going to vote for abolition. The motion proposed by William Wilberforce would have faced certain defeat. A previous attempt in 1792 to pass a motion for abolition had been very heavily defeated. Dundas knew perfectly well that Parliament was packed with members who had strong vested interests in the slave trade. It would take years for the force of the moral argument against the vile trade to have any chance of success.

There were other serious matters for Dundas to contend with. Britain was then at war with revolutionary France and was faced with the real prospect of invasion. Furthermore, the British establishment was terrified that the success of the French Revolution might inspire similar uprisings in the UK. The country was in turmoil and it fell to Dundas to try to restore order at home and to meet the French threat.

During the debate in 1792 Dundas, determined to keep the issue on the statute book, proposed a gradual path to abolition stating: “My opinion has been always against the slave trade.” Indeed it was Dundas who had taken on the case of the West Indian slave Joseph Knight in 1777 which successfully established that there was no slavery in Scotland.

So it is quite wrong to state that Dundas was fighting a rear-guard action against abolition and that he alone was responsible for condemning some 420,000 Africans to the horrors of slavery.

Eric Melvin Edinburgh