THE YOUNGEST FREEDOM FIGHTERS
How enslaved children fought back against their oppressors
The most active juvenile abolitionists were, unsurprisingly, enslaved children. Though British abolitionists often depicted these children as passive victims, in fact they commonly resisted their enslavement.
Abolitionist and black British radical Ottobah Cugoano recalled participating in a failed plot to blow up the ship on which he was transported to the Americas when he was around 13 years old. “It was the women and boys which were to burn the ship,” he recalled, “with the approbation and groans of the rest.”
In the British West Indies, children frequently got into trouble with the colonial authorities for insubordination, stealing supplies and alcohol from plantation stores, and using “violent and indecent language” toward enslavers in the streets.
It’s worth remembering that colonial legislatures often gave no fixed definition of a ‘child’ for enslaved people, so there was no guarantee of protection for young offenders from the worst brutalities of corporal or even capital punishment. Research into these everyday forms of resistance by children remains sparse, but it is clear that even fairly common youthful acts of rebellion and testing boundaries – being a normal child, in other words – required tremendous personal bravery for enslaved children.
As historian Colleen Vasconcellos has noted, the terror of the plantation system did not prevent some children from undertaking more serious forms of insurrection. Plantation owner and novelist Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis recorded how one 15-year-old girl named Minetta was put to death in Jamaica for attempting to poison her ‘owner’. And advertisements describing so-called ‘runaway slaves’, including children, abounded in West Indian newspapers.
Intriguingly, enslaved young people brought to Britain by their masters also frequently escaped, as demonstrated by many adverts in British newspapers collected in a new database by researchers at the University of Glasgow (runaways.gla.ac.uk). There was, for example, young Robert “from Jamaica, about 12 Years of Age”, wearing “a blue Coat turn’d up with red, and red Holes”, who ran away from a house in Brentford-Butts in December 1739.
Alone and unprotected in a strange country, these young people risked everything to make a new life. Their bravery ultimately contributed to the economic and moral rationale of the fight against slavery.