DRAKEFORD ORDERS SLAVE TRADE AUDIT
The stories of Jessie Donaldson and Willis, a slave who found his freedom in Swansea, were almost forgotten to history, but one historian’s tireless work has captured them. John Cooper reports
APAINTING of a hero of Waterloo is the first in the Queen’s Royal Collection of art to be amended to include his links to slavery.
Historic details of the portrait of Sir Thomas Picton have been changed with a reference to his connection to torturing a slave girl when he was known as the “Tyrant of Trinidad”.
The public notes for a painting of Picton hanging at the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle have been altered in the wake of the Black Lives Matter campaign.
Picton was revered for generations as the most senior British soldier to be killed defeating Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.
But campaigners say his links to the horrific slave trade should be highlighted – and a call has been made to remove a grand statue of Picton from Cardiff’s City Hall to be replaced with a memorial to a 14-year-old slave girl he tortured.
Lieutenant-General Picton was the highest-ranking British officer killed at Waterloo after Duke of Wellington called him “a rough foulmouthed devil as ever lived” but “very capable.”
Picton’s is the first to be amended in The Royal Collection Trust which has a 250,000- strong art collection includes exhibits at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.
It now reads: “Picton’s punitive administration of Trinidad and his subjects’ enforced adherence to strict penal codes were the subject of contemporary controversy in Britain and the West Indies.
“He was brought to trial in London in 1806, accused of carrying out torturous practices in jails under his jurisdiction.
“He was later partially exonerated, on the grounds that while he had committed illegal acts not befitting his role as military governor, the right to torture prisoners was recognised under the Spanish laws still enforced at the time.”
It is known as the largest art collection in the world and it is considering altering other notes online and at exhibitions.
A trust spokesman said: “In terms of other records, work is under way within our curatorial teams to improve and update them, which will happen in the coming weeks and months” Sir Thomas was convicted convicted of ordering the illegal torture of 14-year-old Luisa after she accused of stealing.
He admitted to the charge but the conviction was later overturned. He returned to Britain and was a sitting MP when he was killed by the Napoleon’s troops in 1815.
Dr Douglas Jones, of the National Library of Wales, said: “Picton admitted ordering the torture, but claimed that it was legal under the Spanish law still being administered in Trinidad at the time, despite the island being under British rule.”
Dr Jones said Picton’s governorship was “authoritarian and brutal” as he increased the number of lashes given to slaves and authorised executions. A campaign has now been launched to remove Picton’s marble statue from pride of place in a City Hall to be replaced with a memorial to Luisa Calderon.
Dan De’Ath, the first black Lord Mayor of Cardiff, called for the monument to be removed from an array of the heroes of Wales in the council’s Marble Hall. He said: “I feel that it is no longer acceptable for Picton’s statue to be amongst the “Heroes of Wales” in City Hall.”
An open letter to the leader of Cardiff council calls for the statue of Sir Thomas Picton to be replaced with a memorial to his most famous victim.
Council leader Huw Thomas is also backing calls for the sculpture to be taken down from Cardiff City Hall next to the other Welsh heroes.
Elsewhere, a 25-metre tall monument to Picton has stood on the outskirts of Carmarthen town centre since 1888.
Picton Arcade shopping mall in Swansea also received a backlash, and following calls to rename it, owners took action and removed the signs on Thursday, July 2.
And at the three-storey Haverfordwest town house where Picton was born, a plaque marking the spot was removed in June after fears it could be the target of attacks.
Mayor of Haverfordwest Sue Murray believes the plaque should go on display at Haverfordwest Town Museum from next year.
Picton, born in Haverfordwest, is still the only Welshman to be buried at St Paul’s Cathedral.
ACHANCE discovery made by a historian “ploughing through” old newspapers has revealed incredible stories from the era of slavery in the United States.
Swansea teacher Jessie Donaldson was an active anti-slavery campaigner during the 19th century.
At the time, Swansea had one of the largest and most active abolitionist campaigns in Wales, but Jessie would go one step further than simply campaigning from thousands of miles away.
Born in Bristol in 1799, she was the daughter of anti-slavery campaigner Samuel Heineken and picked up her father’s mantle in opposing slavery throughout her 90-year life.
As well as being a vocal supporter of the abolition of slavery from her home in Wales, Jessie, who taught at a school in Wind Street, moved to Ohio in the United States in 1854 to set up a safe house on the ‘underground railroad,’ a network used by slaves in the south to escape to freedom in the north and Canada.
It took historian and founder of Jazz Heritage Wales Jen Wilson 10 years to piece Jessie’s story together, starting with one of several what she calls “eureka” moments searching old newspapers at the library.
“I’m a cultural historian and I was tracing how African-American music had first come to Wales,” she said.
“I was ploughing through the Cambrian News and something caught my eye. There was one section with a gap around it and blacker print than the rest of the page.
“It said that a Mrs Donaldson had died [in 1889] and that was highly unusual because women’s obituaries did not appear in papers then at all.
“The first two-thirds were about her father, of course, but the final paragraph said ‘Mrs Donaldson died at nearly 91 and lived in America for 10 years and ran safe houses for runaway slaves.’ I was gobsmacked. If a historian gets one eureka moment this was mine, but then it was followed by a second.”
Trawling through the pages of The Cambrian again later in her research, Jen found another incredible story linking Swansea with slavery in the
United States.
In February 1833 a 21-year-old man known only as Willis – the name he was given on the American plantation where he had been enslaved – docked in Landore, Swansea, aboard a copper ore carrier called the St Peter.
Willis had stowed aboard the vessel in New Orleans where the ship had stopped for supplies after picking up its cargo of Chilean copper ore bound for Swansea.
“It must have been good luck that he stowed away in that particular ship. He hid in the hold and one of the seamen found him and took him to the captain,” said Jen.
“The captain told him he would have to work his passage back to Swansea and the lad helped the cook in the galley and worked his way back to Landore.”
Willis was born on a southern plantation in 1813 and had made a perilous 800-mile journey down the Ohio River to make his escape.
Jessie Donaldson would later built her safe house next to the River Ohio, helping slaves cross from one bank to the other.
“The Portreeve [port warden] at Swansea set him free right there at the dock. There was no discussion or committee meetings about it with the council, even though some of the crew weren’t sure if he should be freed. The captain gave him a couple of sovereigns, enough for about two weeks accommodation, and that was it.”
The Slavery Abolition Act was passed in the British Parliament in August 1833, just months after Willis’ arrival in Swansea, abolishing slavery in most British colonies.
The trail on Willis goes cold after that, except for a newspaper article which Jen thinks might suggest he stayed in Swansea.
It is a story about well-known characters in the city, published when Willis would have been in his 80s, and mentions an old black man who was known for sitting on a wall in Northampton Lane.
He would nod, smile, and wave at passers-by and tell them: “I used to be a slave.”
Jessie’s story took another turn when Jen’s son moved to the US, by coincidence to Cincinnati, near to where the Donaldson’s safe house was.
When visiting her son Jen trawled through the records at a local museum. “This is where I found out the American side of her story,” she explained. “The people at the museum couldn’t understand what I was saying because I was talking so fast and waving Jessie’s obituary at them.
“They said ‘slow down ma’am’ and after I told them the name they said: ‘We have a Mrs Pat Donaldson who comes in here quite a lot tracing her family history actually.’
“I asked if it was possible to meet her. They rang her up and she said: ‘I’m coming over.’”
Jen and Pat formed a friendship and Jessie Donaldson’s descendant filled in the blanks for Jen, sharing incredible images taken from Jessie’s safe house in the 1800s.
The house, named Clermont by Jessie, was one of three safe houses set up by the Donaldson family along the Ohio River in the 1800s.
One of them, called Penmaen after a farm owned by the family, is still standing today.
Jessie and her husband Francis returned to Swansea in 1866 and she died there in 1899 at the age of 90.
Her incredible story was almost lost to history, but it is now known that she played a major part in the freeing of slaves and knew the abolitionist and former slave Fredrick Douglass among other key figures in the American anti-slavery movement.
The grim truth is that there were many slave owners of Welsh origin and 15% of African-Americans are believed to have Welsh-sounding surnames today.
It was recently revealed that slavery was widely used in the copper industry, of which Swansea was one of the world’s biggest players, particularly in South America.
However, Jen and others are calling not for statues to be pulled down but for some sort of memorial to Jessie and Willis to be placed in Swansea to immortalise their story.
“It’s an opportune time to do this. Jessie deserves a plaque and after that we’ll try and get funds for statues of Jessie and Willis down on the docks. It would be fantastic but that’s down the line somewhere,” she said.
■ You can read the stories of Jessie and Willis in Jen’s book Freedom Music: Wales, Emancipation and Jazz 1850-1950 which is available from University of Wales Trinity Saint David Press