Untold stories: Julia Bush on Bristol Quakers and transatlantic chattel slavery

‘Generations of enslaved Africans laboured to enrich the Dickinson family.’

In 1655, a man called Francis Dickinson took part in Britain’s conquest of Jamaica. He was awarded a land grant for his contribution. He became a Quaker soon after, and thus the Dickinson family in turn became one of several Bristol Quaker families who owned plantations and used an enslaved African workforce. Francis’s eighteenth-century heirs inherited four profitable plantations. Two of his descendants still identified themselves as Quakers even when claiming and receiving government compensation for the abolition of British slavery in the 1830s.

Generations of enslaved Africans laboured to enrich the Dickinson family. An unusually-large collection of family papers in the Bristol and Somerset Archives includes lists of named African men, women and children, recording details of their work and physical condition alongside records of the animal stock on the Dickinson plantations. These painful records are a stark reminder that any true history of transatlantic chattel slavery should be first and foremost a history of African people, rather than merely a history of white slaveholders.

Deeper empathy with an African community struggling to survive on the Dickinsons’ Pepper Penn plantation becomes possible after reading about ‘Neptune, a Boy’ working in the stable; ‘Yellow Mary’ who did the Dickinsons’ laundry; ‘Old Phillis’ who kept the Fowl House; and ‘Mulatto Jenney, Mulatto Sarah and Mulatto Margery’ who worked ‘in the House’. The ‘Field Negro Men’ included London, Bristol, Sampson, Bacchus and Jupiter – reflecting the common practice of ‘humorously’ naming enslaved Africans after British cities or classical heroes, as if to underline their powerlessness and loss of African identity. The ‘Field Negro Women’ included ‘Big Peggy’ and ‘Little Peggy’, ‘Big Damsel’ and ‘Little Damsel’, ‘Big Jenny’ and ‘Little Jenny’ – presumably mothers and (nameless) daughters labouring in the cane fields alongside other African women called ‘Countess’, ‘Fidelia’, ‘Bess’, ‘Rose’ and ‘Prue’. Had ‘Benneba’ and ‘Gabba’ been allowed to keep at least part of their true names? Quite different naming was probably happening in the Dickinsons’ ‘Negro housing’, situated on the swampy banks of Black River.

The Dickinsons were certainly aware of George Fox’s advice to Quaker slaveholders in Barbados to treat their enslaved workers ‘kindly and gently’ by refraining from excessive punishment and promoting Christian worship (this advice was given in a letter to William Willoughby, the governor of Barbados, in 1671). Caleb Dickinson Snr, grandson of Francis, left written instructions along the same lines to his sons and heirs in 1709: ‘To be very careful of my Negroes and kind to them and not work them in the rain nor in the night, nor before day in wet weather on no account… To be always moderate in Correction’. However, there was also an underlying profit motive in his comment that ‘Those Negroes that can’t endure labour I had rather sell them than have them drove, whipped to death or abused so that nobody will buy them.’

Caleb Dickinson Jnr, who inherited the plantations with his brothers, and visited Jamaica in 1757, invested in a British doctor who was sent there the following year with ‘a Compleat Apothecary’s Shop… and medicines of all necessary kinds’. This was not enough to prevent continuous ill-health among the African workforce. A list of enslaved workers from 1805 includes many people suffering from ‘sores’ and ‘yaws’ (a skin condition associated with overcrowding and insanitary living conditions) as well as some described as ‘weakly’ or ‘good for nothing’, and others with ruptures, blindness, venereal disease or missing an arm or a foot.

The Africans on the Dickinson plantations were not simply passive victims, however. In letters to his business associates, Caleb Dickinson commented on the ‘laziness’ of ‘the poor negroes’ and their regrettable ‘practice of skulking and running away’. The 1805 Dickinson inventory for Appleton Plantation included ‘Ivan – run away 10 years since’. One of the many remarkable documents in the Dickinson family papers is a ‘Humble Address and Petition of Free People of Colour to the Assembly of Jamaica’, dated 1792. This document described ‘the various afflixions they suffer and the severities they groan under… they being entirely blameless in regard to their birth and complexion’. An educated minority of Africans were making a determined and eloquent appeal for the protection of British law in Jamaica, in the years which also marked the onset of the nearby Haitian Revolution.

Following in the footsteps of the National Trust, the Bank of England and various universities, Britain Yearly Meeting decided in 2022 to face up to the reality of its involvement in transatlantic chattel slavery. These connections are all around us in Bristol. It was the busiest British slave port in the first half of the eighteenth century and, although Liverpool later took first place, the wealth created by enslavement continued to permeate the fabric of our city and enrich the descendants of those who traded in enslaved Africans and the goods they produced. Bristol’s local heroes until recently included the now-infamous Edward Colston, whose statue was thrown into the harbour by Black Lives Matter activists in 2020. The elegant terraces of Clifton, the Great Western Railway, and even Bristol’s famous suspension bridge, owed some of their funding to slavery profits passed down through the generations.

Where did Bristol Quakers stand, amid this amassing of slavery-based wealth? Many of the most successful Quaker merchants and industrialists owed their fortunes to transatlantic slavery, and we know that some of their money went into building three of the five Bristol Meeting houses. It has not been difficult to find evidence of this from family histories, Quaker records and documents in the Bristol and Somerset Archives. Sadly missing from the surviving historical evidence, however, is an adequate record of the African stories that laid the true foundations for Quaker wealth. This article is dedicated to the African people whose suffering and hard labour made the Bristol Quakers’ comfortable lives and grand Meeting houses possible.

Julia is from Bristol Area Meeting. More Bristol Friends will share further research in the coming weeks.

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