In March 2021, in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matters protests, Edinburgh City Council approved plans to install a new plaque on the Melville monument to Henry Dundas in St Andrew Square, Edinburgh. Part of the text referred to ‘the more than half-a-million Africans whose enslavement was a consequence of Henry Dundas’s actions.’ Now, bitter controversy rages in the Scottish press about the historical accuracy of those words and whether Dundas deserves to be held solely responsible for the evils of continuing the slave trade.
A leading figure in the government of Prime Minister William Pitt, Dundas (later Lord Melville) was Secretary of State for the Home Office, Secretary of War, and First Lord of the Admiralty. He spoke during parliamentary debates on abolition of the British slave trade, including in 1792 when he proposed an amendment for gradual delay when the House of Commons was set to yet again reject William Wilberforce’s proposal for immediate abolition. The year before, the House had comprehensively rejected by 163 votes to 88 Wilberforce’s motion to introduce a similar bill. As a result of Dundas’s intervention in 1792, for the first time the House of Commons voted to abolish the slave trade, but to do so gradually, though there was debate over the eventual end date and it was stalled in the Lords. Final abolition of the British slave trade did not take place until 1807.
The words on the plaque hold Dundas exclusively accountable for this delay, which has been opposed by prominent historians. In the Herald in January 2021, Professor Sir Tom Devine denounced the wording as ‘bad history’ since it presented Dundas as some ‘kind of superman, a titan who single-handedly managed to produce this extraordinary historical result of postponing abolition.’ Rather than blame Dundas, Devine pointed to key political, economic, and military forces that meant no British government ‘would want to get abolition over the line’ in that period.
Those key forces included the violent insurrection of enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue and the immense shock the rebellion caused in British society; war with France and the strategic importance of the West Indies in that conflict; the great economic benefit for Britain derived from the trade in cotton, and for Scotland, dried salted fish; and unrelenting opposition from the House of Lords and King George III.
Writing for the History Reclaimed website, Professor Guy Rowlands also judged the plaque ‘deeply misleading’ and ‘egregiously unfair’ in seeking to make Dundas ‘carry the blame, and carry it alone, for the continuation of the slave trade.’
In contrast, and in line with the wording on the plaque, some historians have attempted to hold Dundas mainly – and in some cases – solely responsible for the delay to abolition. In an article for the Scottish Historical Review, Dr Stephen Mullen writes that Dundas’s insertion of the word ‘gradual’ into the abolition motion, ‘delayed the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade from 1792 until 1807’. In a blogpost he ramped up his claims by asserting he was ‘the great delayer’ and:
‘The activist position (that Henry Dundas delayed abolition) is not one based upon “rewriting history” but the arguments are broadly consistent with the published work of academic historians going back to 1975.’
Edinburgh City Council have a moral duty to amend or remove the plaque as soon as possible
Defending the plaque, Mullen has further alleged on Twitter that historians of slavery and abolition ‘are unequivocal that Dundas delayed abolition. The plaque wording reflects that orthodoxy’.
But my examination of the key works of the historians mentioned by Mullen casts very considerable doubt on his claims and those enshrined in the Edinburgh plaque.
The first problem is Mullen’s misuse of previous scholarship, including his misrepresentation of a statement from the historian Roger Anstey. In The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810, Anstey stated that ‘abolitionists were right to acknowledge Dundas … as the most important cause of the failure of immediate abolition in the Commons in the period up to 1796.’ Mullen, however, elided the words ‘in the Commons’ when citing the historian, and missed Anstey’s other remark that ‘To offer an explanation of the defeat of abolition in the Commons is not, of course, completely to explain the parliamentary failure of abolition.’ For Anstey, these further factors encompassed the arch-conservatism of the Lords, the influence of the French Revolution and the less than effective presentation of the abolition case.
Other historians, such as David Brion Davis, have also pointed out that while Dundas had an influence on the delay, abolition was hardly conceivable at the time due to any number of factors including the anti-abolitionist alliance of the King and royal family, admirals in the navy, commercial West India interests, and landed proprietors.
Some historians have, however, suggested that Henry Dundas mobilised Scottish parliamentarians against a 1796 vote to abolish the slave trade within the year, which failed by 70 votes to 74. Twelve Scottish MPs voted against abolition and one voted for it. According to Mullen, ‘Almost no MPs from Scotland deviated from the committed anti-abolitionist stance of the Scottish manager, Dundas.’
Yet with 45 parliamentary seats in the House of Commons, 31 Scottish MPs did not vote. Dundas was among those who did not cast a vote.
That more Scottish parliamentarians did not vote is surprising in light of the considerable role of Scots in the plantation trades and slave system more widely. As Devine has shown, the impact of slave produced commodities had a more significant impact on Scotland’s Industrial Revolution than England’s.
Why, then, did Henry Dundas fail to mobilise Scottish MPs? Distance from parliament may have been a factor. Part of the answer is also that the vote on abolition was one of conscience on a private bill rather than one run along party lines and loyalties. The extreme volatility of the voting record for and against abolition over the period certainly suggests that Dundas did not in any way have an overwhelming influence over the process and was not the arch controller of Scottish parliamentarians as is suggested.
Many forceful arguments were made by politicians to oppose abolition of the slave trade. They encompassed fears of the ruin of planters, the advantage abolition would give to rival slave trading nations, the supposed benefit of the trade to Africans, and that slavery was not inconsistent with Christianity. Indeed, two-thirds of parliamentary arguments put forward national economic and security issues, reflecting a British society grappling with domestic radical change and the dread of mass risings, radical reform, and social disorder as a result of the French Revolution and associations with slave uprisings. To this we can add the temporary decline of popular enthusiasm for the abolitionist cause. Therefore, although parliament had committed in 1792 to end the British slave trade gradually, politicians made their decisions for or against various ongoing abolition measures within the backdrop of national and international alarms, crises and threats.
David Richardson, a historian who has specialised in research on slavery throughout his long career, has emphasised these factors in his new book, Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and its Abolition. He identified several individuals who did not support abolition of the slave trade including those with West India interests, the monarch and his entourage, and some influential Tory and Whig leaders. For Richardson, this collective hostility meant that abolition as a formal government policy was ‘inconceivable before 1806-7’.
Whatever the merits and realities of the political and social landscape when abolition was debated, the evidence suggests that Dundas’s arguments for gradual rather than immediate abolition of the slave trade could not have decisively influenced voting patterns.
Any consideration of Dundas’s role also needs to take account of developments in the immediate run up to abolition including abolitionists’ alliances and their political approach. William Wilberforce, a leading figure in the abolition cause, but one who also attracted personal opprobrium among some, withdrew from debates in 1806 and 1807, letting other figures assume responsibility for taking charge of the relevant measures.
The first achievement was the passage in 1806 of the Foreign Slave Trade Bill which prevented British ships from supplying slaves to foreign colonies. Then, in early 1807, a motion to end the slave trade was passed first in the Lords and then in the Commons so as to circumvent royal influence. The Slave Trade Abolition Bill was finally passed by a vote of 100 to 36 in the Lords and 283 to 16 in the Commons, making it illegal after 1 May 1807 for Britain to continue its long central involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.
That abolition was a key issue during the 1806 general election and MPs had to convey to their constituents their support or opposition for the cause may have prompted many members to back abolition to ensure they were returned to parliament, as abolitionism became popular again throughout the country. The cause of abolition also benefited from the revolution of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue and its independence from the hated enemy France in 1804 as the new state of Haiti.
Historical realities, then, were much more nuanced and complex in the slave trade abolition debates of the 1790s and early 1800s than a focus on the role and significance of one politician.
Instead, a series of domestic and international factors explain the failure to achieve abolition before 1807 including: defence and security anxieties at a time of international war and slave uprising; opposition to any domestic ‘progressive’ reform for fear of giving comfort and encouragement to the menacing forces of contemporary political radicalism; the critical dependence of the UK Treasury for war revenues from the lucrative Caribbean trades; the intransigence of Wilberforce and his overall poor parliamentary management; the occasional complacency of abolitionists; the influence of the West India interest in the parliamentary debates on abolition; effective stalling tactics in the House of Lords; and the unrelenting opposition of King George III, his political coterie and some ministers of the Crown to abolition itself.
As such, the current text on the plaque beside the statue of Henry Dundas can therefore be considered patently absurd, erroneous, and ‘bad history’. Edinburgh City Council have a moral duty to amend or remove it as soon as possible. Otherwise, it faces the grave charge and opprobrium of falsifying history on a public monument.
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