Robert Wedderburn was born in Jamaica in 1762, the son of a white plantation owner and a black slave named Rosanna. He travelled to London as a sailor, and found work as a tailor. When seven years later Wedderburn visited his father on the outskirts of Edinburgh, he was sent away with 'one draught of small beer and a cracked sixpence'.
In 1812 Wedderburn met Thomas Spence and established a journal with the melancholy title: The Forlorn Hope.Government spies who infiltrated the Society of Spencean Philanthropists claimed that Wedderburn had become the leader of the group.
Wedderburn opened a Unitarian chapel in Hopkins Street, Soho.Spies reported that he was making ‘violent, seditious, and bitterly anti-Christian Spencean speeches’.By 1819 up to 200 people were paying 6d. a head to attend debates, and ‘lectures every Sabbath day on Theology, Morality, Natural Philosophy and Politics by a self-taught West Indian’.
In The Axe Laid to the Root, Robert Wedderburn said ‘The earth cannot be justly the private property of individuals, because it was never manufactured by man; therefore whoever sold it, sold that which was not his own.’
Wedderburn argued that a slave had the right to kill his master.Arrested, charged with sedition and blasphemy, he was sent to Newgate Prison, but released when his followers raised £200 bail. Wedderburn came to believe in the necessity of armed uprising.After the Peterloo Massacre he called a meeting at his chapel and declared ‘an act of murder had been committed by the magistrates and yeoman’. The following month he told an audience that the revolution was about to begin and that all working men ‘should learn to use the gun, the dagger, the cutlass and pistols’.His vision was of simultaneous uprising of the poor in Europe and the black slaves in the West Indies.
In 1820 a group of Spenceans gathered in a hayloft in Cato Street, intending to murder members of the government meeting for dinner in Grosvenor Square that evening.Betrayed by spies, the conspirators were arrested – five were executed and five were transported.
Wedderburn opposed the conspiracy, but only because he thought it was premature.Eventually he was charged with blasphemous libel.In court he asked the jury: ‘Where, after all, is my crime? It consists merely in having spoken in the same plain and homely language which Christ and his disciples uniformly used. There seems to be a conspiracy against the poor, to keep them in ignorance and superstition’.
As to my explanation of the doctrines of Christ, I must still maintain it to be particularly faithful.He was like myself, one of the lower order, and a genuine radical reformer.Being poor himself, he knew how to feel for the poor, and despised the rich for the hardness of their hearts.His principles were purely republican; he told his followers they were all brethren and equals, and inculcated a thorough contempt for all the titles, pomps, and dignities of this world.
As nature has blest me with a calm and tranquil mind, I shall be far happier in the dungeon to which you may consign me, than my persecutors, on their beds of down.
Found guilty he was sentenced to two years in Dorchester Prison.On his release Wedderburn continued to campaign for press freedom, against injustice, and for the ideas of Thomas Spence.In 1824 he published The Horrors of Slavery.In 1831, at the age of 68, he was arrested once more and sent to Giltspur Street Prison; four years later he died.
Sources
Martin Hoyles, The Axe Laid to the Root: The Story of Robert Wedderburn2004.
