The papers of one of the most prominent Irish abolitionists have been handed over to the National Library of Ireland (NLI).
Richard Robert Madden was a vocal opponent of slavery before its abolition across the British Empire in 1833 and then became a special magistrate in the Caribbean to ensure that the transatlantic slave trade was brought to an end.
There were other Irish people who opposed slavery, most notably Daniel O’Connell and Howe Peter Browne, the Marquess of Sligo. Madden is less well known than those two but his influence in highlighting the evils of the slave trade were of profound importance.
Born in Dublin in 1798, the youngest of 21 children, Madden was a doctor and a travel writer before he took up a position as a special magistrate in Jamaica following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Madden’s anti-slavery efforts extended to Cuba, where he served as the first commissioner for liberated slaves and a temporary judge in Havana. Both posts were intended to suppress the international slave trade.
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He also participated in the first World Anti-Slavery Convention in London (1840), as the Cuba expert. Also in 1840, his testimony on behalf of illegally enslaved African people played a crucial role in winning the Amistad case, which ruled that the African people who had revolted on the Spanish ship La Amistad should be freed.
The decision, later upheld by the US, galvanised the abolitionist movement and marked the beginning of the end of slavery in the United States. The events were dramatised in the Steven Spielberg film Amistad, which was released in 1997.
The bound volumes of his writings and correspondence, which include letters written to Charles Dickens and Florence Nightingale, were assembled by Madden’s son Thomas More Madden. The driving force of his father’s life was “an intense love of justice and a hatred of oppression in whatever clime or on whatever race it might be exercised”, he claimed.
Madden was a poet and a prolific writer – he is best remembered for his seven-volume series on the United Irishmen and the 1798 rebellion which characterised the rebellion as a heroic failure.
His writings on the slave trade were also significant.
Keeper of special collections Colette O’Flaherty described Madden as “a great humanitarian and abolitionist” who achieved much in his life.
“He wrote very powerfully on human rights issues which would be called humanitarian issues nowadays. He is somebody from a middle-class Irish background who is taking issue with this profound wrong.”
[ The Dubliner determined to end Irish involvement in the ‘sin of slavery’Opens in new window ]
The acquisition is timely, she adds, because of the Black Lives Matter movement which has focused on the legacy of slavery.
In his writings Madden sought to draw a parallel between the slave trade and the subjugation of Catholics in Ireland which he believed were interlocking parts of the wider problem of oppression, according to the historian Cian McMahon.
Genealogical research which shows that US vice-president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris had a direct ancestor from Antrim who was a slave owner has focused attention on Irish involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. Northern Irish historian Stephen McCracken has revealed Ms Harris’s four-times paternal great-grandfather Hamilton Brown was born in Co Antrim in 1776, the year of the US Declaration of Independence. Brown emigrated to Jamaica, then a British colony, and became an enthusiastic slave owner on the sugar plantations that were the mainstay of the island’s economy.
Brown received the equivalent of almost €11 million in today’s currency in compensation from the British government for his slaves, according to records held by University College London (UCL).
More than 100 people living in Ireland were compensated at the time for the losses they incurred after slavery was banned in the British Empire. One hundred and eighty had Irish addresses.
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