1832 Richard Hill writes from Haiti to the Anti-Slavery Society in London

 

In 1840 Her Majesty’s Government in London offered the post of Lieutenant-Governor of St Lucia to Richard Hill who declined. In 1834 he had been appointed as one of Jamaica’s new stipendiary magistrates tasked to adjudicate disputes between masters and the ex-slave class of apprentices which Parliament had created when it abolished slavery in the colonies. By 1840 he was in charge of the entire team of magistrates, sometimes numbered at forty and sometimes at sixty, and was the link person between them and the Governor. He remained in post until his death in 1872. Born in 1795 he was the son of a Montego Bay merchant who was White and a woman of mixed African and Indian descent; the son therefore counted legally, in the language of the time, as Free Coloured. 

Richard Hill self-portrait circa 1859

His father, also called Richard Hill, was a committed abolitionist who decided that the best thing he could do for his son was send him to England to be educated. The son left at the age of five, lived with members of his father’s family in Lincolnshire, and completed his education at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School in Horncastle. He returned to Jamaica perhaps only shortly before his father’s death in 1818, an event which left him responsible for sorting out complicated and failing business finances and for the well-being of his two sisters, Ann and Jane. He never married.

He became politically active and from no later than 1823 took part in campaigns to enshrine in law equal rights for Free Coloureds. But in 1826 he set out on travels which took him to Cuba, the USA, Canada, and then to England where in 1827 according to his early biographer, Frank Cundall, “The petition from the people of color of this island to the House of Commons for the removal of their civil disabilities, was entrusted to Hill, who upon the occasion of presenting it was permitted "within the bar" of the House. On that occasion Canning delivered his last speech a splendid effort in favor of the petitioners”. 

Hill stayed on in England, speaking and writing against slavery, and joined in the activities of what is usually called the Anti-Slavery Society but which on paper had a variety of more cumbersome titles. That society decided in 1830 to fund him to travel to the republic of Haiti, at that time comprising the whole island of Hispaniola, to report on the success, or otherwise, of the only Caribbean post-slavery society. They hoped to secure evidence which would refute anti-abolitionist claims that economies without slavery were doomed to failure. Hill’s travels in Haiti were extensive and included researches into its natural world and natural resources. 

Part of Hill’s correspondence from his time in Haiti is now in Oxford’s Bodleian Library and excerpts have been published online but this letter appeared in a 2025 auction, misdescribed as a “Missionary Letter”. He writes from Jacmel on the southern coast of Haiti, close to Jamaica, and the island’s main trading port. It may be that the letter’s sharp rebuke to the limited imagination of the Anti-Slavery Society’s committee members led to it being put away in a different drawer. There is no docketing note such as is usually present on filed correspondence. 

Matters worsened on Hill’s return when he discovered that the Society had defaulted on a commitment to provide (out of his own remuneration) regular financial support for his sister Jane who was with him in England. For this and other reasons he cut his connection with the Society though maintaining contact with individual members – the letter singles out the Clapham Sect’s Zachary Macaulay (father of Thomas Babington Macaulay) in a sympathetic sentence. His later successful career in colonial Jamaica included that offer of a Lieutenant-Governorship suggests that he was neither lacking in ability or over-inclined to be difficult; by inference his grievance with the Anti-Slavery Society most likely had some justification.

The Bodleian letters provide evidence of Hill’s deep interests in the natural world and not exclusively in relation to agricultural potential; later in life he wrote extensively on natural history and collaborated with Philip Henry Gosse (the father of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son) on The Birds of Jamaica (1847). The title page of the original edition credits authorship to Gosse but immediately adds “Assisted by Richard Hill Esq of Spanish-Town”; this credit is not always preserved in later editions. As a result of his collaboration and friendship with Gosse, Hill corresponded with Charles Darwin on several topics and supplied him with Jamaican bees and detailed notes on them. The Darwin Correspondence Project has transcribed the text of five letters from Hill to Darwin.

All this (and more) causes me some surprise to discover that Richard Hill does not have a full-length modern biography; the last full-length study appears to be that written as an inaccessible doctoral dissertation by Marlene Manderson-Jones in 1973.  It is, I think, an index of relative neglect that he currently exists online as both “planter” and “former slave”. 

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Transcription

Addressed to: Thomas Pringle Esqr 18 Aldermanbury London [address of the Anti-Slavery Society] per [ship] Birmingham. Landed at Liverpool; London arrival postmark 21 April 1832

Datelined: Jacmel. February 29 1832 / Haiti

My dear Sir

I yesterday received your Communication apprizing me of “the resolution” of your Committee commanding my immediate return to England. In complying with it, you must be aware, that it is not easy in a Country like this in which almost all communication with you is circuitous, either through America or the Continent of Europe and that at not very rapid intervals, to find a ship at a week’s notice. I promise you however to take all my measures with a view to the most speedy arrival with you. 

You intimate to me that my stay here has been too protracted already. As the resolution does not state the reasons which have led to my recal so hastily I am left to conclude that there may be in it some displeasure at the supposed slowness with which I make my journeys. I can only say that though my Christian belief is quite as strong as the generality of mens I have not that faith which can remove Mountains. My path is frequently a flowery one but it is any thing but smooth – and however the speaking of many tongues may be a sign of the Millenial age commencing in the world, that portion of it in which the crooked ways are to be made straight has not yet begun [written over commenced] in Haiti. Persons who can know nothing of the difficulties of travelling, but from what they feel in the inconvenient length and breadth of a mail Coach, or the slowness with which horses are changed by the way side Inn have no means of judging my speed. I can tell you however that people here are surprized I should have gone in the space I have done in the course of 15 months. From June to October was incessant rain, and yet I was travelling. From January to June, a killing drought, yet I was riding frequently fifty miles a day. My poor animals have been taught to eat all sorts of food, and I to endure all sorts of calamities, and if among these I am in the end to count the mistrust of friends  - such too, as boast commiseration for their fellow men beyond men in general, well then, my measure of evils is accomplished, and the wave that puts me on your shores again, will be an ebbing Tide to me. 

I have not received the letter you speak of. The present one is the next date after the one of May to which I replied last month, immediately after it was handed to me. I can see by the date of the present Communication, that you have put your letters in the post office for the wrong packet [boat], that is the first Monday in the month instead of the third, in which case Government frequently despatch the letters by ship [that’s to say, not by a regular Royal Mail packet service], though scarcely think, that this will account for any failure in their transit.

I sincerely hope Mr Macaulay’s health will be found reinvigorated with the coming Spring. I can see that to an active mind, he has been adding of late an anxious heart under domestic affliction [Zachary Macaulay’s wife Selina Mills died in 1831]. Do present my best wishes to him.

With respects as usual    Believe me     Yours faithfully & obediently   

 Richard Hill

To Thomas Pringle Esq 18 Aldermanbury London

References

Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MSS. Brit. Emp. s. 18, C1

Manderson-Jones, Marlene   Richard Hill of Jamaica: his life and times, 1795-1872 (University of Jamaica, doctoral dissertation, 1973).  I have not seen this work.

Cundall, Frank “Richard Hill”, Journal of Negro History, Vol 5, Nr 1 (1920)

Hanley,  Ryan Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing c. 1770-1830 (2019)

Wikipedia: Richard Hill (activist)