In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, Edinburgh City Council drew up plans to install a plaque on the monument to Henry Dundas in St Andrew Square. The text accused Dundas of conspiring to delay the abolition of the British slave trade and that his actions led to the enslavement of more than half a million Africans.

From the start, the initiative proved controversial. Scotland’s leading historian Professor Sir Tom Devine of the University of Edinburgh dismissed it in withering terms as the decision of a ‘kangaroo court’ and a ‘loaded jury’. Not a single historical expert in the field was consulted at the time or since. This was undeniably a political job and not one grounded in any analysis of complex historical evidence.

Now the plaque has gone and the reputation of the council has been further sullied by the disclosure that it seems to have played fast and loose with the legal process of installation by failing to consult owners in St Andrew Square before proceeding with its plans.

However, the basic question remains: how much historical foundation is there to the claim that Henry Dundas delayed abolition of the British slave trade in the later 18th century? My research concludes that the text of the plaque and surrounding information boards are nothing other than bad history.

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When Henry Dundas spoke about abolition in the House of Commons in 1792, he did so a year after William Wilberforce’s proposal to end the slave trade was overwhelmingly defeated and at a time when a second abolition motion was again set to fail. Dundas therefore proposed an amendment to the abolition motion: that it be terminated gradually. The gradual motion received support and was the first slave trade abolition motion to pass in the Commons.

Critics of the 1792 motion proposed by Henry Dundas to gradually end Britain’s slave trade assert that it was designed to delay abolition and ensure the trade would endure forever. This is a gross error. The gradual motion included a 7.5 year timeframe to end all slave trading by British people, companies, and ships. But it also set out to achieve the immediate abolition of Britain’s slave trading with foreign territories. This part of the agreement alone would have ended almost one-half of Britain’s slave trading.

The compromise of a 7.5-year timeframe for gradual abolition to Britain’s territories followed negotiations with two implacable positions: those advocating for immediate abolition (who would accept a 5-year delay) and those seeking to continue the trade (who sought a minimum 10 years of further trade).

Dundas and others advocating for abolition not only had to contend with powerful slaving interests, but opposition from members of the House of Lords and the royal family. Indeed, a recent article in the journal English Historical Review by Professor Suzanne Schwarz outlines opposition to abolition among some members of the royal family, including the King, along with other obstacles that those advocating for any form of abolition had to confront at the time.

The Herald: The Henry Dundas plaqueThe Henry Dundas plaque (Image: free)

Seeking West Indian planter cooperation for abolition was therefore considered vital and all the more pressing since Britain faced the potential loss of its Caribbean colonies if the slave trade was abolished immediately, an outcome that was anathema to King George III who still bitterly recalled the loss of Britain’s 13 American colonies nine years earlier. The King also had the right to veto any proposed legislation. In the face of such considerable opposition, Dundas’s proposals therefore sought gradual abolition, not a delay in ending the slave trade.

Evidence from untapped original sources that I have recently unearthed further indicates that the 1792 motion for gradual abolition found support among prominent abolitionists, some of whom were directed to consult with Dundas. Leading abolitionist William Wilberforce, whose petition campaign had been open to gradual abolition, also admitted that developments were more favourable than he had expected.

Additional new evidence from representatives of slave owners shows that they deplored any attempt at abolition, either gradual or immediate. One of those representatives, a West India agent for Jamaica in London vowed in 1794 to defeat both forms of abolition. That representative is also on record in the 1790s as stating that planters owed defeat of the attempt to abolish the slave trade to George III.

A further problem with the plaque is that it fails to take into account the wider geopolitical events during the decade which meant any form of abolition, immediate or gradual, had no chance of succeeding during the 1790s. As well as Britain’s titanic global conflict with France, the impact of the French and Haitian revolutions undermined all progressive reforms and proposals in the United Kingdom. Public support for abolition also fell away. Abolition of the slave trade was only achieved in 1807.

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It is also important to note in relation to the 1792 gradual motion that Dundas began by suggesting that both slavery and the slave trade be abolished. Denounced by some politicians at the time, including leading advocates of immediate abolition, later abolitionists came to rue that they had not endorsed Dundas’s initiative.

Quite apart from issues surrounding the wording on the plaque, it also appears that Edinburgh City Council acted improperly in attaching it to the Melville monument. The council has been accused of installing the plaque without proper notification to the owners of the monument and has not denied this. It is also worth remembering that Edinburgh City Council’s Development Management Sub-committee voted in March this year to approve removal of the plaque.

It will be a long time before Edinburgh City Council recovers from the humiliation it has suffered both nationally and internationally from this fiasco.

Angela McCarthy is Professor of Scottish and Irish History at the University of Otago, in Dunedin, New Zealand, and author of three peer-reviewed research articles in the academic journal Scottish Affairs on the Dundas plaque controversy.