Black History Month in the UK in October is a time for reflection, education and celebration. One 18th century figure who appeared in a number of articles last month is Joseph Knight. In this month’s blog post we find out about Samuel Johnson’s support for Knight’s legal case, an important landmark in the fight for the abolition of slavery.
In June 1776 James Boswell wrote to Samuel Johnson about a case he was assisting in Edinburgh. It concerned the freedom of Joseph Knight.
Joseph Knight was born in Guinea. His original name is unknown. Taken as a child to Jamaica, he was eventually sold to John Wedderburn who was the largest landowner on the island at the time. Knight was educated, put to work as a domestic servant and brought to Scotland when Wedderburn returned in 1769. In Scotland Knight married Ann Thompson, an employee in Wedderburn’s household and they had at least one child together. Knight asked Wedderburn whether he could leave the house to live with his new family and was refused. He ran away, Wedderburn had him arrested, and the case began in 1774.
Knight’s case against his enslaver was not without some precedent. Somerset v Stewart had already taken place in England in 1772, when Lord Mansfield ruled that the imprisonment and removal to Jamaica of James Somerset was not allowed in the law of England.
Despite the ruling in the Somerset case, Knight’s first case in the Perth courts was found in favour of Wedderburn. Knight appealed successfully, but Wedderburn then appealed to Scotland’s supreme civil court in Edinburgh. It was at this time that James Boswell began discussing the matter with Johnson.
It is no surprise that Johnson, who Boswell described as having “always been very zealous against slavery in every form”, took an interest in the case. Johnson had expressed anti-slavery views throughout his writing career, well before meeting his Jamaican servant and heir Francis Barber in 1752, and recently in his Taxation no Tyranny pamphlet in 1775.
On 25 June 1776 Boswell sent a letter to Johnson enclosing a copy of a paper by John McLaurin, a member of Knight’s principle counsel. Johnson responded by referring to the ruling in the Somerset case, clearly known to him. Johnson was interested in supporting the campaign for Knight’s freedom not only intellectually, but also financially. On 6 July 1776 Johnson wrote:
“Since I wrote, I have looked over Mr McLaurin’s plea, and think it excellent. How is the suit carried on? If by subscription, I commission you to contribute, in my name, what is proper. Let nothing be wanting in such a case”
Boswell passed on the praise, reporting on 14 February the following year that “McLaurin is made happy by your approbation of his memorial.”
On July 15 1777 Boswell sent Johnson a copy of the opposing case, asking him: “Pray read this, and tell me what you think as a Politician, as well as a Poet, upon the subject.” The next, and most significant, discussion of the case reported by Boswell is while the two men are together at Ashbourne in September, visiting Johnson’s childhood friend Dr John Taylor. After supper one evening Boswell asked Johnson to dictate an argument to him in support of the case.
Johnson states that “it is impossible not to conceive that men in their original state were equal; and very difficult to imagine how one would be subjected to another but by violent compulsion.” He argues that the condition of slavery or servitude cannot be passed down through generations (Johnson may have had Francis Barber in mind here, who was born into slavery in Jamaica) and criticises the fact that the laws of Jamaica allow no redress for an enslaved person, whose “colour is considered as a sufficient testimony against him.” He summarises that:
“No man is by nature the property of another: the defendant is, therefore, by nature free: The rights of nature must be some way forfeited before they can be justly taken away”
Boswell published Johnson’s full statement in his second edition of his Life in 1793, but he was dismissive of Johnson’s viewpoint and frames this passage with an anti-abolitionist statement. The support of Knight’s case and an anecdote about Johnson raising a toast in support of slave rebellions are useful resources, but overall the Life does not provide much information on Samuel Johnson’s opinions against slavery. Johnson’s views are now becoming better known and students will have come across them in the classroom now that ‘A Brief to Free a Slave, 1777’ is included in recent editions of the Norton Anthology of English Literature
Knight’s legal team was ultimately successful and Scottish Courts ruled that the rights of an enslaver over an enslaved person “could not be supported in this country to any extent” and that Wedderburn had no right to Knight’s service “for any space of time, nor to send him out of the country against his consent”. Johnson wrote that the cause had been ended “much to my mind” and “on the side of liberty.”
Knight left with his family, but the rest of his story is unknown.
The records relating to his case are held in the National Records of Scotland, and this fascinating blog post published during Black History Month gives an account.
Joseph Knight was the subject of an historical novel by James Robertson published in 2003. In October 2020 a scene from May Sumbwanyambe’s ‘Enough of Him’, a play about Knight’s story commissioned by the Scottish National Theatre, was released as a short film.