Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings

At first glance, the man who emerges from these writings seems hardly more than a minor blasphemous preacher who called Jesus a ``Bloody Fool'' for advocating turning the other cheek and who ran a brothel to finance his Christian Diabolist chapel. Many of the works attributed to this barely literate man were actually ghosted by others identified as editors. Closer examination, however, reveals that the oeuvre of this colorful, disreputable character is important to the African American tradition. Wedderburn became a leading proponent not only of abolition but of what would be termed today a black theology of liberation and a major figure in England's radical republican underground of the Georgian and Regency periods. The freeborn offspring of a Scottish slaveholder and a Jamaican slave, he was at once a product, witness and victim of West Indian slavery. His brief autobiography, reprinted here with various related correspondence, is a vivid indictment of an execrable system; its accounts of torture, including the flogging of his pregnant mother, burn themselves into the reader's mind like the sting of the slaver's whip. McCalman lectures in history at an Australian university. (July)