The influence of Scots throughout the Empire is well known and fully documented. Missionaries, doctors, teachers, engineers, administrators were supplied in abundance. President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia always gave me an especially warm welcome because I was Scottish, and they loved to speak—as did many others—of their education at the hands of Scots. An old joke which I use is that there was no such thing as a British Empire, just a Scottish one to which the English attached themselves.

Yet there was a darker side to this diaspora. A few years...

On a cold February afternoon in 2009 mourners gathered in the graveyard of Holy Cross Episcopal Church in the village of Appin, Argyll, to lay to rest in her ninety-first year Lady Errington of St Mary’s in Glen Crerran. Further up the village on the road to Oban, a century and a half earlier there would have been many similar gatherings to attend burials officiated at by Rev. John Macaulay, the parish minister of Appin and Lismore. John Macaulay’s grandson was the celebrated historian and colonial administrator Thomas Babington Macaulay. But the family member who most interested Reine Errington and...

On the morning of 18 April 1833, 300 delegates from all over the United Kingdom carried an Address to the Prime Minister at Downing Street calling for the immediate abolition of slavery in the British Empire. This was a far cry from the earlier cautious attempts to ‘mitigate’ or improve conditions for those enslaved, alongside the hope of future emancipation that had been tentatively suggested in 1823. Now, a decade later, there was an unequivocal demand for the ending of this system, which seemed to challenge British ideals, Christian principles and civilised practice. Petitioning had by then become a familiar...

The prospect of a voyage to the West African coast (Figure 3) with its dangers and potential threat to health would hardly daunt a young man who had survived five years in the Caribbean. In a letter to Thomas Babington on New Year’s Day 1793 Macaulay indicated that the journey from England to Sierra Leone had been swift and trouble-free. Perhaps to gratify Babington he focussed particularly on his relationship with Rev. Nathaniel Gilbert, Chaplain to the colony, the travelling companion whom his brother-in-law hoped would strengthen his reawakened religious enthusiasm:

We arrived here on the 25th after a period...

‘Accept my dear Selina, my heartfelt acknowledgement of all your undeviating care and kindness, and forbearance and devotion, and rest assured of the undiminished warmth of my attachment, and of my increasing regard and affection’.¹ These words were written by Zachary Macaulay on their seventeenth wedding anniversary, in what was to be just over the halfway mark in their marriage. By the standards of the time, although on the surface it seemed to be a very traditional one, with gender roles carefully demarcated, this was by no means the whole story. It was from the start marked by an extraordinary...

Zachary Macaulay sailed from Portsmouth on 23 February 1796 and reached Sierra Leone on 18 March. James Watt, the First in Council when Macaulay had been acting Governor, had died and William Dawes, who was anxious to get home, left on 25 April. Macaulay was therefore appointed Acting Governor again. The Council Minutes did not record him officially as Governor until it became clear that Dawes was not to return.¹ Macaulay certainly did not covet the post, to judge by his rather desperate comment to Selina: ‘Dawes’ return which I dare not hope, would no doubt make every difficulty (over...

In April 1798 Thomas Ludham arrived in Sierra Leone to succeed Macaulay as Governor. However Gray was on leave in England and Ludham’s inexperience and youth persuaded the older man to stay another year. When Macaulay did sail in a war convoy on theMaryon 4 April 1799 he was not alone. Accompanying him were twenty African boys and four girls, with the rehabilitated teacher Mary Prince and her daughter in charge of the young folk.

It had been the policy of the Sierra Leone Company to invite selected individuals, mainly the sons of rulers, to receive an education...

Throughout their 32 years of marriage Zachary Macaulay spent a great deal of time separated from Selina. It was mainly anti-slavery business that kept him in London when the family were at Rothley, Bristol, or the south coast, where the Macaulays habitually took a house in the summer months. He travelled a number of times to France and it was on one of these occasions that Selina’s alarm showed when they were out of contact with each other. ‘I hope it will please God’, she wrote in May 1814, ‘that you never again will be called away from me in...

‘Many will envy you the honour of an interview with Madame de Staël. I presume you will be received into her chamber.’ Selina’s innocent allusion was to nothing more intimate than a ‘salon’, though it would have won knowing French smiles. Zachary almost certainly as innocently saw only virtue in the celebrated Baroness de Staël-Holstein’s ‘own request’ for his company in May 1814, which he reported to Selina. The Baroness does not seem to have disillusioned him. The same letter from Paris carrying news of the de Staël invitation reported that the visit to her chamber would be followed by...

On 18 January 1823 the editor of theImperial Magazinereceived a letter which read:

Mr. Macaulay presents his respectful compliments to the author of an excellent paper on West Indian slavery signed ‘Observer.’ He would feel himself particularly indebted to the author if he would afford him an opportunity of personal communication, as the subject is one which deeply interests him.¹

Zachary Macaulay would have been familiar with the magazine during the time that he was secretary to the Sierra Leone Company and the African Institution. There appears to be nothing unusual in the article, which is a sympathetic...

Historians have often been critical of late nineteenth-century interest in Africa, defining its belief as that the continent needed a triumvirate of Christianity, commerce and ‘civilisation’. The eighteenth-century founders of the Sierra Leone Company and those who supported the new British colony through the African Institution just as readily embraced these three ‘c’s as the cornerstones of their policy. Missionary zeal both for conversion to the Christian faith and the adoption of British culture always sat uneasily alongside economic exploitation, even if the latter was aimed at development of land and trade in goods rather than people. The spectre of...

Anti-Slavery International, today’s successor to the organisation of which Zachary Macaulay was a founder, gives the chilling statistic that there are more slaves in the world than ever before. No governments and few but the most extreme individuals would today defend the institution. For that reason some modern observers assume that there was inevitable progress towards the abolition of slavery in the early nineteenth century. That is far too simple an analysis. The massive numbers of petitions which were to flow into Parliament in the years 1830–1833 seemed to have been met by determined resistance from the colonies to...

Robert Burns, who but for a stroke of financial good fortune might have had similar employment experiences in Jamaica to Zachary Macaulay, wrote the memorable lines, ‘O wad some power the Giftie gie us, to see oorsels as ithers see us’.¹ Macaulay spent many hours of his life in self-analysis, sometimes torturing himself and often wearying his family and friends. In assessing his contribution to the cause which was so all-consuming in his life, it is necessary to look at what others have said of him.

‘I love you so well that I can truly rejoice you are that man...