I‘m sure most readers (like me) were taught in Junior School how Britain set a wonderful example to the rest of the world in the 1800s by abolishing the slave trade, then slavery itself, forgetting of course that we helped start it! Most people will have heard about the two main Acts of Parliament, firstly to abolish the trade, passed in 1807, and then slavery itself in 1833. But, how few have also heard of the subsequent Slave Compensation Acts, which compensated, not the poor slaves, but their former owners, who claimed to be in dire financial straits as a result of losing their ‘property’?
Between 1834 and 1845 the Slave Compensation Commission paid out around £20 million (multiply by 120 to convert to today’s values), to around 40,000 slave-owners. How was the money raised? – from a loan of £15m and £5m in taxes. That £15m was worth £1.43 billion in 2020 based on inflation, or £76.5 billion if you base it on the share of the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP or income), as many historians consider more realistic. When was it finally paid off? – as late as 2015. Note also, the tax part came from duties, revenue on goods, alcohol, etc, not direct taxation such as income tax, so it was the poor people in this country who ended up paying disproportionately more of their income to ex slave-owners, including over 100 sitting MPs, so there’s nothing new in political sleaze scandals!
A website called ‘Legacies of British Slavery’ (ucl.ac.uk/lbs/search), records all the money paid out if you want to know more. It lists all claimants living in Britain at that time, so you can search the records by name and location. I decided to look at local connections in the area of the former county of Monmouthshire (not the present ‘slimmed down’ council area). Fourteen people are listed, but only half were successful in their claims. What follows is the story of one of the unsuccessful ones, in fact someone I would describe as a most memorable failure – Valentine Morris II.
Valentine Morris was born in Antigua in 1727, and was still at school in London, aged 15 or 16, when his father died in 1743. He inherited Crabbs, Martins and Willoughby Bay Estates in Antigua, including the slaves on them, and also Piercefield House, Chepstow, which his father had bought in 1740.
As a very eligible bachelor, he married Mary Mordaunt, niece of the Earl of Peterborough inn 1748; she was pretty but brought no money to the union; they began living at Piercefield with their family in 1753. He added to the splendour of the estate by landscaping the parkland in the style of Capability Brown, and it became something of an early tourist attraction.
Morris was strongly in favour of road improvement, and promoted the first Turnpike Bill in Monmouthshire (1755); this provided the first decent roads in the area and were paid for by local tolls. He gave evidence to the House of Commons that there were no roads in Monmouthshire and, when asked how people travelled, replied: “We travel in ditches”. As trustee of several turnpike trusts, he was responsible for improving the roads out of Chepstow, often against the wishes of the local gentry who owned the land through which the roads ran. He was successful in building over 300 miles of toll roads in both Monmouthshire and Gloucestershire in the 1760s. As a magistrate, he also introduced standardised weights and measures in trading for the first time in the area.
However, having upset so many of the local gentry, it was probably not a good idea to enter local politics. But in 1771, Morris decided to stand in a parliamentary by-election against John Morgan, brother of Thomas, the late MP and a member of the powerful Morgan family of Tredegar House. A contested election was highly unusual at the time, and the Morgans attacked Morris as an outsider, a slave-owner, and a Creole (ie, white but born in the West Indies). For his part, Morris appealed to the “honest unbiased men” of Monmouthshire to “shake off all shackles, assert your independency, and once in your life have courage to dare elect the man of your choice”. Sadly for Morris, the man of their choice was Morgan who won by 743 votes to 535.
The cost of the election (ie, the bribes customarily paid to voters at that time) only added to Morris’s debts. He was said to be over-generous by nature, lacked business acumen and had a fondness for gambling, so he was forced to flee the country and soon sailed for Antigua. In 1772 he became Governor of the island of St. Vincent, which had been taken from France only nine years before as part of the settlement of the Seven Years’ War. But in 1779, the French, who were allies of the USA in the War of Independence, attacked the island and Morris was forced to surrender it. He blamed the military commander for the disaster but an inquiry later exonerated the latter.
Morris returned to London, disgraced and reduced to poverty, as he had used his own money to defend the island. One account said, “He was reduced to the greatest distress; his books and all his moveables were sold; even the gleanings of Mrs Morris’s toilet were sold to purchase bread.” Before you cringe at the thought of this, I should explain that ‘toilet’ is also an obsolete word for a dressing table, so it meant she had to sell off all her precious bits and pieces. As a result, his poor wife attempted suicide and was confined to a madhouse. The government refused to reimburse Morris for the cost of defending St Vincent (sadly, he couldn’t produce any receipts for his outgoings), so he was imprisoned for debt for seven years. He had to sell his estates in the West Indies. He had already sold his Usk estate to Robert Clive around 1768, and finally he sold the Piercefield estate in 1784. Valentine Morris died in London in 1789, aged 61, and had a lengthy and effusive obituary in The Times. His death was probably unmourned by those wretches he had ‘owned’ in the Caribbean.
