Tag Archives: Simon Taylor
Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 21 May 1792
21/05/1792
Taylor travelled from Jamaica to Britain in 1791. It is likely that he was at sea when the August 1791 rebellion by enslaved people in French Saint-Domingue broke out. He received news of it while in London in the autumn and remained in Britain until the summer of 1792. While there, he visited Arcedeckne in […]
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Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 17 January 1791
17/01/1791
As the abolition debate continued, Taylor’s frustration rose and his language grew more colourful. In his view, abolitionists were behaving unreasonably by interfering with a lucrative system that he thought was best left to the oversight and management of slave-traders and slaveholders. His reference to events in the French islands is probably to the failed […]
Posted in Abolitionism, British Government, Kingston, Revolution, Slave trade abolition, The Letters, Trade Also tagged Chaloner Arcedeckne, Louis XIV, Vincent Ogé, William Pitt, William Wilberforce Comments Off on Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 17 January 1791
Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 7 September 1790
07/09/1790
On 7 September 1790, Taylor wrote to Arcedeckne from his sugar plantation, called Holland, at the far eastern end of Jamaica. While a revolution by white slaveholders might have been an unlikely prospect for Jamaica in 1790, foreign invasion was not. And as the possibility of war with France loomed, Taylor described the outlook of […]
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Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 17 June 1790
17/06/1790
Taylor saw the proposal to end the slave trade as a breach of faith between Britain and the colonies of the British West Indies. Despite the apparent impossibility of Jamaica seceding from the British empire in the same manner as the thirteen mainland colonies during the American Revolution (due to the reliance of white colonists […]
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Simon Taylor to Chaloner Arcedeckne, 24 December 1789
24/12/1789
As well as commenting on the rising abolition movement, Taylor expressed his views on other subjects. His thoughts on the early months of the French Revolution, penned on Christmas Eve, 1789, reveal his antipathy for the French, but also his admiration for a ‘free constitution’ and distaste for what he saw as the anarchical threat […]
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