Extract from the Official Correspondence of Colonel Arthur, Governor of Honduras, with Lord Bathurst, Ordered to be Printed at the House of Commons, on June 16th 1823.

£2,500 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

This rare, and seemingly unrecorded broadside, was issued during the grey-years between the 1807 Abolition Act and the 1833 Emancipation Act. During this time, the focus of many abolitionists and evidently government officials highlighted the appalling treatment of those still enslaved. In 1823, the matter was debated in parliament which eventually passed the “Canning Resolutions”, which among other things outlawed the flogging of women, recognised marriage between enslaved men and women, and allowed for the testimony of enslaved labourers to be used in court. A salvo in the debate between abolitionists and those representing plantation owners, the broadside reprints extracts from an 1820 correspondence between Sir George Arthur (1784-1854), then Lieutenant Governor of British Honduras, and Henry, third Earl Bathurst (1762-1834), then Colonial Secretary, regarding the iniquity of “the result of a trial … against an inhabitant for excessive cruelty towards a poor slave.” In some horrific detail the Colonial Governor notes the facts of the case, brought against “a free-woman of colour, named Duncannette Campbell … for punishing her Slave called Kitty, in an illegal, cruel, and severe manner, by chaining her, and repeatedly whipping her, and for confining her, a considerable time in the said chains, in the loft of the house!” Lord Bathurst was known for his paternalistic administration as Colonial Secretary, and despite not supporting the abolition of the practice of slave-ownin

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