Queens' College and the 'Province of Freedom'

Read the full letter here.

This letter from the mother to the brother of Thomas Perronet Thompson (Queens’ m. 1798) discusses his governorship of the British colony of Sierra Leone. In 1808, at the precocious age of twenty-five, Thomas had been tasked with the administration of that colony, to which formerly enslaved people had been enticed as a place of refuge, freedom and prosperity. The letter indicates that when Thompson arrived to discover that the colony’s administrators had been subjecting former slaves to the practice of forced ‘apprenticeship’, Thompson ‘set the captives at liberty’ and made known his displeasure to ‘private characters’ in England, deemed by him to be responsible. Wilberforce’s response is reported here as having been praise for Thompson’s ‘vigour’, together with unease at his tendency to ‘trust too much in his own judgment’. In reality, Wilberforce deemed Thompson’s whistleblowing embarrassing and counterproductive to his grandiose plans for Africa and arranged for Thompson’s dismissal the following year. In another letter, Thompson raged that Wilberforce and his associates had ‘at last become slave traders with a vengeance’.

Title: Letter from Mrs Philothea Perronet Thompson to John Vincent Thompson (Queens’ m. 1805) 24 October 1808
Source: Loaned by Mr Arthur Robinson, great great grandnephew of Thomas Perronet Thompson.

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