Bermuda Bound: Patrick Williams and the Limits of the Abolitionist Atlantic

This paper examines the life of Patrick Williams, a nine-year old enslaved Bermudian mariner kidnapped or lured from a Bermuda vessel while in New York in August, 1833, the same month Great Britain’s Parliament passed the Act of Emancipation which would have freed him the following year. Transported and sold into increasingly inescapable plantation slavery in Louisiana, the boy disappeared for two decades before he was able to contact his father in Bermuda. The investigation and subsequent negotiations between the governor of Bermuda, the Foreign Office, the British consular officer in New Orleans, on the one hand, and Patrick William’s owner and the Louisiana Supreme Court, on the other, occupied the six years until the Civil War. The surviving documentation addresses current debates about the changing language of abolition in the immediate pre-Civil War period, the limits of British citizenship and humanitarianism, and the influence on American slavery of a post-1833 Abolitionist Atlantic. The rediscovery of an enslaved Patrick Williams confronted white Bermudians with their self-satisfied perspective on the purported benevolence of Bermuda’s immediate emancipation of its own slaves in 1834. The failure of diplomacy in Louisiana, the prevarication of the Bermuda Assembly over the expense of repatriation, and the inability to ensure the safety of the black witnesses who could identify Williams, threatened to collapse the imagined distance between Bermuda’s post-emancipation modernity and American slavery. William’s own short account of his experience survives, recorded by the British consul. In its effort to fix his identity in Bermudian spaces and genealogies, William’s Bermudian memories reveal the necessary preoccupations of an enslaved boy. Kidnapped as a boy at the zenith of British abolition, Patrick Williams disappeared in Louisiana at the start of America’s own upheaval, quite likely having seized his own freedom, his life’s experience neither coincidental nor isolated.