Rabbie Burns and his near-miss with the horrors of slavery

It wasn’t just the richest people who were attracted by the slave trade.

Back in 2009, it gave many of us great pleasure that the man voted as the greatest Scot ever was not a war leader or a politician, but a poet, and ploughman at that.

I think it says something about Scotland and the Scots that we chose Robert Burns, and he is the man we associate with the great paeans of freedom and equality, and none better than A Man’s a Man. Let’s quote the last lines:

Then let us pray that come it may,

(As come it will for a’ that,)

That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth,

Shall bear the gree, an’ a’ that.

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

It’s coming yet for a’ that,

That Man to Man, the world o’er,

Shall brothers be for a’ that.

It comes as a shock to many people, therefore, when they learn that Burns himself was not always so passionate for equality, and it is very instructive of Scotland’s role in the slave trade that our national bard was only days away from becoming involved in the managership of a slave plantation in Jamaica.

It was 1786, and the 27-year-old Burns was in deep trouble. He was broke and the combination of his father’s death and the poor soil at their Mossgiel farm which offered no prospect of advancement caused him to take up an offer from the Douglas family of Garallan who owned a sugar plantation in Jamaica. He was offered the post of bookkeeper at £30 per annum, or twice what he was earning at Mossgiel.

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With the disgrace of his affair with Jean Armour still reverberating around him – her father was all for jailing Burns who did not know Jean was pregnant with twins – Burns signed to go to Greenock and take ship to Jamaica. He may have been planning to emigrate there with Highland Mary Campbell but his friend Gavin Hamilton persuaded Burns to publish the Kilmarnock edition of his poems and Burns was saved from emigration, though Highland Mary died in October, 1786.

Burns came very, very close to being in the slave trade. He wrote: “I had taken the last farewell of my few friends, my chest was on the road to Greenock; I had composed the last song I should ever measure in Scotland – ‘The Gloomy night is gathering fast’ – when a letter from Dr Blacklock to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening new prospects to my poetic ambition.”

Clark McGinn, author of The Ultimate Burns Supper Book, states: “The fact that hurts is that, like all West Indian plantations, the Douglas enterprise was firmly built on black slave labour. Some commentators play the ‘get-out-of-jail-free card’ to RB here. He was ‘only to be the bookkeeper’.

“It is true that the appellation sounds quite dull; but being ‘bookkeeper’ was as much about managing the assets as the numbers. He would have a daily interface with the truth of slavery – from assisting in purchases, through recording punishments and deaths and an ambitious young man might seek advancement by volunteering to be more ‘hands-on’.”

It would have been almost inevitable that an intelligent and literate man like Burns would have advanced high in the managerial ranks of one plantation or another. Would he have been able to ignore his natural empathy for the underdog or would he have rebelled against the strict, and sometimes fatal, discipline enacted on slaves in Jamaica and elsewhere?

The point is that, had he gone to Jamaica or elsewhere in the Caribbean or the USA, Burns would have been following a well trodden path for young Scots in the slave trade and plantations. It seems no-one, bar a few campaigning Christians, was exempt from what we might call plantation fever at that time in Scotland, and it lasted for decades.

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In November, 1786, Burns went to Edinburgh instead, and there encountered fame and the first stirrings of abolitionism. Though he was never at the forefront of the cause, he did support it. It seems appropriate then to finish with the words of the poem and song that was perhaps Burns’s apologia to the people for whom he might well have been slavemaster.

The Slave’s Lament

It was in sweet Senegal that my foes did me enthral,

For the lands of Virginia,-ginia, O:

Torn from that lovely shore, and must never see it more;

And alas! I am weary, weary O:

Torn from that lovely shore, and must never see it more;

And alas! I am weary, weary O.

All on that charming coast is no bitter snow and frost,

Like the lands of Virginia,-ginia, O:

There streams for ever flow, and there flowers for ever blow,

And alas! I am weary, weary O:

There streams for ever flow, and there flowers for ever blow,

And alas! I am weary, weary O.

The burden I must bear, while the cruel scourge I fear,

In the lands of Virginia,-ginia, O;

And I think on friends most dear, with the bitter, bitter tear,

And alas! I am weary, weary O:

And I think on friends most dear, with the bitter, bitter tear,

And alas! I am weary, weary O.