Kate Middleton’s aunt was a famous American activist involved in the abolition of slavery
At least one senior Royal played a significant role in the movement that led to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1837 and the United States in 1865. Harriet Martineau, the great-great-great-great-great-aunt of the Princess of Wales Catherine Middleton, was a Norfolk-born textile manufacturer’s daughter who became known as the greatest American abolitionist. Despite losing her hearing at the age of 12, she confronted male prejudice to carve out a career as a writer, becoming friends with Florence Nightingale, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Bronte, and Charles Dickens. She also had connections with the Darwin brothers Charles and Erasmus.
In 1832, Martineau’s first commissioned book, Illustrations of Political Economy, won widespread acclaim and became a bestseller. Queen Victoria was an avid fan and invited her to her Coronation in 1838, where she was recorded sitting in Westminster Abbey with a pillar to lean against and a nice corner for her shawl and bag of sandwiches. She also had the foresight to take a book to read while waiting.
In 1834, Martineau travelled to America with her young research assistant, Louisa Jefferys. Over the next two-and-a-half years, she travelled the length and breadth of the nation, visiting both New York and Boston, as well as spending six months talking to slaves on plantations in the Southern states, including Georgia and Alabama. Martineau was instrumental in helping two slaves from Georgia who had managed to flee the state in disguise before emigrating to England. She provided an education for the couple, William and Ellen Craft, at a private school in Ockham, Surrey.
In her book Society in America, published on her return to the UK in 1837, Martineau devoted a chapter to the slave trade in Georgia. She also spent two days at the plantation of former President James Madison and his wife Dolley in Montpelier, Virginia, in February 1835, lobbying America’s fourth president, who was dubbed the Father of the Constitution after he drew up the Bill of Rights, about the evils of slavery.
Martineau’s lobbying of U.S. Presidents James Madison and Andrew Jackson ultimately set in motion Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—the declaration that freed the Duchess of Sussex’s great-great-great-great-grandfather Stephen Ragland from servitude. Historian Michael Reed discovered the connection and stated that although Harry and Meghan have been accused of inferring racism in the Royal Family, our future queen has an ancestor who nobly fought the battle to free slaves in America.
Martineau may be relatively forgotten in Britain nowadays, but her work as a formidable sociologist and social reformer continues to inspire.
Read more in Daily Mail: How Kate’s ancestor played a key role in abolishing slavery… after the Sussexes’ barbs about Royals and racism
The title picture presents Catherine Middleton and Harriet Martineau (credit – public resources).
