Robert Burns's Black Neighbours in Ayrshire

Abstract

Robert Burns's decision to emigrate to Jamaica in 1786 as a slave-driver is well known, and is increasingly debated as Scotland develops its understanding of its direct and indirect roles in the transatlantic slave trade and Black chattel slavery. The stories, and even the names, of the Black people of that period (servants and tradesmen) are typically more ephemeral than those of Burns and his friends and patrons, but it would be wrong to assume that there were no Black people living and working in Ayr and its environs in Burns's day. While the Black population across Scotland was small (commentators suggest around seventy individuals against some fifteen thousand in England & Wales), contemporary records show that over a dozen lived and worked in Ayrshire. While there is no concrete evidence in the Poet's writings, this study shows that it is highly likely that Burns saw some of these people on the streets, that he met the biracial children of the manumitted Black man Scipio Kennedy, and that he was present at the baptism of a Black man, John Cartwright, in Mauchline Kirk in 1784.