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Chapter 6 - The Trials of Mary Prince

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2025

By
David Lambert
Edited by
Nicole N. Aljoe
Nicole N. Aljoe
Affiliation:
Northeastern University, Boston
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Summary

With its supporting materials and explanatory footnotes added to the transcribed narrative, The History of Mary Prince resembles a bundle of legal documents. This was no accident: Thomas Pringle sought to intervene in the public debate about Caribbean slavery by publishing a trustworthy, firsthand account of its horrors. Yet the relationship of The History to legal matters was not only metaphorical, and two legal suits followed its publication, both for libel. The first was brought by Pringle himself in response to an attack in print by James MacQueen, a trenchant defender of British slavery. The second suit was brought by Prince’s former enslaver John Adams Wood, who claimed that Pringle had libeled him in the first place in The History. Prince appeared as a witness in both trials, and her testimony during the second trial provides an additional source of information about her life. With extracts from The History and MacQueen’s article read aloud in both trials, the court thus became a significant site for Prince and the continuing “trials” that she faced during her life.

Keywords

legal historylibel trialsproslaveryJames MacQueen
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Mary Prince , pp. 104 - 119
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Works Cited

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Further Reading

Baumgartner, Barbara. “The Body as Evidence: Resistance, Collaboration, and Appropriation in The History of Mary Prince.” Callaloo, vol. 24, no. 1, 2001, pp. 253–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Murphy, Tessa. The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schroeder, Janice. “‘Narrat[ing] Some Poor Little Fable’: Evidence of Bodily Pain in The History of Mary Prince and ‘Wife-Torture in England.’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, vol. 23, no. 2, 2004, pp. 261–81.Google Scholar

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