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Anti-slavery Cameo
Bristol merchants were granted the right to trade in slaves from 1698 right up to the end of the Slave Trade in Britain in 1807. Just over 2100 Bristol ships set sail on slaving voyages carrying around 500,000 Africans into slavery on the sugar and tobacco plantations in the New World.
It is a jasperware cameo and it was used by 18th century abolitionists and became the emblem of the anti-slavery movement. It was made at Josiah Wedgwood's factory in Staffordshire. He was an active abolitionist, and he sent one of these cameos to Benjamin Franklin in 1788, hoping to promote American support for the antislavery cause.
It is made of porcelain and has the tiny 'Am I not a man and a brother' inscription on it. The oval frame is made of wood and covered with a glass front. People would buy the porcelain cameo and then do what they wanted with them. Some people would just keep them in their pockets as a private reminder of their support for the anti-slavery movement. Others would get them made into brooches or pendants so that they could show their public support.
Members of the Society of Friends, informally known as Quakers, were among the earliest leaders of the abolitionist movement in Britain and the Americas. By the beginning of the American Revolution, Quakers had moved from viewing slavery as a matter of individual conscience, to seeing the abolition of slavery as a Christian duty.
Sue Giles, curator of ethnography, says: "Wedgwood made a few dozen of these at a time, and gave them away for free. That was his way of contributing to the anti-slavery movement."
Where can it be found? At the Bristol Industrial Museum, Bristol.
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