Zachary Macaulay

(1768 – 1838)

From plantation manager to abolitionist

The son of a Scottish minister, Zachary Macaulay from Inverary was working in a merchant counting house in Glasgow when at the age of 16 he was sent to Jamaica. He started work on a sugar plantation where eventually he became a manager. After eight years working in the West Indies he returned to Britain. Through his brother-in-law Thomas Babington, a colleague of William Wilberforce, he became a member of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Macaulay’s experiences in Jamaica had made him a committed opponent of slavery and the slave trade. In 1794 he took the post of Governor of the Sierra Leone colony established in 1788 for freed slaves in West Africa. In 1795 Macaulay travelled as a passenger on a slave ship to find out what it was like to sail on the Middle Passage. He was Governor of Sierra Leone until 1799.

Tireless campaigner

When he returned to Britain from Africa his major contribution to the anti-slave trade was his first-hand experience and his work in collecting and collating of evidence and the drafting of reports that highlighted the horrors of slavery and the slave trade. In the 1820s Macaulay focused his attention on securing the total abolition of slavery. He was a founder member of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery, later called the Anti-Slavery Society, in 1823. He was editor of the Anti-Slavery Reporter. He died in London in 1838 and a memorial to him was placed in Westminster Abbey.