Augustus Hardin Beaumont

Radical, journalist and former slave-owner.

Born in New York to an Irish mother (Miss McGowan) and a British father, Dr Beaumont, who had been on the medical staff of the British army during the American War. A. H.'s mother died when he was 5.

Augustus was one of three sons - Arthur James (eldest) and Edmund Hardin (youngest) were his brothers. Their father died not long after their mother: in c.1806 the children were sent to live in Jamaica with their maternal aunt.

At 18, he was put to work on a sugar plantation then as book-keeper and surveyor of the enslaved. But within two years had become clerk to a lawyer in Kingston, Jamaica. During that time he attempted to save the life of a black woman condemned to death for allegedly flogging a child to death. He was, however, unsuccessful.

Between 1823 and 1835, Beaumont worked as both a journalist and in politics in Jamaica. He frequently antagonised local notables, such as in his alleged libel against William Anglin Scarlett, Chief Justice, in 1823. He also occupied a contradictory position: he showed sympathy for the enslaved while arguing for compensation for the owners, helped to organise military resistance to the Jamaican uprising of 1831-32 while also putting forward a Bill in Jamaica for complete emancipation; and subsequently becoming a prominent radical in England, especially in the north east, where he helped to pave the way for Chartism.

March 1823: he established a weekly paper, The Trifler (which closed after a few issues on 21 June 1823).

September 1823: started another paper, the Public Advertiser, which combined with The Courant in October 1826 to become the Jamaica Courant and Public Advertiser. Continued until 31 December 1831.

1826: travelled to England where Joseph Hume presented a petition on his behalf asking for both the protection of planters’ property and compensation in the event of abolition. See House of Commons Debates, 25 April 1826, XV, cc. 577-87.

This pre-dated the publication of  his pamphlet Compensation to Slave Owners Fairly Considered, in an Appeal to the Common Sense of the People of England (London, Effingham Wilson, 1826).  When this was published he was presented with ‘a very splendid silver vase’ from people in Jamaica in the parishes of Manchester, Clarendon and Vere while the Commissioners of Correspondence in Britain ordered 1,000 copies to be printed at their expense.

31 July 1827: elected Common Councilman of Kingston, Jamaica.

1829: as a magistrate he granted a licence to preach to James Killick, a black man.

8 August 1829: became member of the House of Assembly for the parish of Westmoreland.

1829-1830: he supported the removal of Jewish disabilities (and paid the necessary legal fees himself).

1830: to England again where he was immediately elected a member of the standing committee of the West India Association.

The memorialist in the Northern Liberator (21 April 1838) claims that Beaumont’s alliance with the Tories of the West India Association was because ‘he entertained a strong opinion on the impolicy of suddenly striking off the chains of the slaves, brutalized as they were by slavery, and frenzied and misled as they were known to be by the itinerant firebrands in England, and in the very soil of the Western Indies.’

1830: travelled to Belgium where he took part in the revolution. (See his pamphlet, Adventures of two Americans (1830).)

1831: returned to Jamaica: re-elected as member for Westmoreland in the General Assembly. (The Memoir of Beaumont also notes his friendship with Price Watkis, the first person of colour to be elected to the Assembly as member for Kingston in 1832 and noted abolitionist. [q.v.])

1831-32: during Sharpe’s Rebellion (the Baptist War), Beaumont raised a corps at the request of Sir Willoughby Cotton, the commander of forces in Jamaica and helped to suppress the revolt. The author of the memoir (28 April 1838) claims that Beaumont’s stance was  based believing that the revolt could not succeed and that worse bloodshed would follow if it were allowed to continue.

But Beaumont was also to be accused by planters of having ‘excited the negroes to rebellion’; he was certainly in a tiny minority (of 2) in the Assembly in proposing a bill for Compensation Manumission (to allow the enslaved to purchase their own freedom) as he was also to propose, in 1833, a bill for immediate emancipation instead of the apprenticeship scheme.

Between 1829 and 1835 Beaumont had also helped to free a number of people illegally held as slaves: the writer in the Liberator claims it was more than 100.

When his bill for immediate emancipation failed he resigned his seat and began another paper, The Isonomist, though this lasted only from October 1833 to 31 January 1834.

These activities all aroused the ire of many of the planters in Jamaica.

5 May 1835: he finally left Jamaica and sailed to England with his wife, (whom he had married, 23 August 1832).

1836: established in England the Radical, which lasted only from 12 March – 30 June 1836.

Became active in Working Men’s Associations (including the London one).

Then active in Newcastle where he was invited by the Newcastle Working Men’s Association to stand for election in the 1837 General Election and where he established the Northern Liberator in September 1837. As a candidate he advocated not only universal manhood suffrage but also full employment at decent wages by nationalizing railways, canals and other large public works. He was elected on a show of hands but defeated in the poll itself.

The Liberator, which continued after Beaumont’s death, was very prominent in local, working-class, radicalism, giving voice, for example, to protests against the New Poor Law, in support of the Canadian rebels of 1837, and to opposition to the continuing international slave trade. [See for example, ‘Negro Slavery’, Northern Liberator, 5 May 1838.]

In the compensation process, Beaumont filed many claims: his strategy was to identify incomplete claims and those where he could secure judgements in Jamaica and then hold them up for settlement. The strategy appears to have been dictated, according to Beaumont himself, by the political circumstances he was in during 1833-1835.

Evidently not a popular man in Jamaica, the Royal Gazette carried the following notice shortly after his death: "It is said, upon what authority we know not, that at the time Mr Beaumont lay on his death bed, a warrant had been issued from the Secretary of State, on a charge of high treason, and that the state he then lay, prevented the enforcement of its execution. If this is true, and we have no reason to doubt it, the day on which Augustus Hardin Beaumont would have been carried to the Tower, would have been the proudest day of his life. Sic transit gloria mundi. Beaumont is dead and will quickly be forgotten. His ambition had not yet enabled him to ascend that pinnacle for which he thirsted, his virtues nor his vices had not attained that magnitude to herald his fame, so as to cause it to descend, and be the theme of story in after ages--but we believe no man laboured more to acquire it."

For Beaumont's life see 'Memoir of the late Augustus H. Beaumont, esq', Northern Liberator, 21 and 28 April, 5 May 1838; William H. Maehl jr., 'Augustus Hardin Beaumont: Anglo-American Radical (1798-1838)', International Review of Social History, 14 (2) (1969), pp. 237-50.

There is also a short biography by Maehl in Joseph O. Baylen and Norbert J. Grossman (eds.) Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals since 1770, vol. 2: 1830-1870, (Brighton, 1984), pp. 46-8.

See also Keith McClelland, 'Beaumont, Augustus Hardin (1798–1838), journalist and Chartist', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online.

For his petition to the House of Commons in 1826, House of Commons Debates, 25 April 1826, XV, cc. 577-87.

He also gave lengthy testimony to the Select Committee on Negro Apprenticeship in the Colonies, PP1836 (560) XV, pp. 352-407.

See Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation. Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 215-16.