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‘Fermentation will be universal’: Intersections of Race and Class in Robert Wedderburn’s Black Atlantic Discourse of Transatlantic Revolution

The speeches and writings of Robert Wedderburn are the subject of this chapter by Raphael Hoermann who contrasts Wedderburn’s radical brand of abolitionism, rooted in self-emancipation and slave agency, to the conservative, Evangelical approach of William Wilberforce’s moral appeals to white liberators. Hoermann recounts some of the biographical background Wedderburn provides in his self-published pamphlet, The Horrors of Slavery, and draws connections between Wedderburn’s life—as the progeny of a white slaveholder father and black slave mother, and his impoverished life in London eking out a living as a tailor—and the political ideologies he promoted. Hoermann highlights Wedderburn’s provocative argument for a violent overthrow of slavery and his critique of British capitalism that interlinked class and race exploitation as ideas that kept him on the fringes of both the abolitionist and working class movements during his lifetime and have kept him an understudied, obscure historical figure.