Mary Prince

Mary Prince was born into slavery at Brackish Pond, in the British colony of Bermuda, on the first of October 1788, the daughter of a sawyer and a domestic servant. She was sold from her birth household at age twelve and changed owners successively through her teens and twenties — sold first to the Captain Williams household, then to the harsh Mr. D— of Spanish Point, then in 1806 to John Adams Wood, who took her to Antigua.

She labored on Wood's salt-pond at Turk's Island under conditions she subsequently documented in her memoir as among the most brutal of the trans-Caribbean slave system. She married Daniel James, a free Black carpenter, in December 1826 — without Wood's permission, an offense for which Wood subsequently beat her.

The Wood family brought her to London in 1828. Prince escaped the Wood household within months of arrival, sought refuge at the Anti-Slavery Society's London office on Aldermanbury, and was placed by Society secretary Thomas Pringle in protective service in his own household.

In 1829 Prince became the first Black woman ever to present an anti-slavery petition to the British Parliament. The petition argued for her own freedom — under the 1772 Mansfield decision the Wood family could no longer enslave her in England, but Wood refused to manumit her, which meant she could not return to her husband in Antigua as a free woman.

Her dictated autobiography, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) — taken down by Susanna Strickland in Pringle's drawing room — was the first first-person account of slavery by a Black woman ever published in English. The book sold three editions in 1831, was used in the parliamentary debates that produced the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, and remains continuously in print.

Mary Prince's date of death is unknown. She is recorded as being alive in 1833 and is not recorded thereafter.

She is honored here as the first Black woman to publish an autobiography in Britain.