Robert Wedderburn (1762 – 1835/1836?) was a British-Jamaican radical and abolitionist of multiracial descent active in early 19th-century London. Wedderburn was born in Kingston, Jamaica, an illegitimate son of an enslaved Black woman, Rosanna, and Scottish sugar planter James Wedderburn. During his life, Robert Wedderburn sought to reconcile his political priorities and religious views. Influenced by millenarian ideas, he moved from Methodism and towards Unitarian leanings, before rejecting Christianity and embracing a deist outlook. An early freethinker, the combination of his deist views, associations with well-known radicals and atheists, and utopian political ideals, led to his arrest for breach of blasphemy laws. In 1824 he published The Horrors of Slavery, a tract which influenced the Abolitionist movement. Biography Early life Robert Wedderburn was born in Jamaica in around 1762. His mother, Rosanna was a black woman of dark brown complexion but not fully mixed woman, and was enslaved in his white Scottish father's house as a house worker. His father was James Wedderburn, a slave-owner and plantation owner who was born in Scotland, and was the son of Sir John Wedderburn, 5th Baronet of Blackness, who was executed for treason following the Jacobite rising of 1745. Following this catastrophe, the young James and his brother John Wedderburn of Ballendean fled Scotland for the West Indies. James Wedderburn settled in Kingston, making a living as a medical doctor before making his fortune as a sugar plantation owner. While in Jamaica he fathered children with several enslaved women. After Rosanna had given birth to two of Wedderburn's children, and five months pregnant with his third child, James Wedderburn sold Rosanna back to her previous enslaver. James Wedderburn stipulated, however, that Rosanna's child when born should be legally free, and he officially registered both Robert and an elder brother James as free men. In later years, James Wedderburn returned to live in Britain, where his legitimate son and heir Andrew Colville defended his father when these details were made public in the British press, denied the paternity and further claimed Rosanna was both promiscuous and unable to control her temper. Although born free, Wedderburn was raised in a harsh environment, as his mother was often flogged due to her "violent and rebellious temper". She was eventually re-sold away from her son, who was then raised by his maternal grandmother, a woman known as "Talkee Amy". To escape the insecurity and abuse of the