“The Remains of a Negro”: Edward Lamb Parsons and his mysterious companion in death

Adam Brocklehurst went digging to discover some of the human faces involved in the transatlantic slave trade. 

This year is the 160th anniversary of the nationwide emancipation of slaves throughout the United States. With the passing of the 13th Amendment by all the member states of the union in December 1865, slavery was effectively abolished in the US, some 30 years after this happened in Great Britain.

Recently, and serendipitously, I uncovered something in a forgotten corner of an English city that would highlight not only the human cost of enslavement but also how much my own part of England was involved in this trade. It also shone a light on forgotten links between Britain and the New York of founding father Alexander Hamilton, and the earliest years of the fight for emancipation in America.  

One cold March morning in 1838 a cemetery opened for burials just a stone’s throw from the pulsating heart of Manchester, the great cotton metropolis in the north west of England. It was a Dissenting burial ground, reserved for the increasing number of people who fell outside the remit of the established Anglican Church. Joanna Naylor was buried that morning, the first of some eighty-thousand burials which would take place over the next hundred or so years.

Ardwick cemetery, like many other British cemeteries of this period, had opened as a response to the overcrowded and, sometimes, repellent nature of Manchester’s long established churchyards. These grim places were often only a few acres in size, meaning graves were repeatedly reopened for use, time and time again, with predictably horrible results. The stench and appalling sights that met the eyes of horrified people meant something had to be done.

Civic authorities in the newly industrialised and centralised town and cities of Britain sought not only to do away with the grim charnel houses of old but also to introduce a brand new idea into the funerary culture of Britain, the garden cemetery. 

The champion of this movement was John Claudius Loudon, an influential Scottish botanist. Loudon advocated that cemeteries be established at a distance from urban areas, where they would benefit from the fresh air and rural aspect. He suggested they should have broad walks and be planted with handsome specimen trees, in the manner of the arboretum or country park. 

There would be beautiful funerary sculptures, mausoleums and obelisks, all graven with improving and elegant epitaphs.

And this so that the spaces might in time become places for contemplative exercise, quiet discussion and education, as well as a necessary place for burial.

The utopian ideals of the garden cemetery movement were based in the egalitarian, agricultural and romantic philosophy of romantic era, a movement birthed of the rationality, enquiry and learning of the Enlightenment, with a definite foot in, and debt too, the supposed achievements of classical antiquity. 

It was also a reaction against the rapid industrialisation of the nascent modern world, returning to imaginary sylvan glades, peopled with fresh-faced maidens, dotted about with daffodils; it provided a convenient smoke screen to hide the less palatable aspects of the real world surrounding them.

The Grecian offices and mortuary chapel of Ardwick Cemetery stood facing each other behind high wrought-iron gates, just a short stroll from Ardwick Green. The Green was a private enclosed park that followed the old A6 road out of Manchester towards Cheshire and on to London, and was the most exclusive address in the town. 

At one end stood splendid Ardwick Hall, probably the grandest house in 1830s Manchester, and hidden in leafy shrubberies and orchards on either side of the Green were the mansions of Manchester’s cotton plutocracy. These men, neighbours in life, would rest in eternal proximity beneath the heavy earthen crust of Manchester, filling for a pie that included world renowned scientists, surgeons, heroes of the Indian and Napoleonic wars, seasoned with a judicious sprinkling of mayors and aldermen. This would be the newly incorporated Manchester’s necropolis, an eternal pantheon of the great and the good, and the classes were as safely segregated here as they had been on the Green. 

In the midst of all this, the more discreet figure of Edward Lamb Parsons came into the world in Manchester in April 1806. He was baptised in the fashionable church of St Ann in the town centre, the child of well-to-do merchants. 

At some point in his teenage years Edward emigrated to New York and, with whatever capital he had brought with him, made a great success of himself as a cotton merchant. His business premises were on Maiden Street in Manhattan, then the centre of the Jewellery trade in the city. 

He had a splendid townhouse in Lower Manhattan and his country retreat was a sprawling antebellum style mansion set amongst mature English-style gardens in Rye New York. His wife Matilda was born into an old Connecticut family, and, in his relatively short time on earth, he and she managed to sire a large, thriving family.

It was business that had brought Edward back to the North of England. His native Manchester was the global centre of the cotton trade, and Edward was a broker between it and the American markets, hungry, like the rest of the world, for the town’s cheap, high quality, chintzes, linens and other cotton fabrics (Manchester cottons are listed amongst the property of the doomed Queen Marie Antoinette of France). 

The relationship between Manchester and the slave-owning United States was a symbiotic one. As industry boomed in Manchester, the amount of cotton produced in the Southern States of America shot up to meet demand (Economic historian Eugene E. Dattel, suggests a growth of between 156,000 bales of cotton in 1800 to 4,000,000 in 1860). 

African American activist Sarah Parker Remond, writing a few years before the full emancipation of slaves in 1865, observed:

“when I walk through the streets of Manchester and meet load after load of cotton, I think of those eighty thousand cotton plantations… and I remember not one cent of that money ever reached the hands of the labourers.”

Cotton, a member of the Mallow family, requires a semi-tropical climate to thrive and states such as Mississippi were perfect cotton farming areas. Harvesting the cotton bolls (seed-heads) had to be done by hand and was extremely labour intensive and time consuming. 

The South had a solution to hand, an already ingrained culture of racist dehumanisation and a ready supply of slaves. These could be put to work with barely any outgoing cost other than basic food and accommodation. And with minimum expenditure, the profits for those involved could potentially be vast. 

The human cost was the increased amount of slaves required to meet the demand, the enslaved population in the South rising exponentially (according to Dattel there were only 3,489 slaves in 1800 in Mississippi. By 1840, this had swollen to 374,651.)  

In Manhattan, a great distance from the squalid source of her husband’s wealth, Matilda, Edward’s wife, sat at her escritoire and read the letter that had just arrived. It was addressed to his ‘loving wife’ and reassured her he would be leaving Liverpool on Christmas Day. He added presciently, “I pray God, who rules the elements, to bring me safe home to those shores, thy arms and embraces from the little ones.”  

As Matilda awaited his return, Edward boarded the Packet Ship Pennsylvania. The weather was calm that morning, the winds almost nonexistent, and the journey was delayed as they awaited the prevailing winds to rise. Day after day passed. In the end the Pennsylvania dallied in the mouth of the River Mersey, outside Liverpool, for a week. 

Edward probably spent his time aboard the comfortable new ship reading or playing a hand of whist with Captain Smith or the handful of other wealthy passengers. There would have been good food and wine at dinner, convivial chat perhaps concerning the upcoming coronation of the 18-year-old Queen Victoria, the latest thrilling instalment of Oliver Twist, or the perennially popular discussion around the rising cost of living, and the state of trade.

On the 13th day of Christmas 1839, the proverbial storm rode in after the calm. So terrible was the weather that Captain Smith thought it wise to try to return to dock in Liverpool. It was a terrible mistake; the Pennsylvania was thrown about pell-mell by the waves. 

Captain Smith tried to drop anchor. This too was a mistake for the ship was dashed repeatedly against the notorious West Hoyle sand bank. As the ship floundered, Edward, perhaps really terrified for the first time in his short life, tried to save himself by clambering into a small lifeboat. This overturned as it hit the freezing North Sea, throwing Edward into the water. 

Many of the crew climbed the rigging and clung there for days; many more drowned, including the unfortunate Captain Smith. The hurricane would prove to be one of the most devastating in living memory. Not only was the Pennsylvania wrecked, two further ships shared its fate. 

The lethal storm hadn’t finished. It hit the genteel town of Liverpool itself with deadly force, destroying houses and killing rich and poor alike, often without warning.

A correspondent in the Native American newspaper, disgusted by the richness of the cargo, argued that those who perished had brought the wrath of God down on themselves for deigning to travel on the Sabbath.    

Edwards’ swollen and battered body was later found washed up on a beach not far from Liverpool. The coroner would describe him as being ‘tall, slender’, and oddly enough it is also recorded that he was still ‘fashionably dressed’. 

Fashionable dress for a man in 1839 would have meant rather tightly tailored trousers, a lawn shirt and matching cravat, a rich and colourful silk embroidered waistcoat beneath a greatcoat, all accessorised with a fine gold fob watch, diamond tie pin, and gold signet ring. Such extravagant baubles must have proven irresistible to those living in poverty nearby as it is recorded that both the ship and the bodies of the drowned were stripped of valuables.

Less than a year after the burial ground had opened for business, a superbly fitted glass and ebony hearse, pulled by a team of beautiful black drays, drew up on the forecourt of Ardwick Cemetery, followed by a handful of smart black carriages. 

From these descended a small group of men in heavy winter mourning, heavy black wool greatcoats or furs, and high slender top hats. A few bonneted women swathed in crepe gauze, hands protected by sable muffs, joined them. 

They gathered around the expensive private brick lined vault, as the minister intoned the prayers for the dead. The professionally poker-faced sextons moved forward and lowered the lavish velvet and silver fitted, rosewood coffin, with its beautifully engraved silver name plate, into the dark earth.  

The funeral was probably a rushed affair as Edward had already been dead some time, as well organised as could be expected when money was no object, even if time was. The mourners were drawn from amongst Edward’s business colleagues; indeed it was they who had arranged his burial. 

His maternal aunt, the biblically named Heptizebath Hewitt, probably took the place of chief mourner, alongside the few relations and friends who could be contacted hastily. This role would normally have been the prerequisite of his wife Matilda and their children. Distance made it impossible for them to be present and, tragically, they may not yet have been aware of their terrible loss. Later, after the vault had been sealed, a fine memorial was placed above it. The epitaph, having given Edward’s name, then read:

The dutiful son, the beloved husband

the loving father, the valued friend, the estimable citizen

the CHRISTIAN…

his remains rest here in the land of his fathers

AND THE PLACE OF HIS BIRTH

But far from his adopted home, and from those he held most peculiarly dear…

Engraved in the same deep patrician script was a further paragraph.

Near this spot

lie the remains of a Negro, native to North America

sent by E. L Parsons to this country to be educated

and buried at his feet at his own desire

We have no information about this individual. He isn’t even furnished with that most basic of identifying markers, a name. He has been given no date of birth, those identifying numbers which, alongside our name, provide us with the unique code that follows us from the cradle to the grave. 

We know he was black, that Edward educated him, that either Edward or he wished him to be buried at Edward’s feet (the connotation of dog and master here cannot be disregarded.) We don’t know if he shared the same fate as Edward aboard the Pennsylvania. We know nothing of his interests, his religion or his family.

Without a name he is damned to anonymity, objectified and reduced to a single word.

As early as 1698, slavers in the Caribbean were sending the results of their relationships with enslaved women to England to be educated. Possibly some did so out of genuine altruism, others, not yet totally dehumanised, may have been motivated by guilt or the concern of both their own souls and the souls of their children. 

There was a definite trend, à la Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, to choose a talented slave and educate him, the result being someone who could be wheeled out at galas and salons for the amusement of the guests as a kind of living automaton, supposed evidence of the master’s ability to educate a ‘people’ usually denigrated as intellectually sub-normal.

Edward, even in his youngest years, in the extremely conservative society of Manchester, would have been exposed to the world of slavery. The late Georgian world could, on occasion, be surprisingly permissive, and illegitimate children, even bi-racial ones, were often recognised with a candour that is surprising to us. 

Little eight-year-old William Ballard, for instance, born on the Isle de Las, off the coast of Sierra Leone, was brought to Manchester and baptised in St Ann’s, the same church Edward would be baptised in a few years later. William’s father was Scottish, and his mother, probably his father’s mistress, was a local woman. 

Or even earlier, in 1771, sisters Immy and Fanny, both born in the West Indies and both the ‘natural’ (illegitimate) children of a Mr Campbell, also of Scotland, were brought to Manchester and baptised in the venerable Cross Street Chapel, home of the Unitarian Movement in the town. There were enough black people living in the vicinity of Edward for them to be part of the early scenery of his life.

It seems probable that the unnamed young man was somehow connected to the 10,008 slaves living in bondage in New York when the 1820 census was taken. Many wealthy New Yorkers kept slaves as domestic servants or as extra unpaid workhands in small businesses. Or was he, like William Ballard, the illegitimate offspring of a young Edward with an enslaved mistress?

There is also a fascinating link that places Edward at the very epicentre of the abolitionist movement and might suggest a more benevolent rationale. When Edward, flush with cash, was looking for land to build a new country house in rural New York, he didn’t just purchase it from anyone. He bought it from Peter Augustus Jay, one of the leading abolitionists in America.

Peter was the eldest son of American founding father Chief Justice John Jay. This latter was a statesman, diplomat, philanthropist and abolitionist. He was a signatory of the Treaty of Paris, which softened diplomatic relationships between Britain and France and led to the liberalised trade between the two nations after the American Revolutionary Wars which was now benefitting Edward.

His activism caused him to found the New York Manumission Society in 1785, some 75 years before full Emancipation in the US in 1865. Manumission comes from the Latin ‘a hand lets go’, and infers the release of someone out of slavery (Alexander Hamilton, of the musical ‘Hamilton’, was also a founding member). 

Rather than immediate emancipation the society would, in phases, gradually educate, train, and then release enslaved individuals in New York. Ostensibly this would improve their chances of success in the world (both Jay and Hamilton believed there was no difference in intellect between the races) while allowing the slave owners to reacclimatise to a world without full time free labour.  

John Jay had stated “I consider education to be the soul of the republic”, and this unequivocally also applied to black people.

To this end he founded the African Free School in 1787 to educate the children of free and enslaved people of colour, and actually employed black teachers. 

The school would produce many leading black New Yorkers, including the internationally acclaimed black actor Ira Aldridge, whose portrait hangs in Manchester City Art Gallery, and Charles Lewis Reason, the first American black college professor. 

The New York Manumission Society even lobbied against and boycotted those involved locally in the slave trade, and tried to prevent the kidnapping and re-sale of free black people. Eventually John Jay’s son Peter took over his father’s position and continued his efforts until slavery was officially outlawed in New York in 1827.

It would seem unlikely, given his own stance on slavery, that Peter Jay would saddle himself with a neighbour (their estates were next to each other) who was ambivalent to the same causes as himself. It’s even possible that Edward was a paid-up abolitionist and that this connection brought them together. It’s not impossible that this young man had been educated at the African Free School and was sent to England for further education on Jay’s advice.

It must be stressed that, although the motivations of these men appear good, many of those involved in the Society still owned slaves, or like Edward, ‘the CHRISTIAN’, benefitted from wealth derived from slavery, and were fully aware of what this meant morally and socially. 

Peter Jay, whose family owned slave ships, who had grown up in a house with slaves, and who had tried and failed to convince his unwilling compatriots to give them up, was fully aware of the hypocrisy of this position. (Edward’s exact contemporary, the famed British liberal Prime Minister, and abolitionist, William E. Gladstone, son of the notoriously wicked slave owning Sir John Gladstone, also struggled with this dichotomy between his personal beliefs and the source of his wealth.)

There is definitely the feeling of tokenism that certain favoured black people were given the opportunities which the vast majority were denied, and that the donors believed this was enough to atone for the great wrongs they had perpetrated. But for whatever reason Edward chose this young man and privileged him with a life unknown to those still working the cotton fields in the South remains a mystery. It is possible that further research will one day reveal why this was; we might even be able to right a wrong, and return to him a name.

Nor would education alone break the impermeable glass ceiling that would prevent those of colour rising in the world.

For a very long time after slavery was outlawed, systemic racism would take its place. It would take the civil rights movement, civil disobedience, protests and the personal sacrifice of individuals such as Rosa Parks for black people to gain equality in law. 

And even though a black man has been elected president in the US, and Britain has seen a man of colour rise to the position of Prime Minister, racial inequality still raises its head, though, thankfully unlike in the past, these wrongs no longer go unchecked.

This is not quite the end of the story. As the nineteenth century moved on, industry in Manchester grew and the wealthy denizens of the Green moved away from the stench and smoke to suburbs further afield. 

The poor moved in, first into the subdivided mansions, and then into row upon row of identical tiny red brick terraced houses. By the turn of the twentieth century, Ardwick Cemetery too began to fill up. 

In 1901 Edward’s surviving son, John Edward Parsons, now a New York lawyer of great repute and fortune and the first in a long line of eminent Parsons, had his fathers remains exhumed and brought back to New York to be buried next to his wife. He rests there now, and his descendants still live in the house Edward built. 

The monuments of Manchester’s great and good were swept away, rumoured to have been smashed into hardcore for a new motorway, stone proving to be just as ephemeral as the lives recorded on it. The former cemetery is now sports fields utilised by descendants of the very slaves who made the likes of Edward Parsons rich. Beneath the grass, a man rests peacefully, still unknown, but no longer forgotten. 

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