letters of the late ignatius sancho an african

Sancho was orphaned when he was only two years old. But enough- it is a subject that sours my blood.Ignatius Sancho was born while crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a vessel carrying captive Africans to Spanish colonies in the Western hemisphere, where the captives were sold as enslaved people. In Africa, the poor wretched natives, blessed with the most fertile and luxuriant soil, are rendered so much the more miserable for what Providence meant as a blessing: the Christians' abominable traffic for slaves, and the horrid cruelty and treachery of the petty Kings- encouraged by their Christian customers- who carry them strong liquors, to enflame their national madness, and powder, and bad fire-arms, to furnish them with the hellish means of killing and kidnapping. Commerce attended with strict honesty, and with Religion for its companion, would be a blessing to every shore it touched at. “Commerce was meant by the goodness of the Deity to diffuse the various goods of the earth into every part, to unite mankind in the blessed chains of brotherly love, society, and mutual dependence: the enlightened Christian should diffuse the riches of the Gospel of peace, with the commodities of his respective land. The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, edited and published two years after his death, is one of the earliest accounts of African slavery written in English by a former slave of Spanish and English families. He gained fame in his time as 'the extraordinary Negro', and to eighteenth-century British abolitionists he became a symbol of the humanity of Africans and immorality of the slave trade. He is the first known Black Briton to vote in a British election.

1729 – 14 December 1780) was a British composer, actor, and writer.

Letters of the late ignatius sancho an african