Baptism record at Manchester Cathedral offers insight into Black Mancunian life in Georgian-era England | Manchester

When abolitionist Thomas Clarkson delivered a sermon at Manchester Cathedral in 1787 – during the city’s first mass rally against the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans – he saw “a great multitude of colored people standing around the pulpit”.

However, little is known about Black Mancunians in the Georgian period, making a recently rediscovered entry in the church records at Manchester Cathedral particularly important.

The handwritten introduction offers a glimpse into the life of an enslaved African youth living in the city in the 18th century, when it was estimated that up to 20,000 Black people lived in England.

The entry dated December 26, 1798 reads: “Indiana Mundi, aged 14 years. A colored girl from the Congo on the coast of Africa, delivered to Mr. Paton at St. Kitts, and conveyed from him to Arch.d Paton MD, and baptized this day.”

It is now expected that Indiana and others enslaved in Manchester will be honored with a memorial service at the cathedral supported by Heritage Lottery funding. It will be unveiled on Clarkson Day, the cathedral’s annual event on October 28 to confront the legacy of slavery.

Although the existence of Indiana’s unusually detailed baptismal notice has been noted in previous research, cathedral researcher Cathy Hirst recently rediscovered the original entry by chance while working on the 18th-century ledgers.

Other records reveal that Archibald Paton, who brought Indiana to Manchester, was a doctor from Liverpool who had married Sarah Burton in the cathedral the year before, in November 1797.

Indiana is thought to have been a servant in the Patons household during a time when Black servants were a status symbol. “Exotic” names were also in fashion; It is possible that Mundi, which means “belonging to the world” in Latin, was chosen by the Patons.

Malik Al Nasir, Cambridge University academic and author I’m Looking For My Slave Roots, He explained that Englishmen returning from Britain’s colonies brought with them enslaved people to work as domestic servants, butlers, farm laborers, or servants. Girls were “rewarded” but were vulnerable to sexual exploitation.

Al Nasir added that although we know little about Indiana’s experience, “baptism shows that someone has made a connection and just wants to welcome her into their family.”

At the time of Indiana’s arrival, enslaved people from west and central Africa were being transported across the treacherous Middle Passage to British colonies such as St Kitts, which had about 70 sugar plantations by the late 18th century.

During enslavement, baptism had both political and spiritual significance for Black people. Al Nasir said baptism was actively discouraged in British colonies. Plantation owners feared that Christian teaching—especially stories such as Moses’ rescue of the Israelites from captivity—would encourage literacy and resistance.

There was also a widespread belief that baptism provided legal freedom. As Al Nasir explains: “The argument was that you cannot baptize anything, you can only baptize a person, and because he is a person, you cannot treat him as property.”

This argument turned out to be crucial to the abolitionist cause. In 1771, in London—20 years before Indiana was baptized in Manchester—an enslaved Black man named James Somerset was baptized with three abolitionist godparents before refusing to work any longer for his “master,” Charles Stewart. It was a significant moment in black British history.

On Stewart’s orders, Somerset was kidnapped for shipment to Jamaica. However, the judge in the resulting case of Somerset v Stewart held that no master had the right to forcibly detain an enslaved person for the purpose of transporting and selling them abroad.

Somerset was a free man, but this was a narrow decision. Lord Mansfield, the judge whose own niece Dido Belle was of mixed inheritance, did not want to upset the merchant classes who profited from enslavement.

However, the case revealed the fact that no law permitted enslavement on English soil; The judge declared that slavery was “so abominable that nothing but positive law can be admitted to support it.” The ripple effects were profound.

Benjamin Franklin, the founding politician of the United States, was in the gallery for the Somerset trial. He returned to America and reported on the direction of legal thought in London. According to Al Nasir, this contributed to the growing belief among American colonists that, as a British colony, they would eventually be forced to liberate enslaved people, and this prospect became one of the driving forces behind the American war of independence.

Enslaved people in London, England, escaped from their masters and declared themselves free. The news spread throughout Manchester. Masters began sending enslaved people overseas to maintain control, while others sought passage to England precisely to seek baptism and freedom.

But neither the Black Mancunian mob Clarkson encountered in the cathedral in 1787 nor the Indiana Mundi baptized four years later can be assumed to be free.

The legal status of enslaved people in England remained controversial, and many who attempted to assert their freedom were recaptured and deported by masters who ignored the spirit of the Somerset decision. Meanwhile, the transatlantic trade of enslaved Africans continued.

“British ships were officially still going to West Africa until 1807, bringing people not only to the Caribbean and Africa, but also to Liverpool, where they sold them at the market,” Al Nasir said.

In this context, Clarkson’s visit to Manchester in 1787 was a seminal moment in grassroots abolition. Before arriving in Manchester, he had survived an assassination attempt by supporters of the transatlantic trade in Liverpool, where he found a positive audience. His sermon led to one in five Mancunians (10,500 people) signing a petition to parliament against the slave trade.

Clarkson later wrote of her visit to the cathedral: “When I entered the church it was so full that I could barely reach my house… I was also surprised to see a large crowd of colored people standing around the pulpit. There may have been 40 or 50 of them.”

Despite Manchester’s central role in the international cotton trade built on enslaved African laborers, Clarkson’s signature on the cathedral’s “peculiar book of homilies” and Indiana’s baptismal record are among only a few visible connections within the cathedral building.

Others include a monument to the Reverend Richard Assheton, a cathedral warden who inherited 244 slave laborers and a plantation in Jamaica from his uncle in 1732, and a monument near the south entrance to Dauntessy Hulme, a cathedral benefactor who signed a petition against the abolition of slavery in 1806.

“As an institution we have to deal with this history; we cannot continue to celebrate the fact that we were important to the abolitionist movement,” Hirst said.

Parish records offer further insight into Black lives in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries: funerals, baptisms, and brief notes are often all that survive.

On 20 May 1757, “a nigger Philip of Mr. John Mosse” was buried in Manchester Cathedral, while 22-year-old Eliza Alburn of Manchester, a “brown girl from Upper Germany”, was buried in the cathedral on 26 August 1831.

Elsewhere in Manchester city centre, “Immy and Fanny, two West Indian girls, one aged 15 and the other 13, natural children of Mr. Campbell, a Scotsman” were baptized at Cross Street Chapel in 1771, while “Frances Williams… A Colored Woman” was baptized at St Mary Parsonage in 1767.