Take a walk through the grounds of St Margaret’s Church in Westminster, London and you sadly won’t come across the grave of Ignatius Sancho. This, however, is where he was buried upon his death in 1780. Despite there being no epitaph to recognise his life, Sancho did indeed leave his mark on this world. In fact, he even played his part in changing the world.
Sancho is remembered as a man of firsts. He was the first black Briton who exercised his right to vote in the UK; he was the person of African origin to have his obituary published in the British press, and he was the first black prose writer to have his work published in England.
Yes, Sancho was certainly a man of firsts.
It is, therefore, sad to think that his early years were blighted through the same horrendous experiences that countless other people of colour were forced to go through during the 1700s. This was, after all, during the peak of the Slave Trade – an institution that wouldn’t be abolished until 1807 in the United Kingdom.
The Slave Trade came to an end thanks to the efforts of numerous people, including Sancho. Sancho – unlike the vast majority of abolitionists during this era though – was different from his contemporaries because he had actually lived through its horrors first hand.
This is his story.
Born into Slavery
There is no way of shining any sort of positive light on the early years of Ignatius Sancho. The only thing we can be thankful for is that he survived – ultimately meaning he could go on to live a life where he could one day start chipping away at the same institution he was born into.
It’s believed that Sancho was born around 1729. Unlike other men of his time, it’s hard to determine his exact date of birth because he was born into slavery. Sancho’s first days on this earth were actually spent on a slave ship in the Atlantic and – in lieu of official documentation – he essentially had a price tag on his head. Sancho wasn’t considered a person but a piece of property – and he belonged to the highest bidder.
The young orphan – whose mother died in slavery and whose father killed himself rather than live another day without his freedom – spent his first years as a slave in New Granada. However, when he was two-years-old he was gifted to a family of three sisters in Greenwich, London.
While the history books might give more attention to the magnitude of slavery in the Americas, thousands of Africans were also arriving on the shores of Britain during the 1700s. In fact, there were 20,000 black people – many of which had been taken as children from Africa – living in the country by 1780. Sancho became one of them by 1731.
All in all, Sancho spent 18 years serving his three masters. Whether his experience was emblematic of others around the same time is unknown because so few people in the same situation had the means or platform to tell their own story. However, there’s no denying that fate intervened and put the young Sancho on a much more unbeaten path.
This happened when he met the Duke of Montagu.
Changing the narrative
In his later years, Sancho famously mused: “Consider slavery – what it is – how bitter a draught, and how many millions are made to drink it.” These rousing comments were monumental at the time, particularly since they were the words of a black man. Sancho was never bred to consider such eloquent musings, never mind convey them through prose.
But he was able to in the latter years of his life and this is something that can be traced back to his relationship with the Duke of Montagu. The Duke was a regular visitor to Sancho’s masters’ home in Greenwich and saw something in the enslaved boy. He encouraged him to read, write and ultimately delivered him an informal education.
It was a small taste of freedom for Sancho, who unsurprisingly couldn’t get enough of his newfound knowledge. Therefore, when he was 18-years-old, he fled to the Duke’s house in 1749 and became a servant for the Duchess of Montagu. During this period Sancho was able to throw himself into the pleasures that had previously eluded him and enjoyed music, poetry, reading and writing.
The household must have felt like the land of opportunity for Sancho. However, beyond those four walls he still didn’t enjoy the same freedoms as his white counterparts. This, however, all changed upon the death of the Duchess in 1751.
In the Duchess’ will she left her servant a handsome annuity. The young Sancho was to receive £30 each year (which in present day terms would equate to around £7,000) and a year’s salary. This would once again propel Sancho into unchartered territory – in the process allowing him to make history in more ways than one!
Yes, Sancho – unlike others – was literally able to change the narrative through this turn of events. What the average person thought about slavery and the value of black people in society was about to change dramatically in due part to the ideas and talents that Sancho was able to convey across a broad spectrum of channels throughout the remainder of his life.
The ‘balancing act’
From 1751 onwards, Sancho became well versed in practising what many have deemed to be a ‘cultural balancing act’. To briefly summarise, this is the notion that he had to assimilate into white culture while at the same time maintaining his identity as a black man. He did this in numerous ways, including contributing to the arts and building relationships with influential white men of the period.
While initially continuing to work for the ancestors of the Duchess of Montagu, Sancho became a husband and father in the late 1750s. He married his wife, a West Indian woman by the name of Anne Osborne, in 1758 and the pair welcomed seven children. He was quickly becoming a man who could command great respect – conveniently just at a time when there were fresh debates happening over the morality and legality of the Slave Trade.
Sancho earned a staunch reputation as a man who could produce gripping prose and he used this to converse with key abolitionists of the day. It wasn’t, of course, just that Sancho had the ability to turn heads with his words. Instead, it was the fact that he had lived through a unique experience that few in London society could understand. Unlike other slaves and former slaves, he could write and was educated – meaning that he could really lift the lid on the atrocities of slavery and help build the argument for the end of the institution.
As he penned the letter after letter, Sancho was able to enlighten more and more people to the reasons why the country should ban the Slave Trade. Many of the letters were personal correspondence and remained private for some time. However, they would eventually reach a much larger audience when they were published in the years after his death. Sadly, Sancho never got to experience just how much his words could usher in change on a national level.
When Sancho wasn’t writing letters, he was doing something else that was extremely unconventional for a black person at this time: building a business. He opened a grocery store in Westminster along with his wife Anne, where he sold products such as tobacco and tea. The fact that he ran this business and owned property didn’t just give Sancho a degree of independence that he never thought he would experience, but also set him up for a number of feats that would seal his place in history.
Making history
Sancho was in the perfect position to make history during the final years of his life. The most notable example of this happened when he voted in the elections of 1774 and 1780. Due to his position as a male property owner, he was eligible to have his say at a time when other people of colour could not. In fact, this actually gave him more power than many white people in the country who also did not meet the criteria to vote.
In going to the ballot box, Sancho became the first black Briton to take part in the nation’s electoral process. Indeed, he was a trailblazer.
There was, of course, more history to make. Sadly, many of these instances didn’t happen until after Sancho passed away in 1780. The first of which actually happened up to his death when his obituary was published in the press. This might not seem like a particularly astonishing feat, but at this period of time a black man’s life had never been acknowledged in this way and obituaries had remained exclusive for white people.
Meanwhile, Sancho’s words – the same eloquent prose that he used so successfully to enlighten people to the horrors of slavery and build momentum for abolishing the Slave Trade – were published in print in 1782 through The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African. Once again, this was the first time that a black man’s writing had ever been showcased in this way in England.
While we’ll never know the pride that Sancho would have felt to be the man behind these accomplishments, it’s all part of the legacy that he leaves behind – a legacy that people are still talking about almost 250 years later.
The Legacy
There’s no denying that Ignatius Sancho more than deserves his name to be a part of the conversation during Black History Month. In fact, he rightly deserves to be part of a bigger conversation about the history of slavery in the UK and across the world.
The Slave Trade would come to an end following the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. While this was more than two decades after Sancho’s death, he’d been a key player in building the rhetoric that led to the fall of the institution. Without his letters and the details of his experience, the abolitionist movement could have taken much longer and been forced to rumble on deeper into the nineteenth century.
It’s important to remember that Sancho’s legacy stretches much further than just his part in the abolition of the Slave Trade. He’d made pioneering strides during his life in numerous ways, including through owning property and running a business. In addition, he also composed music and proved that so-called ‘high art’ wasn’t just for white people.
There’s every reason to believe that these simple everyday accomplishments – most of which no longer seem ground-breaking, but certainly were at the time – would have gone a great length to changing people’s assumptions of black people during this period in history.
Yes, Sancho was a man of firsts. But because of what he did, when he did it and the grace that he brought to each endeavour, he made sure that he wouldn’t be the last. This may well be his true legacy.