Ignatius Sancho

Charles Ignatius Sancho was born around 1729 aboard a slave ship crossing the Atlantic in the Middle Passage, bound for the Spanish colony of New Granada. His life began in the very machinery of the trade that would define the age: his mother died soon after the voyage, and his father, it is said, took his own life rather than endure enslavement. Orphaned before he was two, the child was carried to England and placed with three unmarried sisters in Greenwich, who kept him in service and withheld letters, believing that ignorance would keep him obedient.

He refused that fate. Drawn to the library of John Montagu, 2nd Duke of Montagu, Sancho taught himself to read and write, and grew into a man of letters, learning, and taste. He served for years as a butler in the Montagu household, and there moved among nobles, actors, writers, and artists, corresponding with the novelist Laurence Sterne and pressing upon him the cause of the enslaved.

In 1774 Sancho opened a grocery shop at Charles Street in Westminster. As a property-holding householder he was qualified to vote, and he cast his ballot in the general elections of 1774 and 1780 — among the earliest people of African descent known to have voted in a British parliamentary election. He composed and published music, wrote essays for the press, and argued without flinching against the bitter draught of slavery.

He died in London on 14 December 1780. Two years later his correspondence appeared as The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African — the first published collection of letters by a writer of African descent, and a lasting testament that a man born in chains at sea could speak, in his own hand, to the conscience of a nation. May his name be spoken with honor.