Our latest “Document of the Week” was chosen by our Senior Curator, Mary Wills. It is a letter from William Lore Hill, a graduate of a Mico Charity School in Trinidad, written in 1839. We can assume that William was formerly enslaved, or descended from enslaved people of the British colony.
In the late seventeenth century, Lady Mico, the wife of the wealthy London merchant Sir Samuel Mico, bequeathed a sum in her will “to Redeeme poor slaves”. By the mid-1830s, after the Emancipation Act of 1833 abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, these funds were applied to the Christian instruction of formerly enslaved people.
The Mico Charity was an educational trust which established schools to spread Christian education and to engage boys in local teacher training programmes. Schools were opened every evening and each Sunday to teach “all children freed under the Emancipation Act”. Infant and adult schools were also opened.
Correspondence from Trinidad to the charity trustees in the 1830s and 1840s offers insight into the experiences of those who attended the schools. William Lore Hill was a former student who himself became a teacher. He wrote to trustees in London:
“I myself am getting on very well, I thank God that my master sent me to school, when I was an infant so that I am trained up well I am glad, that I can write this letter to you I can read in the Bible.”
Mico Charity schools were associated with the broader British missionary enterprise to reshape British influence in Caribbean colonies post-abolition. These documents show the importance placed on education and Christian instruction, as a means, it was believed, of elevating the formerly enslaved from their past experiences.
Where to find this document
This document is from our collection Slavery Through Time: from Enslavers to Abolitionists, 1675–1865. This collection features images from the British Library and the Bodleian Library. It is a key resource for different aspects of the history of transatlantic slavery and its abolition, and of particular interest to students and researchers of the British empire.