The Tyne & Wear Remembering Slavery project I worked on in 2007 identified Sir John Hussey Delaval of Seaton Delaval in Northumberland as having been granted land in East Florida.
Surviving documents in Northumberland Archives
provide some detail of what was envisaged. The first in 1766 is a detailed memorandum on the
manager & servants, slaves, equipment etc. necessary to found & run a
sugar plantation written by
Joseph Manesty, the Liverpool merchant and slave trader. There is a brief
description of Delaval’s land holdings in East Florida written in 1766 and 1771. A
memorandum re-a sugar plantation in East Florida was sent by George Douglas, the agent to Delaval
in 1771. (1)
John Hussey’s older sister Rhoda was a talented artist. She was the subject of a talk on the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Annual Conference held on Zoom on Wednesday 5 January. In answer to a question from me the speaker Joanna Edwards explained that the National Trust which owns Seaton Delaval Hall has a project looking at various aspects of the family’s history including the Florida link. When the project work is complete it will be put on the Hall’s website.
John Hussey Delaval, 1st Baron Delaval (1728 –1808)
We do not know how much John Hussey
invested in developing his land in East Florida. It would have been funds
accumulated from the income from his estates from tenant farmers and the
profits of mining rights at Ford Castle in Northumberland, Delaval and Doddington Hall
in Lincolnshire. The land holdings had been accumulated mainly due to family
inheritance.
The Delavals exploited the Seaton
Delaval estate’s natural resources through involvement in salt production, coal mining and glass
production. In 1764 John and his brother Thomas Hussey created a sluice to form a dock where ships could be loaded.
His father Captain Francis Blake Delaval (1692–752) had been a Royal Navy officer and Northumberland’s MP between 1716 and 1722. He had inherited Seaton Delaval Hall from his uncle Admiral George and Ford Castle from his mother's family.
Admiral George Delaval
Admiral George (1660-1723) had been born in North Dissington in Northumberland. In 1698 as a Royal Navy officer he negotiated the release of British prisoners in Morocco. He was a warship Commander during the War of the Spanish Succession. By 1722 he was a Vice-Admiral. He was also a diplomat in Spain from 1706. In 1708 he concluded an agreement with the Sultan of Morocco not to molest each other's ships. He went to Portugal for three years in 1710 as Envoy Extraordinary to its King. He was elected unopposed as a Whig MP in 1715 and 1722, and was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Northumberland in 1716. That year he bought the Shafto estate at Bavington Hall in Northumberland and two years later Seaton Delaval from his cousin, Sir John Delaval. He died while Sir John Vanbrugh was rebuilding the Hall. He left Bavington Hall to his brother-in-law George Shafto.
John Hussey Land Development and
Politics
John Hussey added to the estates he
inherited by buying Seaton Delaval from his elder brother the actor Sir Francis
Blake in exchange for an annuity. He developed the farming resources at Ford
and the coal and mineral resources at Seaton.
He was MP for Berwick on Tweed 1754–1761,
1765–1774 and 1780–1786. He rose in the English and Irish peerage between 1761
and 1786, when he became Baron Delaval of Seaton Delaval.
Because his only son died aged 19 he
left his second wife a life interest in the Ford estate, after which it was to
pass to his grand daughter Susan. His estates of Seaton Delaval and Doddington went
to his brother Edward Hussey Delaval (1729-14). Doddington then passed to
Edward's wife and then their daughter Sarah. Seaton Delaval passed to Jacob
Astley, the son of his sister Rhoda.
Born in 1756 he was MP for Norfolk between 1797 and 1817, the year he died.
John Hussey’s Family
John Hussey had several brothers and
sisters.
The eldest Rhoda (1725-57), the painter,
married Edward Astley, later 4th Baronet of Melton Constable in
Norfolk. Her letters describe the personal daily lives of the people she
knew in Northumberland.
Sir Francis Blake (1727–1771) briefly found fame as a Royal
Navy officer against France, but became an actor
associated with Samuel Foote. He paid £1,500 for the production of Othello at the Drury Lane Theatre. He
was MP for Hindon in Wiltshire from 1751 to 1754, and Andover in Hampshire from 1754 to 1768.
Edward Hussey (1729-1814) inherited the estates when John Hussey died.
Anne Hussey married William Stanhope, an MP from 1727-68, whose second wife had been Elizabeth Crowley, daughter of Sir Ambrose Crowley, who had developed his iron works at Winlaton, at which were made chains and shackles and specialist hoes for the various slave colonies in the Americas.
John Hussey’s
sister Sarah married John Savile, 1st Earl of Mexborough. The other
siblings were Mary
Elizabeth, Robert, George, Henry and Ralph.
Other North East links With Florida
The
Lowthers And North Easteners In The Floridas
A few other
people with Florida and North East connections
have been identified. The
powerful Lowther family, the Earls of Lonsdale, who had influence in
Northumberland, were granted 10,000 acres of land on the north side of St
John's River in East Florida in September 1768. (2) On 28 January 1769 Mrs Cox, wife of William
Cox, Esq, Messenger to the Assembly of Pensacola, in West Florida died at her lodgings in
Newcastle’s Side. (3) Berwick’s MP from 1768 to 1774 was Robert Paris Taylor.
(4)
The Tonyns
Patrick the second
Governor of East Florida was born in Berwick-on-Tweed. This was not identified
in the 2007 Project. Details of his time
in East Florida can be seen on the Florida History OnLine website. It includes
information about the enslaved people he took from his East Florida plantation
at Fort St. George to Dominica after the Floridas were returned to Spain. The
Legacies of British Slave-ownership database tells us that the Liverpool slave
traders Freeland and Rigby purchased some of his enslaved workers on the island
in 1786.
A query about
Peter George Florida, a negro boy who grew up in Buckinghamshire in the
mid-18th Century and married a local girl was posted by Ivor Clucas on the
Black & Asian Studies Association BASAJISC email discussion group. The
local vicar Charles was Patrick Tonyn’s brother. Their sister Julia(na),
who had also been born in Berwick,
married a merchant called Francis Levett. Levett was involved in the Levant
Company and in slave plantations in the Americas and was an important player in
East Florida development. They married in Rotterdam. How Peter George Florida
came to England is not known nor whether he was slave/secretary to Rev.
Charles, and whether he visited Berwick if Charles went there.
The Fly -Slave Trading Voyage 1776-7
The Fly was a 50 ton British built sloop
registered at Newcastle upon
Tyne with 10 mounted guns.
It set out on 16 January 1776 with a crew of
12 for Africa to transport enslaved Africans to the Americas. 119 were
purchased in Senegambia and offshore
Atlantic and 93 were landed at Pensacola in West Florida. The Fly then returned
to London on 18 July 1777. (5)
Anthony
Tissington
A merchant and mines owner with connection in
County Durham was Anthony Tissington. His
company mining operations for copper,
lead and coal in the County, Derbyshire, Scotland and Swaledale in Yorkshire. He was a friend of John Whitehurst, a member
of the Lunar Society, who had a stake in Tissington’s firm. He lived at Swanick
Hall renting it to the lawyer John Balguy from 1770. A 1774 deed itemises the
income from his mining operations
between 1756 and 1773 as £29,400. He was awarded 10,000
acres in East Florida which is said to have remained fallow into the early
1780s. In 1767 he wrote to his friend
Benjamin Franklin, who had visited him in 1771, that he might visit him en
route to his farm in East Florida. (6)
Joshua and Elizabeth Yallowley
Joshua Tallowley left Georgia in 1773 and established the Orange Bluff
Plantation. In 1774 he purchased the 1765 land grants of Paul Pigg (350 acres) and Edward Pickett.
With his enslaved workers he farmed the
land. He exported 600 gallons of orange juice annually. He went to New
Providence in the Bahamas in 1784. (7)
The East Florida
property was willed to his mother, Elizabeth Yallowley, a widow, who resided at
the time in Hexham. (8)
The Florida Orange Trade And Its Context
The 2007
project did not enable time to be spent to research further into John Hussey’s
Florida interests. A few years later I gave a talk on the orange trade in the long-18thC.
The best oranges seem to have been exported from East Florida to London by Jesse
Fish.
I have been writing up my notes for a pamphlet on the orange trade. I decided to examine in more detail the British controlled East and West Floridas between 1763 and 1784. This in turn has led me to the conclusion that in Britain we do not know much about the period and the inter-relationship of Empire, the slavery business, and the involvement of British landowners both there, in Britain and in the Caribbean after most moved away from the Floridas when they were returned to Spain in 1784.
Little research and
analysis appears to have been undertaken in the UK on the British who were
given land grants and their involvements in other enslaved colonial activities
and in Britain. There is a growing literature in the United States which
provides contextual and detailed information. In August this year George
Kotlik, a graduate of Oxford University, has his book East
Florida in the Revolutionary Era, 1763-1785 published.
(1)
NEPPP Topic 640: Delaval Family
papers.
(2)
NEPPP Topic 741: The Lowthers' American Connections
(3)
NEPPP Topic 865: Newcastle Courant
Extracts 1769-1783 re-People with Connections in the Americas.
(4)
History of the Houses of Parliament
on-line
(5)
NEPPP Topic 930: The Fly: a slave
ship from Newcastle to Florida 1776
(6)
Brenda M. Stephenson. The Barmaster: The Story of Anthony
Tissington
www.thejaxsonmag.com/article/pine-forest-a-southside-gullah-geechee-community
& Florida History Online: San Marco:
Orange Bluff Plantation
(7)
Peter Wilson Coldham. English Estates of
American Colonists. American
Wills and Administrations in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, 1700-1799. 1980
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