Sir John Wedderburn of Ballindean, 6th Baronet of Blackness (1729–1803) was a Scottish landowner who made a fortune in slave sugar in the West Indies. Born into a family of impoverished Perthshire gentry, his father, Sir John Wedderburn, 5th Baronet of Blackness, was executed for treason following the Jacobite uprising of 1745, and the young Wedderburn was forced to flee to the West Indies, where he eventually became the largest landowner in Jamaica. In 1769 he returned to Scotland with a slave, one Joseph Knight, who was inspired by Somersett's Case, a judgment in London determining that slavery did not exist under English law. Wedderburn was sued by Knight in a freedom suit, and lost his case, establishing the principle that Scots law would not uphold the institution of slavery either. Wedderburn ended his days as a wealthy country gentleman, having restored his family fortune and recovered the title Baronet of Blackness.
Ballindean is a country estate midway between Perth and Dundee.
Early life
John Wedderburn was born in Scotland on 21 February 1729, the son of Sir John Wedderburn, 5th Baronet of Blackness, a Perthshire gentleman who had fallen on hard times. The Blackness in his title is Blackness House in Dundee rather than Blackness in Lothian just west of Edinburgh. Sir John Wedderburn's expectations of an inheritance were not fulfilled and he raised his large family in "a small farm with a thatched house and a clay floor, which he occupied with great industry, and thereby made a laborious but starving shift to support nine children who used to run about in the fields barefoot".
In 1745 Sir John joined the rebellion of Charles Edward Stuart against the Hanoverian crown, serving as a colonel in the Jacobite army before being captured at the Battle of Culloden and hauled off to London to face trial and execution. He was indicted for treason at St Margaret's Hill, Southwark on 4 November 1746, and was found guilty, despite arguing in his defence that he had not personally taken up arms against the Crown, and was executed at Kennington Common on 28 November 1746.
The young Wedderburn made his way to London to plead with such friends as his family still had for his father's rescue and pardon. His mission failed, and he was to witness his father's execution as a traitor by hanging, drawing and quartering, after which he was forced to return to Scotland where he found himself cut off from his inheritance and, without prospects, obliged to take ship to the New World. In Glasgow he found a ship's captain prepared to let him work his passage on a ship bound for the Caribbean.
Career
Some time in early 1747 Wedderburn landed in the British Colony of Jamaica, an island which had been seized from the Spanish in 1655, and was fast becoming an important centre for the production and export of sugar. The young Wedderburn settled in the west of Jamaica, near Montego Bay, and tried his hand at a number of occupations, even practising for a few years as a medical doctor, despite having no qualifications. He managed to acquire sufficient capital to become a planter, investing in land, slaves and sugar, at the time an immensely profitable business. Wedderburn's sugar plantations prospered and he acquired huge amounts of land and wealth, becoming at one time the largest landowner in Jamaica, with around 17,000 acres of land. Other members of his family followed him, and the Wedderburns built up extensive estates in the colony.
In 1762 Wedderburn attended a "scramble" (an early form of slave auction) and purchased a young African boy aged 12 or 13 years, named Joseph Knight after the captain of the ship that had brought him to the West Indies. Rather than set Knight to work as a field hand, Wedderburn made him a house servant, teaching him to read and write and having him baptised as a Christian.
Return to Scotland, first marriage and family
Seven years later, in 1769, Wedderburn returned to Scotland, and brought Joseph Knight with him. He returned to Perthshire where he sought to re-establish his family's respectability, marry and raise a family, and reclaim the title Baronet of Blackness. In 1769 he purchased the Ballindean estate, near Inchture, a village between Dundee and Perth on the northern side of the Firth of Tay. The (NB spelling), the listed building visible today, is an 1832 rebuild.
On 25 November 1769, aged 40 years, Wedderburn married his first wife, Margaret Ogilvy, daughter of David Ogilvy, de jure 6th Earl of Airlie (i.e. from a family like his, attainted by the stain of treason). They married in Cortachy, Angus. They had four children, of whom three survived to adulthood:
