The Full Story
1787. A new committee met in London to end the British slave trade. The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
One of its members was a potter from Burslem in Staffordshire. Josiah Wedgwood.
He was not a wheel-turner by then. Smallpox in childhood had wrecked his right leg, so he had mastered everything else. Glazes. Kilns. Factories. He built the Etruria works and ran it like a science.
He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, elected in 1783, and one of the Lunar Society men who met by moonlight to talk chemistry and machines.
The committee needed a seal. Wedgwood turned it into something people could wear.
The cameo was modelled by William Hackwood, one of Wedgwood's craftsmen, after the Society's design. A kneeling enslaved African in chains, hands raised. Around him, 8 words. Am I not a man and a brother?
Wedgwood fired it in jasperware. Pale figure on a dark ground. Then he gave them away. Free, by the parcel-load, to abolitionists across the country.
Britain put them on. Brooches. Bracelets. Hairpins. Some had them set in gold on the lids of snuff boxes. The campaign became something you could pin to your coat.
In 1788 Wedgwood sent a packet across the Atlantic to Benjamin Franklin. Franklin wrote back that the cameo might do as much good as the best written pamphlet.
Wedgwood died in 1795. Britain abolished the slave trade 12 years later, in 1807.
No army made that medallion. A potter, a modeller and a kiln did. An argument you could hold in your hand, and Britain held it.
Why This Matters
The Wedgwood medallion is one of the earliest mass-produced emblems of a political campaign, and it shows abolition spreading the way ordinary people spread things: hand to hand, worn in public, given away free rather than sold. The image was not Wedgwood's alone. The Society set the design, William Hackwood modelled the cameo, and Wedgwood's works fired and distributed it. That collaboration is the point. A craftsman, a manufacturer and a campaigning committee turned clay into a sign that thousands of ordinary Britons chose to wear, long before they could vote on the trade their wages helped end.
Key Facts
- ✓In 1787 Josiah Wedgwood, a member of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, produced a jasperware medallion of a kneeling enslaved African in chains with the motto 'Am I Not a Man and a Brother?' (V&A; Wikipedia)
- ✓The cameo was modelled by Wedgwood's craftsman William Hackwood after the Society's seal design, so Wedgwood was the maker and distributor rather than sole designer (V&A Collections; Wikipedia)
- ✓Wedgwood distributed the medallions free to abolitionists, and they were worn as brooches, bracelets, hairpins and set into snuff boxes, becoming a popular emblem of British abolition (V&A; Smithsonian; Clarkson's own account)
- ✓Wedgwood was a master potter who built the Etruria works, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1783, and was a member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham (Royal Society; New World Encyclopedia)
- ✓In 1788 Wedgwood sent medallions to Benjamin Franklin, who replied that the image might have an effect equal to that of the best written pamphlet (Smithsonian; Wikipedia)
- ⚠Sources differ on the precise modelling credit. The V&A credits William Hackwood, while some accounts also name Henry Webber, and the underlying figure derives from the Society's seal rather than from Wedgwood alone. The page credits Hackwood as modeller and avoids calling Wedgwood the designer.