In The Slave, Grace (1827), William Scott, Lord Stowell, Chief Justice of the High Court of Admiralty, ruled that although Grace James, an enslaved Antiguan woman, had been free during her 1822–23 residence in England with the family she served, she reverted to her enslaved status after returning to Antigua. This chapter examines James’s efforts to obtain her freedom by surrendering herself to Antigua customs officers as contraband under the slave trade abolition statutes. It considers how her claims were contested in the Antigua courts and supported by abolitionist lawyers in London. The chapter also shows how satirical newspaper editorials in response to Stowell’s ruling undermined the legitimacy of slavery. It concludes by examining how Mary Prince, who was effectively exiled in London by Stowell’s ruling, likewise used satire and knowing irony in The History of Mary Prince (1831) to expose the inconsistencies and contradictions of the law of slavery and freedom in the British Empire.

This contribution examines the transatlantic reverberations of the Protestant Reformation in Christian missions among enslaved Africans in the West Indies. These spiritual encounters are revealed in the life story of Mary Prince, who escaped to freedom in England in 1826 and wrote a memoir, The History of Mary Prince, (1831), which helped to galvanize the British antislavery movement. The first ex-slave memoir by a woman, it is also a religious narrative structuring Prince’s life as the intertwining of physical liberation and emancipation from sin through membership in the Moravian Church in Antigua. This project uses Moravian manuscripts to reveal the complex spiritual world that Prince’s narrative concealed for strategic reasons. Just a few years after Britain’s closing of the slave trade, Antigua was the site of intense struggle over Christianity. African-derived folk practices flourished alongside and within evangelical worship. Disciplinary ledgers reflect congregants’ consultation of African spiritual adepts, flouting of church regulations, and mockery of Christianity. Prince was engulfed in a multi-layered religious culture at odds with her providential narrative of redemption.