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The story of Francis Williams (c.1700- c.1770) has been told and retold in a number of places, but never very well nor very thoroughly. Williams has seldom been looked at as his own person but instead has been perceived as a useful little tessera, which various writers for various reasons have placed in some corner or other of their verbal mosaics. This holds true for the first and fullest account of the life and achievements of Williams in The History of Jamaica by Edward Long, who was a member of the island's plantocracy until 1769. In 1917, T. H. MacDermot explained that our "efforts to make an objective evaluation of his position . . . are seriously hampered by the obvious prejudice with which Long describes his subject."'
As many scholars have noted, Long's sole interest in Williams sprang from a desire to render him ridiculous, and thereby prove that black people were an inherently inferior people worthy of enslavement. With a stance of ersatz objectivity, Long declared that he has left "it to the readers' opinion whether what they shall discover of his genius and intellect will be sufficient to overthrow the arguments I have before alleged, to prove an inferiority of negroes [sic] to the race of white men." As W. J. Gardner politely observed about one hundred years later, "it is to be deplored that Mr. Long's history is almost the only source of information relative to the career of Williams, for his prejudices arouse the suspicion that a black man would not receive impartial justice at his hands."2
If the prejudice and polemic are put aside and information from other contemporary sources is introduced, the story of Francis Williams is as follows. He was born around 1700 to John and Dorothy Williams, a free black couple in Jamaica. In a society that considered most people of African descent to be human implements, only a limited number of free blacks were ever in a position to accumulate any property or gain any social status. Free people of color became increasingly outnumbered throughout the eighteenth century. For example in 1703 near the year of Francis Williams' birth, an estimated 45,000 slaves lived in Jamaica. By 1778 during the decade in which he died,...