Mary Prince

Mary Prince (born about 1788 in Bermuda, last recorded in 1833) was an enslaved woman whose testimony became one of the sharpest weapons of the British abolition campaign. She was held by a succession of owners across Bermuda, Turk's Island, and Antigua before leaving her master's household in London in 1828, where slavery had no legal force, though returning to her husband in Antigua would have meant re-enslavement. In 1829 a petition in her name went before Parliament seeking her freedom, the first such petition presented by a Black woman; it failed, and John Wood refused to the end either to free her or let her be bought out. Illiterate all her life, she dictated her story to Susanna Strickland under the auspices of the Anti-Slavery Society, and nothing certain is known of her after 1833.