Collection P049 - Richard Robert Madden Collection

Richard Robert Madden was born in 1798 in Dublin, Ireland, and died in 1886 in Booterstown, Ireland. He was the son of Edward Madden and Elizabeth Corey and had twenty siblings. Madden attended private schools and studied medicine in Paris, Italy, and London, and went on to practice medicine in Mayfair, London, for five years. In 1828, Madden married Harriet Elmslie, daughter of John Elmslie (1739-1822), a Scot who owned hundreds of enslaved people on his plantations in Jamaica. They had three sons. Madden became involved in abolitionism, as the transatlantic slave trade had been illegal in the British empire since 1807, but slavery itself remained legal. From 1833, he was employed in the British civil service, first as justice of the peace in Jamaica and then in 1835, as Superintendent of the freed Africans in Havana, Cuba. In 1839, he left Cuba for New York, where he provided important evidence for the defence of the former enslaved people who had taken over the ship called Amistad. In 1840, Madden became Her Majesty’s Special Commissioner of Inquiry into the British Settlements on the West Coast of Africa. He investigated the continued operation of the slave trade on the west coast of Africa, despite the illegality of the shipping of enslaved Africans across the ocean. Madden found that London-based merchants (including British politician Matther Forster) continued to help traders of enslaved people and that slavery was ongoing but disguised in all the coast settlements. In 1847, Madden became the colonial secretary for Western Australia, but he and his wife left for Dublin in 1849 after receiving news of his eldest son’s death. He was named secretary of the Office for Loan Funds in Dublin in 1850. He continued to campaign against slavery in Cuba, speaking at the General Anti-Slavery Convention in London on the topic of slavery in Cuba. Madden published various books including his travel diaries, but his most notable book is called The United Irishmen, Their Lives and Times (1842-1860), which contains details on the Irish Rebellion of 1798.