Wilson Armistead (30 August 181918 February 1868) was a Quaker, businessman, abolitionist and writer from Leeds. He led the Leeds Anti-Slavery Association and wrote and edited anti-slavery texts. His best known work, A Tribute for the Negro, was published in 1848 in which he describes slavery as "the most extensive and extraordinary system of crime the world ever witnessed". In 1851 he hosted Ellen and William Craft, including them on the census return as 'fugitive slaves' in an act that has been described as "guerrilla inscription".
According to prominent African-American abolitionist William Wells Brown "Few English gentlemen have done more to hasten the day of the slave’s liberation than Wilson Armistead".
Early life
Wilson Armistead was born in Leeds on 30 August 1819 to Joseph and Hannah Armistead and grew up in Holbeck where his family's flax and mustard business was located at Water Hall. The Quaker meeting house was very close by in Water Lane, and in the words of Wilfred Allott the Armistead family had long been "faithful Friends". Armistead married Mary Bragg in 1844 and their first child, a son called Joseph John was born in 1846. The couple would go on to have a further four children, two more sons and two daughters.
Intellectual life and activism
From an early age Armistead demonstrated a talent as a compiler of material rather than author of original work, compiling The Memoirs of Paul Cuffe: a man of colour when he was 21. By the 1840s he was active in the family business and eventually would head the firm. At this time, he was raising a young family and increasingly involved in abolitionist activity. He was a member of the Leeds Library, a private subscription library founded in 1768 which provided him with both a professional and ideological network. His activism extended to pacifism and he is recorded at a lecture by George Thompson in Spring 1855 where, along with Thompson, he represented a minority voice urging the Government to promote peace in Crimea. In a letter published in the Leeds Mercury newspaper on 29th November 1859, he condemned John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Like many quakers, there is also evidence that Armistead supported the temperence movement and in June 1854 he became a member of an auxilliary committee to the United Kingdom Alliance.
The Leeds Anti Slavery Association was founded in 1853 with Armistead as its president and his wife as librarian. In September 1853, he welcomed Harriet Beecher Stowe on behalf of the Association, acknowledging the impact of her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Five years previously in 1848, Armistead had published his most influential work A Tribute for the Negro which Irene Goodyear suggests represents a rare example of Armistead’s creative writing ability, comprising 150 biographical sketches and "a well-reasoned argument covering fifteen chapters". As of 2020, it was still used as an academic text to teach about the abolition of slavery. Sources for Tribute provide evidence that he was in regular correspondence with high profile abolitionists of the day including fellow Quaker and founder of the British and Foreign Antislavery Society, Joseph Sturge, as well as Joseph Jenkins Roberts, Governor of Liberia.
In June 1850 Armistead visited the United States where he met notable African Americans including escaped slave and abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward, Robert Morris, Macon Allen, both lawyers and prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, as well as Ellen and William Craft, slaves from Macon, Georgia who had escaped to the North in 1848. On the same trip, in July 1850, he also describes an encounter on a train with Thomas H. Jones, a self-emancipated fugitive slave from Wilmington, North Carolina. Soon afterwards the Crafts were forced to escape to England after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in September 1850 and their former masters sent agents to Boston after them. While in England the Crafts undertook a lecture tour and were accommodated by Wilson and Mary Armistead on 30th March 1851 when the census was taken. As head of the household, Wilson Armistead recorded his guests as “Fugitives from slavery in America, the land of their nativity” which was covered extensively in the press of the day as an unusual act of abolitionist activism. In a strongly worded article on 12th April 1851, the Leeds Mercury reported on "a remarkable return in the census", and the 'disgrace' that "America's own born citizens are driven to seek refuge in a foreign clime from the man-stealer, and from the horrors of slavery."