John Wedderburn

Sir John Wedderburn of Ballindean, 6th Baronet of Blackness (1729–1803) was a Scottish landowner who made a fortune in slave sugar in the West Indies. Born into a family of impoverished Perthshire gentry, his father, Sir John Wedderburn, 5th Baronet of Blackness, was executed for treason following the Jacobite uprising of 1745, and the young Wedderburn was forced to flee to the West Indies, where he eventually became the largest landowner in Jamaica. In 1769 he returned to Scotland with a slave, one Joseph Knight, who was inspired by Somersett's Case, a judgment in London determining that slavery did not exist under English law. Wedderburn was sued by Knight in a freedom suit, and lost his case, establishing the principle that Scots law would not uphold the institution of slavery either. Wedderburn ended his days as a wealthy country gentleman, having restored his family fortune and recovered the title Baronet of Blackness. Ballindean is a country estate midway between Perth and Dundee. Early life John Wedderburn was born in Scotland on 21 February 1729, the son of Sir John Wedderburn, 5th Baronet of Blackness, a Perthshire gentleman who had fallen on hard times. The Blackness in his title is Blackness House in Dundee rather than Blackness in Lothian just west of Edinburgh. Sir John Wedderburn's expectations of an inheritance were not fulfilled and he raised his large family in "a small farm with a thatched house and a clay floor, which he occupied with great industry, and thereby made a laborious but starving shift to support nine children who used to run about in the fields barefoot".