SOURCE: Thomas, Helen. “Robert Wedderburn and Mulatto Discourse.” In Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies, pp. 255-71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Thomas analyzes two nineteenth-century abolitionist texts written by ex-slave Robert Wedderburn, focusing especially on the impact and influence of his mulatto identity on the works.

But there comes a time, as it came in my life, when a man is denied the right to live a normal life, when he can only live the life of an outlaw because the government has so decreed to use the law to impose a state of outlawry on him.¹

Now I have scarcely a drop of black blood left in me, my blood having so faded with the blood of a Minister, that I am [becoming] as white as a Mulatto.²

Whereas Equiano's narrative of spiritual redemption presents a relatively circumspect demand for political reformation, the...