Samuel Bradburn 

Samuel Bradburn (1751-1816) was born in Gilbralter and eventually became one of the leading Methodist ministers of his day. He was called the “Methodist Demosthenes” for his oratorical skills. He began itinerating in 1774 in the Liverpool circuit and was a close friend of John and Charles Wesley. He came under fire in Bristol for disturbing the peace of the society by favoring ordination and opening the Portland chapel during regular church hours and administering the sacraments. He usually supported the people against the “High Church bigots.” He was ordained in 1792 and published shortly thereafter a pamphlet, The Question, Are the Methodists Dissenters? He was one of the nine who drew up the compromise Plan of Pacification in 1795 and was elected Methodist Conference President in 1799. Bradburn also participated in the slave-trade debate of the early 1790s. In his An Address to the People called Methodists, concerning the Criminality of Encouraging Slavery, published by the Baptist printer Martha Gurney in London in 1792, Bradburn described those who traffick in human flesh as “blood-thirsty monsters, who manifestly take pleasure in torturing the defenceless objects of their malicious passions” (3, 5). After quoting extensively from Fox’s Summary of the Evidence, Bradburn, like the Baptist minister John Liddon, took Parliament to task for merely proposing better regulations of the trade. He advises his readers to do three things to bring about an end to the slave trade:  petition Parliament, pray earnestly to God, and “abstain from the use of Rum and Sugar, till its abolition be completed, or till those articles be procured from some other quarter” (9). Concerning his third point, Bradburn advises his followers to read Fox’s Address, a work “which does peculiar honour to the principles and abilities of the writer.”  Like William Fox, Bradburn believed the boycott would work by driving down the price of sugar and forcing concessions from the planters. By “refusing the produce of the islands,” he writes, the boycotters “will speedily convince the haughty slave-mongers, that it is not at their option, whether the vile traffic in their fellow creatures shall be abolished or not” (15).