Richard Hillier

Richard Hillier (d. 1812) composed A Vindication of the Address to the People of Great Britain, on the use of West India Produce.  With some observations and facts relative to the situation of slaves.  In the reply to a female apologist for slavery (1791), which was published by Martha Gurney in November 1791 and was one of several responses to William Fox’s Address to the People of Great Britain (1791). Hillier was formerly a sailor involved in the West India trade who had joined the congregation at Maze Pond by letter from Samuel Pearce’s congregation at Cannon Street in Birmingham on 3 July 1791, just days before the Priestley riots erupted there. Hillier arrived in London at the height of the slave trade controversy and joined the sugar boycott after reading Fox’s Address ‘in manuscript’ (Vindication, 3), which Martha Gurney was apparently circulating through the congregation at Maze Pond that summer.  Hillier’s pamphlet was in response to An Answer to a Pamphlet, intituled An Address to the People of England, against the use of the West India Produce (1791), composed by an anonymous female who had attacked Fox and the sugar boycott.  The female apologist proceeded to attack Hillier in her next pamphlet for his not abstaining from sugar prior to the recent debate, to which Hillier responded that his conscience had been ‘asleep’ until he read Fox’s ‘well-timed, and spirited Address, to the People of Great Britain’ (Vindication, 2nd ed., p. 3).  Several entries in the Maze Pond Church Book, 1784-1821 (MS., Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford) note Hillier’s arrival: ‘The Church being stayed, M.r Richard Hillier, a Member of the Baptized Church under the Pastoral care of M.r Pearce at Birmingham, Warwickshire, was proposed for communion with us:--Resolved, that he be admitted a Member of this Church when the Church to which he now belongs, grant him a Letter of Dismission’ (f. 77); ‘A Letter from the Baptized Church at Birmingham, under the Pastoral care of M.r Pearce, honorably dismissing M.r Richard Hillier, being read: Resolved, he be admitted into Fellowship with us at the Table the first opportunity’ (f. 78).  Hillier was also present at the church meeting on 18 July 1791 (f. 78).  He died in America on 1 September 1812 (f. 16). He may have been related to Thomas Hillier, pastor of the Baptist congregation at Tewkesbury, 1771-90. See Robert W. Oliver, The Strict Baptist Chapels of England: The Chapels of Wiltshire and the West (London: Fauconberg Press, 1968), 109.