Nathaniel Wells
Nathaniel Wells (1779 - 1852) was the owner of plantations of the West Indies island of St Kitts. He had inherited these from his father, a wealthy merchant, originally from Cardiff. He became a magistrate, County Sheriff and Deputy Lieutenant of Monmouthshire. None of this is out of the ordinary for a wealthy landowner.
Except that Nathaniel was the son of a slave.
William Wells (1730 - 1794) came to St Kitts around 1749. He would eventually own three sugar plantations. Nathaniel's mother was one of William's house servants, an enslaved woman called Juggy. Although William Wells had legitimate daughters, and several illegitimate ones who were carried by his slaves, Nathaniel was his only son. White owners and managers in the West Indies did have children with their female slaves, knowing that they would have been in no position to refuse the advances of a forceful male owner.
When William died he left his plantations as well as £120,000 (the equivalent to £9.2 Million today) to Nathaniel as his only son. He also freed Juggy, who took the name Joardine Wells, as well as eight other slaves. Nathaniel was sent to London for his education, and stayed in Britain, eventually buying land and buying the Piercefield near Chepstow, Monmouthshire for £90,000 from Colonel Mark Wood.
Piercefield (right, by George Eyre Brooks, 1840) and its estate was developed by Wells until the estate was around 3,000 acres. One of his guests, the painter Joseph Farington described him: "Mr Wells is a West Indian of large fortune, a man of very gentlemanly manners, but so much a man of colour as to be little removed from a Negro".
Despite his colour, Wells became an integral part of local society. In 1804 he became churchwarden of St Arvan's Church, near Piercefield. In 1806 he became a Justice of the Peace, leading on to his appointment by the Prince Regent, as Sheriff of Monmouthshire and a Deputy Lieutenant of the County in 1818.
Well's attitudes towards his slaves, and the Welsh working class was very much one of the upper classes and an absentee plantation owner. He remained a slave owner until abolition, being compensated for the freeing of his slaves. Before then he freed only a few of his mother's family. One manager of his estates on St Kitts was criticised for "brining" - putting pepper water onto the wounds of slaves who had been beaten - after the maximum allowed of 39 lashes of the whip. This would make the slaves scream in pain. Pro-abolitionists published a pamphlet about this manager. Wells did not supress the pamphlet, indeed, may have agreed to its publication.
He became a Lieutenant in the Yeomanry Cavalry in 1820, only the second black man to become an officer in the British Armed Forces. This part-time military force was primarily used for keeping the peace. In 1822 he was part of the Yeomanry when they took action against striking coal miners and ironworkers.
Nathaniel Wells married twice, first to Harriet Este, daughter of a former chaplain to King George II. His second wife was Esther Owen, whose sister was married to the eldest son of the great abolitionist William Wilberforce. When he died, his estate was split between his 20 children, 3/5 to the children of his first marriage, 2/5 to the children of his second.
The estate was eventually bought in 1925 by a group of South Wales businessmen and gentry, including 1st Viscount Tredegar for the building of a racecourse. Chepstow Racecourse was opened in 1926.
Peircefield House still stands today (right), but is in a poor state.
The oaths that Nathaniel Wells would have made on becoming Sheriff of Monmouthshire are kept at the National Archives at Kew. You can read the original documents and their transcription here: First Black Sheriff.
Many thanks to Emma Daman Thomas for information on this story. Wells' life has been the subject of the Hidden Presence project at Chepstow Museum.
