Melville Monument, Edinburgh

In 2008 the Melville Monument was restored as part of the Twelve Monuments Project, a joint initiative of Edinburgh World Heritage and the City of Edinburgh Council.[1]

On June 7, 2020, during a Black Lives Matter protest, the Melville Monument was graffitied. Demonstrators believed Dundas had caused a 15-year-delay in Parliament voting to abolish the slave trade.[2]

The leading proponent of the movement to reinterpret the Melville Monument is Sir Geoff Palmer OBE, a human rights activist, Professor Emeritus at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, and Jamaica's Honorary Consult to Scotland.[3] He argues that because Henry Dundas proposed an amendment to a motion before the House of Commons in 1792 to achieve abolition gradually, rather than immediately, he delayed abolition of the slave trade by 15 years.[4] Other critics point to Dundas's role in promoting the expansion of the slavery-based empire in the Caribbean during the 1790s as a reason he should not be celebrated.[5]

Palmer's interpretation is in line with the view of the preponderance of significant historians in the field, including David Brion Davis, Robin Blackburn, Douglas Hamilton, Stephen Tomkins, and Roger Anstey.[6][7][8][9] They maintain that when Dundas inserted the word "gradual" into the debate, he in effect postponed the discussion on the slave trade until an unspecified date in the future, and subverted the abolitionist movement.[10][11] Between 1792 and 1807, when the slave trade was eventually abolished, another half a million Africans were transported into slavery in the British colonies. These historians point out that slavery did not end gradually, but it took another vote in 1807 to finally bring the trade to an end.[12][13][14] In 1795, the poet and anti-slavery campaigner Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed that the Bill "passed the House of Commons mangled and mutilated by the amendments of Mr Dundas, and it has been dying ever since of a slow decline in the House of Lords."[15][16] Dundas insisted that any abolition of the slave trade would have to be dependent on the support of West Indian colonial legislatures, and the implementation of laws concerning the amelioration of the conditions of slaves. Abolitionists argued correctly that West Indian assemblies would never support such measures, and that by making the abolition of the slave trade dependent on colonial reforms, Dundas was in effect indefinitely delaying it.[17]

This interpretation of events is contested by a small number of historians - Brian Young, an intellectual historian, Michael Fry, biographer of Henry Dundas, and Sir Tom Devine, historian of Scotland. They argue that the motion to abolish slavery was heading for certain defeat in the House of Commons until Dundas proposed the amendment for gradual abolition, to be achieved by 1800, but that after the successful vote in the House of Commons the House of Lords declined to consider the matter. In August 2020 Edinburgh World Heritage and Essential Edinburgh applied for planning to erect a plaque on the Pillar. Descendants of Henry Dundas criticised move this as ‘biased’, ‘defamatory’ and ‘historically inaccurate’. [18] [19]

As a lawyer, Dundas also won a landmark case in the abolition of slavery in Scotland. In 1777 in Knight v Wedderburn, he represented a slave who had been brought to Scotland, and who wanted to be freed. He successfully appealed Knight's case, twice, ultimately achieving a victory against slavery when Scotland's highest court decided that no person be a slave on Scottish soil. The decision effectively achieved emancipation of every slave in Scotland, except for enslaved colliers and salters who had to wait until the end of the century for emancipation.[20]

Jack Docherty's short story "Statuesque", centred on this statue, was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on 28 June 2020 in its Short Works series of stories inspired by current events.[21]

List of listed buildings in Edinburgh