Richard Robert Madden

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Richard Robert Madden (1798-February 5, 1886) was an Irish doctor, writer, and abolitionist.

Madden was employed in the British civil service from 1833, first as a justice of the peace in Jamaica, where he was one of six Special Magistrates sent to oversee the eventual liberation of Jamaica's slave population, according to the terms of the Abolition Act of 1833. From 1835 he was Superintendent of the freed Africans in Havana. In 1839 he became the investigating officer into the slave trade on the west coast of Africa, in 1847 the secretary for the West Australian colonies, and in 1850 he was named secretary of the Office for Loan Funds in Dublin.

[edit] Published works

Besides several travel diaries (Travels in Turkey, Egypt etc. in 1824-27, 1829, and others), his works include the historically significant book The United Irishmen, their lives and times (1843; redacted 1858, 4 Vols.), which contains rich details about the causes of the Irish uprising of 1798.

His other books include:

  • The shrines and sepulchres of the old and new world (1851)
  • The life and martyrdom of Savonarola (1854)
  • Memoirs of the countess of Blessington (1853)
  • Phantasmata, or illusions and fanaticisms of an epidemic character (1857)
  • Galileo and the inquisition (1863)
  • History of Irish periodical literature (1867)

His time in Jamaica is also noticeable for his collection of letters and autobiographical accounts of several Muslim African slaves there at the time: Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, Mohammed Kaba, William Rainsford, Benjamin Cochrane (or Anna Mousa), and Benjamin Larten. These accounts are dealt with in his two-volume memoir, A Twelve Month's Residence in the West Indies.

[edit] References

This article is a translation of the German Wikipedia article of the same title, with supplemental information from Allan D. Austin's "Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook" (Garland Publishing, Inc.: New York, 1984)

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