A newly rediscovered baptism entry at Manchester Cathedral offers a rare glimpse into the life of an enslaved African teenager in 18th-century England - proving that even in the Georgian era, Manchester was a bit more diverse than period dramas would have you believe.
The entry, dated 26 December 1798, reads: "Indiana Mundi, aged 14. A negro girl from Congo on the coast of Africa, disposed of to Mr Paton at St Kitts & transferred from him to Arch.d Paton MD baptised this day." Indiana is now expected to be honored with a memorial at the cathedral, funded by Heritage Lottery, unveiled on Clarkson Day (28 October) - the cathedral's annual event to confront the legacies of slavery.
Cathedral research officer Cathy Hirst stumbled upon the original entry while working through 18th-century ledgers. Indiana's unusually detailed notice had been noted before, but Hirst's rediscovery is the real find. Other records show that Archibald Paton, the man who brought Indiana to Manchester, was a Liverpool doctor who married Sarah Burton at the cathedral in 1797.
Indiana likely served as a household servant - Black servants being a status symbol at the time, with "exotic" names like Mundi (Latin for "of the world") in fashion. Malik Al Nasir, a Cambridge academic, explains that British returnees from colonies brought enslaved people to work as servants, footmen, or farm workers. Girls were "prized" but vulnerable to sexual exploitation. A baptism, Al Nasir notes, "would indicate somebody's formed an attachment and just wanted to bring them into their family."
Baptism during enslavement was politically and spiritually significant. It was actively discouraged in British colonies because plantation owners feared Christian teachings - especially Moses leading the Israelites out of bondage - would encourage literacy and resistance. There was also a belief that baptism conferred legal freedom. This argument proved pivotal to abolition, as seen in the 1771 Somerset case in London, where an enslaved man named James Somerset was baptised and then refused to work. The resulting court ruling (Somerset v Stewart) declared no law permitted enslavement on English soil - though the judge, Lord Mansfield, deliberately kept the ruling narrow to avoid upsetting merchant classes.
Benjamin Franklin attended the Somerset case and reported back to America, contributing to colonists' fears that Britain would eventually force emancipation - a driver of the American war of independence. In England, enslaved people ran away, declaring themselves free. News spread to Manchester. Yet neither the crowd of Black Mancunians abolitionist Thomas Clarkson encountered in 1787 nor Indiana could be assumed free. The legal status of enslaved people in England remained contested, and the transatlantic trade continued until 1807.
Clarkson's 1787 visit to Manchester Cathedral was a seminal abolitionist moment. He had survived an assassination attempt in Liverpool before finding a receptive audience in Manchester. His sermon led to 10,500 Mancunians (one in five) signing a petition against the slave trade. Clarkson later wrote of seeing "a great crowd of black people standing round the pulpit. There might be 40 or 50 of them."
Despite Manchester's central role in cotton built on enslaved labor, Indiana's record and Clarkson's signature are among few visible links in the cathedral. Others include a memorial to Rev Richard Assheton, who inherited 244 enslaved workers and a Jamaican plantation, and a memorial to Dauntessy Hulme, a cathedral benefactor who signed a petition opposing abolition in 1806. As Hirst says, "As an institution we have to deal with this history - we can't just keep celebrating the fact that we were important to the abolitionist movement."
Parish records offer further glimpses: burials and baptisms of Black people like "Philip a Negro from Mr John Mosse" (1757) and "Eliza Alburn... a brown girl from Upper Germany" (1831). In 1771, "Immy and Fanny, two West Indian girls" were baptised at Cross Street Chapel. These fragmentary records are often all that survives of Black lives in Georgian England.