Horrors of Slavery announced an abolitionist politics unacknowledged by Romantic-era antislavery activists: place-based, self-liberation initiated and led by Black women. Reworking the abolitionist figure of the sorrowful, enslaved Black mother, Wedderburn celebrated his mother, Rosanna, who demanded that his enslaver father manumit him, and championed his grandmother, Talkee Amy, as a higgler and obeah woman who “trafficked on her own account.” Similar freedom practices are then traced throughout The History of Mary Prince. Prince’s repeated petit marronage demanded enslavers’ acknowledgment of her kinship with her parents and husband. As a higgler, like Talkee Amy, Prince used the produce from the provision grounds to assert freedom in fugitive markets. Wedderburn and Prince’s life narratives brought stories of Black women’s place-based freedom practices to a white audience.

Wedderburn’s view of Black-led abolition was further outlined in his life narrative, Horrors of Slavery. The narrative initially emerged as a series of letters to a working-class periodical, Bell’s Life in London, after the editor had questioned whether plantation owners ever enslaved their own mixed-race children. The question prompted Wedderburn to share his life story, in which he represented himself as a “product” of plantation slavery and testified to his father’s moral depravity as a “slave-dealer.” Although the letters prompted threatening replies from his half-brother, Andrew Colvile, Wedderburn republished the Bell’s Life letters as a pamphlet that was sold by ultra-radical booksellers in London. Horrors radically tracked Wedderburn’s life from slavery on a Jamaican plantation to his harsh sentence of solitary confinement in an English prison for blasphemous libel, making it an essential supplement to more commonly studied Romantic-era slave narratives, such as Equiano’s Interesting Narrative.