Let me advise you on the best way to buy a human being.

Historical Note

These materials document correspondence between enslavers, plantation managers, and slave traders, including William Mackinen or Mackinnon, Stephen Blizard, Abraham Redwood, and their commercial associates in Antigua. They are not neutral administrative records. They expose a system in which Black people were discussed as purchasable units of labour, reproductive assets, financial instruments, and plantation “stock”.

In William Mackinen’s letter to Abraham Redwood from Antigua in seventeen fifty-three, he advised Redwood on “buying negros”, recommended selecting people from the “best countrys”, and described some men as “not worth the expence”. He urged Redwood to buy women and girls alongside men and boys so that the estate would be “stock’t with creoles” for Redwood’s children. The logic is brutally clear: enslaved women and girls were being evaluated not only as workers, but as a means of reproducing the plantation labour force across generations. Mackinen also measured the estate’s value through forced production, arguing that it would make far more sugar if it were “equally slaved”.

Later letters make the same violence visible in even colder commercial terms. In seventeen fifty-five, Mackinen and Stephen Blizard reported the purchase of twenty-three enslaved people from the Gold Coast, listing eighteen men and five women with prices in pounds sterling, then explaining that Redwood would get months of labour from them before having to pay interest on the purchase money. In another letter that same year, they described a “very fine cargo” of enslaved people, said they had taken ten without waiting for Redwood’s reply, and justified the purchase by the expected crop, labour shortage, scarcity, and future price increases. Human beings appear here as cargo, credit, labour capacity, risk, scarcity, and sugar output.

This language is not incidental. It shows the plantation system operating exactly as a machine of racial capitalism: people were bought, sorted by origin, sex, age, and perceived usefulness, priced against expected returns, and folded into inheritance plans. The violence is not only in physical punishment or coercion, but also in the administrative language itself. The letters reduce enslaved Africans and Creoles to stock, expense, cargo, plantation capacity, and future profit. That is dehumanization in its working form.

This also matters for the public presentation of Clan MacKinnon history. The Clan MacKinnon Society states that it is aware of a report that “a MacKinnon forebear was engaged in the slave trade” and denounces that activity. But the evidence is broader than a vague or distant association. Bath Abbey Memorials identifies William Mackinnon, also known as William Mackinnon of Strathaird and the thirty-first Chief of Mackinnon, as a plantation owner linked to Antigua and the transatlantic slave trade. It also notes that correspondence with Redwood shows Mackinnon treating enslaved people as a “commodity” and encouraging the purchase of women to increase the estate’s “stock” of forced labour.

Nor was this connection isolated from the chiefly line. People Australia states that William Alexander Mackinnon, who became the thirty-third Chief of Clan Mackinnon after his grandfather’s death in eighteen hundred nine, came from a family in which his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather had all owned estates and enslaved people in Antigua. It also records that in eighteen thirty-four he and his aunt received compensation connected to two hundred seventy-nine enslaved people on the Mackinnon Estate in Antigua.

So the issue is not merely that one remote ancestor had some connection to slavery. The Antigua plantation economy, the ownership of enslaved people, and the profits and compensation derived from that system were embedded in the same family line that carried the MacKinnon chiefship forward. The surviving letters show how that power was maintained in practice: through purchase, forced labour, reproductive control, racial ranking, and inheritance. Any public account that frames this only as a distant or isolated blemish risks obscuring the fact that slavery was structurally tied to the wealth, status, and continuity of the Antigua MacKinnons and their chiefly line.