Financial legacy
Henry Yates Thompson provides a useful case study of the ways in which financial legacies, material bequests, and personal political ideologies could be at odds with one another in this period and among these social networks.
He was the son of Samuel Henry Thompson and Elizabeth Yates, the daughter of Joseph Brooks Yates. At the point of abolition in 1833, Joseph Brooks Yates owned 18 estates in Jamaica and 2287 enslaved people. He filed compensation claims for the revenue he would lose as a result of abolition and was awarded over £43,000 (over £5.5m in today’s money).
Joseph Brooks Yates left Elizabeth one fifth of his estate, to be passed to her children when they reached the age of 21. It is possible that Samuel Henry Thompson was also a beneficiary of the will of Joseph Brooks Yates.
“I blush for my country when I think of the moral support we are giving to these brutal slave owners, about whom people who know anything, American or English, have only one opinion.” – Henry Yates Thompson
Material legacy
Newnham College’s first purpose-built library was financed by Henry Yates Thompson and his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Victorian publisher George Smith. The Library was named after him. The total cost of the building project is not clear from archive records, and the money may have been paid directly to the architect and construction company.
Cultural Legacy
Collecting
Joseph Brooks Yates had collected 365 books and manuscripts and bequeathed ten illuminated manuscripts to his grandson. Like his grandfather, Henry Yates Thompson became a renowned manuscript collector.. He was famous for limiting his collection to one hundred items and selling previous acquisitions every time he bought another to add to his collection. This meant that he sold or gave away many of the manuscripts he inherited from his grandfather once he found better copies.
Henry Yates Thompson donated around fifty rare books to Newnham College Library, and three manuscripts: Epistre Othea by Christine de Pisan, and Piers Plowman and Preces, both of which he inherited from his grandfather.
Civil War Diaries
Henry Yates Thompson engaged directly with the question of slavery during his lifetime. He travelled across America during the Civil War and recorded his journey in diary entries, newspaper articles, and letters arguing with family members. He was a supporter of the North and the Union, and an advocate for abolition. His writings include interviews and encounters with slave owners and occasionally with enslaved or formerly enslaved people.
Yates Thompson tried to endow a readership at Cambridge with a biennial course of twelve lectures on ‘History and Political Institutions of the USA’, but the University rejected the idea out of fear of spreading Unitarian, republican, or democratic ideas. He delivered his own lecture in Cambridge in 1865 and appealed for donations to the Freedman’s Aid Society, which helped ‘the emancipated slaves in the Southern states who are destitute through no fault of their own’.