Last week, we followed young Newry merchant James “Jemmy” Blair as he left Canal Street in 1773 seeking opportunity across the Atlantic. His mother’s letters revealed a family navigating hardship, loss and the uncertainties of migration. Yet the later decades of Jemmy’s life reveal a more unsettling truth: the same ambition that once sustained a widowed mother in Newry ultimately fuelled a fortune built on the exploitation of enslaved people in the Caribbean and South America.
By the 1780s, Jemmy’s prospects had risen sharply. His years in New York and later on the Dutch island of St Eustatia gave him a firm grounding in global commerce, especially in sugar, coffee and enslaved labour. When political turmoil forced him from St Eustatia in 1779, he moved to St Thomas, continuing to trade and steadily emerging as a well‑connected merchant with growing capital. Around 1790, Jemmy and his brother Lambert dramatically expanded their horizons. No longer content to remain merchants, they began purchasing land in the Dutch colonies of Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo, territories that now form Guyana. With fertile soil, expanding European markets and looser regulations than in British colonies, these regions offered enormous profit potential. The Blairs were no longer traders alone; they were becoming large‑scale plantation owners.
Their nephew, John McCamon, the son of Jemmy’s late sister Betty, joined Lambert in Demerara to help manage the first estates. Letters from these years are few, but other records reveal rapid expansion. By the early 1800s, Lambert alone controlled more than 20,000 acres of prime agricultural land. After the brothers’ deaths, the next generation would consolidate these scattered holdings into even larger plantations.
Meanwhile, the wider Atlantic world was in turmoil. The French Revolution ignited unrest across the Caribbean, including a major uprising in Grenada in 1794. Jemmy, who had settled there after leaving St Thomas, was again forced to flee, this time to Barbados. Yet despite revolutions, embargoes, naval blockades and widespread confiscations, Jemmy’s wealth continued to grow. The Blairs were skilled at turning instability into opportunity, investing heavily at a moment when demand for slave‑produced goods was at its peak. Britain’s formal takeover of the Dutch colonies in 1801 only intensified economic activity and drew British settlers into the region.
Having secured extensive landholdings, the Blairs entered one of the most profitable and most brutal parts of the plantation economy: the trafficking of enslaved Africans. Shipping records show they owned at least two vessels that made repeated voyages transporting enslaved men, women and children from Barbados to Demerara. This marked a stark contrast with the modest world described in Mrs Blair’s earlier letters, where a widow sold flaxseed and shirts to support her family. The Blairs’ prosperity now rested entirely on the forced labour of hundreds of enslaved people, whose lives were shaped by relentless work, harsh discipline and high mortality rates.
Neither Jemmy nor Lambert intended to settle permanently in Demerara. By the early nineteenth century, both were living comfortably in Britain and Ireland, leaving the daily management of hundreds of enslaved workers to their nephews, especially James Blair, son of their younger brother Jack. By 1807, both men had returned home as wealthy members of the rural gentry. Jemmy purchased Merville, near Belfast, where he lived with his wife, Dorothea Ogilvie. Their world of servants, gardens and country pursuits bore little resemblance to the cramped house on Canal Street where Jemmy’s life had begun. Yet traces of the plantation world followed him home. When Jemmy died in 1820, he left a £15 annuity to his “black servant,” Richard Lothian, almost certainly someone formerly enslaved on a Blair estate and later brought to Ireland for domestic service. Jemmy also left donations to the poor of Newry and Belfast. Dorothea erected an ornate memorial to him in St Mary’s Church of Ireland praising his benevolence, though it made no mention of the enslaved people whose labour created his wealth. As Jemmy left no children, his fortune passed to his nephew James Blair, who also inherited Lambert’s estates (d. 1815) and those of John McCamon (d. 1818). James consolidated the family’s vast holdings into Blairmount, one of the largest slave‑worked plantations in the British Empire.
When slavery was abolished in the British colonies in 1833, compensation went not to the enslaved, but to slave owners. As the owner of nearly 1,600 enslaved people, James Blair received £83,530 - up to £69 million today - the single largest award to any individual. It made him one of the wealthiest men in Britain and underpinned a prominent political career rooted entirely in plantation wealth. Jemmy Blair’s story forces us to confront Newry’s deeper connections to the Atlantic slave economy. No slave ships sailed from the town, and no plantations existed in Ireland, yet Newry’s prosperity was entwined with slavery. Linen, butter and beef fed plantation societies; merchants traded with slave economies; and even modest households, like the Blairs of Canal Street, were linked to these global networks.
The Blair letters remind us that history rarely fits a simple narrative. The same family that embodied Newry’s global reach and enterprise also contributed directly to one of humanity’s greatest injustices. Acknowledging this complexity deepens our understanding of the past and of the world shaped by it.
Geraldine Foley is researching Newry’s connection to the Caribbean in the 18th century and would be keen to hear from any reader who might have further information.
Discover more about the lives of residents in the port of Newry in the new exhibition Making Waves: Newry’s rise as a global trade centre which continues at Newry & Mourne Museum until September 2026.
New exhibition at Newry and Mourne Museum
