Mary Ramsay

​Mary Ramsay was born in Alloa, Scotland but moved to Kingston, Jamaica at the age of two, returning to Britain aged 20 after her father’s death. She not only inherited Jamaican property and people worth £20,000 through her father and uncle, but her husband Richard Oswald was a major trader in enslaved Africans, supplying thousands of Africans to Charleston, South Carolina, Savannah, Georgia, and the Caribbean from Sierra Leone. The couple bought swathes of land in the Ayrshire countryside south of Glasgow and built a grand house, Auchincruive. Mary’s portrait by Zoffany now hangs in the National Gallery. Richard Oswald was chosen to negotiate the peace treaty with the Americans at the end of the Revolutionary War; Mary hosted the American delegates - Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Jay.