History of the Stewarts | Famous Stewarts
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According to the History of Parliament, although his ethnicity was not mentioned while he was an MP, there were subsequent references to him as ‘a man of colour’ and the first ‘coloured’ Member of Parliament “It was said that ‘the bigoted anti-colour party in the West Indies could never get over his election by an English borough, but he was extremely popular with his constituents’.” (citing Dundee Courier & Argus, 23 June 1888). When his father died, Stewart took possession of estates in Grenada and Demerara and his father’s house in the Albany, London. By the 1840s he was an established figure in the City of London. His political affiliations wavered: sometimes characterised as a ‘Radical’ he was generally Conservative. What is striking was his defence of slavery, of apprenticeship, and of the sugar duties.
In 1848 he married Phoebe Rossiter, nearly 40 years his junior. She was the daughter of Joseph Rossiter, of Paulton, Somerset. Phoebe died in 1870, aged 52. Stewart died at home, 2 Burwood Place, Hyde Park and was succeeded by his son, William Duncan Stewart, who died at Georgetown, British Guiana, in 1869 at the age of 40. The Annandale plantation passed out of the family’s hands shortly thereafter.