Ramsay became part of the group of influential politicians, philanthropists and churchmen based at Teston, and was persuaded by Lady Middleton, the wife of Charles Middleton and others to publish his account of the horrors of the slave trade. They met at Barham Court.[4] This was the first time that the British public had read an anti-slavery work by a mainstream Anglican writer who had witnessed the suffering of the slaves on the West-Indian plantations.