W

William Buckland (1734–1774) was a British architect who designed several important buildings in colonial Maryland and Virginia.

W

William Butten was a young indentured servant of Samuel Fuller, a long-time leader of the Leiden Church. Butten died during the voyage of the Mayflower while traveling with Fuller, who had been appointed doctor for the group. At that time, children and young men were routinely rounded up from the streets of London or taken from poor families receiving church relief to be used as laborers in the colonies. Butten was sick the entire voyage and died at sea when near the coast of New England.

W

John Casor, a servant in Northampton County in the Virginia Colony, in 1655 became the first person of African descent in the Thirteen Colonies to be declared as a slave for life as a result of a civil suit. In an earlier case, John Punch was the first man documented as a slave in the Virginia Colony, sentenced to life in servitude for attempting to escape his captors.

W

Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin was a French, Dutch or Flemish writer best known as the author of one of the most important sourcebooks of 17th-century piracy, first published in Dutch as De Americaensche Zee-Roovers, in Amsterdam, by Jan ten Hoorn, in 1678.

W

Susannah Augusta Maxwell née Stokes was a prominent Black citizen of Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada, in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

W

Jean-David Nau, better known as François l'Olonnais, was a French pirate active in the Caribbean during the 1660s.

W

John Adam Treutlen, born Hans Adam Treuettlen, arrived in Colonial America as an indentured servant and rose to become a wealthy merchant and landowner. He was a leader in Georgia during the American Revolution and helped write Georgia's first constitution. In 1777, he was elected Georgia's first (post-British) governor. He was one of Georgia's few governors to die by violence.

W

Peter Williamson, also known as "Indian Peter", was a Scottish memoirist who was part-showman, part-entrepreneur and inventor. Born in a croft in Aberdeenshire, he was forcibly taken to North America at an early age, but succeeded in returning to Scotland where he eventually became a well-known character in 18th century Edinburgh. He adopted the pseudonym "Indian Peter" due to his time spent with native Americans and his self-exploitation of this in an autobiography and by touring Scotland and England in the guise of a "Red Indian".

W

Henry Wilson was the 18th vice president of the United States from 1873 until his death in 1875 and a senator from Massachusetts from 1855 to 1873. Before and during the American Civil War, he was a leading Republican, and a strong opponent of slavery. Wilson devoted his energies to the destruction of the "Slave Power" – the faction of slave owners and their political allies which anti-slavery Americans saw as dominating the country.