Moody and his friend Sir James Stirling offered in 1828 to colonise Australia using their own capital, but were prohibited from doing so by the British Government.
Thomas Moody Junior was born in Arthuret, Longtown, Cumbria[1] into a High Church[1] merchant family, with a history of military service,[2] who included Jacobites who had fought Britain's Protestant monarchy, and who had in-common ancestry with George Washington the founder of the USA.
[1][8] His primary influence were the works of Montesquieu;[1] William Petty; William Robertson; Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (whom he knew personally);[8]Johannes van den Bosch; and those of the Africans Toussaint Louverture and Henri Christophe,[2] and he was read in abolitionist literature[8] and influenced by the contemporary Jean-Pierre Boyer who was the African President of Haiti.
[2] He was described by Stapleton Cotton, 1st Viscount Combermere, to whom he served as aide-de-camp from 1817 to 1820, as 'a very intelligent person':[9] and by 20th century historian D. J. Murray as 'an expert on West Indian affairs in general'[9] who 'helped to provide an understanding in the [Colonial] Office of problems the existence of which was barely comprehended, [and] raised fundamental questions and explained the wider implications of the Government's course of action':[9] and by Sir Humphrey Fleming Senhouse as 'an officer of high character and reputation'.
[15] He was a member of London's Political Economy Club, at which he disputed the economics of James Mill, of John Ramsay McCulloch, and of Adam Smith, and admired the philosophy of Jean-Baptiste Say.
[8] He invited the Whig chess champion Alexander McDonnell, whom he thought to have an 'unquestionably clever' 'cool and reasoning manner', to Downing Street to discuss economics.
[28] He was put on half-pay by the Army, in 1815, after the cessation of the Napoleonic Wars, after which[25] he worked for one year in Guiana as an attorney for the Bohemian Jew Wolfert Katz, who was its wealthiest planter.
[2] Moody served as aide-de-camp to Sir James Leith,[25][29] who was Governor of Barbados from May 1815 to October 1816,[29][9][7] and as Superintendent of the Crown Plantations in Guadeloupe.
[28][32][25] Moody was described by Stapleton Cotton, 1st Viscount Combermere in a letter from the same to Sir Robert Wilmot Horton that be dated 15 December 1821, as '[a] very intelligent person, and having been employed in various situations, these gave him opportunities of acquiring a thorough knowledge of the local details, etc.
[9] In 1816, Moody was responsible for the transfer of Africans, whom the Royal Navy had rescued from slave-ships since the abolition of the slave-trade,[7] to the Crown estates in Guadeloupe, where they were to be employed as apprentices.
[9] Moody, who contended that blacks ought to be treated without partiality to whites,[33] witnessed and supported the slave-rebellions of September and October 1816[34] that he described as an attempt 'by the mass of the slaves... to gain independence'.
[9] Moody believed that this title were inaccurate: he wrote in a letter to Robert Hay, of 14 July 1828, 'my real duties have been more connected with the West India Department, the Colonial Finance Accounts, and the correspondence and details relative to emigration'.
[9] Moody also wrote the 1825 Considerations in Defence of the Orders in Council for the Melioration of Slavery in Trinidad:[9] a copy of which is in the library of the Royal Commonwealth Society.
[2] Moody's protégé's Stephen's recommendation, in 1802, of indenture created the basis for both the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and for the Orders in Council.
[2][7] The slaveowners interviewed by Moody included Abraham Mendes Belisario, who was the Deputy Provost Marshal of Tortola, who owned 17 slaves.
[37][7] Sir Robert Wilmot Horton (who had by 1824 written, with Charles Ellis, 1st Baron Seaford, an anti-abolitionist article for John Murray's[43] Quarterly Review[7] for which John Taylor Coleridge wrote anti-abolitionist articles)[44][45] forwarded in 1824 one of Moody's papers to George Canning, who was then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs,[8][46] Moody, who had returned to London by 9 January 1824,[7] in 1825 presented to the House of Commons the official Commission report,[47] with an exposition of the reasons for his refusal to sign Dougan's report.
[2] Moody's first report, which is dated 2 March 1825[47] and consists of over 200 pages,[2] contends that 'without some species of coercion African labour would be worthless'.
Moody had previously advised Stirling's relation James Mangles about the settlement of the Swan River Colony at minimal cost to the British Government.
[12][51][52] Moody then was employed in London by the Duke of Wellington to advise on the defence of the West Indies,[11] to which he returned in 1828 to perform special service in the Dutch Colonies for Sir Robert Wilmot Horton, which he completed in 1829.
[25][3][58] Moody received from Britain only rank-promotions, rather than knighthoods, because its Government did not want to increase his social status above that of Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose father, although a General, was not even a knight, and who was not made a Baronet until 1838.
[64][17] On 2 June 1852, The Times of London advertised for a claimant of unclaimed property, of the value of £120, that had belonged to 'Lieutenant-Colonel [sic] Thomas Moody of Waltham Abbey', of which the dividends had not been claimed since 1839.