Samuel Galton Jnr lived at Great Barr Hall. The Galton family were prominent gun-makers based in Smethwick when over 100,000 guns a year were sold to slave traders. Guns were made for merchants in the 'Africa Trade' who in turn supplied or traded them to African chiefs in return for slaves. The Galtons were Quakers. Quaker opposition to violence caused arguments inside and outside the Galton family.

Samuel Galton's daughters boycotted sugar from slave plantations. Mary Anne Galton (1778-1856) and her sister were committee members of the West Bromwich, Birmingham and District Ladies Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves.

Samuel Galton Jnr tried to defend his connection to the slave trade by arguing that he was just a seller of weapons and what any one sought to do with them, was up to them, and he should not be accountable for other peoples actions.

The role of another Lunar Society figure and Birmingham manufacturer, Samuel Galton Jnr provides an insight into the compromises which businessmen had to make when their interests conflicted with principles. Galton was a Quaker and therefore a member of a pacifist sect. Galton was forced by his fellow Quakers to confront the tensions between his beliefs and his business interests.

In 1792 a committee was appointed to collect subscriptions to enlarge the Quaker Meeting House in Bull Street. The appeal raised an ethical point. One of the friends, Joseph Robinson wrote to the committee as follows:

"When so many eyes are opened to scrutinize into the several branches of the African trade,- the minutest of which are likely to be weighed and exposed, the supplying of slightly proved guns to the Merchants of the coast of Guinea, doubtless to be used by the natives in their wars with each other, and for us to receive part of the thousands of pounds which have probably been accumulated by a 40 year's commerce in these articles, and apply it to the use of Friends, is, I think, a matter which requires your very serious consideration."⁸

The only two members of the Meeting who were gun makers were Samuel Galton Snr and his son Samuel Galton Jnr. The matter was taken further by local Quakers. Samuel Galton Snr retired from the gun trade, but Samuel Galton Jnr mounted a spirited defence in To the Friends of the Monthly Meeting at Birmingham, 1795.

The censure and the laws of the Society against slavery are as strict and decisive as against war. Now, those who use the produce of the labour of slaves, such as Tobacco, Rum, Sugar, Rice, Indigo and Cotton, are more intimately and directly the promoters of the slave trade, than the vendor of arms is the promoter of war, because the consumption of these articles is the very ground and cause of slavery.

These arguments did not carry weight with the Society of Friends and on 10 August 1796 it disowned Samuel Galton Jnr as a member of the Society. Galton continued to attend Quaker worship but could no longer participate in business meetings. When he gave up the gun business in 1804 and started banking, the Society accepted a donation from him towards the enlargement of the Quaker burial ground.

Names of streets, bridges, land are reminders of the power and money and influence of Samuel Galton, in the area of Smethwick and other parts of Sandwell.