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COPYRIGHT 2000 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
Slavery was abolished in the British Empire on August 28, 1833, just a month before the death of William Wilberforce, the "Great Emancipator." On October 11, 1865, 32 years later and some six months after the conclusion of the American Civil War at Appomattox Court House, a bloody riot broke out at the Court House at Morant Bay, Jamaica. The riot, the subsequent brutal crushing of the minor uprising, and the bloody reprisals exacted upon the black population by military forces under the direction of the colonial governor, Edward Eyre, precipitated a crisis in Victorian consciousness much like that of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Intellectual Britain, as well as representatives of all classes, divided into two camps. The leaders of the opposing forces were John Stuart Mill, the Chairman of the Jamaica Committee, a group devoted to bringing Governor Eyre to justice for murder, and Thomas Carlyle, who headed the Eyre Defence Committee to defend the embattled governor. Close friends as young men, the two Victorian sages had been enemies at least since 1849 when Carlyle had published his outrageous article in Fraser's, "The Nigger Question," to be answered by a justly outraged Mill in his "The Negro Question."(1)
Some recent scholars have downplayed the role of racism in the controversy. Gillian Workman, for instance, observes that Mill claimed that his "attitude was determined, not by a desire to champion the Negro, but by a concern for the civil rights of the English citizen." Workman then argues that "Carlyle's stand ... was equally undetermined by the colour of those killed and harmed. It was rather an expression of approval for a man who had not been afraid to use his powers as a ruler."(2) In opposition to this view of the motives of both Mill and Carlyle, I believe that race was, in fact, the central issue that drew the greatest talents of Victorian England to it like a magnet. The issue of race, as I hope to show, was both overtly and covertly intertwined with the attitudes of both parties in the dispute and is the element which makes this moment both in Victorian domestic and colonial policy so important and so instructive.
There were both longstanding and immediate causes of the event, which many at the time termed a "rebellion." The Jamaican situation had always been ripe for trouble. From the late seventeenth century onward, Jamaica had been an important slave market. At the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, there were some 320,000 slaves working on its plantations.(3) In December 1831 a slave rebellion broke out. More than a hundred Negroes were executed and many others were severely flogged as a kind of prologue to the larger catastrophe which would occur some three decades later.(4)
Emancipation in the British Empire, which came about less than two years after this first rebellion, was greeted with enthusiasm by advanced and humane thinkers in both England and America. In a speech at the Concord Court House on the anniversary, Ralph Waldo Emerson commemorated the British action as "an event singular in the history of civilization; a day of reason; of the clear light; of that which makes us better than a flock of birds and beasts.... other revolutions have been the insurrection of the oppressed; this was the repentance of the tyrant."(5)
Emerson's optimism, unfortunately, was not altogether sustained by subsequent events in Jamaica. The interest of the freedmen had not become a priority of the ruling planter class. Education, public health, roads, and the administration of justice were all neglected. Thirty years after slavery, only a little more than a tenth of the adult population could read and write.(6)
One of the causes of the uprising of 1865 was the abolition of preferential duties in 1849, at least partially a result of the rise of laissez-faire economic theory in England. This change in policy brought severe economic hardship to the island. Emancipation of the slaves in 1833 had created a large free labor force with no market for its labor. A recent historian has referred to the black population as "assets in one era," who became "liabilities in the next. The swarm of humanity that had been transported to the island was cast adrift."(7) Conditions had been especially difficult in the 1860s with a series of droughts, high prices, and unemployment. Some peasants had even petitioned Queen Victoria for help. Through the Colonial Office, she turned a deaf ear to their pleas, as did the Jamaica Assembly and the Governor, Edward John Eyre.
In August of 1865, some black settlers under the leadership of Paul Bogle, a small farmer and Baptist preacher, tramped forty-five miles to petition the Governor, who refused to meet them. Two months later, on the 7th of October, Bogle and some of his followers were accused of disrupting a trial at Morant Bay, and a warrant was issued for their arrest. When the local militia could not find him and his followers in his village of Stony Gut, they destroyed the village. On the 11th of October, Bogle and some three to five hundred followers marched on the courthouse, beating drums and brandishing cutlasses, fishing spears, pikes, and some firearms. The Riot Act was read to little avail, and the Custos, or chief magistrate, ordered his militia to fire into the crowd. As is usual, in a historical tradition going as far back as Homer's account of the Trojan War, there is dispute about who first began the violence. In any case, Bogle's forces drove the black and colored militia, the Magistrate, and other white officials into the courthouse and set fire to the building. In the violence and looting that followed, several plantations were attacked, 15 white officials and 3 planters were killed. Thirty-one others were wounded or hurt. Seven of the rioters were killed at the courthouse. Partisans of both sides of the controversy subsequently agreed that women and children were not harmed by the rioters.
Governor Eyre immediately declared martial law in St. Thomas Parish and sealed off the rest of the island. Regular British troops, aided by the black Maroons whose support against the whites Bogle had hoped for in vain, quickly rounded up the rioters, meeting with little resistance and suffering no casualties. Despite the lack of resistance, the subsequent government reaction was savage. Martial law was maintained for an extraordinary period of thirty days and during that time over four hundred people were either shot without trial or hanged after court-martial; some 600 were flogged; and a thousand homes were burned. Bogle was hanged from the yardarm of H.M.S. Wolverine, an English warship summoned to Jamaica.(8)
At the center of the ensuing storm was George William Gordon, a mulatto landowner, magistrate, member of the Assembly, and Baptist minister, who had championed the cause of the black poor, and had been an implacable enemy of Governor Eyre. Gordon had spoken several times at Bogle's church and had ordained him as a Deacon. Governor Eyre believed, as did many others, that Gordon was the mastermind behind the rebellion. Since Gordon was in Kingston during the disturbance, where there was no martial law, the Governor had him arrested, transported on The Wolverine to Morant Bay where he was quickly courtmartialed by junior officers and hanged on October 23 with the express approval of Governor Eyre. Although many deplored the general brutality exercised by the troops, it was the execution of Gordon which later would offer an opportunity to charge Eyre with murder.
The Victorian public was electrified by the news from Jamaica. The first report under the headline "INSURRECTION IN JAMAICA" appeared in London's The Times on November 3, 1865, and called for additional troops and naval forces.(9)...
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