Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies · Web view2020. 8. 6. · This messianic vision of liberty, accessible to everyone, was not dissimilar to the collectivist ideals

6. Were the 1790s really a “turning point” in the resistance

of Black Jamaicans?Notetaker

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Preface:From Rebellion to Revolution : Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World. (1979). Genovese, Eugene D. Throughout the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth century, the numerous slave revolts followed a generally restorationist course. The various slave populations with their discrete African and Afro-American cultures rose against the oppression of their European and white-creole masters. In so doing, they drew upon their own cultural identities and collective commitments to reject oppression and to advance alternative social norms. When their path did not lead to bloody defeat and heroic sacrifice of life, it led to a withdrawal from colonial society and to the establishment of maroon societies. This particularism, with its acceptance of social and political heterogeneity, might entail not only the re-creation of traditional communities but even the exploitation of other slaves. It also lent itself to deals with colonial governments or ruling classes that still accepted a hierarchically organized, particularist vision of social order. Thus, prior to the triumph of the capitalist mode of production and a cohesive bourgeois ideology, slaves could use the colonial world, at the margin, to defend their traditional conceptions of their own rights. The conquest of state power by the representatives of the consolidating bourgeoisie in France decisively transformed the ideological and economic terrain. Nothing changed overnight, but the French Revolution provided the conditions in which a massive revolt in Saint-Domingue could become a revolution in its own right. The brilliance with which Toussaint L'Ouverture claimed for his enslaved brothers and sisters the rights of liberty and equality—of universal human dignity—that the French were claiming for themselves constituted a turning point in the history of slave revolts and, indeed, of the human spirit. Far from passively accepting the hegemony of the ruling class, Toussaint seized and appropriated that hegemony at a transitional moment. Henceforth, slaves increasingly aimed not at secession from the dominant society but at joining it on equal terms.Q1. According to Genovese, slave resistance had been ‘throughout the 17th and most of the 18th century “restorationist”. What could he have meant by this?

Q2. The title of Genovese’s 1979 book is ‘From Rebellion to Revolution’ – why could he have given it this title?

Q3. According to Genovese, two crucial events in the 1790s allowed slave revolts to move from ‘rebellion to revolution’. What were these and why did they have this impact?

1. Where did the Haitian Revolution start?

2. In 1793, what did Britain do and for what two reasons?

3. The Haitian Revolution became a ‘huge trauma’ for the English – why?

4. Why were the events in Haiti ‘unthinkable’ and what could that reveal about racial attitudes at the time?

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5. What, according to Gott (read passage) made the Haitian Revolution such a turning point? What evidence supports this viewpoint?

Testing the Chains (1982)

Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies

Michael Craton - Preface

HISTORIANS who believe history to be the story of man's rise to civilization tend to define civilization to include the acceptance by all classes of their place within the socioeconomic system. The history that results, even when it appears in a liberal guise, is essentially that of accommodation and acceptance. This is the "bourgeois" style that was fundamentally challenged by C. L. R. James in his Marxist interpretation of the Haitian slave revolution and by Herbert Aptheker in his pioneer study of American negro slave revolts. "The slaves worked on the land," wrote James in 1938, “and like revolutionary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors." Likewise, Aptheker demolished the "magnolia and moonlight” myths of the southern United States and the idea that slave revolts were occasional aberrations, concluding in 1943 that "discontent and rebelliousness were not only exceedingly common, but, indeed, characteristic of American negro slaves.". Subsequently, at a slavery conference in 1976, he went far beyond this position to assert that "resistance, not acquiescence, is the core of history." (2)

Aptheker's clarion call in 1976 and James's thrilling account of the struggle led by Toussaint l'Ouverture were primary inspirations for this book, which seeks to achieve for the slaves of the British West Indies what James and Aptheker did for the slaves in Haiti and the United States. Coming a generation later, the present volume is bound in some respects to go even further. Yet in others it stops far short of the pioneer populists' pure Marxism. The fight against enslavement was clearly part of that perennial and universal class conflict consigned by traditional historiography to history's "underside." But having decided that slave resistance was structurally endemic and that white writers have more often than not distorted the account, one is still left with the need to analyse the degrees of resistance open to slaves and the variations in revolts from place to place and from time to time. Doing so involves delimiting resistance and accommodation, or between true political resistance and apparent accommodation. One must decide not just why at a given time some slaves rebelled, while others did not, but - most difficult and contentious of all - why, at every stage, some actually collaborated with the dominant class, while others risked all to rebel. Historians who seek to restore an independent ideology to the Afro American slaves must acknowledge that such an ideology was surely more complex than the simple reactive ethos suggested by Aptheker and James.

Q a phase in a progressive scenario dreamed up by certain Eurocentric historians. Yet the very idea that slave resistance was not an isolated phenomenon but part of a continuum is an aid to understanding. West Indian slaves inherited and melded traditions of resistance both from the Amerindians, whom they largely replaced, and from their own African forebears. They also bequeathed a tradition to their Afro-Caribbean descendants, who formed a downtrodden black majority even after formal slavery had ended. The Amerindian and African backgrounds form the substance of my Introduction; what happened to the former slaves after slavery ended is the subject of the book's brief Epilogue.

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In considering actual slave revolts, I started with a rather over simple formulation predicating a tripartite, sequential model of slave revolts and a set of four "conducive situations." I divided revolts into those of the maroon type, those led by unassimilated Africans, and the late slave rebellions led by creole (colony-born) members of the C slave elite. My preliminary analysis borrowed from many different types. theories of popular rebellion and suggested that resistance might flare into revolt under conditions of extreme oppression, where unassimilable elements were found in the subject population, where the forces of control were weakened, or where slave expectations became frustrated. (3)

At the general level this analysis still has its merits, chief being its concentration on intrinsic forces and the playing down of abstract and extraneous influences, including all the ideologies of the Age of Revolution (1775-1815) that loom so large in many accounts. Yet as I wrote I found it necessary to refine and expand my initial analysis considerably. The three-phase model was overly neat and needed overhauling, at least in its simple sequentially, and the all causal elements required much greater articulation, if not out rejection where they were directly contradictory. The French and Haitian revolutions called for rather more emphasis than they had previously been given, although I was unable to go as far as Eugene Genovese's argument that they marked a decisive watershed between simple rebellions and true revolution. On a narrower scale, besides it was necessary to distinguish more clearly between mere plots and actual revolts, or rather, between different types of plot. All plots that came to nothing were clearly of a lesser level of political achievement than a prolonged revolt or a mass running away. But some plots were simply aborted revolts, at least potentially similar, while others were barely embryonic, mere mutterings of discontent, even figments of the masters' fears, rather than real threats to the regime.

One of my basic assumptions is that the slave system was shaped largely by the slaves. But one must not understate the complexity of the shaping. The first, and shortest, of this book's five parts analyses plantation slave society and re-evaluates forms of resistance short of rebellion with the slaves' influence on the system in mind. I attempt to go beyond the simple analysis of day-to-day resistance first proposed by Raymond and Alice Bauer in 1942 and the rising scale of non cooperation proposed by Kenneth Stampp in 1956 to adopt many of the refinements made by George Frederickson and Christopher Lasch in a seminal article in 1967.5 Not only can slave antagonism toward imposed labour and the master class (feelings like those of all subordinated people) be divided into simple non-cooperation and true political resistance, but slave attitudes can be seen as resulting from choice and calculation. Different decisions could make the same slaves under different conditions appear cringingly docile, simply content, annoyingly troublesome, or implacably rebellious. By emphasizing the effects of change, my view dismisses the simple dichotomies between accommodation and resistance, accommodators and resistors, and sheds light on the issue of whether slaves were more likely to rebel if driven on tight reins or on loose. But I stop short of the conclusion of Frederickson and Lasch that stability and a sense of belonging on the part of the slaves were the slave owners' chief allies that change itself was most dangerous to them.

Part One is an extended prolegomenon. The core of the book is. naturally, a consideration of actual slave plots and revolts. Though I confine myself to the British West Indies, which never more than a third of the Caribbean region or included more than a quarter of the total of Afro-American slaves, this work cannot hope to be definitive. Such an enterprise would require several volumes. The present book describes all major revolts and nearly all serious plots and supplies a comprehensive list in a chronology at the end. Yet I have, inevitably, been selective. My choice was determined not by the admitted patchiness of source materials but by a conscious decision to give due prominence to the salient outbreaks while otherwise selecting examples that would most vividly illustrate themes and variations. Constraints of space also led me to concentrate on the true plantation colonies, excluding, for example, details of the many plots and small scale outbreaks that occurred in the nonplantation colonies of Bermuda and British Honduras and unrest short of armed rebellion in the "marginal" colonies of The Bahamas, Tortola, and Antigua that occurred at the same time as serious revolts elsewhere late in the slavery period. (6)

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Following my original formulation, Parts Two, Three, and Five deal successively with maroons (especially the Jamaican), with African-led revolts, and with the revolts that rose to a climax in the formative period between the ending of the British slave trade in 1808 and the freeing of the British slaves in 1838. Part Four provides the rather more extended treatment I now think necessary of the transitional period that coincided with the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. These four core sections emphasize the interrelation, rather than the separation, of types and phases of revolt. They illustrate how the maroons continued to provide an admired example for rebellious slaves even after most maroon groups had come to terms with the slaveholding class and show that the pull of Mother Africa remained strong even after the umbilical cord had been cut in 1808. These sections also show that creole and elite slaves were prominent in slave unrest far earlier than has previously been thought: the two groups dominated the Jamaican slave plot of 1776 and were of critical importance in the Antiguan slave plot forty years earlier. Indeed, in Barbados, the first of the British sugar colonies, Governor Willoughby as early as 1668 said, in effect, We can control the Africans by mixing the tribes, but what will happen when all our slaves are creoles? (7). The discoveries that I have made all contribute to the devaluation of outside influences upon slave attitudes and behaviour.

Slave revolts, particularly their leadership, were seldom as blind and insensate as the master class averred. At every stage there was far more planning and calculation than any whites recognized. Just as Caribs consciously played the English off against the French, and maroons cannily played off white smallholders and ranchers against the owners of the capital and labour-intensive large plantations within the plantations slaves secretly preserved their private integrity. exploiting the planters' fear of rebellion with constant threats, which cost the slaves less than actual revolt. Anansi, the spider-trickster of West African and Afro-Caribbean folklore, was as significant a hero to the slaves as were the real-life heroes Cudjoe, Nanny, and Tacky. Slave leaders were quite capable of utilizing the ideologies of the Age of Revolution when it suited them and were able to use the support of sympathetic liberals without subscribing to liberal ideas in more than a superficial way. The slaves even moulded and used Christianity in ways beyond the imagination of earnest and self-deluded missionaries.

What, then, motivated slaves? And what was their ideology? In brief, slaves always resisted slavery and the plantation system, rebel ling where they could or had to. Their aim was that of all unfree people—that is, of the vast majority throughout history-freedom to make, or to recreate, a life of their own in the circumstances in which they found themselves. This desire, simple and informal though it was, amounted to a popular ideology even more important than that which justified and explained the slaves' subjugation.

The four situations conducive to slave rebellions that I originally identified possibly mislead as much as they inform. They do not address themselves as much to the causes as to the occasions or forms of slave revolts. Because they ignored the underlying ideology-or culture—of resistance they were bound to seem contradictory and thus to perpetuate in the analysis the ignorance and puzzlement of contemporary whites. Surely, some slaves—like all subject peoples - might rebel when they were treated too harshly; some slaves might rebel more readily than the others, and some might look especially for opportunities offered by the temporary weakness of the masters, while others might rebel only when their slow, insensible gains were threatened. Yet none of these conditions was necessarily conducive to uprising. In their arrogant assumption of cultural superiority and superior power, whites were lulled or confused by those slaves who worked well under severe conditions, by those slaves thought to be implacable who actually collaborated, by the numbers of slaves who volunteered for colonial defence or to fight against rebels, and above all by the slaves who appeared content with the gains they had achieved, or had been granted, in the last and creolizing phase of formal slavery.

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At the very least one should reformulate the four conducive situations, turning them around so as to see them not from white masters’ viewpoint but from that of the Afro-Caribbean slaves. A more satisfying summary might conclude that oppression on the part of the masters was particularly likely where unassimilable elements were found but that violence nearly always provoked counter violence and that the forces of control had to be constantly on the alert, for even where the planters accommodated the creolizing tendencies of their slaves, the planters did not tame the slaves or deflect forever their will to freedom.

When I look back over servile resistance in the British West Indies. two overall interpretations seem possible. In one sense there was clearly a continuum of active slave resistance, which connected the Amerindians' defence of their heritage and the Africans' resistance in Africa to shipboard "mutinies" on the Middle Passage, resistance in the plantations short of rebellion, maroon activity, African-type rebellions, and the more sophisticated late Afro-Caribbean revolts. In another sense, one might argue that all these forms of resistance worked inexorably toward a climax that resulted in slave emancipation when the time was ripe.

Of the two interpretations, the latter can be plausibly argued, but I prefer the former, because whether or not the slaves were instrumental in the passage of the emancipation acts of 1834 and 1838, the notion that an unequivocal victory was achieved at this time is an exaggeration, if not a dangerous myth. Only if one were gifted with Marxist optimism could one conclude that history did, and does, go forward, that the former slaves formed a class of independent commodity producers in the essential intermediate phase, and that the Revolution is around the corner, if not quite here. Certainly Amerindian, maroon, and slave resistance has already entered the official mythology of independent countries throughout the Caribbean region, along with worthy campaigns to bring dignity and respect to Afro-Caribbean peasants and their culture. It is somewhat doubtful that the spirit represented by the splendid statue Le marron inconnu in front of Duvalier's palace in Port-au-Prince is quite the same as that expressed in the designation of Cuffy, Nanny the Maroon, Samuel Sharpe, and Julien Fédon as Heroes of Guyana, Jamaica, and Grenada or in the official attitude of the Cuban regime to Hatuey the Arawak and Esteban Montejo the runaway slave. But what the following chapters can do for such heroes, and for the masses they led and symbolize, is to disentangle myths from reality, whether the myths are those of former masters or those of former slaves.

Q1. What are the ‘two possible interpretations’ of Slave Resistance Craton sets out?

Q2. Do you think Craton agree with Genovese’s thesis that there was a ‘turning point’ in slave resistance in the 1790s? (Please give quotes from Craton to support your answer).

Q3. Instead what does Craton finish by arguing in this preface? How does this help us answer our big enquiry question about the amounts of change and continuity in British-Jamaican relations? Does Craton’s argument cover our whole period?

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Q4. What evidence, information or ‘facts’ could you use to either support Craton’s argument or refute it?

FORGING FREEDOM Steven HahnIntroduction: struggling against slaveryFrom the moment the institution of slavery established its first toeholds in the Americas, the enslaved engaged in struggle against it. Their struggles were guided by personal and group histories, by their places of origin, their ages and genders, their work skills and regimens, their spiritual practices, the alliances they could fashion, the temperaments and resources of their owners, the geopolitical location of their captivity, and, of course, the wider historical context. The historian Hilary McD. Beckles can therefore write, in reference to the British West Indies, of the slaves’ “two hundred year war” against slavery (Beckles, 1988).

Inevitably, struggles against slavery, wherever and whenever they took place, had as their aim the limiting, weakening, or destruction of the power of slaveholders. Thus some level of “freedom” always proved to be an objective for slaves struggling against enslavement. Slaves might flee individually from new or abusive owners, or might head in groups to less accessible terrain and try to establish fugitive settlements called maroon communities. More commonly, they would push back against the demands of their masters and the imperatives of enslavement, seeking to form relations of kinship and friendship, find time to provide for one another, create spaces to meet and worship together, and, of course, mitigate as best as possible the brutality of their daily lives. On occasion, when circumstances appeared most opportune, they might conspire to rebel against slavery as they knew it. At all events, they battled to constrain the reach of slaveholders, define relations and activities subject to some of their own control, and turn privileges that owners may have conceded into rights they could embrace and defend. Slaves looked, that is, to carve small spaces of freedom in a large world of slavery.

Waged with varying degrees of success across the hemisphere, these struggles contributed, by the last third of the eighteenth century, to a deepening crisis of slave regimes on both sides of the Atlantic. We know best about the growing moral doubts that slaveholding came to raise among Quakers and some Protestant evangelicals, as well as about the intellectual and economic challenges that the Enlightenment and the new political economists of England and France hurled at the hierarchies, coercions, and inefficiencies that slavery appeared to represent (see, for example, Davis, 1965; Brown, 2006; Drescher, 1987). But these may have come to little had they not been allied with the energies of slaves on the ground, which began to intensify during the 1770s and disrupted more and more of the Atlantic for at least the next six decades. In this sense, freedom was being “forged” well before it was officially proclaimed (Blackburn, 1988).

Extract from THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF SLAVERY (2010)Edited by Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard: LONDON AND NEW YORKQ1. Hahn quotes Hilary Beckles, what is Beckles’ answer to our enquiry question on Slave Resistance?

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Q2. Do you think Hahn sympathises with Beckles’ argument or not? (please quote)

Professor Brown’s discsusses the aims and extent of what became known as ‘Tacky’s Revolt’ – which he refers to as ‘Tacky’s War’. Professor Vincent Brown - http://revolt.axismaps.com/project.html

Viewed on the map, the insurrection appears to have been the product of genuine strategic intelligence, one that utilized Jamaica’s distinctive geography and aimed toward the creation of alternative enduring societies. Recognizing a real threat to the maintenance of the colony, the British mounted a rapid and diversified response, drawing upon the highly coordinated efforts of the regular military, the haphazard and decentralized tactics of the local militia, and the rough-terrain warfare of maroon allies, each of which traversed the landscape in distinctive ways…Mapping the great Jamaican insurrection of 1760-61 allows us to see how the island’s topography shaped the course of the revolt, how the rebellion included at least three major uprisings, and how its suppression required the sequenced collaboration of several distinct elements of British military power. From the cartographic evidence, it appears that the insurrection was in fact a well-planned affair that posed a genuine strategic threat, checked ultimately by an effective counterinsurgency. Yet if the map draws a clearer picture of the extent and contours of the insurrection, it cannot convey the ambition, hope, desperation, shock, dread, alarm, cruelty, bloodlust, and sheer mayhem of the experience. These are matters left to the historical imagination of viewers and readers.

Q1. Do you think Brown would be more supportive of Craton or Genovese’s interpretation of Black Jamaican resistance? Please explain.

Gott, R (2011) Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt

Fresh slave revolts and mutinies marked the start of a long period of unrest in Britain’s slave colonies, partly provoked by the continuing upheavals in Haiti, and partly by the more immediate belief that the parliamentary moves to end the slave trade was but a

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http://revolt.axismaps.com/project.html

prelude to an end to slavery. Slavery itself, of course, remained legal in the colonies, but an end to slavery itself was now the firm goal of its victims, to the alarm of their owners .

…

While military triumphs in India after the overthrow of Tipu Sultan created fresh opportunities for the promoters of the developing empire, British authorities in the Caribbean were faced by the difficult aftermath of military defeat. Shortage of troops through illness, and the perceived failure of the two great naval expeditions sent out in 1793 and 1795, had left the slave population alert and rebellious. The settlers and the landowners, for their part, were nervous and fearful. Britain and France had been at war for eight years; both sides were exhausted . Fresh slave revolts and mutinies marked the start of a long period of unrest in Britain’s slave colonies, partly provoked by the continuing upheavals in Haiti, and partly by the more immediate belief that the parliamentary moves to end the slave trade was but a prelude to an end to slavery. Slavery itself, of course, remained legal in the colonies, but an end to slavery itself was now the firm goal of its victims, to the alarm of their owners .

Q1. Do you think Gott would be more supportive of Craton or Genovese’s interpretation of Black Jamaican resistance? Please explain.

The Uprising of 60,000 Jamaicans That Changed the Very Nature of RevoltJust Months After the Groundbreaking 1831 Rebellion, the British Empire Abolished Slavery

Tom Zoellner (2020) is a professor of English at Chapman University and the author of Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire.

In the summer of 1831, a select group of enslaved people in northwest Jamaica began murmuring to each other about “the business.”

To mention the fledgling enterprise in the presence of a white master was a ticket to torture and likely death by hanging, so everyone took precautions to swear new recruits to secrecy. With a few months, more than 60,000 enslaved people had heard about the

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effort, through well-wired plantation networks. Then, on the night of December 27, 1831, “the business” opened. The first signal fires were lit in the hills above Montego Bay, and soon plantation houses went up in flames across the richest West Indian colony of the British empire. White Jamaica found itself contending with its biggest insurrection ever. It took five weeks for a British military crackdown to restore quiet.

The rebellion’s end would not be a lasting defeat. Much of the British public was already disgusted by slavery—the price of maintaining it seemed to be endless wars overseas—and after the Jamaica rebellion, political pressure built. Within 18 months of the first fire, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire.

The rebellion, after failing, had succeeded. And not just at advancing freedom. “The Christmas Uprising” in Jamaica was a groundbreaking action and a model; its enslaved leaders anticipated the methods of later revolutionary movements—from the Irish Republican Army to Gandhi’s struggle against the British, from the French underground fight against the Nazis to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. The story of the Jamaican revolution suggests that methods of calculated revolutionary action transcend historical periods.

In other words, the ways of resistance are timeless. Jamaica’s enslaved population was among the most abused and powerless on the globe in 1831. Most were illiterate. Few had ever seen anything but their owner’s plantation. Their only weapons were machetes and rocks. They constantly lived on the edge of hunger and harsh punishment. Yet even in this isolated atmosphere of extreme deprivation, they developed durable strategies for a politically successful revolution.

One such strategy was nonviolence. The chief conspirator of “the business,” an enslaved Baptist deacon named Samuel Sharpe, had insisted the protest would be a peaceful sit-down strike. The plan was to simply refuse to work on the second rest day after Christmas unless masters agreed to pay striking workers half the daily wages that a free person would get for chopping sugar cane.

This simple tactic of resistance anticipated the philosophy of Mohandas Gandhi by 70 years. What Gandhi would call satyagraha, or “truth power,” forced authorities to confront and defend a central injustice, and perhaps open their own eyes to a moral blind spot. Just as Gandhi knew that British abuses would not last forever under the scrutiny of outside public opinion, Sharpe was also aware of a larger world that might sympathize with his cause.

As a traveling church deacon, he had access to the newspapers brought by cargo ships and had read about the abolitionist sentiment in Britain. His Christian beliefs were of the pacifist kind and he repeatedly told his followers not to harm anyone. Indeed, the extremely low reported death toll among whites in the uprising—just 14, when up to 500 rebels were killed or executed—speaks to the tremendous restraint and forbearance among those who had every reason to want revenge. The Jamaican revolution also employed a simple idealism—its leaders understood that, if oppressed people were going to risk their lives, they must be given a vision of a higher purpose that could be phrased in simple terms. Samuel Sharpe used the New Testament, visiting slave villages to preach verses considered too provocative by white missionaries, in particular those that emphasized freedom in Christ. Along with scripture, Sharpe (one of the few enslaved people on the island who was literate) let his followers in on a secret: The British people across the ocean were agitating to free the enslaved, and the King of England had signed a general “free paper” that was being kept under wraps by the Jamaican sugar barons.

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This last part was embroidered. William IV was an ardent defender of slavery. But the enslaved people in Jamaica still revered his name and believed him to be their friend. Sharpe’s pro-liberty message was both simple and electric. Slavery was against God’s law and the King’s will.

This messianic vision of liberty, accessible to everyone, was not dissimilar to the collectivist ideals touted 40 years later by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who exulted, “In Moscow from a sea of blood and flame the constellation of the revolution will rise, high and beautiful, and will become the guiding star for the good of all liberated mankind.” Martin Luther King, Jr., an admirer of Gandhi, also advanced a message of Christian love and justice that cut across racial lines, was easy to communicate, and proved difficult to refute.

In Jamaica, Sharpe, while insisting on nonviolent methods, also knew he needed a military wing. At planning meetings in fall 1831, several of Sharpe’s lieutenants agitated for a backup plan in case the strike should fail. Two of those present—Thomas Dove and Robert Gardiner—would become the fiercest fighters against the white volunteer militia once the strike had moved into a less peaceful phase. In January, they even built and staffed an impressive hilltop fortress, designed to repel incursions, called Greenwich Hill, and fought several engagements with British troops. In this, they anticipated another commonplace practice of 20th-century resistance movements: to maintain an armed underground sector operating beneath the political wing. The Palestinian Liberation Organization and Ireland’s Sinn Fein are the most well-known examples of this “arrows and olive branch” approach.

Sharpe also cultivated the enslaved “elite.” The Jamaican colonial government was surprised when it learned that the revolt’s leaders were among the most privileged of the island’s enslaved population: head drivers, head boilers, butlers, and traveling deacons like Sharpe. They were those with seemingly the least incentive to rebel because they enjoyed the most perquisites and avoided the whipping customarily dealt out to field hands. Sharpe himself told his interrogators he had always been treated kindly by his master and never beaten.

Yet the “elites” were also best positioned to recruit followers because they were trusted both by laborers on their watch and by white guardians of the sugar estates. The value of elite support is an enduring lesson of revolution. American colonial resistance to British rule was backed by Boston’s richest men. Vladimir Lenin was no peasant; he grew up in a middle-class household in Ulyanovsk, attended Kazan University and surrounded himself with fellow educated radicals.

Sharpe also used operational tactics—including small cells and safe houses—that would become de rigeur. French Resistance operatives in World War II famously kept themselves in small clusters to avoid mass arrest, and recruited only one or two people at a time, using a case officer who did not know the central command. After the war, communist insurgents used a similar strategy. But enslaved people in 1830s Jamaica had already figured it out.

Samuel Sharpe had been permitted to travel between plantations for the ostensible reason of teaching Bible lessons and leading small worship services. This he did, but he also appointed cell leaders who appointed their own small groups. Sharpe created a ritual called “taking the swear” in which new recruits would promise on the Bible to sit down after Christmas and not work. Sharpe did the first secret swearings, but from then on, his own “case officers” did the work of exponential recruitment. In this way, and within one of the most repressive societies on earth, he built a connected network of strangers that stretched 70 miles in all directions. Sharpe’s development of safe houses was also ahead of its time. Every Jamaican

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plantation had a section the white ruling class called the Negro Village: a “main street” of individual houses occupied by enslaved people. Field hands typically occupied small huts, but those in senior labor roles tended to have frame houses. In these elite houses, Sharpe preached about the “business.” His top-level recruits used these houses for the most sensitive meetings, stockpiled weapons in them, and even created their own military-style uniforms: blue jackets with red sashes.

This was not unlike the system that Nelson Mandela would use in townships all across South Africa in the formative days of the African National Congress. He would appear at certain homes unexpectedly, a step ahead of the state police. “He put a number of questions to us and then gave us a briefing about what he had been doing outside the country and then discussed the tasks that lay ahead,” recalled one man who met Mandela secretly at a house in Durban in 1962. Finally, the Jamaican rebels were astonishingly good at the secret sharing of intelligence, and they often knew about troop movements, government decrees, and even international news before their white masters heard about it. They used a sophisticated network of deck hands, house servants, traveling Bible teachers, and cargo ship stevedores to pass along messages.

A planter on the north shore once heard a critical piece of news from Kingston before the mail arrived and surmised there must have been “some unknown mode of conveying intelligence.”

The most critical piece of information of the early uprising, however, could not have been more visible: the first signal fire lit at Kensington Estate on the night of December 27, 1831. Whether Samuel Sharpe approved of it or not, the first blaze was followed almost immediately by a chain of fires lit on neighboring plantations that turned the night sky a dazzling orange and told the entire northwestern side of the island that “the business” was coming to pass at last.

The white ruling class could not help but be intimidated to the point of total confusion.

“The whole surrounding country was completely illuminated, and presented a terrible appearance, even at noon-day,” marveled a white militiaman. “When, however, the shades of night descended, and the buildings on the side of those beautiful mountains, which form the splendid panorama around Montego Bay, were burning, the spectacle was awfully grand.”

News that such a conspiracy could have been so widespread landed with explosive force in Britain. The public became convinced that prolonging the institution of slavery would only lead to further revolts and huge transatlantic military expenses. “The slaves must be sooner or later set at freedom,” editorialized the Morning Advertiser in London, “whether it be or whether it be not for their benefit, and the sooner that proper steps are taken for this purpose, so much the better.”

Within 18 months, William IV gave his reluctant royal assent to the Slave Emancipation Act of 1833. Samuel Sharpe died on the gallows before he saw it come to pass. But the revolutionary methods of “the business” had been victorious against the most powerful government in the world, and more than 800,000 people were set free as a result.

Q1. What was the Baptist War ? When did it happen? Who was involved? What were its key moments?

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Q2. According to Zoellner, what were its causes and what were its aims?

Q3. Do you think Zoellner agrees with Genovese’s ‘turning point’ interpretation or not? (Please explain)

Extract from David Olusoga’s ‘Black and British’ – Chapter TEN ‘Mercy in a Massacre’The event that ignited tensions in Jamaica occurred in early October, when a court case over the eviction of a man who had been farming on an abandoned estate led to a minor disturbance in the court house at Morant Bay. This led to charges being issued for the arrest of the lay-preacher Paul Bogle and a number of other men. When the police came to the village of Stony Gut to make their arrests they were attacked by the local populace. This act of rebellion quickly escalated, the white militia were called up, troops were mobilized and the next day the two sides confronted one another at the court house. The crowd threw stones at the militia, the Riot Act was read and then suddenly the soldiers opened fire, killing seven people. After the initial shock of the salvo receded, a wave of anger overtook the crowd, who attacked and burnt down the court house killing eighteen whites including the local magistrate, the Anglo-German Baron von Ketelhodt. The events of the Morant Bay Rebellion remain legendary in Jamaica and have been described in detail elsewhere; what concerns us here is the response of the governor to the scandal that followed .On the day of the killings in Morant Bay, the Governor of Jamaica, Edward Eyre, declared martial law. Ships were sent from Kingston to evacuate the white population of the town and the surrounding estates and soldiers were dispatched to the region. The troops arrived the following day and within three days had put down the unrest in the parishes around Morant Bay . Within a week they had pacified the whole region and this violent but relatively minor rebellion was effectively over. However, from 12 October onwards exaggerated and fanciful reports of what had happened in the east of the island were sent to the governor who, rather rapidly it seems, convinced himself that Morant Bay was the opening act in a general rising of the black population. Eyre was urged on in his paranoia by sections of the white population. He evidently became entrapped in a mindset in which all other interpretations of the violence were discounted. At its height it has been estimated that the number of people involved in the disturbances around Morant Bay totalled between fifteen hundred and two thousand. Accepting the higher figure and presuming that all those involved were actively engaged in rebellion, this was less than half of one per cent of the total black population. Yet Eyre, within the first few days of the rebellion, concluded that the black population of Jamaica were engaged in a ‘systematic conspiracy’.33 When no evidence of this conspiracy could be found, Eyre made do with rumour. When later pressed to provide evidence for his conspiracy theory he explained, in a dispatch to London, that ‘It could not be expected that there should be any documentary evidence amongst the negroes themselves of a conspiracy to overthrow the Queen’s authority, and to massacre the white and coloured people of the Island, nor could it reasonably be supposed that people like the negroes should have established any very complete organisation, or have made any perfect arrangements to

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act in combination.’34 In his most expansive fantasy Eyre convinced himself that an island-wide war of ethnic cleansing had been planned. His paranoia was a reflection of his views of black people much more than it was an analysis of the information he was receiving in the governor’s mansion. Utterly persuaded that a race war would spread across the island if not immediately and decisively checked he launched a campaign of extraordinarily and utterly disproportionate violence and retribution .For six weeks units of the West India Regiment, accompanied by the local militia, were let loose upon the rural population of St Thomas parish. Additional troops were drafted into the island and the Maroons – who sided with the British – were armed, equipped and deployed to the areas under martial law. In an orgy of bloodletting 439 black Jamaicans were killed. Sick men were dragged from their homes and shot and as events spiralled out of control soldiers deployed to east Jamaica, some of them hardened veterans of the Indian Mutiny, were given the opportunity to express their individual sadism. Six hundred men and women caught by the troops were flogged; some men were lashed with wire whips, leaving them with egregious injuries. In addition to these crimes against the person over a thousand homes were burnt and men and women who had worked themselves out of absolute poverty, having left the plantations penniless and homeless, were again reduced to destitution .

1. What was the spark for the revolt? What happened and who led it ?

2. What was Eyre’s immediate response to the violence?

3. What did Eyre soon after assume was happening? Why did he take this view, according to Olusoga? What does it reveal about attitudes of White Jamaicans at the time?

4. What did Eyre then do, based on the assumption of an oncoming ‘race war’?

5. Do you think Olusoga support’s Genovese’s interpretation or not or is it impossible to say? (Please explain)

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Q. Which sources of evidence appeal to a historian of Black resistance in Jamaica?

When encountering a source of evidence, we can ask the following questions:1. Provenance: What type of source is it? Who produced it and why? Does this make it a more or a less reliable source of evidence of the conditions of the enslaved people of Jamaica? Why? 2. What does the source say and what does it reveal of resistance by Black Jamaicans?3. How valuable (revealing + reliable) is the source as evidence of resistance by Black Jamaicans?

When encountering an event, we should ask the following questions:

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Evidence Problems :Why?

1. Compare to what? Until

1838 they had virtually no

political rights and weren’t

‘spoken to’ by almost anyone in the archives.

2. Indeed enslaved are

regularly being ‘spoken for’ -

be careful who is doing so…

3. Political Motives at play

– when speaking for

the enslaved, what political motives were at play? Does this hinder or enhance the

evidence?

1. What could the event reveal about the nature of resistance by Black Jamaicans at the time?2. How confident can we be of this? Why?

1728-1739 First Maroon WarA conflict between the Jamaican Maroons and the colonial British authorities that started around 1728 and continued until the peace treaties of 1739 and 1740. The treaties recognised that it could not defeat the Maroons, so Trelawny (British Governor of Jamaica) the offered them peace treaties instead that accepted a certain amount of autonomy for their towns. In exchange, they were asked to agree not to harbour new runaway slaves, but rather to help catch them.

1760-61 Tacky's Revolt / Coromantee WarAn uprising of enslaved people on the Island of Jamaica. Named after one of the supposed leaders of the revolt, an 'Akan' man kidnapped from the 'Gold Coast', it was the largest uprising by enslaved persons on Jamaica in the 18th century. Over the course of eighteen months the rebels killed as many as sixty whites and destroyed many thousands of pounds worth of property. During the suppression of the revolt over five hundred black men and women were killed in battle, executed, or committed suicide. Another 500 were transported from the island for life. Colonists valued the total cost to the island at nearly a quarter of a million pounds.

Source : . Diary of Thomas Thistlewood, 4 December 1760.Extract and transcribing taken from In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750-86 By Douglas Hall, Thomas Thistlewood

Thomas Thistlewood (16 March 1721 30 November 1786) was a British citizen‒ who migrated to the western end of the Colony of Jamaica where he became a plantation overseer and owner of land, property, and slaves. His diary – as brutal as it is assiduously kept- is considered an important historical document chronicling the history of Jamaica and slavery during the 18th century. He is also known for keeping a detailed account of the treatments of his slaves as well as his sexual relationships and abuse of them.

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1. Provenance: What type of source is it? Who produced it and why? Does this make it a more or a less reliable source of evidence of the conditions of the enslaved people of Jamaica? Why?

2. What does the source say and what does it reveal of resistance by Black Jamaicans?

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3. How valuable (revealing + reliable) is the source as evidence of resistance by Black Jamaicans?

4. Could it be used as evidence to support or refute Genovese’s thesis? Please Explain.

Source - Rebel’s Barricade. This detail from a 1763 Map of Jamaica shows the location of the Rebel’s Barricade in Westmoreland Parish.

Introductory extract from Professor Vincent Brown - http ://revolt.axismaps.com/project.html Viewed on the map, the insurrection appears to have been the product of genuine strategic intelligence, one that utilized Jamaica’s distinctive geography and aimed toward the creation of alternative enduring societies. Recognizing a real threat to the maintenance of the colony, the British mounted a rapid and diversified response, drawing upon the highly coordinated efforts of the regular military, the haphazard and decentralized tactics of the local militia, and the rough-terrain warfare of maroon allies, each of which traversed the landscape in distinctive ways…

Mapping the great Jamaican insurrection of 1760-61 allows us to see how the island’s topography shaped the course of the revolt, how the rebellion included at least three major uprisings, and how its suppression required the sequenced collaboration of several distinct elements of British military power. From the cartographic evidence, it appears that the insurrection was in fact a well-planned affair that posed a genuine strategic threat, checked ultimately by an effective counterinsurgency. Yet if the map draws a clearer picture of the extent and contours of the insurrection, it cannot convey the ambition, hope, desperation, shock, dread, alarm, cruelty, bloodlust, and sheer mayhem of the experience. These are matters left to the historical imagination of viewers and readers.

…

Historical maps—a topographical view of the entire island and three separate maps of Cornwall, Middlesex, and Surrey counties— were printed in 1763 for Henry Moore, who, as Lieutenant Governor of Jamaica in 1756-61, was responsible for suppressing the insurrection. Drawn from surveys conducted by engineer Thomas Craskell and surveyor James Simpson, these maps show both the mountainous topography of the island and the placement of estates. Most interestingly, the map for Westmoreland marks the location of the “Rebel’s Barricade,” where the rebels built a fortified encampment and repulsed an attack by the militia before succumbing to a combined force of militia, soldiers, sailors, and maroons.[3] The base maps were geo-referenced to give rough latitudes and longitudes, so that movements gleaned from a locational database could be plotted as points on the graticule.

By Thomas Craskell, surveyor. Courtesy of the UK National Archives.

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1791 St Domingue revolution beginsIn 1791, the only ever successful Slave Uprising began in Saint Domingue, a French colony which produced 50% of the world’s coffee and 30% of its sugar. 500,000 enslaved Africans liberated themselves by force, led by the formerly enslaved Toussaint L’Ouverture. Fear among Slave Owners in the Caribbean spread as they sought 'refuge' in nearby islands like Jamaica. Hope spread as quickly among the enslaved populations of the Caribbean. In 1795, the British saw a chance to seize the island from the French. The navy invaded but failed dismally. 60% of the soldiers died and the British left in 1798. After brutal battles, in 1804 the establishment of an independent Haiti was declared.

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1795 Second Maroon War in JamaicaThe agreement between West Indians and the Maroons that had lasted since the First Maroon War broke down. The prospects of a general slave revolt (the fear of St. Domingue provided a horrifying warning to the planters), meant troops were sent immediately to Montego Bay. Maroon efforts to incite slaves to revolt were, however, largely unsuccessful, most slaves having little liking for the Maroons. Eventually many Maroons did surrender, and over 500 were transported to Nova Scotia.

1831 -2 Baptist WarAlso known as the Christmas Rebellion, it was an eleven-day rebellion that mobilized as many as sixty thousand of Jamaica’s three hundred thousand slaves in 1831–1832. Considered the largest slave rebellion in the British Caribbean and the most notable since Tacky's in 1760. Led by an enslaved Baptist preacher Samuel Sharpe, the uprising is seen by many historians as a catalyst for the Abolition of Slavery Act that came a year later.

Source : Hope Waddell (1863) – Twenty-nine years in the West Indies and Central Africa: a review of missionery work and adventure. 1829-1858Accessed: https://archive.org/details/twentynineyears00waddgoog/page/n71

Reverend Hope Masterton Waddell (14 November 1804 – 18 April 1895) was an Irish medical missionary in Jamaica and Calabar, Nigeria.

Following Waddell's ordainment in 1829, he married Jessie Simpson and together they embarked on a mission to Jamaica with the Church of Scotland Mission. Here he worked with the enslaved population of Cornwall until 1831, when the Baptist War slave revolt broke out. Many within the Plantocracy blamed the revolt on the Christian and Baptist missions in giving the slaves ideas about equality and freedom. He remained in Jamaica until 1834, when owing to his wife's illness the couple left Jamaica.

At the beginning of the 1831–32 uprising led by Samuel Sharpe, Waddell recalls:

"Scarcely had night closed in… when the sky towards the interior was illumined by unwonted glares.... As the fires rose here and there in rapid succession, reflected from the glowing heavens, we could guess from their direction, and the character of masters and slaves, what estates were being consumed. Soon the reflections were in clusters, then the sky became a sheet of flame, as if the whole country had become a vast furnace.... That was a terrible vengeance which the patient drudges had at length taken on those sugar estates, the causes and scenes of their life-long toils and degradation, tears and blood."

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https://archive.org/details/twentynineyears00waddgoog/page/n71

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1833 Abolition of Slavery ActIn 1833 Parliament passed an act abolishing slavery in the Caribbean, Mauritius and the Cape of Good Hope. A period of apprenticeship was forced upon the formerly enslaved people of 5 years (in effect to pay back their owners for the 'skills' they'd acquired from them). The British government also paid out £20 million of compensation to the slave-owners- approximately 40 per cent of government's annual expenditure at the time.

1838 Apprenticeship EndsA temporary system for the formerly enslaved- that functioned a lot like the previous Slave Plantation system- was eventually abolished by each of the colonial assemblies in the West Indies, including Jamaica (with interference in the Jamaican constitution needed

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from Westminster). It required another trade off with the West India lobby - this time in return for maintaining preferable Sugar tariffs that allowed them to compete with sugar produced by full enslaved workers in Cuba and Brazil.

1838 + Enforcement of 'Free Labour' in Jamaica

In an agriculturally abundant island like Jamaica, plantation owners were fearful that they would be unable to force to emancipated to continue to work on their land- or that they would have to pay them well in order for them to do so. Indeed emancipated workers were keen to develop economic independence and avoid working for white planters. Across Jamaica various measures were put in place after 1833 to ensure planter supremacy - vagrancy laws that made it effectively illegal to not work, or travel beyond your parish, land prices were exaggerated to prevent Black ownership, 'indentured labourers' were trafficked fromelsewhere in the empire (India and China) to create competition between workers for jobs.

1865 Morant Bay RebellionConditions for the formerly enslaved population of Jamaica had failed to improve - many were forced to work on the same plantations they had worked on before the 1830s. Discontent grew and a small protest march in south-east Jamaica to a courthouse led by preacher Paul Bogle ended violently and left dozens dead on both sides. In response, Governor Eyre of Jamaica instituted 'martial law', sending in troops to indiscriminately execute up to a thousand. Such a response revealed the limits of freedom for the formerly enslaved and their descendants in Jamaica.

Source - West Indian Nos. 1 to 21, 21a and 22. – Proclamation of 17 October signed by Paul Bogle and his associates

The local peasants rose up in what became known as the Morant Bay Rebellion. Bogle's proclamation was delivered during a prayer meeting at Stony Gut. In it, Bogle called for war against the 'white people' who were coming for them, urging them to take up their guns and 'cutlisses' (as he spells it). He appealed to 'black skins' and called on them to gather together at Stony Gut.

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Source : An anonymous letter collected by the Royal Commission into Morant Bay - Eyre to Cardwell, November 7, 1865, PP, Jamaica Disturbances, 125–26 (dispatch 22, enclosure 43). Accessed via https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.25290/prinunivlibrchro.72.2.0533

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After the brutal actions of Governor Eyre, One of the most startling pieces of evidence to appear among the documents collected by the Royal Commission is an anonymous letter delivered to the custos (warden) of Kingston. Written in everyday language, it gives a poignant sense of poorer people’s reactions to the suppression of the rebellion:

WE tell you of what happen in St. Thomas-in-the-East; that the Governor sent to shot every man and woman, old and young, and to burn down every house. That it is a damn shame to see this, but God will save them from the second death the innocent ones them, Lord save them. This Governor send men to shot without law, not to seek for the rebels alone and the riotors. We let you know this, and to believe this as St. Thomas-in-the-East burn down where we get the best of yam produce. What is the use we live again, for we will starve to death almost, and our best black men are going to shot. Well, Sir, it is but one death, as Mr. G. W. Gordon is gone, the poor man’s friend, for in the House not a man remember the poor man. Well, we will burn down the town down to the ground, and kill you and kill ourselves if you don’t bring back every man you take away from Kingston. We don’t care of our lives or your lives or property. Not all the soldiers or men-of-war ships can do good. We will bring judgment to Jamaica at once, at once. … We, as black and brown, and poor whites so we don’t care for burn lose lives, so bring them back and let them go. You will laugh at my writing, but I don’t care at that. Death, death for all, and [breaks off].





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1866 Jamaican House of Assembly replaced by Legislative Council and Crown Colony statusThe Morant Bay rising so alarmed the white planters that governor Edward John Eyre and the Colonial Office succeeded in persuading the two-centuries-old assembly to vote to abolish itself and ask for the establishment of direct British rule (something West Indian Planters had previously declared an imposition on their liberty). The practice of barring non-whites from public office was reinstated and an unstated alliance – based on shared color, attitudes, and interest – between the British officials and the Jamaican upper class was reinforced in London, where the West India Committee (a renamed version of the London Society of West India Planters and Merchants) lobbied for Jamaican interests.

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1944 Universal Suffrage grantedFull adult franchise granted, after major strikes & disturbances of 1938, led at first by sugar workers on Tate and Lyle’s Frome Estate, the adult franchise was finally granted (in 1944) and government reform initiated. Prior to that, the right to vote was determined by the amount of wealth or property a man held (excluding many Black Jamaicans), and women were not allowed to vote at all. The new system extended voting rights to adults irrespective of their race, sex, or social

1962 Jamaican IndependenceJamaica became an Independent Nation and a member of the British Commonwealth, with The Queen as Head of State. On that day, the Union Jack was ceremonially lowered and replaced by the Jamaican flag throughout the countr

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Documents

Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies · Web view2020. 8. 6. · This messianic vision of liberty, accessible to everyone, was not dissimilar to the collectivist ideals