Articles and Book Reviews by Fergus M. Bordewich
Slavery in Jamaica: Anatomy of an Uprising
Back-breaking labor, an oven-hot climate, whip-bearing overseers and a planter class eager to exploit slave labor. Jamaica exploded in rebellion—and the empire struck back.
[Book review] Island on Fire: The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire by Tom Zoellner
[Book review] Jamaica in the Age of Revolution by Trevor Burnard
[Book review] Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War by Vincent Brown
Reviewed By Fergus Bordewich in The Wall Street Journal, July 2020.
JUST AFTER CHRISTMAS in 1830, the British Empire's wealthiest island exploded. "[F]ive weeks of burning, looting, crop destruction, courts martial, on-the-spot executions, severed heads mounted atop poles, and outright human hunting for sport…shook slaveholding Jamaica to its foundations," writes Tom Zoellner, a professor of history at Chapman University, writes in "Island on Fire," a pounding narrative of events that led to the end of slavery in the British colonies. "Soon the hills were on fire, each spiky leaf of sugar like a small torch or match head. Millions of yellow flaming pinpricks spread in all directions in the velvety Caribbean night."
Hundreds of slaves, worked beyond endurance, attacked hated overseers and their masters' property. "We have worked enough already, and will work no more," striking laborers told one plantation owner. "The life we live is too bad; it is the life of a dog." In all, 145 estate houses were totally destroyed and many others severely damaged. Mr. Zoellner's vigorous, fast-paced account brings to life a colorful gallery of participants, black, white, and "colored" -- the then-standard designation for quasi-free people of mixed race. Among them are the island's biggest plantation owner, Richard Barrett, a relative of the poet Elizbeth Barrett Browning, who passed for a moderate in the island's reactionary society; the remarkable "colored" newspaper editor Edward Jordon, who had only gained full civil rights the previous year; and the revolt's tragic central figure, an enslaved Baptist deacon named Samuel Sharpe. An apparently gifted speaker, Sharpe preached the equality of man based on the teachings of the Bible. He also believed inaccurate rumors reports that the king had already declared slaves free but that the masters were keeping it a secret. Sharpe surreptitiously planned a peaceful work stoppage until whites acknowledged that the slaves were free. He may also have hoped for the establishment of an independent republic similar to the one that had come into being a generation earlier in Haiti. Whatever his intentions, the revolt quickly spiraled beyond his control.
The rebellion was soon over, having been weakened by its poor organization, thwarted by the failure of the island's 300,000 slaves to rise en masse, and overwhelmed by the firepower of British troops. Few whites were killed but the vastly outnumbered colonial elite's confidence in its ability to defend itself was deeply shaken. Hundreds of enslaved men and women were killed in battle or summarily executed, some simply because they had attended a Baptist meeting. The exact number is unknown.
The revolt failed to improve conditions for the enslaved in Jamaica. But it crucially wounded the institution of slavery itself. Mr. Zoellner acknowledges that the rebellion was only one factor in the ending of slavery, along with surging abolitionism in Britain, an increasingly muscular reform movement in Parliament, and the falling price of sugar, the islands only export crop. But the revolt, he writes, "sent an unambiguous message to London that slavery was no longer sustainable-not economically, not militarily, and not morally."
THE CHALLENGE TO SLAVERY in Jamaica and the rest of Britain's Caribbean possessions had been a long time coming. As Trevor Burnard, a professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull, amply shows in his expansive and scholarly "Jamaica in the Age of Revolution," colonial Jamaica was characterized by extreme systemic violence against enslaved people and a famously dissolute planter class obsessed with short-term profits that made it cheaper to work slaves to death and buy new ones than to sustain them into their later, less productive years.
Long before India became the greatest jewel in the empire's crown. It was Jamaica, the "colony that was most indispensable to imperial prosperity," Mr. Burnard writes. Jamaica's rulers, many of them absentee plutocrats living in England, were the richest people in the entire British Empire by the 1770s, and "probably had more influence within the British imperial state than any other colonial subjects of George III." They bought seats in Parliament like baubles.
In the late eighteenth century planters could expect rates of return in excess of 17 percent annually on their investment. Output continued to grow as slavery became more "efficient": between 1750 and 1810, the average productivity of enslaved workers doubled as mistreatment became more calculated and systematic. For countless slaves, life was brutish and short. Cane fields were oven-hot and rat-infested. The labor was back-breaking. When cane was boiled during production, liquified sugar clung to the skin like searing glue. Workers who arrived late in the fields were commonly subjected to a "slight whipping" of ten to twenty lashes. Many died of sheer fatigue. Henry Coor, a white millwright, who worked in Jamaica in the 1760s, described how inured he became to cruelty: "it became so habitual that I thought no more of seeing a Black man's head cut off than I should now think of a butcher cutting off the head of a calf." Official policy long took it all for granted. "British statesmen in the age of Robert Walpole thought that maximizing labor productivity, as with slavery, and producing goods, such as sugar, at the lowest possible cost for the benefit of a growing consumer class was central to any imperial policy," writes Mr. Burnard. Slavery's defenders, meanwhile, claimed that slaves had in fact been "rescued by British benevolence from the Hobbesian world of African cruelty and superstition."
REVOLTS WERE ENDEMIC: at least nineteen in the course of the eighteenth century. The largest of these unfolded in 1760, as Vincent Brown, who teaches history at Harvard, recounts in intricate detail in "Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War." Mr. Brown rather grandly calls his subject "a war for the British Empire itself." But the rebels' cause was doomed from the start. In the revolt's first phase, in April, slaves led by a shadowy figure known as "Tacky" seized guns and ammunition, and over the course of about a week ranged across St. Mary's Parish, with their numbers steadily swelling to several hundred. The second phase, in Westmoreland Parish, began in late May and was led by a man known as "Wager." Mr. Brown believes that the two events were meant to be coordinated but that Tacky's followers acted prematurely. After early successes, both phases were defeated by colonial troops bolstered by contingents of Maroons, free communities descended from one-time Spanish slaves who, though black, during this period generally aligned themselves with the island's whites, who contracted with them to hunt runaway slaves.
Retribution was savage. Fleeing rebels were massacred; many committed suicide rather than surrender, cutting their own throats or hanging themselves in the woods, and in one instance hurling themselves with their wives and children over a cliff. Scores were captured and tried, and often executed on the spot, either by hanging or roasting alive. Reported one planter, "Our party has taken and kill'd about two hundred, what they bring in a Live We Burn & some we hang in Gebbits." Others were left to starve in cages. Heads were stuck on poles and mutilated bodies were put on public display along the highways. Hundreds of survivors were eventually deported to other British Caribbean colonies.
Mr. Brown argues that Tacky, Wager and other leaders were most likely men who had held high rank in Africa and had hoped to regain their status in some kind of independent black enclave based on the Maroons' model. He further suggests that the revolt should be seen as "a war within an interlinked network of other wars which had diverging and overlapping provocations, combat zones, political alliances, and enemy combatants. In effect, he says, "it was part of four wars at once: it was an extension of wars on the African continent; it was a race war between black slaves and white slaveholders; it was a struggle among black people over the terms of communal belonging, effective control of local territory, and establishment of their own political legacies; and it was, most immediately, one of the hardest-fought battles of that titanic global conflict between Britain and its European rivals that would come to be known as the Seven Years War." Not all these global assertions are wholly convincing. Mr. Brown's dogged interrogation of the revolt nonetheless leads him to numerous intriguing insights. He persuasively suggests, for instance, that the rebels' tactics were based in the prior experience in the tribal wars of coastal West Africa, a subject to which he devotes one of his book's most interesting chapters.
Revolts would recur every few years through the rest of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. Yet change was stirring. Less in reaction to the bloodletting than as a result of reformist impulses in England, the foundation was already being laid for the political attack on slavery that would finally come to fruition in 1834. Beginning in the 1760s, reformers began to challenge both the immense power of Jamaican planters and the morality of slavery. Their critique gained traction as they made the case that reactionary planters were determined to impose their tyrannical and "un-British" ways of life on free Englishmen, in part because, it was alleged, they would import black slave labor into Britain itself. In 1834, faced with rising public hostility and buffeted fear of further rebellions, slaveowners and their parliamentary allies persuaded the government to buy them out. Commented one, "If the slavery of our colonies is a sin, it is the sin of the nation, and ought to be redeemed at the nation's expense." In all, twenty million pounds was handed out to the empire's slaveowners, about 40 percent of the national budget at the time. Full emancipation was completed in 1838. Writes Mr. Zoellner, "Three centuries of bondage were this terminated with a dull bargain and a cash payout amid the grind of politics."