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Morant Bay Rebellion

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Morant Bay Rebellion

The Morant Bay Rebellion broke out in southeastern Jamaica

on October 11, 1865, when several hundred black people
marched into the town of Morant Bay, the capital of the
predominantly sugar-growing parish of St. Thomas in the East.
They raided the police station and stole the weapons stored
there, and then confronted the volunteer militia that had been
called up to protect the meeting of the vestry, the political body
that administered the parish. Fighting soon broke out, and by
the end of the day the crowd had killed eighteen people and
wounded thirty-one others. In addition, seven members of the
crowd died. In the days following the outbreak, bands of people
in different parts of the parish killed two planters and threatened
the lives of many others. The disturbances spread across the
parish of St. Thomas in the East, from its western border with
St. David to its northern boundary with Portland.
The response of the Jamaican authorities was swift and brutal.
Making use of British troops, Jamaican forces, and a group of
Maroons (runaway slaves) who had been formed into an
irregular but effective army of the colony, the government
forcefully put down the rebellion. In the process, nearly five
hundred people were killed and hundreds of others seriously
wounded. The nature of the suppression led to demands in
England for an official inquiry, and a royal commission
subsequently took evidence in Jamaica on the disturbances. Its
conclusions were critical of the governor, Edward John Eyre,
and of the severe repression in the wake of the rebellion. As a
result, the governor was dismissed, the political constitution of
the colony was transformed, and its two-hundred-year-old
assembly was abolished. Direct rule from London—known as
Crown Colony government—was established in its place.

In the months following the outbreak, and in the period since,

there has been considerable debate about the origin and nature
of the disturbances. The governor and nearly all the whites and
browns (or coloreds, meaning those of mixed racial ancestry) in
the colony believed that the island was faced with a rebellion at
the time. They saw it as part of an island-wide conspiracy to put
blacks in power. This was not a surprising view in light of the
Haitian revolution at the end of the eighteenth century and the
massive 1831 slave revolt in Jamaica. Equally important,
Jamaican society was demographically skewed: the
overwhelming proportion of the population was black, while
whites and people of mixed race formed only a small segment
of the population. For the whites and browns of Jamaica, the
governor's actions in putting down the rebellion had saved the
colony for Britain and preserved them from annihilation.
At the same time, there was a different perspective of the
outbreak, especially in Britain. The outbreak was perceived by
some as a spontaneous disturbance, a riot that did not warrant
the repression that followed in its wake. John Stuart Mill (one of
the leading liberal philosophers of the nineteenth century) and
others formed the Jamaica Committee, hoping to bring the
governor to trial in England and thereby establish the limits of
imperial authority.
The evidence suggests that the outbreak was indeed a
rebellion, since it was characterized by advance planning and
by a degree of organization. The leader of the rebellion was
Paul Bogle, a small landowner living in Stony Gut, a
mountainous village about four miles inland from Morant Bay.
Bogle, along with other associates, organized secret meetings
in advance of the outbreak. At these meetings, oaths were
taken and volunteers enlisted in expectation of a violent
confrontation at Morant Bay. The meetings were often held in
native Baptist chapels or meeting houses; this was important
because the native Baptists provided a religious and political
counterweight to the prevailing white norms of the colonial
society.
Bogle was careful to take into account the forces that would be
arrayed against him, and he attempted to win over the
Jamaican Maroons. Moreover, Bogle's men were carefully
drilled—when they marched into the town of Morant Bay to
confront the vestry, their first target was the police station and
the weaponry stored there.
It is significant that the rebellion took place in St. Thomas in the
East. One of the parish's representatives to the House of
Assembly was George William Gordon (1820–1865), a colored
man who had clashed with the local vestry and was ultimately
ejected from it in 1864. Gordon had also grown increasingly
close to the native Baptists in St. Thomas in the East and to
Paul Bogle, a deacon of the church. In fact, Bogle served as
Gordon's political agent in St. Thomas in the East. This
identification with the native Baptists marked Gordon as a
religious and political radical, but he was also a very popular
figure in the parish. His expulsion from the vestry led to a bitter
court case, which was scheduled for a further hearing when the
Morant Bay Rebellion broke out.
This was not the only grievance of the people in St. Thomas in
the East. Their stipendiary magistrate, T. Witter Jackson, was
also a highly respected figure. As a neutral magistrate
appointed by the Crown, Jackson, who was colored, was
perceived as an impartial magistrate and very different from the
planter-dominated magistracy. Yet a month before the outbreak
of the rebellion, parish officials engineered Jackson's transfer
out of St. Thomas in the East.
There were also other problems which created bitter feelings
among the populace of the parish. Many people in the parish
believed that it was impossible to obtain justice in the local
courts. Since almost the entire magistracy was dominated by
planters, it was often the case that employers were judging the
cases of their employees. High court fees also made it very
difficult for laborers and small settlers to pursue cases in court.
One of the grievances of the crowd at Morant Bay, and in the
rebellion generally, was the lack of justice in the parish. For
example, when asked the reason for the rebellion the day after
the events at Morant Bay, one of the members of the crowd at
Bath claimed it had broken out "because the poor black had no
justice in St. Thomas in the East … there was no other way to
get satisfaction in St. Thomas in the East, only what they had
done" (Heuman, p. 268).
For the blacks in the parish, there was at least one other
alternative that some of them had tried. In several parts of the
parish, blacks had organized their own courts. These "people's
courts" were held in districts not far from Morant Bay, and
offenses were punished by fines and by flogging. Such
alternative courts seem to have existed in other parts of the
island as well, providing further evidence of the dissatisfaction
of the people with the administration of justice.
Another source of difficulty for the people of St. Thomas in the
East was the issue of wages, particularly the low wages
provided on the sugar estates of the parish. There were also
serious complaints about the irregularity of payment for work on
the estates. A missionary reported that his parishioners
believed that they were "not paid regularly on some of the
estates, that their money was docked, [and] their tasks were
heavy" (Heuman, p. 268). Two of the prominent figures killed at
Morant Bay, Custos Ketelhodt and Rev. Herschell, had
experienced problems with their laborers over this issue. At
Ketelhodt's estate in the parish, there were complaints about
low pay for the workers. Many of the people who worked on the
estate came from Stony Gut and the surrounding villages.
Given the lack of redress in the courts, the concern about
wages figured prominently among the grievances of the crowd
at Morant Bay.
In addition to these issues, there was also the problem of land.
More specifically, there was a belief that the provision grounds
away from the estates (the land that peasants and laborers
used to grow their own crops) belonged to the people and not to
the estates. The people's view was that they should have this
land without paying rent. It is likely that Augustus Hire, one of
the planters killed in the days following the outbreak at Morant
Bay, was a target of the crowd because of his stance on this
issue.
These problems over land, justice, and wages need to be seen
in light of the wider problems affecting Jamaica as a whole, as
well as the specific history of the colony. A significant aspect of
Jamaica's history has been the large number of rebellions and
conspiracies, especially during the slave period. The most
important of these occurred in 1831 and was instrumental in the
emancipation of the slaves. Slaves in the 1831 rebellion made
use of the structure of the missionary churches and chapels to
organize the outbreak.
After the abolition of slavery, the tradition of protest persisted.
Riots continued in the post-emancipation period (including in
1848, for example) because of a rumor that slavery was to be
reimposed. The Morant Bay Rebellion can therefore be seen in
the context of a long history of protest in Jamaica.
The economic problems that afflicted Jamaica during this
period, especially in the 1860s, also contributed to the rebellion.
Sugar was the economic mainstay of the island's economy, but
it underwent a steep decline in the decades after emancipation.
Partly because of the loss of a protected market in Britain in the
1840s, and partly because of the relatively high cost of
producing sugar in Jamaica, many estates failed. By 1865, at
least half of the sugar plantations that had operated in the
1830s no longer existed.
In the 1860s, Jamaica's economic situation worsened
considerably. The American Civil War had the effect of
dramatically increasing prices for imported goods, including
foodstuffs, and a series of prolonged droughts devastated the
peasants' provision grounds, further adding to the cost of food.
The output of sugar was also reduced, and work on the
dwindling number of estates became harder to find.
Jamaica's problems in 1865 were highlighted by a letter from
Edward Underhill, the secretary of the Baptist Missionary
Society in England, to the British Secretary of State for the
Colonies. In the letter, Underhill complained about the dire
situation in Jamaica, pointing especially to the starving condition
of the peasantry. For Underhill, there was no doubt about "the
extreme poverty of the people," which was evidenced "by the
ragged and even naked condition of vast numbers of them."
The Colonial Office forwarded Underhill's letter to Jamaica,
where it was widely circulated, and meetings were held all over
the island in the spring and summer of 1865 to discuss the
letter. These meetings were heavily attended by blacks, and
therefore often dominated by members of the opposition to the
local administration. Dissidents such as George William Gordon
traveled from parish to parish, speaking at these gatherings and
highlighting the oppression of the population. Some of the
language he was reported to have used worried the authorities.
In one parish, Gordon was alleged to have encouraged the
people to follow the example of Haiti—in effect, to institute their
own Haitian Revolution.
In St. Thomas in the East, Paul Bogle and other leaders of the
rebellion were organizing meetings at which people expressed
their grievances, especially over the issues of land, justice, and
wages. At these meetings, oaths were administered to willing
adherents. Those who refused to swear the oath were not
allowed into the meetings. These oaths were similar to the cries
of the mob at Morant Bay and elsewhere: "Color for color; skin
for skin; cleave to the black." There was a clear antiwhite and
antibrown feeling among the crowd at Morant Bay, although the
people agreed to save any black or brown person who joined
them. There were also many subsequent reports of men
engaging in military drills and preparing for "war."
Faced with an unyielding government and ruling class, Bogle
and his allies saw no solution to their grievances. They were
concerned about the lack of justice in the parish and the
problem of access to land and to work. They were supported by
an African-oriented religion, and they believed they had allies in
Britain and in Kingston, and the atmosphere was rife with
arguments about white oppression of the blacks. Fearful that
they might even be re-enslaved, the people marched into
Morant Bay.
See also Bogle, Paul; Gordon, George William; Haitian
Revolution; Maroon Wars

Bibliography
Bakan, Abigail. Ideology and Class Conflict in Jamaica: The
Politics of Rebellion. Montreal and Kingston, Jamaica: McGill-
Queen's University Press, 1990.
Curtin, Philip D. Two Jamaicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical
Colony, 1830-1865. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1955.
Heuman, Gad. The Killing Time: The Morant Bay Rebellion in
Jamaica. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994.
Heuman, Gad. "Post-Emancipation Protest in Jamaica: The
Morant Bay Rebellion, 1865." In From Chattel Slaves to Wage
Slaves: The Dynamics of Labour Bargaining in the Americas,
edited by Mary Turner. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1995.
Holt, Thomas C. The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and
Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938. Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
gad heuman (2005)
Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History

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