Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  Breaking out eight years after the Indian uprising, Morant Bay has long been recognized as the other mid-nineteenth-century national crisis which contributed to ‘new ways of categorising racial difference’.2 ‘After the Morant Bay Rebellion’, writes Marouf Hasian, Jr, ‘the belief in racial hierarchies also ossified, and Afro-Jamaicans were re-characterized as unruly and untrustworthy colonial subjects.’3 The profound effect of this uprising on metropolitan discourse has also been discussed in terms of the fundamental questions it raised ‘about the nature of Englishness itself’.4 Tim Watson reminds us of the ‘disproportionate significance’ accorded to Morant Bay at the time, arguing that the event presaged the re-emergence of ‘the modern notion of the British Empire as a single conceptual, territorial, and political unit’.5 Consequent upon the controversy was nothing less than the consolidation of the British Empire ‘as an imaginary unit soldered together by modern humanitarianism’.6 Within the British historiographical record, the Governor Eyre controversy functions as a locus classicus, a characteristic moment of internal moral crisis leading to self-correction – in this case a more responsive, liberal and reforming colonial government, with Jamaica passing to direct Crown rule in 1866, when its Legislative Assembly dissolved itself. ‘The moral perils of empire’, writes R. W. Kostal, situating the controversy in a historical frame, ‘were quintessentially English preoccupations, and they had surfaced many times before.’7

  Contemporary etching of rebels being hanged at the Morant Bay Courthouse

  What happens, though, to the insurgent Jamaican subject who instigates the crisis in the first place? While there is little doubt that the whole controversy was ‘appropriated and reconstructed as a means of contesting political positions and propositions in England’ itself, it is a mistake to view the Eyre affair as only as the mise en scène for a very British debate about rights and constitutionality, the Jamaican elements rendered secondary to the process.8 Even where connections have been touched on, discussions of the Morant Bay episode have in general tended to emphasize either events in Jamaica or the famously divided high-profile response in Britain. In fact, not only was the Jamaican insurgent instrumental in fomenting debate and division but black agency – and what was to be done with it – was, in many ways, at the heart of the controversy. The positions taken by British domestic parties to the controversy were profoundly inflected by an awareness of both the reality of black Jamaican self-assertion and, crucially, the fact that ‘ex-slaves chose to define the content of their freedom in apparent opposition to market forces’.9 Their words and actions fomented division in Britain, and in doing so also formed the basis for the emergence of criticism of post-Emancipation white rule in the West Indian colonies, as well as something very like the transnational working-class solidarity envisioned by Congreve and Jones in the wake of the Indian rebellion.

  Once again, the question of ‘voice’ is central – indeed more so, for, unlike the 1857 crisis, this time the documents of counterinsurgency provided a channel for the voices of black Jamaican rebels – as well as Gordon himself – to resonate more fully in the British public sphere. Mimi Sheller notes that, even prior to the rebellion, ‘the numerous two-way ties between freed people and the British government made both sides adept at addressing the other’, leaving a more extensive documentary trail than was often the case.10 Thus, the historical record shows very clearly that Jamaican dissidents and rebels made demands of Britain and British rule while challenging its rhetorical contradictions. Their specific post-slavery understandings of what freedom should mean were frequently distinct from, and in conflict with, those generated by the imperial centre. The multiple speech acts through which the black Jamaican peasantry and their political leaders communicated, both leading up to and following the rebellion, registered upon and were interpreted by various interests back in Britain and should be regarded as significantly tributary to the controversy that subsequently unfolded. It is not just that when Jamaica ‘reappeared on centre stage of British public life in late 1865, it also found itself at the centre of a new set of political and cultural beliefs’.11 Afro-Jamaican insurgency helped shape those beliefs in very fundamental ways, giving them genuinely transnational dimensions and thickening the meaning of democratic rights. In his excellent legal history of the controversy and the various attempts made by the Jamaica Committee to prosecute Eyre for ‘murder’, among other misdeeds, Kostal has suggested that the ‘controversy arose from the tectonic stresses generated by the collision between global imperial ambition and bedrock moral and legal sensibilities’.12 This familiar reading of the controversy largely in terms of ‘Burkean qualms’ elides a constitutive third party: the Afro-Jamaican peasant rebels who, in ways their Indian counterparts could not, offered to a metropolitan audience engagements with their own condition.13

  One of the reasons that the Morant Bay uprising created much more pronounced and high-profile divisions than we saw in the case of India 1857 is the extent to which the voices of Jamaican discontent were heard – and speaking in English – back in the metropole. The British press across the spectrum reported assiduously on the insurgency and its repression, often carrying copies of dispatches and reports from the Jamaican press. The views and aspirations of black Jamaican peasants were available for metropolitan understanding in a striking variety of forms: petitions, memorials, speeches, addresses, resolutions, letters, placards, and leaflets. These embodied genres ranged from complaints, lamentation, deposition and testimony to plea, threat, demand, accusation and claim. Even Edward Underhill, whose famous letter to the colonial secretary detailing the condition of the Jamaica peasantry became a flashpoint for Jamaican organizing, would recall in his memoirs that the Royal Commission of Inquiry itself drew on a wide variety of evidentiary texts, from pieces by ‘editors and writers in newspapers’ to ‘the loose talk of the nursery’, ‘the jokes of friends’, ‘the vague rumours which accompanied or followed the political meetings’ and ‘the exasperated language of men smarting under fresh acts of injustice’.14 Underhill’s memoir details the manifold ways in which black Jamaican peasants voiced their discontent, his own controversial letter having drawn on their articulated grievances rather than ‘authoring’ them, as was charged. One response to such self-assertion was, as Holt observes, a redefinition of black people themselves as ‘a different kind of human being’, so that hardened racial lines became a means of fending off the threat of resistance to the demands of political economy.15 Studies of such ‘re-characterization’ have tended to focus, as in the case of India in 1857, on this sharpening of boundaries and racial ‘othering’, which undoubtedly testifies to the ultimate triumph, as it were, of the Eyre camp’s racism. Those responses which sought, in contrast, to insist on the need for parity of treatment for white Briton and black Jamaican, have largely been read in terms of anxieties about the British constitution and the rule of law, rather than as an engagement with the question of racial equality. (Holt is one of the few to suggest that this might have been strategic, given a post-1857 milieu of tremendous racial hostility to non-white peoples.) My own argument here is that the self-assertion of the Jamaican blacks and their insistence on shaping their historical condition were key not just to the vitriolic racism of those like Carlyle, Dickens and Ruskin, who counted themselves supporters of Eyre and were open about the dangers of black agency; they also put pressure on those liberals and radicals who came together to hold the governor accountable, making for the emergence of more racially inclusive and egalitarian conceptions of rights. If John Stuart Mill’s leadership of the Jamaica Committee was impelled by an ‘imagined community [which] was one of potential equality’, it is necessary to acknowledge the role of the Jamaica rebels in pushing open the racial and geopolitical borders of that community.16 Here, as elsewhere, agitation and insurgency from below served to radicalize liberalism in ways that need to be made more visible – or audible.

  A recognition of black agency also inflected an incipient British labour in
ternationalism which began to stress class ‘sympathies’ or solidarity over racial differences. The ‘Jamaica affair’ was one of the few Victorian crises of empire in which there is a record of expressed British working-class sympathies for victims of violent colonial repression. The parallels between domestic struggles and those of the Jamaican peasantry were not invoked simply out of generosity or a colour-blind egalitarianism, but in response to a self-assertion which made claims upon working-class solidarity. We know, for instance, that in early September 1866, by which time the Royal Commission had reported back very fully on events leading up to the rebellion, Eyre was burned in effigy on Clerkenwell Green.17 Funerary decorations used in some condemnatory working-class protest meetings hailed Gordon’s death as that of a martyr. As the controversy over Eyre’s conduct heated up, the question of according parity to the struggles of both the white working classes and the black peasantry itself became a flashpoint, Dickens complaining in a letter to a friend: ‘So we are badgered about New Zealanders, and Hottentots, as if they were identical with men in clean shirts at Camberwell, and were to be bound by pen and ink accordingly.’18 Others, however – labour leaders and trade unionists – called for common cause to be made, not least because the Tories could do to the English working classes what they had done to Jamaicans. Indeed, the question of who had the right to be accorded ‘sympathy’ was central to the arguments for and against Eyre’s actions. But it is misleading to view this simply as an exercise in the expression of existing political dispositions; it was, at least partly, a dialogical response to the claims put forward by rebellion. In the context of the Hyde Park riots of 1866 and the Habeas Corpus Acts in Ireland, ‘political reformers did not take long to see similarities between the Jamaican episode and their own struggle for parliamentary reform’, Douglas Lorimer rightly observes, though insisting that these ‘simply reconfirmed existing beliefs’.19 Such an assessment overlooks the ideological and rhetorical tensions that became evident in progressive engagements with the moment and afterlife of the Morant Bay rebellion. If, as Catherine Hall suggests, the Eyre debate ‘marked a moment when two different conceptions of “us”, constructed through two different notions of “them”, were publicly contested’, it is worth examining how it was black insurgency that made space for the construction of a radical ‘us’ that crossed both racial lines and the boundary between colony and metropole. This was less about the ‘potential of Jamaican blacks’ to become like a transnational ‘us’ through a civilizing process, but rather the active forging of ‘us’ out of a fellowship of ongoing struggle.20 In what follows, I first explore the content of the uprising; then the role played by Gordon, and his death, as a vehicle for controversy; and, finally, the responses of British liberal reformers and working-class radicals to the claims made by the Jamaican insurgency.

  A Most Serious Insurrection

  John Edward Eyre had been first lieutenant governor then governor of Jamaica for about three years when he faced the uprising that would eventually result in his immense notoriety. Though it has now receded from the popular memory in Britain, the general outline of the story is a familiar one to scholars of British imperial history. On 11 October 1865, an organized procession of several hundred black men and women entered the town of Morant Bay, converging from different roads leading into town. They were blowing shells and horns or beating drums, and many were armed with sticks and cutlasses. While their destination was the town courthouse, en route they stopped at the police station where, by all accounts, they beat up at least one policeman before divesting the building of its weapons (though, as it turned out, the guns were missing parts and there was no ammunition to be had).21 When the crowds reached the town square, they were addressed by the Baron von Ketelhodt, the ‘custos’ or chief magistrate of the parish of St-Thomas-in-the-East in which Morant Bay was located. In front of him stood a line of ‘volunteers’ from the island’s militia, which had been summoned as a precaution. Ketelhodt asked those gathered not to come into the square and, when they proceeded to do so, read out the Riot Act. The crowd’s response was to fling stones at the militia, at which point the latter began firing, killing several. Instead of backing down, many of those present then rushed the militia. Outnumbered, the volunteers retreated into the courthouse to join the custos and other officials. Ignoring the truce flags, the insurgent crowd then set fire to the courthouse.22 As the custos and other officials came running out, some of them, including Ketelhodt, were set upon and killed.23 Some accounts suggest that the latter’s fingers were deliberately cut, with one person ‘observing that they would write no more lies to the Queen’.24 After setting another building on fire and releasing some fifty prisoners from the district gaol, the crowd left the area.25 By most accounts, the protesters retreated to a Native Baptist chapel run by their leader, Paul Bogle, in the settlement of Stony Gut, and spent some time in prayer.

  The unrest spread to a handful of settlements and sugar plantations in the parish of St-Thomas-in-the-East the following day as crowds entered them, plundering some stores and houses. One threatening chant hinted that that the area would be cleansed of ‘buckras’, or whites:

  Buckras’ blood we want

  Buckras’ blood we’ll have

  Buckras’ blood we are going for

  Till there’s no more to have.26

  Despite some pillaging and taking of prisoners, there was in fact only one killing – that of the attorney of the Amity Hall Estate plantation, Augustus Hire, who had been directly involved in a conflict with some of the rebels over land tenure. As official reports would later take the trouble to note, no white women or children were harmed; some had been taken to safety by loyal black servants. By the next day, Governor Eyre had sent troops to regain control of the area, and within three days the outbreak had been completely suppressed, the troops apparently meeting with little resistance. Martial law was nevertheless declared in the whole county of Surrey excepting the town of Kingston, which was the seat of government. Over the next several days, as troops rampaged through the eastern portion of the island, hundreds of actual and presumed rebels were summarily shot, while others were executed after cursory military trials. Additionally, over 600 men and women, many of whom had nothing to do with the uprising, were subjected to brutal floggings, and some thousand dwellings were burned to the ground in what would later be described by a Royal Commission of Inquiry as a ‘wanton and cruel’ manner.27 Some military officers would write back to friends and colleagues in England describing the killings and floggings with a ‘levity’ deprecated by the Royal Commissioners.28 Meanwhile, in Kingston, after hearing that a warrant for his arrest had been issued, George William Gordon, who had been unwell, voluntarily turned himself in to the governor. Eyre promptly loaded him on board the naval sloop Wolverine, and personally conveyed him to Morant Bay to face a military trial. This would turn out to be a disastrous misstep on Eyre’s part. After a trial that lasted barely a few hours, Gordon was hanged after having been deemed – according to Major General O’Connor who presided over the clearly flimsy proceedings – ‘to have been one of the principal instigators of the people to rebellion, and the primary cause of the miserable massacre of Europeans and native inhabitants at Morant’.29 The creak of that scaffold would resonate in England for the next three years.

  George William Gordon (1820–65)

  When news of the uprising reached England in early November, there was immediate consternation: memories of 1857 were still fresh in the public mind, and familiar racial anxieties were swiftly rekindled as snippets of news about atrocities against whites came off the ships arriving from the Caribbean. The Times reprinted a bulletin from Major General O’Connor claiming the rebels’ plan was ‘to murder all of the white and coloured men first, then the children, and to keep the women as servants and for their own pleasure’.30 As the week went by, however, more reassuring news indicated that the situation was in fact under control, and that the white community of Jamaica was now safe.31 Specula
tion about the causes of the rebellion began, with some fingers pointed at Baptist missionaries for ‘authoring’ discontent, and others at colonial officials and the planters of Jamaica for poor governance and deteriorating social conditions. By the time Governor Eyre’s first official dispatch, dated 20 October, arrived in London on 16 November 1865, news had already started circulating about the questionable manner in which the uprising had been put down. The dispatch itself would set off a flurry of sceptical responses, inaugurating the ‘Governor Eyre’ or ‘Jamaica’ affair. Opening with news of the ‘great loss of life and destruction of property’ entailed by what it termed a ‘most serious and alarming insurrection of the negro population’, Eyre took self-regarding cognizance of his own ‘promptitude and vigour of action’ in suppressing the uprising.32 His swift imposition of martial law and dispatch of troops to the troubled region, he asserted, had spared the mother country the loss of Jamaica, the alternative to which might have been an ‘almost interminable war and an unknown expense’ to keep the colony.33 Instead, those responsible had been brought swiftly to military courts and executed after trial to prevent the outbreak spreading further. While outlining troop movements and suppression measures in a matter-of-fact tone, Eyre’s dispatch is unable to resist a touch of post-1857 sensationalism pertaining to what he describes as black atrocities against whites: a victim who ‘is said to have had his tongue cut out whilst still alive’ as attempts were made to skin him; another who was set on fire; and still more who ‘are said to have had their eyes scooped out’ as ‘heads were cleft open, and the brains taken out’ (these were later shown to be unsubstantiated rumours). Indeed, Eyre pointed out cannily that ‘the whole outrage could only be paralleled by the atrocities of the Indian mutiny’, before going on to add that, ‘as usual’, the women ‘were even more brutal and barbarous than the men’.34