It is only towards the end of his dispatch, however, that Eyre finally reveals his hand. As he toured the affected region in the days following the outbreak, he writes, he had ‘found everywhere the most unmistakable evidence that Mr George William Gordon, a coloured member of the House of Assembly, had not only been mixed up in the matter, but was himself, through his own misrepresentations and seditious language addressed to the ignorant black people, the chief cause and origin of the whole rebellion’.35 After briefly outlining what he identifies as additional provocateurs and provocations responsible for the uprising – primarily a letter by the Baptist missionary Edward Underhill that, earlier that year, had detailed the multifarious distresses suffered by the majority of islanders – Eyre somewhat defensively alludes to the ‘just severity’ of the measures that had been exercised under his personal approval and instruction.36 Then, in a terse postscript dated 23 October at the bottom of the letter, Eyre finally informs the colonial secretary that Gordon ‘has been tried by court-martial at Morant Bay, and sentenced to be hung’ that morning.37
An outbreak of some seriousness contained by proportionately serious measures: Eyre’s dispatch unfolded a story that had been told many times before. As the activist lawyer Frederic Harrison would note sardonically, ‘the oft-recurring tale of insurrection’ was a familiar one,
a tale of wonderful sameness – one unbroken weary round of horror. A riot; much agitation; a good deal of plunder; a little bloodshed: then an ominous pause. Soon an organized reign of terror by the planters, martial-law, burnings, floggings, torturings, and indiscriminate massacre of an unresisting and cowering people, protracted for months, until the very executioners become exhausted. Afterwards a murmur of indignation at home, defiance from the planter interest, a craven Government, and public apathy.38
The Colonial Office published Eyre’s unmistakably defensive dispatch in short order, three days after it arrived, on 19 November 1865, and it was carried by the country’s main newspapers, with unhappy consequences for the colonial governor. From the early perception that he had done an admirable job in so swiftly quelling a catastrophic uprising against colonial rule, the tide now turned to concern that Eyre might have presided over a brutally disproportionate response to a small, localized insurrection. As newspapers began to carry other letters and reports, it became apparent that there were many questions to be asked of Eyre and his officials in Jamaica. Why had suppression of the uprising necessitated the gruesome deeds, including the vicious flogging and shootings-on-sight of which some military officers were boasting in letters? Why was martial law imposed for so many days after the insurrection had been put down? Had the brief military trials been just and based on clear evidence of complicity? Why had Gordon – now revealed to be a political opponent of Eyre and other legislators – been swiftly transported from Kingston, where civil law prevailed, to Morant Bay for military trial and execution? By the beginning of November, in just two weeks, as one historian puts it, ‘the Jamaica affair had been transformed from a narrative about the salvation of Jamaican colonists into a narrative about the destruction of the English constitution’.39 As various representations criticizing Eyre’s actions were made to the Colonial Office and to Downing Street, with British antislavery activists leading the charge, the government announced the formation of the Jamaica Royal Commission to investigate what had happened in Morant Bay.40 On 19 December 1865, the newly constituted Jamaica Committee – which included members of various existing antislavery advocacy organizations, including Exeter Hall – also met for the first time.41 A number of luminaries agreed that, pending further investigation, Eyre could face prosecution. They included the politician John Bright, the philosopher and politician J. S. Mill, the academic Goldwin Smith, the Positivist Frederic Harrison, and the scientists Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, and Herbert Spencer (‘all the leading evolutionists … besides others less known’, as the last would note).42 It was around this attempt to hold Eyre to account that a bitter controversy would unfold over the next several months, leading the Tory Saturday Review to complain that every dinner party and tea party was ‘worried and wearied’ by arguments as to the ‘brutal inferiority or the angelic superiority of the sons of Ham’.43 The culture wars brewing from the 1838 Emancipation onwards had finally come to a head.
In her influential work on the Eyre controversy, Catherine Hall has suggested that slave emancipation itself provoked a hardening in the typologies of racial difference, inasmuch as it ‘raised the spectre of black peoples as free and equal’.44 In fact, the Morant Bay uprising manifested the feared reality of subjects of the British Empire willing to struggle – just as their slave forebears had rebelled – for rights, justice and opportunities beyond the nominal freedom which was bestowed on them.45 It is this embodied reality – of what the Spectator magazine correctly described then as ‘the demand of negroes for equal consideration with Irishmen, Scotchmen, and Englishmen’ – that underpins much of the British response to the Morant Bay uprising, and shapes the ideological fault line that became visible in its wake.46 It elicited a range of reactions, all of them to do in one way or another with the implications – for Britain and the colonies – of realized black freedom. The presence of colonies, writes Linda Colley, made inescapable the question of whether colonial subjects, ‘those millions of men and women who were manifestly not British, but who had been brought under British rule by armed force … have any claim on those vague but valuable freedoms so many Britons considered to be peculiarly their own’.47 What if the Morant Bay rebellion also pointed to a clash of freedoms – one in which, rather than be forced to concede ground to a wholly different conception of political economy where workers had considerably more control over what to do with their labour power, it might be wiser to concede, in response to a claim, certain limited shared rights precisely as joint ‘British subjects’? ‘The case of Governor Eyre’, as Bernard Semmel observes, ‘was perhaps the first in which it might be said that the realities of a heavy-handed imperial rule were confronted by the growing acceptance of democracy in the homeland’.48 That confrontation, however, was itself facilitated by the voices of G. W. Gordon – whose language had been so central to the charges against him – and those his judicial execution had brought to metropolitan attention.
‘A sanctimonious bearing and a brown skin’
Wild, east and west, he roams and raves,
Against the Church and State,
Seeking to idolize the small,
And demonize the great.
W. Hosack, describing G. W. Gordon49
In the late autumn of 1865, as arguments began to rage (again) over whether ‘strong white government’ was the only way to control the black man, or whether Britain had been dishonoured by the violation of the rule of law, from beyond the grave came the sobering voice of George William Gordon, whose last letter to his wife, written on the morning of his death, was published by British newspapers on 1 December 1865.50 In the letter, which was later distributed by antislavery activists and cited in a great deal of writing around the incident, Gordon’s tone was calm but disconcertingly firm:
My beloved Wife – General Nelson has just been kind enough to inform me that the court-martial on Saturday last has ordered me to be hung, and that the sentence is to be executed in an hour hence; so that I shall be gone from this world of sin and sorrow.
I regret that my worldly affairs are so deranged; but now it cannot be helped. I do not deserve this sentence, for I never advised or took part in any insurrection. All I ever did was to recommend the people who complained to seek redress in a legitimate way; and if in this I erred, or have been misrepresented, I do not think I deserve the extreme sentence. It is, however, the will of my Heavenly Father that I should thus suffer in obeying his command to relieve the poor and needy, and to protect, as far as I was able, the oppressed. And glory be to his name; and I thank him that I suffer in such a cause.51
For all that it is written by a ‘truly devoted an
d now nearly dying husband’ who accepts his fate with faithful calm, Gordon’s last letter is also unflinching, indeed defiant, in naming the injustices he has been subject to. The judges appear to have been against him from the outset, he notes, even determined to have him ‘sacrificed’.52 He had hoped that the governor would give him a fair trial, but witnesses had changed their testimony, judges retaining the version that was to his disadvantage. The ‘rigid manner of the court’ meant that he had been silenced and could not ‘get in all the explanation I intended’.53 What he is very clear about is that neither his wife nor other members of his family should be ashamed of his death: ‘I have fought a good fight, I have kept the faith.’54
It is tempting to suggest that Gordon became the focus of moral outrage and anti-Eyre sentiment in England because he was essentially regarded as an almost white Christian English gentleman. This, however, is to overlook not only the extent to which the Jamaican politician was explicitly racialized as an ungrateful ‘incendiary mulatto’, but also his open espousal of the interests of the black poor.55 Gordon also practised a form of Christianity – Native Baptism – that was wholly connected with black life and African influences, a fact used against him politically. As Abigail Bakan has noted, the ‘political leadership of the producing classes was associated with self-styled Baptist preaching’.56 While it is certainly true that Gordon exuded a certain establishmentarian respectability – he was a man of property who was also educated and articulate – it would have taken a degree of wilful evasion for his supporters in England to overlook both his close connections to the black peasantry and his consistently antagonistic relationship to the white planter establishment. Underhill, for instance, describes Gordon as ‘a staunch and unfailing advocate of the interests of the negro, to which race, by his birth he was allied’.57 One British politician described Gordon as possessed of the ‘fanatical earnestness of the field-preacher’, likely referring both to his religious observances and his political style.58 While Gordon undoubtedly used a politician’s calculus in setting up a large support base among the black peasantry, it seems clear that he was also genuinely ‘willing to confront the wrong-doings of men who hold a position of public and important trust’, and that this earned him great malice from his foes.59 The Spectator clearly grasped the importance of Gordon’s connections to Jamaican blacks, as it criticized Eyre’s acquittal in a private prosecution brought by the Jamaica Committee:
We remark that Mr Justice Blackburn uses the phrase, ‘general belief in the colony’ – which he says was all against Mr Gordon – as synonymous with general belief amongst the whites of the colony … That Mr Gordon had plenty of warm friends who thoroughly disbelieved in his guilt amongst the mulatto and native population, and who were utterly aghast at the violent measure taken, no one disputes.60
It is likely that Gordon, in fact, posed something of a problem for detractors and admirers alike, since he was at once recognizable as someone ‘rather eccentric in his views and notions of the people’s rights’, a familiar prototype in mid-Victorian Britain, but also insistently different by virtue of his own skin colour.61 His insistence on what he called ‘the stern obligations of a sense of justice and common humanity’ would have struck a chord with English liberals; but they were rather more used to calling for the benevolent deployment of humanitarianism towards the ‘weaker races’ than having the claims of common humanity articulated as a demand.62 In the face of inhuman treatment and lack of redress, Gordon apparently agreed that ‘the people would be quite right to break out into open rebellion. If an illegality is permitted in the Governor, an illegality may be permitted on the part of the people.’63 Described by fellow assemblymen as habitually thwarting their goals, Gordon was ‘a sort of constitutional Opposition in himself’, speaking up persistently and urging his constituents to do the same, and insist to their employers on their rights as waged labourers.64 Testimony before the Royal Commission described his ‘language and deportment’ as ‘anything but what it ought to have been’; his personality was obdurate – he refused to leave the vestry even after he was stripped of his position as a churchwarden and physically lifted in his chair out of the room.65 At the same time, he appears to have exhorted his Afro-Jamaican electors to self-improvement: ‘Educate your children, and in time they will be able to take the leading posts in the country.’66 In a letter to the colonial secretary shortly after Gordon’s execution, Eyre claimed that a few educated persons were stirring up the ignorant and illiterate: at meetings ‘language of the most exciting and seditious kind was constantly used, and the people told plainly to right themselves, to be up and doing, to put their shoulders to the wheel, to do as the Haytiens had done, and other similar advice’.67 He was referring to Underhill and other Baptists, but clearly also to Gordon and his allies.68 Whether or not Gordon could be held ‘morally guilty and legally innocent’, as one of Eyre’s later biographers had it, he certainly minced no words, and was clearly aware of rebellious sentiments fermenting among Afro-Jamaicans.69 In Jamaica, Gordon was both disliked and feared by white politicians, including Eyre, who – referring partly to Gordon’s ownership of the newspapers the Watchman and Jamaica Free Press and the Sentinel – complained to the Colonial Office that the newspapers were mostly owned by ‘either Jews or coloured persons – classes that have been generally for the last two years in violent antagonism to me from one cause or another’.70
It was the black vote in a restricted franchise that, in 1863, saw Gordon elected to the Assembly; his political agent was Paul Bogle, a prominent figure in the uprising to come. Gordon also established his own ‘Tabernacle’ as a Native Baptist preacher. ‘That he was an agitator, I will not dispute; that his agitation was invariably measured and prudent I may not affirm’, wrote one of his white supporters.71 It is inadequate to claim, as a sympathetic British politician did, that Gordon simply represented the best of representative politics within an English constitutional system, a politician who ‘out of his very restlessness and troublesomeness often does good … representing the check of perpetual opposition’.72 But it is very likely that ‘his employment of the usages of British political agitation in so heated an atmosphere, probably contributed to store up combustible elements’.73 Indeed, he seemed fully aware both of the level of discontent on the island and of his own power to harness it, observing frankly to one white interlocutor: ‘If I wanted a rebellion I could have had one long ago. I have been asked several times to head a rebellion, but there is no fear of that.’74 At the same time, he believed that a popular ‘great movement’ was afoot and that, unless changes were secured, ‘in six months there will be a revolution in this country’ – apparently noting too, according to witness testimony that was taken by some to be damning: ‘As I have always stood by the people, I will stand by them then.’75 A report of a meeting chaired by Gordon indicates that he actually cautioned his constituents against terrorizing and abusing white residents, but urged them to ‘speak out boldly as to the state of the Island’ and claim their rights as British subjects.76
‘It was never made clear to me how a rich brown man and a poor black man came to share the gallows at the Courthouse in 1865’, remarked a commentator in the Jamaican newspaper the Sunday Gleaner in 2004, reflecting on Gordon’s death.77 The answer has to do with the milieu of political ferment, in which alliances between the coloured middle classes and the black peasantry were integral. Although Gordon knew how to put pressure on the constitutional system within which he operated, it is important to recognize that Jamaicans – who were, in any case, not fully enfranchised – did not merely ‘ “learn” democratic political culture from British tutelage’, but seized opportunities ‘to push forward their own vision of freedom’ in ways that were sometimes constitutional and, at others, possessed of ‘more violent undercurrents’.78 By the middle of 1865, in conditions of extreme poverty and deprivation, and the widespread resentment that resulted, there had emerged a remarkable political confluence: investigative missionarie
s from Britain like Underhill, Jamaican political agitators of colour (of whom Gordon was only the most literate and prominent), and, most crucially, a black population in dire straits willing to organize and take risks. Emancipation had both enabled this concatenation of factors and created a need to make claims on freedom as a state of being, and expand it into a more meaningful condition; in this sense, the end of formal slavery in 1838 had posed a beginning rather than an ethical and political end-point.
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