If Gordon is a key figure in thinking about the implications of the Morant Bay rebellion for dissent in Britain, it is not only because he himself was extraordinarily articulate, but also because the manner of his detention, unjust military trial and subsequent execution excavated a channel through which voices other than those of English missionaries, planters and colonial administrators could be heard back in the imperial homeland. The Reverend Henry Clarke, an Anglican rector in Jamaica who wrote to the Anti-Slavery Society, noted of Gordon’s power-in-death:
G. W. Gordon is at this moment speaking more loudly, more persistently, more effectively for the people of Jamaica than ever he did in his life time, and the time is not far distant when amid the grateful tears of a free and prosperous people a glorious monument shall be erected over his grave inscribed to him as the self-sacrificing martyr whose blood sealed the Magna Carta of the black man’s liberties.79
As in many other colonial contexts, our knowledge of what happened at Morant Bay comes largely from the written accounts and archived documents provided by British officials, travellers, missionaries and journalists. Embedded within these, however, are the copious communications of those Jamaicans involved in some way with the uprising, particularly those who attended the infamous ‘Underhill meetings’ called by Gordon and his allies, using the English missionary’s critique of conditions in Jamaica as a basis for speaking up and organizing. These included, according to one disgruntled editorial in the Colonial Standard and Jamaica Despatch, ‘the stump orator, the little agitator, the small speechifier [and] the disappointed scoundrel, the embryo cut-throat, the ambitious leader of illicit trainbands and secret associations’.80 One of the organizational roles that Gordon had played successfully was the ‘bridging of oppositional middle-class and black smallholder networks’, and this meant that the archives contain a combination of formal registers and constitutional and ‘gentlemanly’ as well as more untutored and colloquial forms of speech.81 These also reflected a range of oppositional activities which realized what Sheller calls ‘peasant economic agency’, from organized work stoppage and strikes to cooperative labour, self-help societies, collective landholding and credit associations.82 It was precisely this level of organization and the concomitant ‘spectre of … increasing black control of the legislature’ that had caused anxiety for Eyre and his supporters well before the Morant Bay episode:83
The negroes were for the most part uneducated peasants, speaking in accents strange to the ear, often in a phraseology of their own, with vague conceptions of number and time, unaccustomed to definiteness or accuracy of speech, and in many cases still smarting under a sense of injuries sustained.84
The report of the Jamaica Royal Commission and the related papers laid before parliament, for instance, enable us to hear – as many Victorians would have – the voices of Gordon, his political allies like Paul Bogle and James McLaren, and many ordinary and poor Jamaican blacks.85 Some are refracted – and undoubtedly distorted – by second-hand accounts, while others emerge through copies of anonymous letters and accounts of meetings and resolutions taken. They speak in varied registers and tones but are strikingly devoid of simple postures of suffering – the passive, imploring and benevolent black figures that had become familiar to a British audience through abolitionist discourse. If the answer to the ‘world-renowned’ question ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ was in some doubt, as one British newspaper argued, it was perhaps now being posed as a statement rather than a plea.86 As illustrated in several threatening letters to colonial officials collected and placed before the Royal Commission, there was growing anger and a spirit of self-assertion among the Jamaican peasantry:
Your swords we do not care about. Your firearms we don’t care about. It must be life or death between us before we should live in such a miserable life … We are yours disobedient subjects [sic]. (Anonymous, sent to the Custos of St Mary)
We not to be dread of anything … By the time you send for man-of-war and soldiers all you white fellows will be sent to a flight and all you who call yourself men in laws that will try to oppress us because we are poor. (Signed ‘Thomas Killmany, and intend to kill many more’, sent to Messrs J. B. Goffe & Co.)87
We can hear in this untutored speech growing awareness of both what freedom from slavery has meant and what it has not yet achieved; discontent at the limitations that still govern the lives of former slaves and their descendants, ‘disaffection’ with a government that is perceived to be not on their side and, increasingly, a sense that little will change without some form of action and assertion undertaken by those who feel themselves exploited. ‘Remember that, “he only is free whom the truth makes free” ’ exhorts the ‘State of the Island’ placard that circulated in the wake of the ‘Queen’s Advice’: ‘You are no longer slaves but free men.’88 Freedom – and this is an insight repeated in a variety of ways – will have to be fleshed out and given meaning through some form of action by the ‘freed’: ‘We advise you to be up and doing; and to maintain your cause; you must be united in your efforts.’89 As Underhill himself recollected: ‘An opportunity had now come for the despised negro to give utterance to his complaints. The oppressed and down-trodden people were not without able expounders of their rights, men risen from their own ranks’.90
Many of these expounders ‘were able public speakers, and could express themselves in forcible Saxon speech’.91 Immediately prior to the outbreak, Bogle and nineteen other black men had also sent an articulate collective statement of their position to the governor:
We, the petitioners of St Thomas-in-the-East, send to inform your Excellency of the mean advantages that has been taken of us from time to time, and more especially this present time, when on Saturday, 7th of this month, an outrageous assault was committed upon us by the policemen of this parish, by order of the Justices, which occasion an outbreaking for which warrants have been issued against innocent person, of which we were compelled to resist. We, therefore, call upon your Excellency for protection, seeing we are Her Majesty’s loyal subjects, which protection, if refused to will be compelled to put our shoulders to the wheel, as we have been imposed upon for a period of 27 years with due obeisance to the laws of our Queen and country, and we can no longer endure the same.92
While this missive has been read variously – as indicating, according to Eyre’s critics, a willingness to follow a constitutional path, or, according to the Royal Commissioners, ‘the character of a manifesto preparatory to and attempting to justify a recourse to violence’ – what is really significant is its insistence that resistance in the face of governmental intransigence is not so much a right as a moral compulsion on the part of otherwise law-abiding subjects. The freed blacks who are signatories to this manifesto are, like many slave rebels before them, ‘purposeful subjects aware of their own voices’, clearly cognizant of and insightful about their political situation and the possible need for forceful action to remedy it if other avenues remain closed to them.93 We know, for instance, that, in August 1865, Bogle had headed a delegation to take grievances to Eyre, only to be turned away.94 The above address, sent to the governor on 10 October 1865, refers to having endured injustice but also makes clear that the time of endurance is over. Whether or not the Royal Commissioners were correct in suggesting that the primary purpose of the letter was to justify violence, they were certainly right in detecting a note of ‘scarcely concealed defiance’.95 This kind of knowing self-assertion – which even in its early stages manifested itself in ‘impertinent’ body language, ‘insolent’ back-chat and deliberate idling at work – could not ultimately be entirely ignored by debates and commentary in the imperial capital, though it could be either demonized as Carlyle’s famous ‘miserable mad seditions’ or minimized by some missionaries as ‘a proneness to petty quarrelling and a love of litigation’.96
Exactly two months before the riots outside the courthouse, on 11 August, a placard was posted on a cotton tree on the main road in Morant Bay. It was a
n exhortation:
People of St Thomas ye East, you have been ground down too long already. Shake off your sloth, and speak like honourable and free men at your meeting. Let not a crafty, jesuitical priesthood deceive you. Prepare for your duty. Remember the destitution in the midst of your families, and your forlorn condition. The Government have taxed you to defend your own rights against the enormities of an unscrupulous and oppressive foreigner. Mr Custos Ketelhodt, you feel this: it is no wonder you do. You have been dared in this provoking act, and it is sufficient to extinguish your long patience … it is your duty to speak out, and to act too!97
The language of the lengthy notice, titled ‘State of the Island’, is clearly erudite and sophisticated, and evidence indicates that Gordon, even if he was not its sole author, had contributed substantially to its formulation. This short extract reprises the themes that would be rehearsed both in private and public communications by Gordon and others: the fact of widespread poverty across the island, a flat tax that weighed disproportionately on the poor, and a judicial system which was seen, with good cause, to be skewed in favour of the white planters who also, scandalously enough, comprised the magistracy. Such causes for disaffection had already been elaborated in Underhill’s letter.98 But unlike the letter, which highlights suffering, the emphasis here is on the unavoidable duty of claiming freedom and working to give it meaning by being ‘up and doing’.
The insistence of the Jamaican peasant petitioners on taking responsibility for their own futures is relevant to the contest over the meanings of Emancipation. Following the ‘Underhill meetings’, a petition or ‘Memorial’ signed by 108 persons was sent to the queen in April 1865 by the ‘poor people of Jamaica and Parish of St Ann’, laying out their grievances and asking for due redress.99 The petition spoke of ‘great want and distress for want of employment’ and lack of land to cultivate to ameliorate this situation.100 High prices and heavy taxes caused further impoverishment; many poor blacks had committed themselves to prison in consequence. If rendered some initial assistance – that is, if the queen would rent them land to work at a low rate – the petitioners would ‘put our hands and heart to work, and cultivate coffee, corn, canes, cotton and tobacco, and other produce. We will form a company for that purpose’.101 Where missionaries read the document as a cry of distress from a suffering people, it was treated by Eyre’s government as a political demonstration. In fact, it had elements of both. Described later by the Jamaica Committee as an ‘insult’, the widely circulated reply from the Colonial Office and Cardwell, in the form of ‘The Queen’s Advice’, would come as a huge blow to the petitioners, greatly increasing disaffection and laying the ground for the more radical steps that some of them would advocate and take. Implicitly upholding the white plantocracy’s view of black labour as lazy and uncooperative, the letter informed the petitioners that the prosperity of Jamaica depended ‘upon their working for wages, not uncertainly or capriciously, but steadily and continuously, at the times when their labour is wanted, and for so long as it is wanted’.102 Put simply, the petitioners would not be assisted in their modest goal of farming their own small plots of land, but were patronizingly urged instead to become the reliable wage labourers sought by planters. By endorsing the planter view that the main problem affecting Jamaica was the lack of steady black plantation labour, this royal ‘advice’ refused to acknowledge the widespread desire among freed slaves and their descendants to control their own economic destiny through farming smallholdings rather than be shackled to low-wage labour on terms laid out by the planters.103 What had emerged, therefore, was a stark ideological clash about what freedom meant. One view, touted by the planters and endorsed by the colonial government, insisted that freedom consisted of the ‘option’ of selling labour to a capitalist entity for prices determined by the latter. The other refused anything resembling the contractual and compulsory extraction of labour in favour of controlling the output of a smallholding. This disagreement paved the way for the events in Morant Bay on 11 October 1865.
The Uses of Freedom
What God Almighty make land for? You have plenty; we have none.
A Morant Bay peasant
The personal cultivation and ownership of land was fundamental to the post-slavery Jamaican conception of freedom. Well before 1865, rumours had begun to circulate that, along with freedom, the queen had bestowed lands upon ex-slaves to cultivate, linking ‘the idea of liberty of the person with liberty of the land’, as the Royal Commission would put it.104 The owner of an uncultivated estate, Wellwood Maxwell Anderson, testified before the Commission that his tenants refused to pay ground rents, arguing ‘that the Queen had given them the place when she gave them freedom; and freedom would be of no use if they had not their lands and houses’.105 Although Gordon himself became the subject of rumours in which he says that peasants were entitled to get land or fight for it, such claims appear to have emerged autonomously. As James C. Scott notes, oppressed groups ‘often read in rumors promises of their imminent liberation’.106 A plot of land, however small, ‘symbolized freedom, personhood, and prestige among the descendants of former slaves’.107 The Royal Commission concluded that ‘a principal object of the disturbers of order was the obtaining of land free from the payment of rent’.108 The bone of contention was access to what was known as the ‘back lands’ – lands that lay on the perimeters of cultivated or plantation land which had fallen into disuse by its tenants and owners. One witness’s account of a September meeting in Paul Bogel’s chapel in Stony Gut illuminates matters clearly. Addressing the meeting, McLaren, who would be one of the leaders of the October uprising, explains ‘why cause me hold this meeting’, given that, although his parents were slaves, he himself had been born free:
But now I am still a slave by working from days to days. I cannot get money to feed my family, and I working at Coley estate for 35 chains for 1s., and after five days’ working I get 2s.6d. for my family. Is that able to sustain a house full of family? … Well, the best we can do is to come together, and send in a petition to the Government; and if they will give up the outside land to we, we shall work with cane, and cotton, and coffee like the white. But the white people say we are lazy and won’t work … if the outside land was given up to them to work, they should pay the taxes to the Queen, and if the land was given up to them they did not want anything from the white people, they would try to make their own living themselves.109
In former slave colonies, ownership or use of land at reasonable rent was more than an alternative means of sustenance; it was tied to a deeply felt resistance to working for plantation owners, owing not only to a clearly inadequate, indeed unviable, economic return, but also a suspicion that wage labour under those conditions was too close to, and might entail a return to, slavery. In the months leading up to Morant Bay, a popular rumour held that slavery was to be reinstated.110 There was something of a panic about this, one clergyman maintained in his testimony: ‘a settled belief gaining strength from the time it arose’ which, to his mind, paved the way for potential rebellion. Importantly, the curate is firm in his insistence that the black peasantry are no more credulous ‘than England or other places’, taking seriously ‘only such reports as that which peculiarly affect their own position, such as that of being made slaves’.111
Another element of the organized mobilizing that appears to have emerged independently of either Gordon or his ‘seditious language’ was a call to black unity by some agitators. The rhetoric of race and racial unity in Morant Bay was most apparent as a form of collective self-assertion, one underpinning a claim to land through a reversal of the existing racial hierarchy of ownership and use: ‘Hurra! Buckra country for us.’112 For the white propertied class of Jamaica and their supporters in Britain, the perceived refusal of freed blacks and their descendants to submit to the regimes of plantation labour in favour of tilling their own plots of land threw their self-serving idea of ‘freedom’ into crisis. The liberty of black Jamaicans to sell or withhold t
heir labour power as they pleased was as much an economic problem as a political one. In this regard, an observation offered to the Royal Commission by a planter on his relations with the freed black peasantry is illuminating:
I should be very glad if they would be dependent on my capital; but they are not, and that would be the great difficulty in Jamaica with regard to agriculture; the negroes are not like those in Barbadoes, they are not dependent upon estates for their livelihood … their very independence is an evil.113
Another critic of the Morant Bay rebels, who describes himself as a ‘A Thirty Years Resident’, concedes that, at Emancipation, planters ‘rather resembled madmen than reasonable beings; deprived of the unrequited labours of the slaves, their great object seemed to be to assimilate [the slaves’] freedom as nearly as possible to slavery’.114 This included concerted action to keep wages as low as possible and charge enormous rents for cottages and provision grounds.
Their unacceptable resistance to a regime of wage labour within the plantation economy is a salient theme in Victorian broadsides against ex-slaves and their insurgent descendants. It is not so much the discursive spectre of an existentially free black human being that occasions indignation here as the material refusal of Jamaican peasants to comply with the economic imperatives of mercantile capitalism. The Times editorial of 13 November 1865, just after news of the Jamaica insurrection came in, mulls over what it regards as the colonial failure to ‘eradicate the original savageness of the African blood’ by turning slaves into wage labourers: ‘The negro has been able to live with little or no work, he has been able to get a patch of land readily, and to subsist by a wretched cultivation of it.’115 Necessitating the importation of coolies, or indentured labour, from India and China to do the plantation work instead of them, black Jamaicans are uncivilized to the precise extent that they refuse to accede to the demands of capitalism or ‘the laws of industry and labour, which naturally regulate all well-managed communities’, as one critic of Emancipation puts it.116 In frustrating the demands of political economy, the emancipated black is ‘freer than … the white man’117 – and so prosperous that ‘no peasant in England, Scotland, France, or Belgium could compete with him in his command of the comforts of life’.118 In his later, more measured reflections on the matter, Charles Roundell, who had acted as secretary to the Jamaica Royal Commission, would ask in a hopeful vein whether the perceived ‘failure’ of Emancipation might not be ‘an economical question of capital and labour, supply and demand, which, like all economical questions, is capable of being grappled with, of being understood, and successfully surmounted’.119 The right restrictions on labour and employers alike could ensure a controlled liberty that would result in more plentifully supplied capital, a consistent labour supply and better returns.
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