Insurgent Empire

by Priyamvada Gopal

  For supporters of Eyre, the resistance to the claims of political economy, which culminated in the Morant Bay violence, could easily have led to a repeat of the nightmare of the Haitian Revolution – an obsessive preoccupation for many critics of Emancipation. Gordon was repeatedly accused by planters of exhorting his electorate to ‘do as they do in Hayti’; he was equally insistent that he had never thought of it. ‘The vicinity of Hayti and its barbaric independence’, The Times editorial of 20 November 1865 pronounces, almost triumphantly, ‘have fostered [the black man’s] dreams of vengeance and his dreams of aggrandizement … He dreams of the glorious island in which he lives being owned in perpetuity by himself and his posterity.’120 That version of freedom, to be avoided at all costs, is ‘the erection of a semi-barbarian Sovereignty in the West Indies’, along the lines of Haiti.121 Freedom, in other words, was divisible into the putative universalism of capitalist political economic imperatives and the unacceptable particularism of refusing them. The real issue at stake for those who denounced the Jamaica rebels emerges more explicitly in a well-known polemic titled ‘The Negro in Jamaica’, given before the Anthropological Society of London in 1866. In it Commander Bedford Pim would state the case for ‘moderate control’ in baldly honest political-economic terms:

  The negro in a state of freedom continues powerless to advance himself in civilisation, and he is most improvable when under moderate control. It is no longer expedient to make a slave of him; he has performed his part in the world’s history in that capacity … He has no right, however, and civilized man has no right to allow him, to pass his existence without in any way contributing to the advancement of mankind.122

  It is not until the ex-slave has been fully incorporated into this economic regime, having proved his title, that ‘he can be admitted into the fellowship’ of the free, and therefore the fully human. In the ensuing discussion, many of Pim’s audience would repeat a familiar grouse: that the Afro-Jamaican limited ‘his husbandry to the satisfaction of his daily wants’, and that as a group they refused to ‘apply their knowledge for their own gain in life or for the benefit of their employers’.123 As the writer J. A. Froude, a friend of Charles Kingsley’s, would put it, looking back on the events of 1865 some two decades later, if self-government of any kind was to be granted in the West Indies, it would be impossible to take black allegiance for granted, or to remain confident ‘that the liberties which we concede will not be used for purposes which we are unable to tolerate’.124

  Reframing Rebellion: The Jamaica Committee and the Problem of Freedom

  What purposes should underlie liberty, and who should have it? These were indeed the questions at the heart of the disagreement over Eyre’s actions, as English intellectuals broke ranks and formed two opposing committees to determine the governor’s future after he was recalled from Jamaica in 1866. Once, in August 1866, it became clear that the Jamaica Committee would pursue a private prosecution of Eyre, as the government had declined to charge him, an organization to champion Eyre’s cause came into being. The Eyre Defence and Aid Fund felt it to be ‘a solemn public duty on the part of all those who believe that Governor Eyre quelled the insurrection in Jamaica, and saved the island, to come forward and boldly proclaim such to be their opinion’.125 Its constituent members included many well-known writers and intellectuals, such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, as well as John Tyndall and Charles Kingsley; it would receive support from the likes of Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson and, later on, J. A. Froude. Equally revealing are the self-descriptions given by those who anonymously sent subscriptions to the fund; they include, among others: ‘One whose sister was massacred at Cawnpore’, ‘One who perceives the necessity of firmness and vigour in those in authority’, ‘A lady who has suffered by insurrection’, ‘A soldier who has not forgotten Cawnpore’, ‘A lady who was in India during the Mutiny’ and ‘A lady ashamed of her country’s ingratitude’.126 For Eyre’s defenders, the rebellious blacks whom he had contained were an imminent threat, above all, to the political economy of empire. In a letter to the Jamaica Committee, some of whose members he was friendly with, the scientist John Tyndall lambasted ‘a tendency on your part to tone down the crimes of the negro and to bring his punishments into relief’.127 Objecting to the Committee’s downgrading of the Morant Bay uprising to a mere ‘local riot’, Tyndall pointed to ‘the spirit of rebellion’ born of widespread disaffection that could only have been quelled, as Eyre had done, by ‘making the name, power, and determination of England terrible throughout the island’.128 Like many others, Tyndall saw this insurgent flame as originating from and nourished by the historical and spatial proximity of Haiti’s success in overthrowing the power of France. Gordon, he said, had to be read as, at the very least, a ‘taproot’ for insurgency, rather than the bland constitutionalist that the Jamaica Committee had made him out to be.129 Moreover, attempts to universalize liberty and identify black and white resistance were illegitimate: ‘We do not hold an Englishman and a Jamaica negro to be convertible terms, nor do we think that the cause of human liberty will be promoted by any attempt to make them so.’130 Also writing a letter on the topic, to the Daily Telegraph, was John Ruskin, an active member of the Eyre Defence Fund, noting that the difference between him and the Jamaica Committee was not just that he was for lordship and they for liberty, but that he believed ‘that white emancipation not only ought to precede, but must by law of all fate precede, black emancipation’.131 In a lecture on ‘Liberty’, also given in 1865, Ruskin uses a tellingly vivid metaphor of the dangers of excessive freedom illustrated by the housefly, ‘free in the air, free in the chamber – a black incarnation of caprice – wandering, investigating, flitting, flirting, feasting at his will, with rich variety … what freedom is like his?’132 Carlyle, who drafted a Petition from the Eyre Defence Fund to the House of Commons, spoke similarly of the Morant Bay incidents as a ‘frightful and immeasurable kindling of black unutterabilities’ – a telling phrase, seeking to render the voices of black rebellion literally unspeakable.133 Famously, of course, Carlyle also described the Jamaica Committee’s observations as less than human, relegating them to the same level of speech as those they defended, ‘nothing but a group or knot of rabid Nigger-Philanthropists, barking furiously in the gutter, and threatening one’s Reform Bill with loss of certain friends and votes’.134

  For the Jamaica Committee, which included no fewer than nineteen members of parliament headed by John Bright, the questionable deployment of martial law by Eyre raised the possibility of repression coming home to roost: ‘What is done in a colony to-day may be done in Ireland to-morrow, and in England hereafter’, as Fredric Harrison had it.135 ‘Men became members of that committee who had never taken part in public agitation of any kind before’, wrote the MP Justin McCarthy many years later.136 The ‘members of the Jamaica Committee’, Bernard Semmel averred, were ‘men of the new middle classes, sober, respectable, pious and serious’.137 For those who came to Eyre’s defence – largely ‘King’s men’, in Ruskin’s terms – the Jamaica Committee represented what would today be called ‘political correctness gone mad’, or as Dickens would put it, a ‘platform-sympathy with the black – or the native, or the devil – afar off, and platform indifference to our countrymen at enormous odds in the midst of bloodshed and savagery’.138 Ironically, of the two parties, it is those who backed Eyre who accorded to the Jamaica rebels, albeit with outrage, the status of full-fledged black insurgents whose actions and views might, in the long run, portend full independence from white rule, along Haitian lines. The Jamaica Committee’s deliberations, in contrast, stressed the right to constitutional forms of agitation. Though they denied that events at Morant Bay amounted to outright rebellion, the right of those in British territories to agitate – ‘as men must ever be allowed to do in every free country’ – was nonetheless central to the case the committee made against Eyre.139 Their principal goal, insisted these campaigners – who came to include the veteran antislaver
y figures from Exeter Hall, Louis Chamerovzow, Charles Buxton MP, and Frederick Chesson – was constitutional: the absolute ‘defence of those legal and chartered rights which protect the lives and liberties of all’.140 The language of its public documents and deliberations was therefore self-consciously ‘moderate’ and, perhaps also reflecting its composition, carefully parliamentary. As Mill, who had spent a career with the East India Company, and had just been elected to parliament, in July 1865, put it: ‘There was much more at stake than only justice to the Negroes, imperative as was that consideration. The question was, whether the British dependencies, and eventually perhaps Great Britain itself, were to be under the government of law, or of military license.’141 Events in Morant Bay indicated, the Jamaica Committee argued, rioting rather than outright rebellion, so that the imposition of martial law was not only legally questionable but also strategically unnecessary. Even if ‘resistance did occur in the riots’, they argued, there was, nevertheless, no ‘rebellion’, in the sense not only of ‘forcible resistance to lawful authority, but a resistance that is concerted, and, to some extent at least, organized’.142

  There was undoubtedly a certain doubleness to the Jamaica Committee’s formal position, which at once insisted on the right of colonial subjects of the Crown to resist, as domestic subjects could, and attempted to mitigate the extent of that resistance as it had unfolded in Morant Bay. The rebellion in Jamaica was, in other words, recast by the Jamaica Committee in terms that would be familiar to British constitutionalists and advocates of gradual change, annexed to the rhetoric of liberal constitutionalism. In its advocacy of Gordon as a semi-heroic and peaceable figure, the Committee insisted that any ‘popular agitation as revealed in the Jamaica press was of a constitutional kind’, deriving from a situation where ‘a large portion of the people believed themselves to be under a system of government in which the interests of the many were sacrificed to the desires of the few’.143 There was ‘no evidence that revolutionary measures were contemplated’.144 While reminding ‘their fellow-citizens that hopeless wrong is the sure parent of rebellion, and that its best antidote is the hope of constitutional redress’, the Committee also insisted that, in sending their representatives to Jamaica to investigate matters, they had ‘no desire to abet resistance to lawful authority or to weaken the arm of the magistrate in preserving public order’, and intended to ‘lend no assistance or countenance to those persons who had suffered for real’.145 Collating evidence and assessments into a series of pamphlets, the Committee believed that these showed not only

  the necessity for an official inquiry into all the circumstances of the so-called ‘Rebellion’ in Jamaica, and into the legality of the sanguinary measures of repression, but … the need of a powerful organization to assist in the collection and examination of evidence, and to demand, on behalf of the British nation, the impartial application of the law in any well-authenticated cases of cruel excess of power.146

  This doubleness has to do with the fact that, in significant ways, what the Jamaica Committee was also doing was channelling into more parliamentary language the emergence of a more radical solidarity with Jamaican resistance.

  There was an important third force which, like Eyre’s defenders, chose to read events and actors in Jamaica as indeed constituting a radical resistance to political economy; unlike the Eyre party, it considered the resistance desirable. British working-class and labour movement engagements with the Jamaica controversy were direct and polemical in defending the right of Jamaican labourers to resist an exploitative system with all their might. This third approach manifested a process of recognition in which the voiced resistance of the Jamaican peasant resonated with attempts to give voice to working-class men in Britain through the franchise. Radical British polemics on the Eyre controversy cautioned against seeing the violent repression of resistance in Jamaica as singular, for what the Jamaican rebels had exposed was a system of exploitation so red in tooth and claw that it was unlikely to take any more kindly to being substantially challenged in the metropole than in the colony. Such a system necessitated a resistance that would cut across the racial divisions of empire. The popular Reynolds Newspaper, founded by novelist G. W. M. Reynolds with a largely working-class circulation (350,000 by 1870), covered the Jamaica controversy extensively. One of its regular columnists, writing under the pseudonym ‘Northumbrian’, sounded the keynote for an oppositional approach at the outset, reading dominant rhetoric – purveyed by the likes of The Times – against the grain, and identifying points of commonality with the rebels. ‘Somehow or other’, observed Northumbrian sardonically, ‘British arms are always engaged in fighting Kaffirs, Maories, Hindoos, or negroes. Now, this policy may be necessary, but certainly is not glorious.’147 Race and racial discourse are engaged with directly: ‘Excesses and atrocities of the most fiendish kind have been committed’, announced an article in late November 1865 satirizing the hysterical high notes of The Times’s coverage of the insurrection as an attack on whites. ‘The most lawless, malignant, and diabolical of these atrocities have been perpetrated, not by the blacks, but by the whites … men of British blood, who arrogate to themselves an immeasurable and unapproachable superiority over the despised African.’148 Identifying similarities in the workings of power across colonial contexts helped allies of the Morant Bay insurgents to make the argument that what happened out in the Empire was likely to come home to roost by stages: ‘Our rulers have not used the Jamaica negroes in a more unlawful manner than they have the Irish Fenians. The difference in the treatment of these two is one of degree, not of principle … Let Englishmen think of these things; for, although Irishmen and negroes are the present victims, who knows who may be the next people exposed to the tender mercies of the Hobbs’s, the Eyres, and the Wodehouses?’149

  Reynolds was clearly drawing on sentiments expressed in working-class and other public meetings held to discuss the Jamaica business, lengthy accounts of which were also carried in the paper. A report of a meeting in Manchester notes that 600 signatures had been requisitioned to call it. ‘A riot was a rising of the people against authority for the time being,’ said one speaker, as a resolution introduced by T. B. Potter MP – who also edited the smaller-circulation trade union paper the Bee-Hive – invited listeners to make connections between violence against colonial subjects and repression at home.150 Manchester too had faced an ‘attack upon the people by the authorities [which] gave the signal for great changes in this country’, he reminds his listeners, referring presumably to the Peterloo massacre of 1819.151 The trouble taken to make these parallels and to urge audiences to see the historical resonances cannot be simply dismissed as discursive annexation, for a great deal of effort goes into identifying and illuminating points of connection. Similarly, Potter’s insistence on Gordon’s and his allies’ right to be seen as Englishmen is clear-sighted in reframing national identity as a fellowship of common cause rather than a matter of racial essence: ‘When one looked at the case of Mr Gordon, he (Mr Potter) confessed it made his blood run cold to think that an Englishman – for though coloured men these were Englishmen – (cheers) – our fellow-subjects, whose rights were our rights, as ours were theirs – (renewed cheers)’ had been subjected to a court martial as the Jamaican civilian opposition politician had been.152 The language is deliberately reciprocal, locating both parties in a mutually reinforcing relationship of struggle against a common enemy, rather than one ‘bestowing’ rights on another. Indeed, most of the writing on the controversy in Reynolds Newspaper is marked by a distinct lack of paternalism and contains strikingly few references to the ‘inferiority’ of other races. Speaking at the same meeting, Jacob Bright, brother of the famous Liberal politician John, would apostrophize Gordon thus: ‘And if there could be fifty such men, there might be a Government in Jamaica (applause).’153

  From several articles and summaries of speeches at public meetings, it is clear that the recognition of common cause was, in fact, based on an informed engagement
with the issues at stake, including the fact that the blacks of Jamaica had articulated their needs only to be denied redress. In its very first report on the insurrection, Reynolds was swift to note that the blacks of Jamaica laboured under very real injustices, and had cause to be ‘dissatisfied’ with the results of their applications for relief.154 A later article observed that the whites of Jamaica had ‘never yet reconciled themselves to the emancipation of the blacks’, despite the hefty compensation paid out by the ‘plundered and impoverished’ working classes of Britain.155 It is understandable, however, that the ‘freedmen’ (printed with scare quotes) might not have found wage labour on plantations a congenial prospect, and would wish to make their ‘freedom’ more real than the planters intended it to be: