Sam Sharpe: The Scriptures that Motivated Him and their Implications for Today

ABSTRACT

Sam Sharpe, an enslaved person and initiator of the rebellion of enslaved peoples in Jamaica, 1831–2, was a Baptist deacon who knew the Bible well. While biographies and accounts of the rebellion cite a number of texts that the writers believe motivated Sam Sharpe in his actions, we only have undisputed evidence for his appeal to four specific texts (Matthew 5:33–37, Matthew 6:24 // Luke 16:13, 1 Corinthians 7:20–21, Philippians 2:12); our knowledge of his use of these is to be gleaned from the records of his trial, together with the reports of two missionaries who visited him in prison. This article shows that it is nevertheless possible from these accounts to deduce significant insights into his interpretation of scripture and its effect on his extraordinary leadership in the events of the time. Correspondingly, this hermeneutic can offer guidance for modern movements for peace, justice and freedom.

KEYWORDS:

• Sam Sharpe
• slavery
• scriptural interpretation
• freedom

This article was originally given by Paul S. Fiddes as the Annual Lecture of the Baptist Historical Society in May 2023, drawing on research by Larry J. Kreitzer.

Sam Sharpe and his Bible

Can there be any readers who do not know about Sam Sharpe, one of the seven national heroes of Jamaica and now formally endowed with the title, ‘The Right Excellent Sam Sharpe’ by a grateful state? Just in case this is so, we must begin by recalling that on 28 December, 1831, in and around Montego Bay, a large number of enslaved persons staged a strike – or a ‘sit-down’, as they called it – and refused to go back to work until their owners payed them a wage for their labour. The organiser of this strike was one of the enslaved persons, Sam Sharpe, who was also a deacon in the Baptist church in Montego Bay pastored by the English missionary Thomas Burchell. Centred on the parish of St James where Sharpe was living, Sharpe had coordinated sit-down strikes in several estates in four further parishes, covering some 600 square miles and involving 20,000 enslaved persons, an extraordinary feat of organisation.¹ Unfortunately, what he had intended as non-violent resistance was forestalled and undermined on the evening before by the burning down of the Great House on the Kensington Estate by dissident enslaved persons without, it appears, the knowledge or consent of Sharpe.

While the strike went ahead, and was effective over a wide area, the action rapidly turned into armed conflict. There were more burnings of storehouses, and violent attacks by enslaved persons on some planters and their property. This in turn provoked a savage military reponse by British authorities, as well as attacks on Baptist church properties (along with some Methodist and Moravian chapels). Over eight days about 14 white overseers or planters and 186 slaves were killed. What became known as the ‘Christmas Rebellion’ was quickly put down, and in the ensuing trials more than 500 enslaved persons were executed, among them Sam Sharpe; he was tried at a Special Slave Court in Montego Bay on 19 April 1832 for his part in leading the rebellion, found guilty and hanged. Yet historians are clear that this revolt, which soon became well known in England and was referred to in Parliament, played a significant part in the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in an Act of 1833.² We need to challenge the self-congratulatory tone of much discussion about the action of the British Government in bringing slavery to an end in its Empire: the oppressed largely liberated themselves, at great cost to themselves.

For all this, and despite his honouring by the Jamaican state, we know little about Sam Sharpe the man. We do not know whether the traditional pen and ink drawing of his face is from life, but it is unlikely. Unknown is the original African name of his family; earlier called ‘Archer’, he carries for ever the name of his slave-owner, the Englishman Samuel Sharpe Esq., as was customary at that time. Court records tell us that he was 27 years old, that his mother’s name was Eve, and that he was married.³ He was a trusted ‘house slave’ of Samuel Sharpe, not a ‘field-slave’, as is clear from his relative freedom of movement. A striking tribute is paid to him by someone hostile to both him and the rebellion, one Bernard Martin Senior, owner of the Saltspring estate. In his memoir, published in 1835, Senior calls him ‘active, intelligent. and subtle’. It is from Senior we also learn that others called him ‘Daddy’ or ‘Ruler’, honorific titles belonging to his leadership in the church which Senior significantly describes as being ‘employed by the preachers to carry the word’.⁴

My concern in this paper is to ask what evidence there is for Sam Sharpe’s use of the word of scripture, and what this might tell us today about the way we might approach issues of justice, peace and freedom in a scriptural way. There can be no doubt that Sam Sharpe knew his Bible. He was literate, and as a Baptist deacon in Thomas Burchell’s congregation, he would have been responsible for leading Bible studies, both in the church and in private houses. In fact, it seems that he used meetings for Bible study and prayer as the very occasions for initiating and coordinating the extraordinary network of strikes.

Sharpe was reported as saying that he relied on the authority of Holy Scripture for the view that ‘the white man had [no] more right to hold the blacks in bondage, than the blacks had to enslave the whites’.⁵ This is not a naive statement that he cannot find a reference to black slaves in scripture; it is a refutation of the theological position of many white slave owners, that they were justified in holding slaves by being the new spiritual Israel, and so inheriting the ‘right’ of Ancient Israelites to hold slaves from other nations. However, our knowledge of how else Sharpe interpreted scripture, and which texts inspired his actions, is very limited.

Certainly, those who have written about him have guessed at which passages would have been in his mind in planning the slave rebellion, and these have been informed guesses in so far as they are based on the texts which the English Baptist missionaries drew on in their sermons on the theme of spiritual freedom – preaching which was very cautious in avoiding any actual incitement to rebellion or violence, although it often landed them in court. One of these Baptist pastors, William Knibb, made clear in his addresses to large audiences back in England that he himself believed that spiritual liberation was not possible while people were still enslaved in body, but he was careful not to say this directly in Jamaica.⁶ Texts employed in such dangerous sermons included John 8:32, ‘And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free’, John 8:36, ‘If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed’, Galatians 3:28, ‘There is neither bond nor free’, and Galatians 5:1, ‘Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free’. Bernard Senior, again in his memoir, mentions texts preached on in the Montego Bay Baptist chapel to which he took exception, namely John 8:36, Galatians 3:28, and Galatians 5:1, along with 1 Corinthians 7:23, ‘Ye are bought with a price, be not ye the servants of men’ and Matthew 6:24, ‘No man can serve two masters’.⁷ He complains that these ‘and similar passages were constantly read and expatiated on, with the utmost virulence’, and claims that some of those present at the final service before Christmas, just preceding the rebellion, had told him that the sermon ‘forced them to take free, because parson tell dem tings to make dem blood boil.’⁸

Unfortunately, however, we have no evidence that Sharpe himself referred to these particular texts in motivating others to join in his ambitious plan, with the exception of the last text, ‘No man can serve two masters’ (Matt 6:24), to which we will come later.⁹ He might well have used them, and writers about Sharpe have simply supposed that he did.¹⁰ The most recent scholarly study of the rebellion confidently states that ‘four passages in particular drew his attention’, and names Matthew 6:24, John 8:36, 1 Corinthians 7:23, and Galatians 3:28,¹¹ but there is unfortunately no evidence for this assertion beyond the first text.

In the light of Senior’s outraged comments there seems little doubt that Sharpe’s Bible was the King James Version in its wholeness and unabridged. We mention this because there was a heavily edited Bible published in 1807 called Select Parts of the Holy Bible for the use of the Negro Slaves in the British West-India Islands, and it has recently provoked attention through exhibitions in London and Washington, giving rise to the impression that a truncated Bible was widely used among missionaries.¹² This abridgement was produced for the use of Anglican clergy and their congregations by ‘the Society for the Conversion of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies’, though the Society was a small one and it is unclear whether these selected scriptures were ever widely circulated.¹³ The volume omitted large parts of the Old Testament, but it does include extensive parts of Genesis and Deuteronomy; it may then be significant that from Exodus it includes only chapters 19–20, featuring the ten commandments, and omitting the story of liberation from slavery in Egypt. It also omits key texts from the New Testament which Baptist missionaries were later accused of using to incite rebellion, namely John 8:32 & 36, Galatians 3:28, and 1 Corinthians 7:23. It does include Matthew 6:24 (//Luke 16:3) and Galatians 5:1, but these might be interpreted more easily to avoid reference to literal slavery. One of the texts that we are going to show that Sharpe was familiar with from his own Bible – 1 Corinthians 7:21 – is also missing. All this by itself would rule out this being the version used by Sharpe.

Moreover, there is absolutely no evidence that this abridged Bible, probably in use among at least some Anglican churches, was used at all by nonconformist ministers. There is in fact an important difference between the origin of Anglican and Baptist missionaries from England in Jamaica which is relevant to the question. Anglican missions arrived following the track of colonisation, whereas Baptist churches in Jamaica were originally founded by black Baptists themselves, initiated by the work of the Revd George Liele who was a freed slave born to slave parents in Virginia, USA.¹⁴ This ‘Native’ Baptist church, founded in 1783, was already meeting in Kingston and Montego Bay when local groups invited the Baptist Missionary Society in England to send ministers to assist them, beginning in 1814. It is inconceivable that a different version of the Bible from the one already in use could have been introduced.¹⁵

Despite the general paucity of evidence about Sam Sharpe’s appeal to specific scriptural texts, our aim in this paper is to take four texts for which we do have evidence of association with Sharpe. They may not, of course, have been as central to his thinking as other texts, and we only know about them from the reports of others, but at least we have some idea about the way he approached these scriptures. The first of these texts is:

Matthew 5:33–37

According to the evangelist Matthew, Jesus teaches like this: ‘Ye have heard that it was said of old time, [thou] shalt perform unto the Lord thy oaths: but I say unto you, Swear not at all … but let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay.’ This text occurs in a conversation reported by the enslaved person Edward Hilton to have taken place between himself and Sharpe, and as recorded by the missionary William Knibb. Knibb writes that when Hilton was told by Sharpe that he had read in the newspapers that King William IV had granted the slaves their freedom, Hilton said he would accept Sharpe’s word if he would swear on it. Sharpe replied by quoting the passage from Matthew 5:33–37, and concluding with the exhortation that Hilton ‘must take [my] word of mouth, or else you make [me] a liar’.¹⁶ The question is whether this rebuke by Sharpe, refusing to take an oath, was inconsistent with another of his actions: that is, in the various meetings he held he instituted a ceremony of oath-taking on the Bible in order to bind together those enslaved persons who intended to participate in the rebellion. In fact, the third charge against him in his trial was the unlawful administration of oaths.¹⁷ We suggest that Sharpe was not inconsistent, and that putting the two incidents side by side shows both his approach to scripture and throws an interesting light on the oath of conspiracy.

In the first case, Sharpe understands Jesus’ words to be about truthful speaking. It is an undermining of the power of truth if you cannot be sure of what someone says unless they support it with an oath. In this particular case, truthful speaking was essential. The report was circulating that the King had signed a paper for the emancipation of the slaves, but that the slave-owners were suppressing this fact for their own economic ends. It seems that this belief was a strong motivation for Sharpe’s plan, to stage a sit-down strike to demand at least half normal wages owed to a free worker. Unfortunately the rumour was not true, though Sharpe spoke the truth about what he had read.¹⁸ Incidentally, we should note that this misconception does not cancel out Sharpe’s intelligent awareness of economic factors in calling for a strike; he rightly calculated that if all slaves withdrew their labour and held together the estates would collapse economically, so that the estate-owners would be compelled to offer wages.

Returning to exegesis of the Gospel text, it seems that Sharpe did not simply understand it in the literal sense that Christians should never swear oaths in any circumstances, but that oath-taking should not be used to reinforce truthful speaking. In this, Sharpe was in line with the early Baptists: they differed from Anabaptists/Mennonites in being willing to take oaths of allegiance to the King and Parliament, but still maintained they were being faithful to Jesus’ words. The ceremony of oath-taking that Sharpe established was not about reinforcing truth, but about faithfulness to one another, securing a confidentiality that was essential for keeping secret a plan which was known to thousands but remained unknown to the slave-owners until the rebellion happened. Ironically, the same Hilton who asked Sharpe to confirm his words by an oath declared under examination in court that he had refused to take Sharpe’s oath.¹⁹

The contrast between Sharpe’s refusing to swear, and then administering an oath, becomes even sharper in the light of an interview with Hilton recorded by a Methodist minister, Henry Bleby. Bleby, along with his Baptist colleague William Knibb, was invited by Major General William Miller, the district commander, to interview the imprisoned slaves in Montego Bay, and he records these interviews in his later book, The Death Struggles of Slavery (1853). During a conversation between Hilton and Bleby, Hilton offered another version of the story he had told to Knibb. According to Bleby, Hilton recalled that, at a meeting in the Retrieve estate following a prayer-meeting, he asked Sharpe to swear to the truth of his statement by kissing the Bible. It is implied that Sharpe refused (as Knibb records), but that after intense discussion lasting far into the night ‘the whole party bound themselves by an oath not to work after Christmas as slaves’, and that ‘Sharpe first kissed the book’.²⁰ This makes clear that Sharpe would not take an oath to confirm his truthful speaking, but did take an oath to be ‘bound’ in trust to others.

There are several accounts extant of taking this oath. For instance, at Sharpe’s trial the enslaved person Edward Barrett recounts how he met Sharpe at Zincke’s House in Haze-lymph the week before Christmas, where Sharpe gave the assembled group instruction about the proposed sit-down strike and asked them to swear on the Bible that they would not work unless they got half pay for their labour.²¹ He also explained that Sharpe ritually intensified the administration of the oath by getting them to kiss the Bible.²² Interestingly, Barrett stated under cross-examination that Sharpe had the Bible in his pocket,²³ implying that he regularly carried the Bible with him, and confirming Sharpe’s familiarity with scripture. Using the Bible in this way probably also implies that Sharpe thought his action to be authorized by scripture. In his testimony before the Slavery Committee of the House of Lords, William Knibb recounts his own conversation with Sharpe about the oath-taking, and this adds another aspect of the oath – it was not only to seal the intention to cease work, but about secrecy:

I said, ‘Sharp, now tell me, that is a good man, just how you did at Retrieve.’ … . And Sharp said, ‘I was the first man who took the oath … I got up before them, and took the bible in my right hand, and I said, ‘if ever I witness against my brothers and sisters any thing connected with this matter, may hell be my portion;’ and the whole of the rest did the same. The oath was not administered by any person, but every one went voluntarily to the table, and took this oath of secrecy.’²⁴

So this oath-taking makes clear Sharpe’s sophisticated exegesis of Matthew 5; he understood it as not strictly forbidding any oaths at all, but as forbidding oaths that might undermine telling the truth. Faithfulness and trust was at the heart of this particular oath, a mutual commitment that was the foundation for all truth-speaking. Breaking the secret and informing the authorities about it would be tantamount to false witness against brothers and sisters. Faithful relations were the character of the whole enterprise in a situation of oppression we can scarcely comprehend, and it is not suprising that a modern Jamaican Baptist historian, Horace Russell, understands the oath-taking to be a kind of sacramental act, noting that sacramentum in ancient Roman society meant an oath or pledge.²⁵ Sharpe’s plan was to sit down in resistance, and he was asking others to pledge to sit down with him. Russell suggests that this has resonances of Jesus’ ‘sitting down’ with his disciples at the last supper (recalled, we may add,²⁶ in the promise of Jesus in Revelation 3:21 to ‘sit down’ with disciples of every age). Russell comments that ‘slaves do not sit down to a meal’, and so the act of sitting is ‘in itself a challenge to the principalities and powers’; the oath is a sacramental act linked with the sacramental occasion of sitting at the Lord’s Table, and so is a declaration of freedom in Christ. Russell adds that ‘the acts of sitting-down and oath-taking are outward expressions of [a] new personal and communal identity’.²⁷

Those of us who are not Jamaicans should respect the way that this story from Russell’s own culture speaks to him, and learn from his perception that administering the oath to all who wished to ‘sit down’ with Sharpe was ‘an act of exodus and covenant’. In fact we may add that the making of a communal promise has echoes of the long Baptist tradition of covenant-making,²⁸ brought into Jamaica by former slave and then Baptist minister George Liele whose ‘Anabaptist Church’ (as it was called) was bound together by covenant in America in December 1777, and in Jamaica in December 1783. Here the covenant becomes specific in a situation of upholding social justice.

Taking together Sharpe’s refusal to swear about the truth of his report and his administering of an oath, we believe we can say that the Gospel text ‘let your yes be yes, and your no be no’ was of significance for Sharpe, and that it was exemplified and not denied in the communal oath-taking. In fact, it recalled the saying of Jesus recorded in the Fourth Gospel, ‘You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free’, a favourite text of the missionaries.²⁹ Though there is no record of this text being directly associated with Sharpe’s teaching and actions, it is surely implied by the incidents we have been looking at. The centrality of truth for issues of justice and peace today is something to which we want to return. Meanwhile, let us pass to a second text:

Matthew 6:24 (// Luke 16:13)

Here we have further words of Jesus: ‘No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon’ (KJV). There are several instances in the records of the association of this text with Sharpe’s own words, especially focussing on the first phrase, ‘No man can serve two masters’, and underlined by the assertion that one must serve only Christ as master. The political assertion here is obvious in a situation where the name for slave-owners was ‘master’. The word in the patois of the time was ‘buckra’, probably from the Nigerian Efik word mbakara, and it meant both ‘master’ and ‘white man’.³⁰ In the twentieth century ‘buckra’ as used in the West Indies now only means ‘white man’, sometimes used in a contemptuous way of former colonial ‘masters’, but at that time it was a neutral term, and yet to be brought through the reading of this text into collision with the lordship of Christ.

Bernard Martin Senior, whom we have already mentioned as an advocate for slavery, stated that Thomas Burchell and William Knibb preached to the slaves on this text from Matthew 6:24/Luke 16:13 and prompted them to view it as a scriptural warrant for their rebellion against slavery. In Senior’s words ‘These individuals lost no opportunity of instilling into the minds of the negro population the utter impossibility of their serving two masters’³¹ [that is, Christ and their slave-master]. Baptists were singled out generally for this accusation, such as by the Reverend Thomas Stewart, the rector of the parish of Westmorland, who took down the confessions of some of the rebel slaves in Westmorland, and who concludes:

With the exception of one convicted rebel, all the rest who suffered the penalty of the law in Westmorland declared themselves to belong to the Baptist sect; they add, that they had been taught to believe from their preachers that they ought not to serve a temporal and a spiritual master; that the King had made them free, and that they ought only to serve Jesus Christ.³²

One of the confessions Stewart took down in March of 1832 was that of an enslaved person named Linton, who is reported to have said, ‘this … religion says we cannot serve two masters, but must only serve Jesus Christ.’³³

It is unlikely that the missionaries Knibb and Burchell were so direct in their application of the text, and Sharpe was scrupulous in wanting to clear them from involvement in inciting rebellion, but there is no doubt that this was his own interpretation. This is clear from the confession of Robert Gardner (Gardiner), recorded by Thomas Stewart on 11 February 1832 in the Savanna la Mar gaol. Gardner was one of the most important military leaders of the slave rebellion, and appeared alongside Sam Sharpe on a reward poster from 3 January 1832. Gardner states ‘Samuel Sharp often told us that God never intended us to be slaves; that we had but one master, Jesus Christ, to obey, and that we could not serve Christ and our master at the same time.’³⁴

The criticism might be made that this is a naive exegesis of the text; Jesus, after all, had ‘mammon’ or money in view as the rival master to God. But we may respond that, on the one hand, the meaning of a text is always partly created by the context in which it is read; the word of God comes alive for new generations in unexpected ways from a text, unlimited by the original intentions of speaker or author, as is clear from the way that New Testament writers quote the Old Testament. This is truly liberation exegesis. On the other hand, there is a continuity with the original meaning in this startling re-application; the slaver-owners were indeed making mammon their master, and true allegiance to Christ required the challenging of a whole economic system based on slavery. ‘You cannot serve God and mammon’ is a word of rebuke to the buckras; it is a word of encouragement to those enslaved that service of God will somehow overthrow the demands of a whole financial structure. We might say it is a word of promise: ‘You shall not serve God and mammon.’ Today the word that ‘no one can serve two masters’ will come alive in new situations, as both challenge and promise, as we consider what political and economic structures assert mastery over us.

1 Corinthians 7:20–21

Let us move from Jesus to Paul. This text declares (in the KJV): ‘Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. Art thou called being a servant? care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather’.

There appears to be an ambiguity in the last phrase, which in the Greek simply reads ‘use rather’. It could mean: if you have an opportunity to gain your freedom, then take it. This is an active meaning, and encourages slaves to work for emancipation. It could mean, however, ‘abide in your calling until God chooses to make you free’, an essentially passive meaning. There is an even more passive reading that we find in the NRSV: ‘Even if you can gain your freedom, make use of your present condition now more than ever.’ We know which meaning Sharpe gave to it – the first, active sense – because of an exchange between him and Bleby. In the last conversation Bleby had with Sharpe, while Sharpe was awaiting execution, they discussed whether the rebellion had been justified, and the passage from 1 Corinthians 7:21 turns up. Bleby reports:

[T]he last time I conversed with Sharpe, he repeated his expressions of sorrow that he had been the cause of so much mischief. He was not, however, to be convinced that he had done wrong in endeavouring to assert his claim to freedom. When reminded that the Scriptures teach men to be content with the station allotted to them by Providence, and that even slaves are required to submit to their lot, till the Lord in his providence is pleased to change it, – he was a little staggered, and said, ‘If I have done wrong in that, I trust I shall be forgiven; for I cast myself upon the Atonement.’³⁵

Bleby is clearly alluding to 1 Corinthians 7:21, and is understanding the last phrase (‘use it rather’) in the passive sense that ‘slaves are required to submit to their lot until the Lord in his providence sets them free’. Since Sharpe is ‘staggered’ by this exegesis, it seems clear that he reads the text a different way, in the active sense of taking every opportunity to secure freedom. It is not surprising that he reads the text in this way, since it seems that the Baptist ministers he knew understood it in this way too. Knibb, for example, when responding to a question about the compatibility of Christianity and slavery, declared:

My opinion of Christianity is that it will induce in the mind of every possessor a love for freedom. I think, at the same time, that every person who truly loves Christianity, and embraces it from the heart, will never use any unlawful means to obtain that freedom; that he will choose it rather, as the apostle Paul says, if he can obtain it.³⁶

Knibb reads Paul’s phrase ‘use it rather’ as ‘choose it rather’: a person will always choose freedom, if he or she has to opportunity to get it. This appears to have been Sharpe’s understanding. Admittedly, Knibb thinks – or is only prepared to say before a Parliamentary committee  – that this will never involve breaking the law. Sharpe and his enslaved fellows evidently believed that unjust laws could be broken in pursuit of choosing freedom, and there will still be a difference among Christian people on this critical issue, a point to which I intend to return. But what matters here is an active attitude, not an attitude of passivity and resignation before an unchanging divine providence which allots people their places in life. Bleby’s interpretation would have been held by many Baptists of the time. The Baptist woman author Esther Copley, for example, published 1836 a voluminous History of Slavery which tracked the history of the abolitionist cause with detail and enthusiasm, regarding slavery as originating in ‘human depravity’.³⁷ She is well-informed about the rebellion of 1831–32, and knows that Sam Sharpe was a Baptist (though not that he was a deacon).³⁸ However, she puts into the mouths of ‘religious slaves’ a similar view to Bleby:

The more conscientious Negroes justly argued, ‘If freedom is come, we shall get it quietly; but if we do wrong, and commit violence, we shall bring a disgrace upon religion, and freedom will not come to us with a blessing.’ It is true, that in some few instances, these better principles were overborne by the force of persuasion and example … but such was the tendency and general prevalence of christian instruction; and it is evident that, not from missionaries or emancipationists did the Negroes get the notion of freedom.³⁹

There may only be a nuance of difference in some circumstances between Copley’s ‘getting freedom quietly’,⁴⁰ and Knibb’s ‘choosing freedom’, but it is all the difference between passivity and activity. The active attitude of seeking liberation assumes a God who is also discontented with the present situation, who is faced with a world that has deviated from God’s purposes for it, who is protesting with us against suffering and oppression,⁴¹ and who wants the cooperation of human beings in bringing about a new creation. It is not always realised how radical the theology is that encourages the oppressed to seek freedom and the ‘goods’ of life; it assumes a God who is vulnerable, who does not have a rigid plan, who wants response from human persons to carry through divine intentions for the world, and for whom the future is at least partly open. It is not surprising that a Bleby cannot handle this, however sympathetic he might be to Sharpe, and however opposed to slavery.

Philippians 2:12

Finally, there is one additional passage from the Pauline epistles which was attributed to Sam Sharpe. This is Philippians 2:12: ‘Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling’. The last phrase ‘work out your salvation’ occurs in the speech said to have been made by Sharpe as he stood on the gallows. The speech was published in The Christian Record in July of 1832:

Samuel Sharpe, while he stood on the scaffold in Montego-Bay market-place, made the following declaration before an immense crowd. ‘The white Missionary’ (Mr Burchell) ‘who is gone off, and who left his native land for our good, had nothing to do with it; and I have violated him too, for if I had heard what he said, I would not have come to this … And let me beg you, my brethren, to take his advice, and follow your Christian duties, to work out your salvation.’⁴²

We cannot be sure that this is an accurate account.⁴³ Sharpe may also have been exaggerating his failure to follow the missionary’s advice, and his regret for this, in order to remove all blame for the rebellion from the missionaries, as he was determined to do. This confession may well be a last supreme act of generosity. Nevertheless, the quotation of Philippians 2:12, made so casually, has the authentic character of a text lodged deeply in the mind which emerges just as it is needed. The context of the quotation is extraordinarily apt, as the Apostle Paul is dealing with a situation in which he has been removed from the people he had loved and led. The exhortation to ‘work out your own salvation’ follows on in Paul’s letter from the phrase ‘just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence, but much more now in my absence … ’ It seems likely that Sharpe is thinking of his own imminent removal and absence, and like Paul wants his followers to take new responsibility for themselves. The missionary Burchell, his pastor, is already absent in a far-off land (he had returned temporarily to England), and Sharpe is also about to be made absent. Paul’s phrase about Christian obedience is echoed in Sharpe’s reference here to ‘Christian duties’. This evocative context makes it very likely that Sharpe is recalling a text which is important for him.

‘Work out your own salvation’ has the same active sense as Sharpe’s understanding of 1 Cor. 7:21. In face of the failure of their rebellion, the slaves are not to sink into passivity and resignation. However, the work they are to do is not simply what the Apostle Paul criticises as ‘works without faith’, since in Philippians 2 the injunction is followed immediately by Paul’s theological explanation: ‘since it is God at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure’. This is a work of cooperation with the God who wants to bring freedom. Sharpe leaves open what exactly this work might be, not binding his fellow-Christians or the future. Paul urges his hearers to work out their salvation ‘with fear and trembling’, which underlines the need to be open, humble and expectant about what may be required in the future.

The phrase ‘with fear and trembling’ is repeated in Ephesians 6:5, but Ephesians is generally understood to be a letter written by a disciple of Paul, and here the phrase is used to underline a more socially conservative message: ‘Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.’⁴⁴ In Sharpe’s speech, the citation is clearly from Philippians 2, and obedience is not to slave-masters but only to the God at work within us.

Working for Peace, Justice and Freedom Today

We must be careful not to twist and wrench the unique experience of Sam Sharpe for our own ends. But this little collection of texts, small as it is, reveals an attitude of mind shaped by scripture. It is a mind that is devoted to truth, to ‘yes being yes, and no, no’; it rejects all other masters than Christ; it seeks actively for opportunities to gain freedom; and it accepts the responsibility of working in cooperation with God. All this is illuminating, we suggest, for the task of seeking peace, justice and freedom today, and we have already dropped a number of hints about this along the way.

In the first place (reflecting on the first text), freedom and justice is deeply tied up with exposure of the truth. Christians need to be courageous in the speaking of truth to society, picking up the mantle of the Old Testament prophets who saw beneath the surface of their societies to the rottenness beneath. They ‘saw deeply’ as much as ‘forseeing’, and spoke God’s truth to their own time. This can be a painful painful process, involving hurt and sacrifice, as we share in the pain that God experiences in meeting resistance to God’s own liberating rule. We can participate in this divine suffering which has the power to win space for the kingdom, or for human flourishing in the world. Suffering witness has the power to expose the truth of the situation, especially when it becomes non-violent protest and passive resistance, including a non-violent breaking of unjust laws. This is what Sharpe seems to have intended, a passive resistance of a sit-down strike. The truth of the situation emerges as worldly authorities repress a suffering witness, and the truth has power to liberate. Unjust powers will in the end hasten their own downfall by their response; passion does make revolution. As Leonardo Boff points out from his experience in South America, those who act unjustly to suppress the witness of the martyrs lose their ability to control people, to win hearts and minds, and they will fall in due time.⁴⁵ This is the story of the triune God, making revolution in history.

In the second place (and reflecting on the second text), the injunction not to serve two masters warns us about the way that systems and ideologies can become oppressive, whether they are religious, economic or political. The biblical language of ‘principalities and powers’ alerts us to the tendency of all systems to become ‘demonic’; when we believe we must have them, that there is no alternative to them, they become demonic in the sense of possessing us and gaining power over us.⁴⁶ What were our tools have become our masters. If we are to be aware of this, then we must use our God-given reason to analyze the situation, using social and political theory to understand what is going on. Sharpe analyzed his situation, and worked out the economic implications of the system of slavery.

Third (in line with the third text), we need to shake off an attitude of resignation, the belief that nothing can be changed, and look actively for opportunities to gain freedom, peace and justice. This will mean the participation of those who are bound and oppressed in making their own freedom.⁴⁷ Freedom cannot be handed over in a patronising way by powerful people; this is only another form of domination, another form of imperialism. Engaging in God we discover that freedom needs the participation of the oppressed or it becomes another form of domination.

Action for freedom, taking every opportunity, also raises the question of whether this can include the use of violence. The question is often asked: when violence is already being used by governments against oppressed peoples, is it not just collaborating with this violence to fail to use violence in return? Are we really loving the oppressed if we allow unjust violence to overwhelm them? On the other hand, Christians have pointed out that to return violence for violence is to assume the ethic of the oppressors; we become just like them. We might generally agree that Christians should not set out to use violence as the first means of promoting peace, freedom and justice. Sharpe’s intention seems clearly to have been passive resistance.⁴⁸ A report that pastors in Baptist churches at the time had read out the story of the destruction of the City of Ai by Joshua by fire and sword in Joshua chapter 8 in order to incite rebellion, was dismissed by the enslaved persons themselves as untrue. While there is evidence that the passage was used by some enslaved persons to justify a strategy of violence, there is no report attaching the use of this passage to Sam Sharpe.⁴⁹ However, when violence is used against peaceful protest, what should one do then? Christians will differ about this.

Though the historical evidence is highly ambiguous, it seems probable that Sharpe was prepared to use force in a limited way if he and his fellow-strikers were attacked.⁵⁰ Witness was given in court that he was seen armed on some occasions, variously with a cutlass, a ‘fowling piece’ and a ‘short gun’.⁵¹ Although we need to adopt a hermeneutic of suspicion with regard to these records from the imperial power, the readiness to use force as a weapon of last resort, when driven to it, may have been regarded by Sharpe as consistent with ‘seeking every opportunity for freedom’ (cf. 1 Cor 7:21). On the other hand, other Christians will think that keeping totally to the non-violent path will bring about revolution through the power of truth and the working of the Holy Spirit. We cannot resolve this question from the history of Sam Sharpe, from his use of scripture, or even from scripture itself. We suggest that it is an open question, and Christians can take either view with integrity. It is a matter where Sharpe would say to us: ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling’.

So, fourth (expanding from the fourth text), we are to work for freedom, justice and peace in cooperation with God’s own work. Since God is at work within us then, as Philippians 2:12 tells us, we must take the responsibility of working out our own salvation. Historically, Baptists have pointed to three aspects of this work. First, Baptists came to believe in the eighteenth century that human beings shared in divine rights by virtue of being made in the image of God. The worth of every human being, made in God’s image, gave them natural rights (‘the rights of man’ in the language of the time) of life and liberty.⁵² From the previous century onwards they had insisted that religious freedom in particular is a matter of the rule of God in the world. It would infringe the sovereign rights of God and his representative Jesus Christ if the state were to interfere in the relation between a human person and God.⁵³ Baptist abolitionists like Knibb believed that this spiritual freedom was not possible without physical freedom.⁵⁴ Third, Baptists believed from their earliest days that the conscience of a person must be respected, as this is part of the relation between that person and God, as an area of human life in which the Holy Spirit was at work. Conscience might go wrong, but each person will be judged by God as to what they do in the light of conscience.⁵⁵ Working for peace and justice can become distorted if we over-emphasize any of these elements, or separate them from each other.

The sovereignty of God, natural rights and freedom of conscience must work together, and each qualify the other. It is a responsible task to hold these three in balance, but then this is the task to which Sam Sharpe commits us, in his final testament from the scaffold, saying ‘work out your own salvation’, and we think he expects us to know that the quotation ends, ‘with fear and trembling.’

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For details of the rebellion, see Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire. The Revolt that Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020), 79–190.

2 The Act came into effect in Jamaica in August 1834, but slavery was replaced by compulsory ‘apprenticeships’, continuing many of the restrictions and punishments of slavery, which lasted until full emancipation in 1838.

3 Sam Sharpe’s family details are recorded in the Slave Owner’s Return Forms submitted by his owners Samuel and Jane Sharpe and found within The National Archives (TNA) at Kew. For a discussion of these see Larry J. Kreitzer, ‘Kissing the Book’: The Story of Sam Sharpe as Revealed in the Records at the National Archives at Kew (Oxford: Regent’s Park College, Oxford, 2013), 11. This booklet also contains an image of the Slave Owner’s Return Form dated 28 June 1832 recording Sam Sharpe’s death (TNA, T 17, 223, page 267); cf. Zoellner, Island on Fire, 26–9, 320n14.

4 Bernard Martin Senior Jamaica As It Was, As It Is, and As It May Be (London: T. Hurst, 1835), 184. Senior published his memoir anonymously as ‘Retired Military Man’.

5 Henry Bleby, Death Struggles of Slavery (London: Hamilton Adam, 1853), 111.

6 See J. H. Hinton, Memoir of William Knibb (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1849), 50–1.

7 Senior, Jamaica As It Was, 183.

8 Ibid., 184.

9 He does also comment on 1 Cor 7:21, adjacent to v. 23: see below.

10 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Wars of Respect: Nanny and Sharpe (Kingston: Agency for Public Information, 1977), 19–20, mentions Matt 6:24, Jn 8:35, 1 Cor 7:23 and Gal 3:28, cited by C. S. Reid, Samuel Sharpe. From Slave to National Hero (Kingston: Bustamente Institute, 1988), 60, in turn cited by Horace Russell, Samuel Sharpe and the Meaning of Freedom. Reflections on a Baptist National Hero of Jamaica (Oxford: Regent’s Park College, 2012), 12. Delroy Reid-Salmon, Burning for Freedom. A Theology of the Black Atlantic Struggle for Liberation (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2012), 28, cites Matt 6:24, Jn 8:36, 1 Cor 7:23.

11 Zoellner, Island on Fire, 80.

12 This ‘slave Bible’ featured in an exhibition at Lambeth Palace in January 2023, and earlier in an exhibition at the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC in 2022. See Rachel Hall, Guardian 31 Jan 2023, ‘Exhibition lays bare Church of England’s links to slave trade.’

13 Published London, Law and Gilbert, 1807. B. Hurlbert, “The Slave Bible: For Slavery or Salvation?” TheTorah.com, 2023. https://thetorah.com/article/the-slave-bible-for-slavery-or-salvation, maintains that the purpose of the bible was not to defend slavery but to educate the reader, but this seems implausible given the nature of the omissions from the original text.

14 See Devon Dick, The Cross and the Machette. Native Baptists, Identity, Ministry and Legacy (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2009), 44–6, 100–4; Clement Gayle, George Liele: Pioneer Missionary to Jamaica (Nashville: Bethlehem Book Publishers, 2002) (more popular).

15 For the Native Baptists’ use of the KJV, see Dick, Cross and the Machete, 136–7.

16 William Knibb, Facts and Documents Connected with the Late Insurrection in Jamaica and Violations of Civil and Religious Liberty Arising out of It (London: n.p. 1832), 12. Also see William Knibb, A Second Letter from Legion (London: S. Bagster, 1833), 112.

17 Kreitzer, Kissing the Book, Document #2 = The Bill of Indictment against Sam Sharpe, 19 April 1832 (TNA, CO 137/185, Part 2, pages 304 recto-305 verso); lines 72–87.

18 Bleby, Death Struggles, 115–6, suggests that Sharpe himself realised that no royal order had been signed, but that he used the report to incite rebellion, believing that ‘the end justified the means’; this however is mere surmise and he reports no conversation to support it.

19 Kreitzer, Kissing the Book, 42–4, Document #8 = The testimony of Edward Hilton at the trial of Samuel Sharpe, 19 April 1832 (TNA, CO 137/182/32, pages 375 verso–376 and 380 recto; TNA, CO 137/185, Part 2, pages 308 verso–309 recto; 313 recto); lines 25, 31–32, 41, 46–47).

20 Bleby, Death Struggles, 112.

21 Kreitzer, Kissing the Book, 41–2, Document #7 = The testimony of Edward Barrett at the trial of Samuel Sharpe, 19 April 1832 (TNA, CO 137/182/32, pages 375 verso and 380 recto; TNA, CO 137/185, Part 2, pages 308 verso; 312 verso-313 recto; lines 8–10, 20–22, 28–30, 40–43).

22 Ibid., lines 13, 46.

23 Ibid., lines 23, 31.

24 Knibb, A Second Letter from Legion, 112.

25 Horace O. Russell, Samuel Sharpe and the Meaning of Freedom (Oxford: Regent’s Park College, 2012), 11.

26 Russell, however, does not himself add this text.

27 Ibid., 12.

28 See Fiddes, Tracks and Traces. Baptist Identity in Church and Doctrine (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2003), 21–47.

29 See K. R. M. Short, “Jamaican Christian Missions and the Great Slave Rebellion of 1831–2,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27 (1976): 60, responding to the claim that Knibb never preached on John 8:32 (‘The truth shall make you free’) to the slaves.

30 Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), entry ‘buckra’. For use of the word, see Bleby, Death Struggles, 112, 113.

31 Senior, Jamaica As It Was, 183 (a similar comment about Burchell is contained on page 174).

32 TNA. Colonial Office (CO) 137/181, page 69. Stewart goes on to identify Thomas Burchell as a person often named in the confessions, although he is careful to explain, ‘whether Mr Burchell, or any other preacher of his sect, actually misinterpreted passages of Scripture to the slaves in relation to freedom, is impossible for me to say’.

33 TNA, CO 137/181, page 71. Also see the testimony of the Revd John McIntyre the rector of the Parish of St James, cit. Kreitzer, Kissing the Book, 15.

34 TNA, CO 137/181, page 76.

35 Bleby, Death Struggles, 117.

36 Knibb, A Second Letter from Legion, 54.

37 Esther Copley, A History of Slavery and its Abolition (London: Sunday-School Union, 1836), 12.

38 Ibid., 13: ‘not a single deacon’ was implicated in the rebellion.

39 Ibid., 411–2.

40 Her quietist tendency is further seen in that, in her first edition of 1836, she regrets that full emancipation has not been granted (544, 555), but is not explicitly critical of the ‘apprenticeship’ scheme (see fn 2 above), hoping that it will ‘die away gradually’; she is critical of even passive resistance to it (554). After full emancipation, in her second edition (London: Houlston and Stonement, 1839), she ‘upbraids herself’ for not realising that slavery had ‘continued to exist under the specious name of apprenticeship’ (640).

41 So Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, trans. R. A. Wilson and John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1974), 225–7.

42 “Vindication of the Baptist Missionaries,” The Christian Record 1, no. 7 (July 1832): 181.

43 Though the essentials are also in Bleby, Death Struggles, 118.

44 Neil Elliott Liberating Paul: The Justice of God and the Politics of the Apostle (The Biblical Seminar #27; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 25–54, goes so far as to describe the teaching about slavery contained in Ephesians 6:5–8 and Colossians 3:22–4:1 as an example of ‘the canonical betrayal of the apostle’.

45 Leonardo Boff, Passion of Christ, Passion of the World (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1987), 123.

46 See Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Combined Volume (London: James Nisbet).

47 See Stephen Pattison, Pastoral Care and Liberation Theology (London: SPCK, 1997), 254–7, 263.

48 This is what Bleby gathered from talking with Sharpe: Bleby, Death Struggles, 113.

49 See Kreitzer, Kissing the Book, 13 fn24.

50 So Bleby, Death Struggles, 112–3.

51 Kreitzer, Kissing the Book, 26–4: Document #3 = Testimony of Joe Martin, 19 April 1832 (TNA, CO 137/182/32, pages 373, 378; TNA, CO 137/185, Part 2, pages 307, 310); Document #4 = Testimony of James Clarke, 19 April 1832 (TNA, CO 137/182/32, pages 373–4, 378; TNA, CO 137/185, Part 2, pages 307, 310–1); Document #5 = Testimony of Robert Rose, 19 April 1832 (TNA, CO 137/182/32, pages 374–5, 378–9; TNA, CO 137/185, Part 2, pages 307–8, 311–2); Document #6 = Testimony of James Sterling, 19 April 1832 (TNA, CO 137/182/32, pages 375, 379–80; TNA, CO 137/185, Part 2, pages 308, 312); Document #8 = Testimony of Edward Hilton, 19 April 1832 (TNA, CO, 137/182/32, pages 375–6, 380; TNA, CO/137/185, Part 2, pages 308–9, 313).

52 E.g., Robert Hall, “An Apology for the Freedom of the Press and for General Liberty” (1793), in The Works of Robert Hall, ed. Olinthus Gregory. 6 Volumes (London: Holdsworth and Ball, 1832), vol. 3, 122.

53 E.g., Thomas Helwys, A Short Declaration of the Mistery of Iniquity (n.pl.:, n.p., 1612), 41.

54 See fn. 6 above.

55 E.g. Isaac Backus, “Memorial to the First Continental Congress” (1774), in A Memoir of the Life and Times of the Rev. Isaac Backus, ed. Alvah Hovey (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1859), 210.