The Morant War of Representation: Freedom and Whiteness in Jamaican Narratives of the Morant Bay Uprising

ABSTRACT

This article approaches Jamaican responses to the Morant Bay uprising as part of the earlier ‘war of representation’ fought between abolitionists and pro-slavery writers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Initial Jamaican responses to the rebellion and its suppression were firmly integrated into global print networks but, in the months and years that followed, narratives evolved in ways that expose ongoing tensions about the meanings of freedom after slavery. In particular, the article explores how articulations of whiteness were entangled within an ongoing war of representation. Extending histories of whiteness during slavery, the shifting narratives around Morant Bay capture how white Jamaicans were attempting to navigate their place in a post-emancipation landscape. Anxiety and vulnerability quickly gave way to more triumphant representations of the rebellion’s suppression, but for some commentators, especially those on and beyond the margins of whiteness, reactions were more complex. By the late nineteenth century, Jamaican representations were further fractured by increasing frustrations towards Crown Colony government, especially for Jamaica’s white population, for whom abolition had already been perceived as an affront to their traditional rights and liberties.

KEYWORDS:

• Whiteness
• Jamaica
• empire
• rebellion
• emancipation

Introduction

For observers across the globe, the Morant Bay uprising in 1865 positioned Jamaica as a test case for the ‘success’ of emancipation and the limits of liberal imperialism. The ‘moral’ of the rebellion was transformed from its origins as a predominantly Black protest against economic and political injustices, and the planning and organization that went into the uprising – to such an extent that Clinton Hutton argues it is better characterized as a ‘war’ – increasingly took second place to the legal question of martial rule.¹ In Britain, critics of the brutal suppression overseen by Governor Edward John Eyre coalesced into the Jamaica Committee to pursue legal action, framing the trial and execution of alleged rebel leader George William Gordon as the result of military despotism, which, if left unchecked, might not be contained to Jamaica alone.² But while men like Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Charles Buxton, and John Stuart Mill traded letters and speeches at the metropole disputing Governor Eyre’s culpability, there has been limited attention thus far to Jamaican responses and interjections in these debates and what this might tell us about the renegotiations of racialized identities in a post-emancipation society.

Jamaicans were keenly aware that Morant Bay returned the island to the global spotlight, and this article contends that Jamaican narratives of the rebellion were deeply entangled in a revitalization of what Catherine Hall has termed the ‘war of representation’ that emerged during the period of slavery.³ Waged across the Atlantic, abolitionist and pro-slavery writers had debated the Black man’s capacity for freedom and equality, and in response to the events of October 1865, these questions returned to the forefront of public discourse. However, this ‘propaganda war’ was never limited to Black identity but also encompassed a contestation of the meanings of whiteness in the Caribbean as abolitionists claimed slavery had a corrupting influence on slave-owners. The Caribbean came to occupy a liminal place in British geographies of civilization and, due to its economic significance, Jamaica was frequently positioned as the archetype of slavery’s evils and excesses.⁴ Pro-slavery writers responded by affirming the loyalty of white West Indians to the British metropole while simultaneously stressing their constitutional rights. Abolition was presented as a threat to the property rights and political autonomy of the colonists as fellow Britons, while their involvement in slavery seemingly afforded them authoritative knowledge about the nature of enslaved peoples.⁵

The war of representation surrounding Morant Bay was a resurgence of this familiar rhetoric. The rebellion and its suppression came to be perceived as both a measure of Black Jamaicans’ capacity for freedom and the white population’s ability to effectively manage this freedom. Although many initially endorsed the move to Crown Colony government, the issue of colonial autonomy, which had been at the heart of abolitionist and pro-slavery debates, took on renewed importance. With abolition having already subverted the authority of local legislatures and disrupted the historical synonymity between freedom and whiteness, the loss of political representation exacerbated the contested place of white Jamaicans in colonial geographies.⁶ Indeed, the very meanings of whiteness were increasingly blurred during this period and by looking to the weeks, month, and years that followed the Morant Bay uprising, this article revisits this well-documented moment but extends analysis into what Faith Smith describes as a ‘quiet period’ of Caribbean history.⁷ Tracing the multiple, shifting narratives surrounding the rebellion produced in Jamaica, this longer perspective captures the ongoing legacies of abolitionist and pro-slavery discourses long after formal abolition.

Reporting the Morant Bay Rebellion

The press played a central role in the early cultivation and circulation of narratives about the Morant Bay uprising, and attention to print networks evidences the evolution of meanings attributed to the rebellion and its suppression.⁸ In Kingston, initial reports framed events as a rebellion of the Black peasantry against the ‘white and brown man’ and the image of sleeping ‘on the very brink of a volcano, whose irruption [sic] at any moment might have compassed our destruction’ was widespread, speaking to common feelings of surprise and powerlessness.⁹ Such a metaphor conjured connotations of vulnerability and even innocence, while claims that Gordon wished to turn Jamaica into a second Haiti mobilized long-held fears about Jamaica’s neighbour. For advocates of abolition, the Haitian Revolution had represented the dangers of continuing to import enslaved people from Africa, whom they mistakenly claimed were most likely to rebel, while planters cast the Black republic as a symbol of Jamaica’s future should slavery be abolished and white control not maintained.¹⁰ In 1865, fears about Haiti were compounded by the alleged involvement of Haitian refugees in Kingston, and conspiracy quickly became a popular theme across newspaper reports.¹¹ One correspondent to the Gleaner declared that ‘some mastermind’ must be involved because the rebels appeared to be acting ‘systematically’ and, without external influence, ‘nothing like system could be suggested, much more acted upon’.¹² Adding a dose of sensationalism, such claims also reduced the agency of the rebels and seemingly alleviated any sense of guilt among readers. George William Gordon came to be labelled as an ‘arch-conspirator’, recast in the role of devious criminal seeking to circumvent the law while later, just days after his execution, the Gleaner advertized the spectacle of Paul Bogle’s hymn book on public display at its premises M. DeCordova, McDougall & Co stationers. Framed as ‘the Arch-Traitor’s Hymn Book’, this was a departure from the anxious reports of less than two weeks earlier. Now, readers were invited to assert a sense of their own white authority through the reinvention of Bogle as a spectacle to be viewed and consumed rather than feared.¹³

With the radical press effectively silenced – the editors and proprietors of the Watchman and County Union newspapers were all arrested on charges of libel – papers like the Gleaner and Colonial Standard were tasked with producing a sense of solidarity and approval for the Governor’s actions through their reporting.¹⁴ Yet if these newspapers could easily disavow the rebels, the Morning Journal had to perform its own set of negotiations as a paper owned and edited by men of colour. Edward Jordon and Robert Osborn had long been staunch campaigners for the civil rights of free people of colour and the Morning Journal largely echoed their politics. Jordon had previously been arrested for libel in the wake of Sam Sharpe’s rebellion (1831–1832) and, more recently, both Jordon and Osborn had been dismissed from the Privy Council earlier that decade.¹⁵ In the wake of Morant Bay, to denounce the rebels became a way to affirm their own distance from the rebellion, likely an astute defensive move considering the potential precarity of their positions. The Morning Journal lent into racialized discourses of blood and civilization to articulate a distinctive ‘brown’ identity, closer to white than Black in this moment. Recognizing that ‘one or two other brown men are mixed up in it’, the Morning Journal emphasized that this was a rebellion ‘among the negroes’ who ‘sought to destroy the best blood of the colony’ and ‘extinguish the white and coloured races, to wipe out, so to say, the very intelligence of the land, to level authority in the dust and set up ignorance, corruption, and misrule in its place’.¹⁶ Proximity to whiteness was further reinforced through editorial practices such as earlier on 17 October when the Morning Journal’s coverage of the rebellion had appeared alongside a clipping from Macmillan’s Magazine entitled ‘Civil and Savage Life’. Choosing to reprint this extract from an article by Francis Galton originally entitled ‘Hereditary Talent and Character’, the editors of the Morning Journal were participating in a wider discussion about the importance of ‘nature’ to human behaviour.¹⁷ The article addressed the question of nature versus nurture and the hereditary character of ‘civilization’. Galton referred to an example of ‘children of a low race’ who were separated from their parents at an early age and raised by a settler family but, years later, ‘in some fit of passion […] abandoned their home, flung away their dress, and sought their countrymen in the bush’ living with them ‘in contented barbarism, without a vestige of their gentle nurture’ ever since.¹⁸ The development of Galton’s eugenicist thinking was already evident, and the inclusion of this piece alongside news from Morant Bay suggests how it was perhaps carefully chosen to reinforce the editors’ ‘natural’ ties to whiteness at a moment of intense racialized tensions.

By the close of December however, the Morning Journal began to reject the official narrative and reframed events as the ‘so-called “rebellion”’, a change that reflected attitudes emanating from the metropole and increasing concerns regarding Governor Eyre’s handling of the suppression.¹⁹ The arrival of the Royal Commission in early 1866 firmly drew the eyes of the British – and international – press to Jamaica. Many British papers dispatched their own correspondents to the island, and organizations like the Society of Friends and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society also sent out representatives to report on conditions, ensuring that subsequent debates increasingly spoke to older abolitionist and pro-slavery discourses.²⁰ Like the Morning Journal, newspapers like the Gleaner similarly engaged with this transnational circulation of print and ideas, but remained steadfast in their denunciation of the rebels and on behalf of its largely white readership, performed the role of loyal, gracious citizens saved by the Queen’s representative. Publishing testimonials from residents of various parishes across the island, the paper also participated in fundraising and served as a hub for financial subscriptions in support of Eyre when he later faced trial in Britain.²¹ These addresses were powerful intertextual productions that locate Jamaica within a wider network of colonial discourses, with inhabitants expressing their gratitude to Eyre for his ‘wise, prompt, and effective measures’, mirroring the language of the Royal Commission’s findings published in June 1866 and seemingly legitimizing these words.²²

More broadly, the Kingston press participated in transnational print circuits by frequently republishing articles from abroad that evidence the persistence of pro-slavery and abolitionist discourses into the 1860s. Conservative papers like the Gleaner and Colonial Standard reprinted examples of international support for Eyre, strengthening their defence of the governor while simultaneously inviting readers to imagine themselves as part of a global white community. Articles from and about Britain, New Zealand, and Ireland were printed alongside their own editorials and local testimonials, constructing a common ‘us’ across the white settler populations of the empire.²³ These revived debates about race, slavery, and citizenship were also particularly poignant in the context of the American Civil War. With the fall of the Confederacy and end of slavery in the neighbouring United States, the question of what freedom meant returned to the forefront of many minds. Land, labour, and political representation, as in the British Caribbean thirty years before, were prominent concerns for observers from the United States and beyond and, as abolition had challenged the historic relationships between freedom and whiteness, Morant Bay compounded these questions.²⁴ Jamaicans were attuned to these debates and refracted their own experiences through this prism, reprinting and commenting editorially on articles from American papers like the New York Herald. The Herald had been sympathetic to the Southern cause, and now followed the views of the London Times and Morning Post in emphasizing the threat the Morant Bay uprising posed to the white population of Jamaica. However, it also proposed that the events of 1865 stemmed from the actions and interference of ‘white men, miscreant demagogues, [who] clamoured for negro rights, though they did not care a filbert for the negroes’.²⁵ Such arguments functioned as a warning to white radicals in the United States while simultaneously eliding the agency of Black men.²⁶ Reprinted in the Colonial Standard, the Jamaican paper presented international support for its position, placing blame firmly at the feet of those who would ‘interfere’ in the natural order and so placating white and elite Jamaicans’ culpability. The Gleaner took a similar view. In May the paper reprinted another article from the New York Herald, first published two months earlier, which claimed that, without Eyre’s prompt action, ‘at this day not a white man would have been living in the island except the few scoundrels whom Gordon would have protected’.²⁷ In the same issue, the paper levelled accusations against English Baptists like Mr Underhill ‘and other fanatics’ for claiming the population of Jamaica was living in poverty. Denouncing this as ‘ridiculous’ as well as ‘untruthful and wicked’, the Gleaner sought, by reprinting the Herald’s article, to emphasize support for its case.²⁸

However, by directing blame at the interference of philanthropists and politicians, these narratives also disrupted a neat, racialized binary of ‘us’ and ‘them’.²⁹ For many white Jamaicans, a collective white identity was undermined by claims they were consistently misunderstood by the ‘Mother-country’. ‘A place where poor relations were sent to make fortunes, without any concern as to the manner in which this was to be accomplished’, the Colonial Standard argued that slavery had been ‘imposed’ upon the Caribbean islands. When the British people ‘all at once, became virtuous’, they suddenly perceived the planters of Jamaica to be ‘base, false, cruel and cowardly ruffians’. The Standard’s editor criticized the ‘pseudo philanthropists of England’ who ‘interfere wildly in favour of the negro’ and who ‘even now […] refuse to believe in his incorrigible barbarity, when, after thirty years of teaching, he has exhibited the untamed passions of the African, and perpetrated the most diabolical murders’. The newspaper hoped the coming Commission would finally ensure ‘a proper appreciation of the causes of our ills, and a judicious administration of the right remedies’.³⁰ Presenting the rebellion as proof of philanthropic interference, the Standard crafted a victim narrative for white Jamaicans, presenting them as underappreciated and misunderstood by their British brethren.

This perspective did not go unchallenged. The Colonial Standard presented itself as the voice of the ‘upper class’, a claim the Morning Journal treated with sardonicism. Placing double quotation marks around ‘“upper-class”’, the Morning Journal drew attention to the euphemistic nature of this nomenclature.³¹ Having once been a strident critic, the Journal noted that its competitor’s sudden support for Governor Eyre must stem from a discovery that ‘he is the man for them’. They proposed that the governor’s success in Jamaica was dependent on him being ‘a man embued [sic] with complexional prejudices – one who will so direct affairs as to give the planters a predominance in the country and enable them to legislate for themselves and adverse to the predial classes’.³² Slippages between the language of race and class indicate an emerging correlation between social status and race that became ever more complex and euphemistic as the period progressed. Denying that ‘the “upper classes” are naturally cruel’, one editorial in June 1866 drew clear connections between slavery, race, and class in its commentary about Eyre’s Jamaican supporters. Lamenting ‘the existence of the old slavery spirit’, the paper proposed that ‘hatred to the black and coloured man is traditional, and it evidently increases as the “inferior races” approach nearer to them in wealth and intelligence and go farther beyond them in domestic and commercial morality’.³³ The preservation of old racial hierarchies trumped political dislike of the Governor, or, as another writer to the Journal summarized it, ‘the editor of the Standard is suffering from Melanomania – that he writes up Mr. Eyre, not because he hates Eyre less, but that he hates the negro more’.³⁴

This writer proceeded to denounce those who ‘would drive “panthers” and “pantheroids” out of the country’ in a pointed reference to a letter to the London Times by Scottish Presbyterian minister Rev. John Radcliffe, then resident in Jamaica. First published in November 1865, like the New York Herald and Colonial Standard, Rev. Radcliffe reproached those in England who viewed the Black man ‘romantically […] as the victim of the white man’s oppression’. His words helped to reignite the war of representation by powerfully redeploying pro-slavery rhetoric in his account of the rebellion, claiming that abolitionists had ignored the safety of white people in Jamaica and now the consequences had come to fruition. Playing off gendered anxieties about the sexual threat towards women, Radcliffe directly addressed ‘all sentimental young ladies, and all philanthropic ladies, and all old ladies of both sexes’ to put aside ‘romantic ideas about the gentleness of the negro’ or else come to Jamaica ‘and experimentally test the correctness of our opinion and the extent of our danger’. Evoking the famous abolitionist sentiment emblazoned on Wedgewood medallions, his letter claimed that ‘there was a forgetfulness that the white man was also a man and a brother’.³⁵ Recirculating to Jamaica by December, Radcliffe’s sentiments roused a storm among many Jamaicans of all colours. Black Jamaicans wrote into the Morning Journal, subverting the clergyman’s claim that ‘we have been petting panthers’ by reclaiming the term for themselves. Signing off ‘A Panther’ in their letters to the editor, these writers expressed outrage towards Radcliffe, but also subverted philanthropist and missionary discourses that often veered towards infantilisation. Addressing ‘my brother-panthers’, these writers convened a positive Black identity and community that defied other portrayals in the planter and British press.³⁶

The diversity of white responses to Radcliffe’s claims is also evident in the letters to the editor published by the Morning Journal, contributing to our understanding of what Mimi Sheller has termed the ‘hidden textures of race’ embedded in the Morant Bay uprising.³⁷ For example, on 18 January Andrew Henry Lewis wrote to the Morning Journal in criticism of Radcliffe’s claims. In particular, he responded to the accusation that earlier in 1865, a member of the House of Assembly had sought to incite rebellion by uttering the threat ‘of driving the whites into the sea’.³⁸ Recognizing the words as his own, Lewis declared that this been taken out of context by Radcliffe to suit his own propaganda. Declaring himself ‘a white man, with a family and property’, Lewis ridiculed Radcliffe by asking why he would voice such a threat against his own family. Lewis’s voting record demonstrates his affinity to the politics of the Morning Journal, advocating alongside Edward Jordon for greater educational provision while criticizing the proposed extension of taxation that would hit the poorest the hardest. Notably absent from his condemnatory letter, however, was Lewis’s presence at the court martial of George William Gordon, and indeed his oversight of the trials of other alleged rebels during martial law.³⁹

As a Jamaican of Jewish descent, Lewis’s identification as a white man demonstrates the slipperiness of whiteness in Jamaica during this period.⁴⁰ Jewish Jamaicans had long held a contested position in Jamaican society, enjoying religious freedoms in the seventeenth century that they were denied in England, but only receiving full civil rights in 1831. Samuel and Edith Hurwitz argue this was likely a calculated move by a white planter Assembly seeking allies in response to the increasing prospect of abolition and the new political rights of free people of colour granted the previous year.⁴¹ Yet Lewis’s identification as white contrasts to consistent racialization of Sidney Levien, editor of the County Union, who was arrested in the days following the outbreak at Morant Bay. As Mimi Sheller has argued, Levien upsets easy readings of the rebellion. An outspoken Jewish Jamaican who had been campaigning on behalf of indentured Indian labourers, he signifies the importance of interrogating how narratives of Morant Bay were constructed. He was repeatedly marked by his Jewish identity. In his despatch to the Colonial Office, Eyre rather disparagingly identified Levien as ‘a Jew’ while his apparent co-conspirator Dr Bruce remained unmarked.⁴² Yet at the same time, Sheller notes that Levien escaped the floggings inflicted on many Black and brown Jamaicans, proposing that his ‘approximation to whiteness’ stayed the hand of the provost-marshal.⁴³

Whiteness, and white Jamaicans, were thus not an impermeable, homogeneous whole, even as proximity might afford certain privileges. Yet even some who might be expected to conform to the standard narrative of the white planter elite diverged, contributing to the complexity of the propaganda war over Jamaica’s place in the liberal imperial landscape. Former Assemblyman George Price had once been a political opponent of Gordon but in 1866 published a pamphlet in London that vehemently criticized Eyre’s conduct both before and during the rebellion. Emphatic that he was no ‘philanthropist’, Price identified himself as ‘neither black, brown, nor Baptist, nor an Anti-slavery or Exeter Hall man’.⁴⁴ He defended Gordon as once a ‘peaceable, inoffensive man, minding his own business, avoiding politics’ and who, due to Eyre’s actions, ‘took to the metier of “demagogue”’.⁴⁵ Participating in a war of representation over the character of Jamaica, Price foreshadowed later accounts that increasingly framed the ‘crisis’ as one of Eyre and the Colonial Office’s own making. He engaged the rhetorical tool often used by pro-slavery writers of comparing Jamaica and the metropole, although now not to defend slavery but to suggest that ‘if Englishmen had found their own laws ignored in England as those of Jamaica have been […] there would probably have been a “man Gordon” in every village in England’.⁴⁶ Indeed, he praised the sobriety of African Jamaicans prior to Eyre’s heavy-handedness as Governor, noting that ‘[T]he negro allows the well-to-do man to sleep securely in Jamaica, with his property exposed, his doors and windows unfastened, and often wide open’. Meanwhile, ‘in England men’s brains are safest at night when under the protection of locks, bolts, bars, revolvers, and policemen’.⁴⁷ Emphasizing the civilized and law-abiding character of Jamaican society upset by the interference and ignorance of colonial officials, Price’s arguments reflect both continuities from earlier in the century, as well as the ongoing tensions that reshaped white Jamaican narratives of Morant Bay into the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Justice and Liberty After Morant Bay

In January 1866, the Jamaican House of Assembly voted to abolish itself, effectively ending representative government on the island. This transition to Crown Colony has often been understood as a decision designed to exclude Black Jamaicans from politics in response to the Morant Bay rebellion. Yet even as economic and social power largely remaining in the hands of the white creole elite, this did not stop expressions of increasing frustration towards perceived restrictions to traditional rights and freedoms.⁴⁸ Colonists’ rights as Englishmen had long been a source of tension, and in the years prior to 1865 there had been repeated attempts by the Colonial Office to wrestle control from the warring factions of Jamaican politicians.⁴⁹ Representing a defeat in this longer war, Morant Bay thus signified a moment of rupture and in the years that followed, public narratives of 1865 were reproduced within a nascent colonial nationalist framework that paid homage to liberal imperialism and seemingly elided the racialized inequalities of Jamaican society.

Already by the 1870s, the focus shifted in papers like the Gleaner and Colonial Standard from praising Eyre to condemning him for sending ‘highly calumnious if not false despatches […] which led to such a disruption of the body politic here’.⁵⁰ Little faith was placed in succeeding colonial governors and their ability to work in the best interests of the colony – or at least elite, white Jamaicans. Proposed legislation regarding the falsification of accounts led the Gleaner to lament that ‘not only is the old controlling voice which we once possessed entirely gone, but with it much that we owed to it’. The paper drew attention to the Colonial Office’s former reliance on Eyre to criticize the current governor, Sir John Peter Grant. It also looked further afield to Governor John Pope Hennessey in Barbados. Earlier that year, Barbados had experienced the Confederation Riots as Black labourers marched through the streets in support of Pope Hennessey and his reformist agenda, threatening violence against prominent local whites. The unrest was preceded by proposed constitutional changes resisted by the Barbadian plantocracy who wished to retain one of the last representative governments in the British Caribbean.⁵¹ Drawing a connection between Eyre and Pope Hennessey, the Gleaner simultaneously drew a correlation between Jamaica’s own constitutional plight and that of its neighbour. The common enemy was an overbearing and interfering Colonial Office that threatened the rights of the local white elite to govern themselves.

Debates over whiteness and citizenship mapped onto these wider political struggles within the colonial relationship, foregrounding the contested translation of British values and identity into the colonial setting. While the Colonial Standard and Daily Gleaner had evoked the epistemic distance between their island and the metropole in response to the Jamaica Committee, by the 1880s rhetoric had evolved to assert the rights of Jamaicans as Englishmen, deserving of the same recourse to political agency. Reminiscent of the pro-slavery discourses from the turn of the nineteenth century, Morant Bay and Governor Eyre emerged as key touchpoints through which these arguments were expressed in Jamaica. In 1881, George Levy opened his pamphlet denouncing the ‘evils of Crown Government’ with an explicit reference to 1865. The proprietor of the Colonial Standard, Levy forcefully argued that those events led to ‘the frenzied immolation of our Constitutional form of Government, (which had existed for over Two Hundred Years,) on the so termed “Altar of patriotism”’.⁵² Levy condemned Crown Colony government as an oppressive institution which aimed to ‘humiliate and crush by whatever means it can command’ men who would ‘point out grievous mistakes and shameful incompetency’. He addressed both the Jamaican and British publics, emphasizing the familial relationship between them and calling on Britons to support their ‘fellow-countrymen in Jamaica’ in the restoration of ‘civil liberty’.⁵³ Alongside this discourse of political rights and civil duties, Levy also underscored his personal connections to the mother country, declaring himself to have been ‘reared and educated […] in that land which boasts of according liberty and fair play alike to all men – FREE AND HONEST ENGLAND’.⁵⁴ Collapsing the distance across the Atlantic precisely to demand freedom, Levy downplayed the dangers of Morant Bay and the excitement it incited was ascribed to ‘exaggerated accounts’ that misled the House of Assembly into ‘that act of humiliation and disgrace’.⁵⁵

Such arguments voiced by representatives of the predominantly white elite were also challenged by the brown press who similarly mobilized 1865 in their rebuttals. The Budget, edited by Charles L. Campbell, situated the demands of the white elite within the political machinations of the nineteenth century, decrying the Colonial Standard’s campaign for representative government as an attempt to reassert the dominance of white Jamaicans.⁵⁶ Proposing that ‘the glorious act of emancipation broke down and crushed that principle which declared one class of people the rightful owners and rulers of the land’, the editor argued that a ‘fight for the mastery’ ensued until 1865 marked a decisive shift.⁵⁷ Rather than a cruel colonial official, the Budget argued that Eyre had been manipulated into abolishing the Assembly by men who misrepresented ‘a local riot’ as ‘the premature outburst of a well planned rebellion on the part of the black and coloured people with a design to slaughter all the whites and “convert this country into a second Hayti”’. The Budget transformed Eyre into the ‘puppet’ of the white elite who hoped to establish a ‘local oligarchy’. Thwarted by the imperial government, they were now ‘rabid against their own Frankensteine [sic] and bent upon its destruction’. This was fundamentally an issue of race, colour, and class for the Budget. Campbell was not wholly against a change of government, but not while people of colour and Jewish Jamaicans found themselves only tolerated when they ‘possess money enough to pay for their footing in certain charmed circles’. Suggestive of the blurred margins of whiteness, Campbell argued that Jewish Jamaicans should be ‘respected irrespective of his creed’, and men of colour valued ‘according to their merits irrespective of their hue’. His words reflect ongoing legacies from the period of slavery as, although free people of colour experienced legal restrictions up until 1830, some successfully petitioned for the full legal privileges of whiteness based on wealth, cultural refinement, and family networks.⁵⁸ Thus, despite little mention of race or colour in Levy’s pamphlet, Campbell clearly identified the question of whiteness within these political debates, reflective of his position as a man of colour on the outskirts of elite society. Meanwhile George Levy, the editor of the Colonial Standard, was himself of Jewish descent, and Campbell possibly had him in mind when he proposed that material wealth offered entry into ‘charmed circles’.⁵⁹ If so, the Colonial Standard’s claim to represent the ‘upper classes’ itself reads as a performance designed to ensure inclusion within the bounds of whiteness.

Despite the Budget’s reservations, public demand for constitutional change increased during this period. The language employed powerfully illustrates how many Jamaicans sought to mobilize British liberal discourses against the metropole itself, and in doing so, elide the racial divisions identified by the Budget. In April 1884, the Falmouth Gazette reported on a ‘large and enthusiastic’ meeting in Portland that denounced the ‘Paternal Despotism’ of the Crown Colony government in Jamaica. So ‘thoroughly hated and condemned by all classes of the population’, the British Government was accused of ‘treating us as SLAVES’. Referring to the new Governor as a ‘Slave Driver’ who might be ‘lenient’, the newspaper declared that ‘Slavery in its modified form is an abomination to men who have been for two hundred years accustomed to the enjoyment of political rights, as allegiant subjects of the Sovereign of the United Kingdom’.⁶⁰ Mobilising the old rhetoric of ‘loyal opposition’, slavery was seemingly divorced from race and labour to be transformed into a common experience of disenfranchisement across the Jamaican population at the hands of the metropole.⁶¹ The island’s centrality within geographies of slavery – and recognition that African Jamaicans had historically been denied political rights due to their enslavement – appears entirely absent. Instead, asking to be ‘treated as men – men of intelligence, knowing that our best happiness consists in the cultivation of peace and good-will one to the other’, political autonomy was entangled in ideas of masculinity that, at least rhetorically, espoused a harmonious coexistence.

Despite these representations of white, Black, and brown ostensibly united in their demands to be recognized as politically responsible men, asymmetrical access to economic, social, and cultural capital ensured that racial inequalities persisted. The reintroduction of a limited franchise in 1884 was established based on literacy and property taxes and meant that 13.44% of registered voters were classed as ‘Europeans’, despite comprising just 2.5% of the total population of 580,804. The number of Europeans registered in the census was itself often questioned, especially by visitors to Jamaica who frequently expressed difficulty reading Jamaica’s racial landscape and deciphering who was ‘really’ white.⁶² Meanwhile, 3,766 ‘African’ voters were enrolled even as 444,186 ‘Africans’ were recorded in the 1881 census (a number excluding those classed as ‘coloured’).⁶³ Although no African Jamaican was returned in the subsequent elections, many elected members of Jamaica’s Legislative Council increasingly positioned themselves as representatives of the people during the late nineteenth century, elected to safeguard the rights and liberties of all Jamaicans. In 1896, for example, Philip Stern as member for St Catherine demanded the right to investigate complaints against the Magistracy because ‘it was the small people who were actually being troubled’.⁶⁴ While he made no mention of race, this emphasis on the ‘small people’ carried loaded implications of paternalism that turned discourses of objectivity and fairness against the colonial government.

A white Jamaican of Jewish descent, Stern’s election to the Legislative Council in 1895 had not been without controversy and indicates ongoing dissonance between a rhetorical emphasis on cross-class harmony and persistent fears of Black agency. Stern’s successful electoral campaign was attributed to support from the followers of Black religious leader Alexander Bedward, something the Falmouth Gazette was scathing about in its commentary. Demonstrating the enduring belief that most Jamaicans were not fit for political autonomy, the paper cited Stern’s election as evidence that ‘the Franchise instead of progressing is retrograding. Better by far to return to Crown Government’.⁶⁵ Earlier that year, Stern had been responsible for the legal defence of Alexander Bedward during his trial for sedition. Bedward had attracted enormous attention due to the sensationalism of his religious preaching as his followers flocked to his base in August Town to bathe in the healing spring of the Mona River. His incorporation of revivalism and creolized religious practices invited both the fascination and mockery of onlookers, and alongside Marcus Garvey, Bedward is now understood as one of the key antecedents of Rastafarianism.⁶⁶ His arrest in January 1895 points to ongoing fractures in Jamaican society, reportedly telling his followers that ‘Hell will be your […] portion if you do not rise up and crush the white man […]’. As Bedward declared that the ‘white wall has oppressed us […] for years; now we must oppress the white wall’, his threat was powerfully underscored by the call to ‘Let them remember the Morant War’.⁶⁷

Yet if the legal pursuit of Bedward represented attempts to contain Black agency, the arguments of Stern as his defence counsel suggest ongoing concerns about how Jamaica was represented on the world stage. Just four years earlier, the Jamaica Exhibition had launched the ‘New’ or ‘Awakened’ Jamaica, an economically productive and socially harmonious new island identity. Seeking to encourage tourism and wealthy white settlers, the New Jamaica campaign worked to replace a history of Black insurrection with ideas of civilization and order.⁶⁸ On one hand Stern’s arguments sought to maintain social order by preventing resentment and potential instability, but his rhetorical emphasis on colour-blind justice also served to appeal to this image of a New Jamaica. Speaking to the jury at Bedward’s trial, Stern argued that ‘they had a great chance of doing “poetic justice” to themselves and the country’, reminding them that ‘justice was for all persons and all times its principles were eternal and immutable’. He asked the jury to consider only the facts before them and remember that ‘they had more than Bedward’s case in their hands’.⁶⁹ They were representing Jamaica as they sat in court, and their decision would determine how Jamaicans would be perceived in Britain. As the Governor Eyre controversy had evidenced, the rule of law was integral to British liberal sensibilities.⁷⁰ As such, Stern expressed his hope that jurors ‘would not let the idea get abroad that a white jury would necessarily convict a black man’, underscoring the public character of the court, watched not only on the island but also by foreign observers.⁷¹

Considering the shadow cast by the Morant Bay rebellion over proceedings, Stern was perhaps eager to warn the jurors that their verdict could once again invite the scrutiny and censure of thirty years earlier. After all, ‘the country had already been besmirched with the taint of being seditious and they were only getting over it: the people of Jamaica were not a seditious people although they were very fond of the law’.⁷² Presenting the trial as a spectacle on the global stage, Stern sought to rescue Jamaica from the pale of British imperial geographies of civilization.⁷³ Adherence to British codes of colour-blind justice was central to this because it formed a core part of Britain’s rationalization of empire. Stern thus expressed concern at the Crown Solicitor’s two attempts to request a special jury for Bedward’s trial, the first application having been rejected a week earlier by a different judge.⁷⁴ At this time, special juries comprised householders of at least £50, indicating the class of men reserved for this duty.⁷⁵ Stern seized upon this, questioning if ‘there was any sinister motive’ in calling these jurors ‘instead of summoning a jury in the ordinary way’.⁷⁶ Bedward was eventually found ‘not guilty by reason of insanity’ and ordered to be detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Such a verdict was perhaps designed to tread carefully between conveying a paternalistic justice and seeking to contain a perceived threat. Nevertheless, after Bedward was sent to the Lunatic Asylum, Stern successfully advocated for the preacher’s release on the grounds that such a verdict was not admissible in misdemeanour cases. The Prophet, as he was known, returned to his flock under continued police surveillance.⁷⁷

Conclusion

Alexander Bedward was arrested for a second time in 1921 on charges of vagrancy. Leading a march of his followers from August Town to Kingston, the Prophet was once again sent to the Kingston Lunatic Asylum where he died in 1930. The prosecution of his followers was less straightforward, however. The Bedwardites were tried in batches due to their large numbers, with some politicians subsequently arguing that the ‘exhibition in court did not savour of British justice’ but instead ‘looked like lynch law’. With rumours of annexation to the United States circulating at this time, such word choice differentiated Jamaica from its northern neighbour while affirming a commitment to colour-blind, objective justice.⁷⁸ Most Bedwardites were soon released at the mercy of the Governor, and the Gleaner celebrated that ‘calmness and clemency’ were used against ‘ignorance and momentary ebulitions[sic] of primitive passion’. In its reports, the Gleaner reinforced racialized codes of difference, arguing that Bedwardism was a form of ‘West African survivals’ that endangered ‘the name of Jamaica as a country civilised’.⁷⁹ Such responses capture several persistent tensions since the period of slavery. With vagrancy legislation often employed against ‘idleness’ and a lack of ‘honest livelihood’, the charge of vagrancy gestures to wider attempts to regulate the agency and labour of working-class African Jamaicans.⁸⁰ Meanwhile, the Gleaner’s concern that Bedwardism undermined the ‘civilising’ claims of New Jamaica, coupled with anxiety regarding the ‘exhibition’ of the Bedwardites’ trial, encapsulates how public perception of the island on the world stage remained a significant concern. The war of representation still lingered.

Today the Morant Bay uprising is remembered as part of the national story and George William Gordon and Paul Bogle celebrated as national heroes. Howard Johnson has connected Gordon’s evolution from ‘pariah to patriot’ to the growth of nationalism and mass politics, emphasizing how, as a respectable man of colour, Gordon was increasingly positioned as a symbol of cooperation for Black and brown Jamaicans establishing a post-colonial nation.⁸¹ Interrogating how discourses of whiteness were entangled in narratives of Morant Bay, similar negotiations are evident in the colonial nationalism of white and elite Jamaicans during the nineteenth century. A continuation of the discursive battle between planters and abolitionists, representations of Morant Bay and the subsequent loss of political representation exhibit how white Jamaicans were attempting to navigate their increasingly ‘ambivalent identity’ as both ‘coloniser and colonised’ following the abolition of slavery.⁸²

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor David Lambert, Dr Sascha Auerbach, and Dr Adam Challoner for feedback on early iterations of this article.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This article is based on research conducted as part of my Midlands4Cities – AHRC-funded Doctoral Studentship at the University of Warwick.

Notes on contributors

Liz Egan

Liz Egan is an Associate Tutor in the Department of History and an Early Career Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Jonathan Connolly, ‘Re-Reading Morant Bay: Protest, Inquiry, and Colonial Rule’, Law and History Review 41, no. 1 (9 February 2023): 1–24; Clinton A. Hutton, Colour for Colour, Skin for Skin: Marching with the Ancestral Spirits into War Oh at Morant Bay (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2015); Gad Heuman, ‘The Killing Time’: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 1994); Don Robotham, ‘The Notorious Riot’: The Socio-Economic and Political Base of Paul Bogle’s Revolt (Kingston: Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of West Indies, 1981).

2 R.W. Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 31–7, 146–91.

3 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 107; David Lambert, White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2–5, 12.

4 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 436; Lambert, White Creole Culture, 10–13; Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 92–3; Christer Petley, ‘Gluttony, Excess, and the Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean’, Atlantic Studies 9, no. 1 (2012): 85–106.

5 Christer Petley, ‘Slaveholders and Revolution: The Jamaican Planter Class, British Imperial Politics, and the Ending of the Slave Trade, 1775–1807’, Slavery & Abolition 39, no. 1 (2018): 53–79; Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica: Colonial Society and Culture during the Era of Abolition (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2016); Petley, ‘“Devoted Islands” and “That Madman Wilberforce”: British Proslavery Patriotism During the Age of Abolition’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39, no. 3 (2011): 393–415; Petley, ‘Slavery, Emancipation and the Creole World View of Jamaican Colonists, 1800–1834’, Slavery & Abolition 26, no. 1 (2005): 106; Lambert, White Creole Culture, 210.

6 Jack P. Greene, ‘Liberty, Slavery, and the Transformation of British Identity in the Eighteenth-century West Indies’, Slavery & Abolition 21, no. 1 (2000): 1–31; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Srividhya Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759–1815 (Farnham Surrey: Ashgate, 2009); Petley, Slaveholders in Jamaica, 60–7.

7 Faith Smith, Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-Sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023), 2.

8 Stephen C. Russell, ‘“Slavery Dies Hard”: A Radical Perspective on the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica’, Slavery & Abolition 43, no. 1 (2022): 185–204; Richard Huzzey, ‘British Liberties, American Emancipation, and the Democracy of Race’, in The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776–1914, ed. Ruth Livesey and Ella Dzelzainis (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 121–34.

9 Morning Journal, 25 October 1865, 2; ‘Latest’, Morning Journal, 24 October 1865, 2; ‘The Conspirator’s Plan’, Daily Gleaner, 26 October 1865, 2.

10 Petley, ‘Slaveholders and Revolution’.

11 ‘Morant Bay, [Camp.], Sunday 15th October, [From Our Special Correspondent.]’, Daily Gleaner, 20 October 1865, 2; ‘The Conspirator’s Plan’, Daily Gleaner, 26 October 1865, 2; Morning Journal, 16 October 1865, 2; Jack Webb, Haiti in the British Imagination: Imperial Worlds, 1847–1915 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 106–22; Matthew J. Smith, Liberty, Fraternity, Exile: Haiti and Jamaica after Emancipation (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 5, 148–52; Mimi Sheller, Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Rebels in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida, 2000), 227–46.

12 ‘Morant Bay, [Camp.], Sunday 15th October’, Daily Gleaner, 20 October 1865, 2; see also Morning Journal, 16 October 1865, 2.

13 Daily Gleaner, 23 October 1865, 2; ‘Paul Bogle’, Daily Gleaner, 27 October 1865, 2.

14 Hutton, Colour for Colour, Skin for Skin, 210–11.

15 For more on Jordon, Osborn, and the Morning Journal, see Gad Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloureds in Jamaica, 1792–1865 (Westport: Greenwood, 1981), 85–90, 174; Gad J. Heuman, Brown Man Politics in Post-Emancipation Jamaica. (Kingston: University of the West Indies, Department of History, 1981); Gad Heuman, ‘Robert Osborn – Brown Power Leader’, Jamaica Journal 11, no. 1–2 (1977): 76–81; Meleisa Ono-George, ‘“By Her Unnatural and Despicable Conduct”: Motherhood and Concubinage in the Watchman and Jamaica Free Press, 1830–1833’, Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 2 (2017): 356–72; Alpen Razi, ‘“Coloured Citizens of the World”: The Networks of Empire Loyalism in Emancipation-Era Jamaica and the Rise of the Transnational Black Press’, American Periodicals 23, no. 2 (2013): 105–24.

16 Morning Journal, 24 October 1865, 2; Morning Journal, 25 October 1865, 2.

17 Francis Galton, ‘Hereditary Talent and Character: Second Part’, Macmillan’s Magazine, ed. by David Masson, vol. XII (London: Macmillan and Co, 1865), 318–27.

18 ‘Civil and Savage Life’, Morning Journal, 17 October 1865, 2.

19 Morning Journal, 12 January 1865, 2; Christine Bolt, Victorian Attitudes to Race (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1971), 83–101; Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power; Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1962); Semmel, ‘The Issue of “Race” in the British Reaction to the Morant Bay Uprising of 1865’, Caribbean Studies 2, no. 3 (1962): 3–15; B.A. Knox, ‘The British Government and the Governor Eyre Controversy, 1865–1875’, The Historical Journal 19, no. 4 (1976): 877–900.

20 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 107, 411; Thomas Harvey and William Brewin, Jamaica in 1866: A Narrative of a Tour Through the Island (London: A.W. Bennett, 1867).

21 ‘Eyre Defence and Aid Fund’, Daily Gleaner, 2 October 1866, 3.

22 Report of the Jamaica Royal Commission 1866: Part 1 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1866), 40.

23 ‘Who are Responsible for Rebellions? – Justice Keogh’s Opinion’ from the Irish Times’, Daily Gleaner, 26 January 1866, 3; ‘Governor Eyre and the Rebellion’, Daily Gleaner, 1 May 1866, 2; ‘Governor Eyre’s Policy’, Daily Gleaner, 4 August 1866, 2. For Eyre’s time in Australia and New Zealand, see Julie Evans, Edward Eyre, Race and Colonial Governance (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2005).

24 Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012); Huzzey, ‘British Liberties, American Emancipation’; Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Russell, ‘“Slavery Dies Hard”’; Webb, Haiti in the British Imagination, 119.

25 ‘Radical Doctrines in the West Indies and in the United States – and their Consequences’, Colonial Standard, 12 December 1865.

26 Robert J. Stewart, ‘Reporting Morant Bay: The 1865 Jamaican Insurrection as Reported and Interpreted in the New York Herald, Daily Tribune and Times’, in Before & after 1865: Education, Politics, and Regionalism in the Caribbean, ed. Roy Augier, Brian L. Moore, and Swithin Wilmot (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1998), 333–35.

27 ‘Governor Eyre and the Rebellion’, Daily Gleaner, 1 May 1866, 2.

28 ‘Poverty in Jamaica’, Daily Gleaner, 1 May 1866, 2.

29 Hall, Civilising Subjects, 25.

30 Colonial Standard, 13 December 1865, 2; Colonial Standard, 23 December 1865, 2.

31 Morning Journal, 16 February 1866, 2.

32 Morning Journal, 12 January 1866, 2.

33 Morning Journal, 11 June 1866, 2.

34 ‘To the Editor of the Morning Journal’, Morning Journal, 13 January 1866, 2.

35 Rev. J. Radcliffe, ‘To the Editor of the Times’, Times, 18 November 1865, 6. See also ‘The Jamaica Question’, Punch, 23 December 1866, 249; Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest, ‘Introduction’, in Victorian Jamaica, ed. Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 19.

36 ‘To the Editor of the Morning Journal’, Morning Journal, 29 December 1865, 2; ‘To the Editor of the Morning Journal’, Morning Journal, 6 January 1866, 2.

37 Mimi Sheller, ‘Hidden Textures of Race and Historical Memory: The Rediscovery of Photographs Relating to Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865’, The Princeton University Library Chronicle 72, no. 2 (2011): 550.

38 Andrew Henry Lewis, ‘To the Editor of the Morning Journal’, Morning Journal, 18 January 1866, 2.

39 Report of the Jamaica Royal Commission, 1866: Part II (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1866), 838–9.

40 Heuman, Between Black and White, 173; Jacob A.P.M. Andrade, A Record of the Jews in Jamaica, from the English Conquest to the Present Time … Illustrated (Kingston: Jamaica Times, 1941), 30.

41 Samuel J. Hurwitz and Edith Hurwitz, ‘The New World Sets an Example for the Old: “The Jews of Jamaica and Political Rights 1661–1831”’, American Jewish Historical Quarterly 55, no. 1 (1965): 49.

42 The National Archives [TNA], CO 137/395 Jamaica Original Correspondence, Governor Eyre to Edward Cardwell, 20 November 1865, f.351; Harvey and Brewin, Jamaica in 1866, 118–19.

43 Mimi Sheller, ‘Complicating Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion: Jewish Radicalism, Asian Indenture, and Multi-Ethnic Histories of 1865’, Cultural Dynamics 31, no. 3 (2019): 219; Sheller, ‘Hidden Textures of Race and Historical Memory’.

44 George Price, Jamaica and the Colonial Office: Who Caused the Crisis? (London: Sampson Low and Marston, 1866), 4.

45 Price, v.

46 Price, 132.

47 Price, 6.

48 Patrick Bryan, The Jamaican People, 1880–1902 (London: Macmillan, 1991), 11–12.

49 Holt, The Problem of Freedom; Heuman, Between Black and White, 109–11, 191–4.

50 Daily Gleaner, 16 November 1876, 2.

51 David Lambert and Philip Howell, ‘John Pope Hennessy and the Translation of “Slavery” between Late Nineteenth-century Barbados and Hong Kong’, History Workshop Journal 55, no. 1 (2003): 1–24.

52 George Levy, A Few among Many Facts Concerning Crown Government in Jamaica and How It Is Administered (Kingston, Jamaica: Colonial Standard Office, 1881), 1.

53 Levy, A Few among Many Facts, 14.

54 Ibid., 2.

55 ‘Jamaica’, Daily Gleaner, 14 November 1883, 2.

56 ‘Jamaica Newspapers: The History of Our Press’, Daily Gleaner, 19 October 1901, 9.

57 Budget, 27 March 1882, 2.

58 Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733–1833 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Linda L. Sturtz, ‘Mary Rose: “White” African Jamaican Woman? Race and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica’, in Gendering the African Diaspora: Women, Culture, and Historical Change in the Caribbean and Nigerian Hinterland, ed. Judith A Byfield, LaRay Denzer, and Anthea Morrison (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2010), 59–87.

59 Budget, 27 March 1882, 2; Sheller, ‘Complicating Jamaica’s Morant Bay Rebellion’, 211.

60 ‘Paternal Despotism and the Unsettled State of the Country’, Falmouth Gazette, 4 April 1884, 2.

61 Lambert, White Creole Culture, 210.

62 See for example, Bodleian Libraries, MSS.W.Ind.s.51 Copy of Journal of Thomas Capper as Inspector of Schools, Jamaica, January-July 1881; ‘A Jamaican “Pepper-Pot”. For English Readers’, Daily Gleaner, 28 September 1899, 1; John Henderson, Jamaica, illustrated by A.S. Forrest (London: A. and C. Black, 1906), 173.

63 Kálmán Tekse, Population and Vital Statistics, Jamaica 1832–1964 (Kingston: Dept. of Statistics, 1974), 78; Holt, The Problem of Freedom, 340–1.

64 ‘Hon. Legislative Council’, Daily Gleaner, 1 April 1896, p. 7.

65 Cited in Daily Gleaner, 22 August 1895, 2.

66 Like Marcus Garvey and Rastafarian leaders Robert Hinds and Leonard Howell, Bedward’s arrest testifies to the repeated use of the law to silence Black criticism of the ruling order. Garvey similarly found himself on trial for sedition in 1929, and Robert Hinds and Leonard Howell in 1934. See Henrice Altink, Public Secrets: Race and Colour in Colonial and Independent Jamaica (Oxford: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 167–8; Charles Reavis Price, ‘“Cleave to the Black”: Expressions of Ethiopianism in Jamaica’, New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 77, no. 1–2 (2003): 31–64.

67 ‘The Warrant’, Daily Gleaner, 22 January 1895, 3; for more on Bedward, see A.A. Brooks, History of Bedwardism, or the Jamaica Native Baptist Free Church, Union Camp, August Town, St. Andrew, Ja. B.W.I., with Engravings, 2nd ed. (Jamaica: The Gleaner Co. Ltd, Printers, 1917); W.F. Elkins, Street Preachers, Faith Healers, and Herb Doctors in Jamaica, 1890–1925 (New York: Revisionist Press, 1977).

68 Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 67–9; Henry A. Blake, ‘The Awakening of Jamaica’, The Nineteenth Century 28, no. 164 (1890): 534–44; Henry A. Blake, ‘The Jamaica Exhibition’, The North American Review 152, no. 411 (1891): 182–93; Henry A. Blake, ‘Opportunities for Young Men in Jamaica’, North American Review 155, no. 433 (1892): 661–6; Edgar Mayhew Bacon and Eugene Murray-Aaron, The New Jamaica (Kingston: A. W. Gardner, 1890).

69 TNA, CO 137/566 Jamaica, Original Correspondence: Despatches from Henry Arthur Blake, Governor of Jamaica, 1 May 1895–30 June 1895, Enclosure to Jamaica Despatch no. 165 dated 28 May 1895, newspaper extract ‘Bedward’s Trial’, ff.286–300 (f.293); ‘Bedward’s Trial’, Daily Gleaner, 2 May 1895, 7.

70 Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power.

71 ‘Bedward’s Trial: The Defence Opened’, Daily Gleaner, 1 May 1895, 7.

72 TNA, CO 137/566 Despatches from Henry Arthur Blake, Enclosure to Jamaica Despatch ‘Bedward’s Trial’, f.293.

73 Duncan Bell, ‘Empire and International Relations in Victorian Political Thought’, The Historical Journal 49, no. 1 (2006): 289; Sandra Den Otter, ‘Rewriting the Utilitarian Market: Colonial Law and Custom in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British India’, The European Legacy 6, no. 2 (2001): 177–88; Martin J. Wiener, An Empire on Trial: Race, Murder, and Justice under British Rule, 1870–1935 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

74 ‘Bedward Brought Over to Kingston’, Daily Gleaner, 17 April 1895, 3.

75 TNA, CO 137/504 Jamaica, Original Correspondence: Despatches from Anthony Musgrave, Governor of Jamaica, 1 January 1882–31 March 1882, ‘Report on Law 52 of 1881’, Attorney General’s Office, 19 January 1881’, f.123.

76 ‘Bedward’s Trial’, Daily Gleaner, 2 May 1895, 7.

77 TNA, CO 137/566 Despatches from Henry Arthur Blake, Henry Blake to the Marquess of Ripon, 28 May 1895, ff.278–80.

78 ‘Imprisonment of Bedwardites for Subject of Debate in Legislative Council, and its Session Yesterday’, Daily Gleaner, 29 April 1921, 1.

79 ‘The Bedward Episode’, Daily Gleaner, 2 May 1921, 6.

80 A.C. Edwards, ‘The Development of Criminal Law in Jamaica up to 1900’ (PhD diss., London University, 1968), 525–45; Bryan, The Jamaican People, 1880–1902, 28–9. Vagrancy legislation was also used elsewhere in the British empire to regulate “proper” racialized behaviour and interactions, see Catharine Coleborne, ‘Consorting with “Others”: Vagrancy Laws and Unauthorised Mobility across Colonial Borders in New Zealand from 1877 to 1900C’, in Empire and Mobility in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. David Lambert and Peter Merriman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 136–51.

81 Howard Johnson, ‘From Pariah to Patriot: The Posthumous Career of George William Gordon’, New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 81, no. 3/4 (2007): 197–218.

82 Catherine Hall, ‘What Is a West Indian’, in West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, ed. Bill Schwarz (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 35.