Bogle stated that he would go to Morant Bay the next day to see his accusers. Six policemen and two constables came to Stony Gut on Tuesday 10 October to arrest Bogle, but they were mobbed by more than 300 men armed with cutlasses and sticks, detained for several hours, and made to swear oath that they would ‘join their colour’ and ‘cleave to the black’, drinking gunpowder-laced rum to seal this. In consequence, on Monday 9 October, the magistrates issued warrants for Bogle’s and others’ arrests for assisting Geoghegan. Two policemen gave chase but were beaten and mocked by the crowd. The magistrates ordered Geoghegan arrested but he fled into the throng. James Geoghegan, a Black spectator, urged him to pay the fine but not the costs. A crowd had assembled for the Petty Sessions, at which the magistrates found a boy guilty of assault and fined him, tacking on much higher court costs for him to pay. The Morant Bay Rebellionīogle was in Morant Bay on Saturday 7 October 1865. In St Thomas-in-the-East one Native preacher, Paul Bogle, expounded a radical, political vision to his congregation at his chapel in Stony Gut, near Morant Bay. Their Gospel was more radical – they merged African cultural practices with Christian ritual, they spoke more to the political concerns of the island’s Black poor. The Native Baptist churches had been started by Black refugees from the American Revolution. But after emancipation, European preachers’ influence waned. Non-conformist missionaries had been active in the Caribbean since the 17th century, and were blamed for many slave rebellions by Jamaica’s plantocracy. One of the mainsprings of these campaigns were the Native Baptist churches. They organised and campaigned for more equitable treatment and working conditions. Jamaica’s Black estate workers and peasants were not passive. They feared the Black population would be forced to riot if they were carried (footnote 2). Petitioning the Secretary of State for Colonies, Edward Cardwell MP, to veto the Bills, the Anti-Slavery Society noted that ‘the whip is the symbol of slavery’ and its return, coupled with ‘a revival of involuntary servitude or slavery’, expressed a ‘mischievous and dangerous tendency’ on the Assembly’s part. Now the Assembly proposed punishing cane cutting with whipping, or a return to ‘apprenticeship’ for those under 16. Since emancipation this, and ‘squatting’ on abandoned estates (often the only way labourers could make ends meet), had been codified as crimes. In early 1865, the Jamaican Legislative Assembly had passed Bills against cane cutting, the surreptitious harvesting of small amounts of sugarcane for personal use, a custom which had been relatively tolerated even under slavery. Apprenticeship was abandoned in 1838, but over the next three decades Black estate workers and peasants bore the brunt the economic crises, receiving few civil or religious freedoms from Jamaica’s white (and to a lesser extent, mixed race) elites, who often actively tried to restrict and criminalise them further (see footnote 1). The island’s enslaved population had been emancipated on 1 August 1834 but were initially placed in ‘apprenticeship’ to their former ‘masters’, another form of bonded labour, for a period of four to six years. The island was in the grip of an economic decline, but had also faced years of epidemics, floods and droughts. The rebellion was the result of years of political, economic and racial tensions in Jamaica. Catalogue ref: CO 700/JAMAICA37 Background The areas on the map coloured red show sugar estates in cultivation in 1790, the blue those under cultivation in 1890. Thomas-in-the-East parish and Morant Bay. This was the Morant Bay Rebellion, an infamous episode of brutal, colonial violence which would reverberate both in Jamaica and in Britain. On 13 October he issued a proclamation of martial law for the island’s county of Surrey, which covered its eastern end. Within hours of receiving this news, Eyre had sent hundreds of troops to St Thomas. ‘The people at Morant Bay have risen, burnt down the Court-house, released all the prisoners, murdered several white people.’ Colonial Office Confidential Print, ‘Narrative of the rebellion in Jamaica, October 1865, taken from the official despatches’, 1865. On 12 October 1865, John Davidson, a magistrate in the east of Jamaica, wrote to the island’s Governor, Edward John Eyre: Content note: this blog includes descriptions of violence and the death penalty, and quotes original documents containing racially offensive language.
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