The Baptist War (Jamaica)
Sharpe planned a peaceful withholding of labour after Christmas unless the enslaved were paid, drawing on the chapel networks that had spread literacy and organisation across the western parishes. The strike escalated into an uprising that burned estates across St James and neighbouring parishes over about ten days before the militia and regular troops suppressed it. The retribution was severe and highly public: summary trials, mass hangings including Sharpe's, and the destruction of Baptist and Methodist chapels by planter militias, who blamed missionaries for the rising. Those missionaries returned to Britain and testified, and the resulting parliamentary attention arrived while abolition was already before Parliament. The Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833, less than two years after the rebellion.
- Year: 1831 CE
- Category: Social
