The Baptist War (Jamaica)
Some 60,000 enslaved people in western Jamaica stopped working on 27 December 1831 in what was intended as a general strike and became the largest rebellion in the island's history. Its leader was Samuel Sharpe, a literate Baptist deacon in Montego Bay who preached and organised through the chapels, which is why it is called the Baptist War. His plan was passive: a refusal to return to the fields after Christmas unless wages were paid, on the widely believed report that emancipation had already been granted in England and was being withheld by the planters. The strike became a rising within a day, and estates burned across St James, Hanover, Westmoreland and Trelawny. The militia and regular troops suppressed it in about two weeks. Around 200 rebels were killed in the fighting and something over 300 executed afterwards, many for offences as small as the theft of a pig, in courts martial that made no serious attempt at evidence. Sharpe was hanged in May 1832 and is reported to have said he would rather die on the gallows than live in slavery. The planters then attacked the missionaries they blamed, burning chapels and forming the Colonial Church Union, and Baptist ministers went to London to testify. That is what made the rebellion decisive. The scale of the rising and the savagery of the reprisals were reported in Britain in the middle of the abolition debate, and destroyed the argument that the enslaved were content and that emancipation could wait. The Slavery Abolition Act passed in August 1833.
- Year: 1831 CE
- Category: Social
