Samuel Sharpe

Samuel Sharpe led the largest slave revolt in the British Caribbean and was hanged for it in Montego Bay, eighteen months before Parliament abolished slavery. He was enslaved on a Montego Bay estate, literate, and a deacon in a Baptist chapel, which gave him standing across plantations and the ability to move and speak. He had read in newspapers that abolition was being debated in London and concluded, wrongly in the detail and correctly in the direction, that freedom had been granted and was being withheld by the planters. What he organised for Christmas 1831 was a general strike: the enslaved would refuse to work after the holiday unless they were paid. It became the Baptist War, some sixty thousand people across the western parishes, and it burned estates for eleven days. Fourteen whites died. The suppression killed more than two hundred people in the fighting and executed over three hundred afterwards, including Sharpe, who is recorded as saying on the scaffold that he would rather die on yonder gallows than live in slavery. The scale of the retribution, reported in Britain, did more to move opinion than any argument had; the Abolition Act passed in 1833. He is a National Hero of Jamaica and is on the fifty-dollar note. The Baptist missionaries whose chapels had given the movement its structure were attacked by planters afterwards, and several returned to Britain and gave evidence to Parliament, which is the mechanism by which the revolt reached the abolition debate so quickly. The square in Montego Bay where he was hanged is named after him. He was pardoned posthumously and named a National Hero in 1975.

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