The Morant Bay Rebellion began in October 1865 after a court in Morant Bay, Jamaica issued a fine to a boy, causing the crowd to protest. When the police went to arrest one of the leaders of the crowd several days later, hundreds of supporters defended him. The militia arrived the next day and attacked a crowd of civilians. This marked the beginning of a month-long, violent campaign of suppression and retribution by the government. 

While these were the immediate circumstances of the uprising, the rebellion was really fueled by a long history of racial violence and oppression on the island. Slavery had been abolished in Jamaica in 1834, but for decades the colony’s black population had limited civil rights and remained economically oppressed. The government sought to exacerbate the economic conditions of black people to make them a more easily exploitable labor force. In 1865, for example, it criminalized cane cutting and squatting, both previously accepted practices that helped the poor provide for themselves. This contributed to the tensions in that year.

The response to the rebellion was extremely violent and led to debates in Britain over colonial government. At the start of the rebellion, Governor John Eyre proclaimed martial law, and within a month the government killed, flogged, and destroyed the homes of hundreds of Black Jamaicans. Eyre suspected that George William Gordon, the mixed raced son of a planter and enslaved woman, was the leader of a conspiracy that instigated the rebellion. Despite lack of evidence for a premeditated conspiracy, Gordon was executed under probably unlawful circumstances. As a result of his actions during the rebellion, Eyre was suspended as governor but was not otherwise punished. 

John Stuart Mill references the Morant Bay Rebellion once in his autobiography while describing his years in Parliament. He expresses outrage over the atrocities committed by the government in Jamaica. For him, the event showed the dangers of treating martial law as an acceptable form of government in the colonies. He commented that “The question was, whether the British dependencies, and eventually perhaps Great Britain itself, were to be under the government of law, or of military license” (166). 

Citations

Day, Chris. “The Morant Bay Rebellion, October 1865.” The National Archives Blog, The National Archives, 20 Oct. 2022, blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/the-morant-bay-rebellion-october-1865/.