Although the people of Jamaica represented to the home government that the slaves were satisfied and happy, and would not accept their freedom were it offered them, a revolt of the blacks took place in 1832. More than fifty thousand were engaged in this effort to obtain the long-wished-for boon.
The man with whom the insurrection originated,—Samuel Sharp,—was a slave, and a member of the Baptist Church in Montego Bay. He was born in slavery, but he had never felt anything of the bitterness of slavery. He was born in a family that treated him indulgently; he was a pet, and was brought up as the playmate of the juvenile members of the family, and had opportunities of learning to read and for mental cultivation, to which very few of his fellow-slaves had access; and Sharp, above all this, was possessed of a mind worthy of any man, and of oratorical powers of no common order.
Sharp determined to free himself and his fellow-slaves. I do not know whether he was himself deceived, or whether he knowingly deceived his fellow-conspirators; but he persuaded a large number of them to believe that the British government had made them free, and that their owners were keeping them in slavery, in opposition to the wishes of the authorities in England. It so happened, that, just at that time, the planters themselves were pursuing a course which favored Sharp’s proceedings directly. They were holding meetings through the length and breadth of the Island, protesting against the interference of the home government with their property, passing very inflammatory resolutions, and threatening that they would transfer their allegiance to the United States, in order that they might perpetuate their interest in their slaves.
The insurrection was suppressed, and about two thousand of the slaves were put to death. This effort of the bondmen to free themselves, gave a new impetus to the agitation of the abolition movement, which had already begun under the auspices of Buxton, Allen, Brougham, and George Thompson, the successors of Clarkson, Wilberforce, Sharp, and Macaulay; and the work went bravely on. Elizabeth Heyrick, feeling that the emancipation of the slave could never be effected by gradual means, raised the cry of “Immediate emancipation.” She wrote: “Immediate emancipation is the object to be aimed at; it is more wise and rational, more politic and safe, as well as more just and humane, than gradual emancipation. The interests, moral and political, temporal and eternal, of all parties concerned, will be best promoted by immediate emancipation.”
The doctrine of immediate emancipation was taken up by the friends of the Negro everywhere, and Brougham, in Parliament, said:—
“Tell me not of rights; talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves. I deny the right; I acknowledge not the property. The principles, the feelings, of our common nature, rise in rebellion against it. Be the appeal made to the understanding or to the heart, the sentence is the same that rejects it. In vain you tell me of laws that sanction such a claim.”
John Philpot Curran followed, in one of the finest speeches ever made in behalf of the rights of man. Said he,—
“I speak in the spirit of the British Law, which makes liberty commensurate with, and inseparable from, the British soil; which proclaims, even to the stranger and the sojourner, the moment he sets his foot upon British earth, that the ground on which he treads is holy, and consecrated by the genius of Universal Emancipation. No matter in what language his doom may have been pronounced; no matter what complexion, incompatible with freedom, an Indian or an African sun may have burnt upon him; no matter in what disastrous battle his liberty may have been cloven down; no matter with what solemnities he may have been devoted upon the altar of slavery; the first moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the god sink together in the dust; his soul walks abroad in her own majesty; his body swells beyond the measure of his chains, that burst from around him, and he stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled, by the irresistible genius of universal emancipation.”
The name and labors of Granville Sharp have been overshadowed by those of other men, who reaped in the full, bright sunshine of success the harvest of popular admiration for the results of a philanthropic policy, of which Granville Sharp was the seed-sower. Zachary, Macaulay, Clarkson, Wilberforce, and Buxton are regarded as the leaders of the great movement that emancipated the slaves of Great Britain. Burke and Wilkes are remembered as the enlightened advocates of the Independence of America; and these great names throw a shadow over the Clerk in the Ordnance, who, with high-souled integrity, resigned his place, and gave up a calling that was his only profession and livelihood, rather than serve a government that waged a fratricidal war, and who, in defiance of the opinions of the Solicitor and Attorney-General, and of the Lord Chief-Justice, opposed by all the lawyers, and forsaken even by his own professional advisers, undertook to search the indices of a law library, to wade through an immense mass of dry and repulsive literature, and to make extracts from all the most important Acts of Parliament as he went along; until, at the very time that slaves were being sold by auction in Liverpool and London, and when he could not find a single lawyer who agreed with his opinion, he boldly exclaimed, “God be thanked! there is nothing in any English law or statute that can justify the enslaving of others.”
Granville Sharp, in his boyhood a linen-draper’s apprentice, and afterwards a clerk in the Ordnance Department of England, one day, in the surgery of his brother, saw a negro named Jonathan Strong, lame, unable to work, almost blind, very ill, and turned adrift in the streets of London, by his master, a lawyer in Barbadoes. The assistance of Granville Sharp, and of his brother William, the surgeon, restored Jonathan Strong to health, and obtained for him a situation. Two years afterwards, the Barbadoes lawyer recognized his slave, strong, healthy, and valuable, serving as a footman behind a lady’s carriage, and he arrested the negro, and put him in prison, until there should be an opportunity to ship him for the West Indies.