“Threats to Their Lives, Limbs and Property”: The Missionaries Who Took Jamaica’s Case Against Slavery to London

• Baptist and Methodist missionaries were arrested and persecuted after the 1831 Christmas Rebellion
• The Methodists had suffered much property loss and sent representatives to England
• William Knibb vowed to see slavery “destroyed root and branch”
• The Emancipation Act followed in August 1833, less than two years after the uprising

Christians in Jamaica were on both sides of slavery. Members of Christian denominations took part in the transatlantic trade and held enslaved Africans on their plantations until August 1, 1838, Paul H. Williams wrote in the Sunday Gleaner on July 28, 2024. Historians such as Eric Williams have argued that slavery ended when it did because of capitalism rather than humanitarian campaigning. Yet the role of some Christians cannot be discounted.

Baptists led by William Knibb, Thomas Burchell and James Phillippo, along with Methodists and Quakers, campaigned against slavery and faced persecution and “threats to their lives, limbs and property”. After the 1831 Baptist War, or Christmas Rebellion, in which impatient enslaved people set fire to plantations, six Baptist missionaries, including Knibb and Burchell, were arrested and charged with inciting the uprising. They were not convicted, but their lives were in danger. Samuel Sharpe, the article notes, had planned a strike over unpaid work after Christmas and took no part in the burning.

Knibb went to England, uncertain whether the Baptist Missionary Society would back him, since some committee members saw slavery as a political matter. At the society’s annual meeting he declared: “Whatever the consequence, I will speak. I will not rest day or night until I see slavery destroyed root and branch.” The Methodists, who had suffered much property loss, sent John Duncan and Peter Barry to tell their side. Together the missionaries addressed meetings, answered questions before a House of Commons select committee and debated the planters’ West India Committee.

Phillippo also toured England with Robert Smith, an enslaved Jamaican who had bought his freedom but was given no document. When his owner’s agent tried to sell him again, Smith stowed away to England, found his owner and was officially freed. The Emancipation Act was enacted in August 1833, less than two years after the rebellion.

Slavery was, at bottom, a system that treated people as property, and the story of Robert Smith shows how much turned on paper. Having paid for his freedom, he was still at risk because nothing had been written down. The lesson has not faded in a country where many families still occupy land without registered title. A receipt, a transfer and a registered document are what turn a payment into ownership, and Jamaica’s long record of disputes over family land and church land shows what happens when that last step is skipped.

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