The Morant Bay Rebellion, British Colonial Policy, and Travelling Ideas about Haiti

IntroductionIn defending George William Gordon, who was executed by Governor Eyre during the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica in 1865, one witness, Dr Robert George Bruce, swore before the Royal Commission that Gordon had never demanded of his supporters that [w]e must do as they have done in Hayti.1 The Royal Commission, sent from Britain to investigate Eyre's actions during the War, in which hundreds of Jamaicans were brutally massacred and tortured and over thousand displaced, was particularly interested in whether Gordon had cited Haiti. They pressed Bruce further, asking What do you understand by the cry 'Do as they do in Hayti?' Bruce replied has no significance at all here - it means to cut the white people's throats . . . It is that they are to kill all the white people.2 The Commission investigated whether Gordon had cited Haiti to discern if, as Eyre and his supporters claimed, the motive of the protestors at Morant Bay was simply to enact massacre on the grounds of racial antagonism. Claims of reference to Haiti were not only deployed in Jamaica around the time of the Morant Bay Rebellion to justify Eyre's acts of violence but were understood, in Britain, to suggest the existence of ferocious racial conflict. This version of Haiti, increasingly mobilized by Eyre's supporters as the debate over Morant Bay accelerated, aided Eyre to some extent in his reprieve from prosecution for his illegal actions, as well as justifying increased autocratic rule on the island.Paul Farmer argues in the Uses of Haiti that, over the past five hundred or so years, Haiti has had various uses for the West.3 Until independence in 1804, and the perceived erection of black rule, Haiti was subject to colonial systems that involved the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of African people put to work on plantations. In the nineteenth century, Farmer suggests, Haiti became a completely different sort of symbol . . . In monolithically racist world, Haiti was 'the nightmare republic'.4 Such nightmares seem to have been particularly vivid in the imaginations of the colonial administration in the aftermath of the Morant Bay Rebellion. As Matthew Smith finds, the threat of second Hayti . . . was intended to conjure fearsome image of Jamaica beset with endless revolutions and race wars.5 In this article, I examine how ideas concerning Haiti moved between the British and Jamaican contexts. Such ideas were multiple, depending on the varying, specific, historical situations in which they were construed. As ideas about Haiti moved between contexts, however, they necessarily informed one another. In the opening lines of The Idea of Haiti, Millery Polyne emphasizes the need to recognize and unpack the relationships between the different settings in which Haiti was constructed:There is not sole idea . . . Multiple designs exist. Its roots are rhizomorphic maintaining local, national and international and also these ideas continue to be in conversation and in tension with one another. Furthermore, some specific knowledges occupy more prevalent space in the psyche of laypersons and scholars, and within global apparatuses.6In analysing the circulation of ideas about Haiti during the Morant Bay Rebellion, I focus on one particular strata, considering notions about Haiti that moved between the racial scientists of the Anthropological Society of London (ASL), British colonial officials and parliamentarians.Such communication network, was positioned largely within the British national context but also spanned across the Atlantic as its members, and their ideas, migrated. I begin the article by assessing this communication network, as well as the concept of travel. Although ideas about Haiti also circulated beyond this particular nexus, these interested groups were particularly influential in shaping and applying such ideas during the debate over the Morant Bay Rebellion. …