18 Quotes by Tom Zoellner

A basic reality awaited those who surrendered and were not shot: the dismal existence of a slave, with all of its pain, indignity, physical punishment and humiliation. For a brief while – though they were hunted – they had had a taste of self-government and freedom. Giving up had to have been indescribably bitter.

It was this 'ripening' that the slaveholding classes of North American seemed to fear above all else: the dawning consciousness of enslaved persons that they had an inborn right to be free--and that they might take further steps to make it happen, because they already had superior numbers. All they would need in the future was a little more knowledge, a little more discipline, and some more key allies among the whites.

If Samuel Sharpe had been trying to seize the attention of the mother country – just as Nat Turner had given the American South a brief window through which to reconsider slavery – he succeeded far beyond what he might have hoped. Never before had enslaved people spoken so loudly in Britain.

The revolt Samuel Sharpe had started on a Caribbean island was building to a culmination at Westminster – a final drive to asphyxiate slavery throughout the British Empire. But it came not through a spectacular legislative duel or an inspiring floor speech, but rather through the grind of parliamentary process and the unromantic reality of dickering in the shadows.

Then the congregation listened as the clock chimed the twelve bars of midnight. At the last one, Knibb shouted: 'The monster is dead! The negro is free! The church 'broke out into one loud and long-continued burst of exultation and joy,' that awoke Knibb’s young son and rattled all the windows. 'Never did I hear such a sound,' Knibb wrote later.

The house of leaves burst into full orange-yellow combustion, as the crowd stood up with the reflections shining on their faces and called back as a chorus; the gathered voices grew louder as the flames danced upward and filled the valley with light and shadows. 'Burn it down!' he said.'Burn it down!' they said.'BURN IT DOWN!

The burning hillsides seemed to make the relentless daylight of Jamaica even sharper and more dazzling, and the visual effect of flames spreading in all directions at night was like nothing anybody had ever seen before, as if the combined anger and desperation of three hundred years had been unleashed on the hills. The white people, it seemed, had been magically dispelled.

Samuel Sharpe’s movement was different: resistance on a dazzling scale. It was well organized, spread across a wide geographic area and inspired by Baptist salvation thinking. More than 30,000 enslaved people were eventually brought into a plot rooted in nonviolent idealism that anticipated 20th century movements such as those led by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the proponents of liberation theology in Latin America.

Here was a remarkable admission of Jamaican weakness, as well as a revealing disclosure that the sugar gentry were as afraid of an idea as they were of knives.