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 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.

Before the night was over, Bleby, Morris, and thousands of others watched awestruck as new fires spread on neighboring plantations, in an unstoppable chain, as if the universe itself was answering the first call of flames and setting free some beautiful and terrifying spirit that could not be called back.

The slaves themselves were powerless to create any written record of what they witnessed, or to publicize it in any way beyond the discreet oral circles of plantation life. What can be known of Sharpe's method and motives must be seen through the lens of the Jamaican prosecutorial narrative, which sought to understand him only to the point of gathering sufficient evidence to justify his hanging.

[Sharpe's] only goal had been to make people free, he said, and what had been a peaceful movement had spun out of control. But he remained defiant to the end about the idealism of his cause, if not the means.'I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery!' he said. Belby reported that Sharpe's frame expanded, his spine stiffened, and his eyes seemed to 'shoot forth rays of light' when he said this.

The Jamaican violence had given humanitarians powerful evidence that the institution was costing Britain far more than it was giving back, and the humanitarians could now make extended pragmatic arguments as well as moral ones.