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 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.

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.

For enslaved people who had spent their entire lives under the shadow of the whip, without any military training of experience with guns, to one day pick up a firearm or a machete or even a rock and oppose a superior force must have taken an extraordinary level of nerve. The thirst for liberty was powerful enough to overcome even the fear of probable death.