‘Slavery Dies Hard’: A Radical Perspective on the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica

After playing a leading role in opposing Jamaica's largely white plantocracy and the island's English governor, both as a journalist and a politician, mixed-race Jamaican Robert A. Johnson (1825–1899) migrated to New York in July 1865, where he joined the editorial staff of the New York Tribune. A few months later, news reached New York of an outbreak in Morant Bay and the violent government suppression that followed. Johnson covered these events from New York, with deep personal knowledge of Jamaica and an ability to read against the grain of the newspaper accounts arriving by steamship. This article recovers Johnson's body of writing on Jamaica published in the Nation, the Evening Post, the New York Tribune, and Hours at Home in 1865–1866 and locates it within a public debate then taking place about what lessons should be drawn from Jamaica for race relations in America. Pointing to the legal mechanisms of planter power, Johnson warned his readers, ‘the whole of this bloody affair … shows also how unsafe it is to intrust the keeping of negro rights to the hands of men bred in the school of slavery or inheriting its traditions.’