The feud that raged over the religious instruction of the negroes makes a curious piece of Jamaican history.
“The imported Africans were wild, savage and barbarous in the extreme; their untractable passions and ferocious temperament rendered severity necessary. They provoked the iron rule of harsh authority; and the earliest laws, constructed to restrain their unexampled atrocities, were rigid and inclement. They exhibited, in fact, such depravity of nature and deformity of mind as gave colour to the prevailing belief in a natural inferiority of intellect; so that the colonist conceived it to be a crime of no greater moral magnitude to kill a negro than to destroy a monkey; however rare their interest in them, as valuable property, rendered such a lamentable test of conscience.”
Thus the Rev. George William Bridges on the negroes when their spiritual state was exercising the minds of all the religious teachers. This particular shepherd was wroth because he objected to the sectarians, that is Quakers, Methodists and Baptists, taking upon themselves any interest in the souls of the slaves. “The country already pays,” he remarks, “near £40,000 per annum for their religious instruction.”
I don't know if I shall be called libellous, but it does seem to me that the Church was decidedly slack in dispensing that instruction for which she was so highly paid. She administered religion in the impersonal and dignified manner that was her wont, and the slaves might be christened if they so desired. Of course they had to get their master's consent, for it was not likely the parson was going to do it for nothing, and at the end of the eighteenth century it cost four bits a head, that is about 2s. 6d. But the clergyman was sometimes open to a bargain, and would do the whole estate for a fixed sum—about half the usual cost per head. And sometimes a whole estate would clamour to be christened. Sometimes they did it as a safeguard against some feared Obeah man, and sometimes simply to have names like the buckra. After their new name they added that of their master for a surname, and reserved the old name for common use. And then came trouble for the overseer or book-keeper, for the new Christians while exceedingly proud of being Christians like the buckras, were apt to forget their new names, and were always teasing to be told them, for, of course, they were recorded in the estate book.
As late as the end of the eighteenth century no one bothered about the naming of the slaves, and we find them entered in the Worthy Park estate book as Villian and Mutton, Baddo, Woman and Whore, but towards the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth, when Lewis writes, we find that even the Rose Hall slaves, and Rose Hall slaves were backward, had been christened, most of them.
Hannibal, a Creole, that is a slave born in the island, aged 54, of good disposition, appears to have been content with his old slave name; but Ulysses, of the same age, and also a Creole of good disposition, becomes Henry and adds Palmer because that was the name of his owner. Shemonth and Adonis, both Creoles of 42 and 39, make no change, perhaps the owner would not pay for their christening, neither does Aaron, an African of 44, though how they knew the age of an African unless he had been bought as a baby I do not know. Out of fifty male negroes nearly half changed their names, but some who did not were children, so perhaps they were christened in the ordinary way; The names they chose seem to have been singularly commonplace. Why should Adam, aged 6, become William Bennett? Or Othello, who was older, J. Fletcher? Why should Robert, a quadroon 3 years old, become Lawrence Low, and why should Isaac, 12, become simple J. James?
Out of sixty women and girls only six of mature age neglected to change their names. None of the older women are married, but some of the younger ones add their married names. Still, matrimony was not much in favour, either with slave or free. Lady % Nugent, twenty years before this book was entered up, is always worrying about it.
“See Martin's daughter soon after breakfast. It is a sad thing to see this good, kind woman, in other respects so easy, on the subject of what a decent kind of woman in England would be ashamed of and shocked at. She told me of all her children by different fathers with the greatest sangfroid. The mother is quite looked up to at Port Royal, and yet her life has been most profligate as we should think at least in England.”
And so, I suppose, these slave women who were entered in the book about twenty years after Lady Nugent left the island, Cecelia and Amelia and Maph and Cowslip, who was christened Mary Paton, and May who became Hannah Palmer, never bothered about matrimony. What made Sussanah Johnston become Elizabeth Palmer I wonder, and why did Kate become Annie Brindley, and why was Frankie, who was only 32, and valued at £90, neither christened nor married? I don't know that Sabina isn't a prettier name than Eliza, but a Creole negro slave of a hundred years ago evidently didn't agree with me. Eve aged 9 became Ellen, and to change a negro Venus to Eliza Stennet is bathos indeed.
“Baptism,” says Lewis, “was in high vogue, and whenever one of them told me a monstrous lie—and they told me whole dozens—he never failed to conclude his story by saying, 'Now, massa, you know I've been christened, and if you do not believe what I say I'm ready to buss the book to the truth of it.' I am assured that unless a negro has an interest in telling the truth, he always lies in order to keep his tongue in practice.”
The question Lewis did not ask himself was whether a white man in like circumstances would have behaved any better.
It may be that the planters were—some of them—brutal men, but I know that had I lived in those times I should probably, like the planters, have regarded the ministers of the other denominations outside the Church of England as most offensively officious. The planters as was not unnatural regarded their slaves as their property, property for which they had paid very heavily, and even though they allowed them many privileges they desired it to be clearly understood that these were privileges given of their own goodwill, and by no means to be considered as rights. The Baptists and Methodists preached what the planters considered sedition. Even tolerant Lewis forbade the Methodists on Cornwall and Hordly, though he allowed any other denomination to preach to the slaves, and much as I dislike the Church of England parson Bridges, I dislike still more the Rev. H. Bleby. He and his confrÈres must have been a most pernicious lot. Evidently on their own showing they were not men of education. They took the Bible as their guide, quoting it in season and out of season. This is of course not a crime, but even nowadays it grates on the average man. In those days the insistence that the negro was a man and a brother when his master declared him a chattel was extremely offensive.
Besides the doctrine of equality was considered dangerous. It was dangerous.
In the beginning of the nineteenth century the talk of freedom was in the air. It was the burning question of the day in Jamaica. The planters discussed it openly at their tables, so did the overseers and book-keepers, and the listening slaves waiting round the table carried all the gossip to the slave quarters, for then as now the black people went back to their quarters once the day's work was done. The tinder was more than dry when the spark fell.
The former revolts in Jamaica had frankly been outbreaks of savages, dimly conscious of wrong, trying to regain their freedom, but the revolt of 1831-32 was a revolt into which religion entered largely. The planters declared openly it was engineered by the Baptists, and the slaves themselves called it the “Baptist War” and the “Black Family War,” the Baptists being styled in slave parlance the “Black Family.”
Bleby discussing this last of the slave revolts which raged through Hanover, Westmoreland, St James and Trelawny, declares it started because a certain Mr Grignon, the Attorney of Salt Springs near Montego Bay, going out there one day close to Christmas met a woman with a piece of sugarcane in her hand—not a very desperate offence one would think—and concluding it had been stolen from Salt Springs—it probably had—not only punished her on the spot but took her back to the plantation and called upon the head driver to strip and flog her. She happened to be this man's wife, so he refused, and the second driver was called upon and he too refused, and all the people taking their cue from their headmen defended her. The Attorney could not get that woman flogged, and becoming alarmed at the attitude of the people he called out the constabulary to arrest the offenders. But the whole body of the slaves menaced the constables, and the principal offenders made their escape to the woods. And the woods round Montego Bay, woods that clothe all the hills that the Maroons held so long, are particularly suited for such guerilla warfare.
0273
Kensington, a place high in the mountains, was the first place burned, and presently the night was lighted by properties burning in all directions. Down the steep hills from Kempshot, down through the dense jungle from Retirement, from Montpelier and from Salt Springs, came the white people flocking to Montego Bay. We can understand the consternation that prevailed in the town. We can imagine the unbridled delight of the slaves as Great House after Great House was abandoned and went up in flames. Those flames spelled to them freedom, and they were sure that the whole island was given over to them. It was not. And in this revolt there was a peculiar character that we find in no other. Many of the slaves were partly civilised now. It was twenty years since any had been imported from Africa; many were acquiring a little property and had some small stake in the land, and must have felt the futility of the uprising. And on these the consequences of the revolt pressed heaviest. Which side were they to take? As plantation after plantation went up in flames, doubtless they were inclined to believe what the insurgent leaders told them, that the country—the country they loved, their country—had been abandoned by the white men. The position of the faithful slaves was difficult.
Bleby says, and a certain Mr Beaumont, who certainly was not prejudiced in favour of the slaves, says that many of them were more afraid of the insurgents than they were of the free inhabitants, and many were carried off by the insurgents and forced to accompany them.
But this did not save them once the whites got the upper hand. The planters put every slave in the same category and hanged ruthlessly, asking no questions, believing no assertions of innocence. They had been badly frightened, and they took vengeance like frightened men.
About the revolt Bleby gives us more information than perhaps he intended. He is delightful—unconsciously.
“Information reached the Commanding Officer,” he says, “that it was the intention of the insurgents to attack and pillage the town; and as the number of men was inadequate to the purpose, he required all who were capable of bearing arms to enrol themselves for its defence” (it certainly seems to me a very natural desire on the part of the Commanding Officer), “myself, a Scotch missionary and a curate included, the rector and another curate having already presented themselves as volunteers. I was far from yielding a cordial consent to this demand upon my services,” how they must have loved him. “He gave promise that we should not be required to leave the town, and should only be called upon to act if the safety of the place should be menaced.”
And now, listen to the sufferings of this noble gentleman. One day they were asked to go a little way into the country and to return in the evening, but when they had been gone some distance he found they had no intention of returning for several days. I can see the Commanding Officer smiling secretly over the discomfiture of his valuable recruit. Incredible as it seems, considering the country was in the throes of a slave revolt, with all its possible horrors, this gentleman can actually write that they were “harassed by journeys day after day amongst the woods and mountains, often riding for eight or ten hours in succession beneath a scorching sun, and sleeping without pillow, sheet or mat, or any other accommodation on the boarded or earthen floor of the house where we might happen to stop for the night.”
Truly a very gallant gentleman! I quite feel for the pleasure the Commanding Officer must have got out of making him as uncomfortable as he possibly could. Doubtless he would have joyfully put him in the forefront of the battle had there been a battle, but there wasn't one.
After the first riotous outburst, when the whites were taken by surprise, there seems to have been no hope for the wretched slaves.
The militia was composed naturally of planters, the officers being in many instances men whose property had been destroyed by the insurgents, and who regarded themselves as ruined or reduced to the verge of ruin by the revolted negroes. We cannot but agree with Bleby that these were the last men who should have tried them, but try them they did, and the reprisals were terrible. As in the old days the Romans in Sicily, if I remember rightly, crucified their rebellious slaves along the sea-shore, so these Jamaican planters hanged and shot the deluded people without finding out whether they were guilty or not. After six weeks of trials, one of the newspapers at Montego Bay gravely announced: “The executions during the week have been considerably diminished, being in number only fourteen.”
They hanged them by twos and threes in the public market-place and left them hanging there till another lot were due, when they cut down the bodies and left them lying on the ground till the workhouse negroes came out with carts in the evening and took them away, to cast them into a pit dug for the purpose a little distance from the town.
When the tropical day drew swiftly to its ending, and the sun sank gorgeous into the sea, when the purple and gold changed to bands of seashell pink and delicate nile green, and the shadows swept up and the stars, gleaming crystals, came out in a sky of velvet, then for me those dead-and-gone slaves, trapped in a web of circumstance, rose from their graves and walked along the shore. Ignorant, toil-worn, insolent, cringing by turns, with all the vices of their unwilling servitude upon them, they cry to high heaven for vengeance. And avenged they have been, for surely Jamaica is the land of wasted opportunities.
There is an old house high on the hills above Montego Bay. It is beautifully situated, looking away over the hills and over the lovely bay. It has two-foot thick stone walls built by slave labour, the pillars that uphold the verandah are of solid mahogany—painted white by some Goth—and the windows are heavily shuttered.
It is haunted, they say.
“Knock, knock, knock!” comes a sound against the shutters of one room every night, a passionately appealing knock that will not be stayed. Only some people can hear it, but when they do, it wrings their hearts, so importunate is it. One man I know of sitting there reading at night, used every prayer and exhortation he could think of to still that uneasy ghost—he was a priest of the Church of Rome—but it would not be stilled, and at last he—practical, middle-aged man as he was, fled away from the sound of it to some friends who lived the other side of the town, and refused ever to come back to that haunted house. Was it some unhappy woman begging and praying her master who had been her lover to intercede for her son caught in the slave revolt? Whoever it was prayed there, prayed in vain, and now sensitive souls hear the knock, knock, knock, “for God's sake have pity and help me!”
Oh, most of the houses of the old slave town could tell pitiful stories.
Bleby tells ghastly ones of what happened to the unfortunate slaves when the whites had recovered themselves and got the upper hand. In reading them, we must always remember that this is always the case when a handful of people holding a very much larger class by fear has been thoroughly frightened itself.
There was a negro named Bailey who had hidden his master's silver for safety in a cave, and after the rebellion was over he took one of the women belonging to the estate and went to the cave to bring back to the house the property which he had hidden. He sent off the woman with a load upon her head, and remained behind to get out the rest. A company of militia came upon him thus engaged. They paid no heed to his explanations, and when the woman returned for another load he had been hanged as a man taken red-handed!
But the case that Bleby dilates upon is that of a negro named Henry Williams. Now Henry Williams appears to have been a very decent, respectable man, far advanced from the wild savage who was his progenitor. He was wickedly treated, but I do not think he was exactly the martyr Bleby makes out.
“He was a respected and useful class leader in the Wesleyan Society at Beechamville,” says Bleby. Can't we imagine him? He was a driver when he wasn't in religion, a slave on Rural Retreat, and the adjoining estate belonged to our friend the Rev. George William Bridges. This was extremely unlucky for Henry, for evidently the attorney who managed Rural Retreat and Mr Bridges got talking together, and doubtless agreed on the unfortunately growing tendency of the slaves to think for themselves. More particularly did they object to this chapel-going, and the attorney of Rural Retreat instanced Henry as a particularly virulent specimen of the genus Black Baptist. They concocted a plan which holds them both up to contempt. The manager of Rural Retreat sent for Henry, and though he was not in the habit of going to any place of worship, told him that he was going to church at Mr Bridges' house and desired the attendance of all the slaves on Rural Retreat. None were to go to Bellemont chapel, which appears to have been the place they affected. But none came to Mr Bridges' house save and except Henry. Even his wife and children had gone to Bellemont as usual. On his master asking him why he had not obeyed his order and brought the people to service, he answered meekly enough that the people were not under his direction on Sunday.
“But have I not told you,” said his master, “that you and the people are not to go to Bellemont chapel preaching and praying? How dare you go when I tell you not and encourage the people to disobey my orders? I'll teach you to disobey my orders. You shall not go to Bellemont for nothing!”
And he actually sent the unfortunate man to the Rodney Hall Workhouse, the most dreaded workhouse in the whole island—this man who was a class leader and a man of standing among his own people—with his hands tied behind his back and in charge of other slaves like a common criminal, though they knew perfectly well that he would have gone and delivered himself up to receive what was coming to him.
“I have no mind,” said his master, “that you should go there as a gentleman, as if you were going on your own business.”
“Excessive labour, miserable diet, chains and the whip, soon brought down his strength,” writes Bleby, and he goes on to tell at length of his suffering. His leg was so diseased that he could not put it to the ground, he had been thrashed till his back was one unspeakable sore, so pestiferous that the prisoners in the same cell complained that the stench proceeding from his wounds was too great to be endured. At last he was released. And I suppose for want of any other place to go to, made his way back to his own people.
And his master made him the text of his discourse to his slaves.
“Do you see that man,” he said. “There is a man that wears as good a coat as I do, and can be trusted with anything about the property, but because he will go to that————— preaching place, you see what a tremendous punishment I have laid upon him; and if I will serve that man so, what won't I do to the rest of you if you disobey my orders and go to Bellemont chapel.”
Undoubtedly Williams could have induced the people on the estate to go to church, and undoubtedly he encouraged them to disobey their master. It shows a great step upwards in the status of the slave, and it shows us clearly the cruelty of slavery. Why should not a man worship where he pleased? But it was for disobedience that Williams was punished. Bleby talks about him as we should of a saint and martyr. He may have been, but in the eyes of his master he was merely a very disobedient slave whom he had to break lest the disaffection spread.
Bleby is an amusing person, though he does not intend it. He finds in the end that all those who had ill-treated the slaves suffered punishment at the hands of God. Most of them were cut off in their prime, by accident or suicide, all but Mr Bridges the rector, who had his deserts in a different manner.
“One morning, having breakfasted on board a ship in the harbour with his four youthful and lovely daughters, who were but too fondly beloved, and several other ladies and gentlemen, the whole party went out for a short excursion in the ship's boats. While they were thus pleasurably engaged a squall arose, unobserved by the party in the boats, and swept suddenly across the bay ('beautiful Kingston Harbour'), when the boat containing the four young ladies and two or three other persons was capsized, and the sisters all disappeared, to be seen no more. The agony of the bereaved parent while he gazed from the other boat upon the spot where his children had been swallowed up in a moment, may be more easily conceived than described. He was stricken to the dust. The towering pride which was characteristic of the man gave way when he thus felt the hand of God upon him.”
It was men like Bleby who took the religious training of the slaves in hand. And they succeeded in gaining their confidence, not because they were the best people to have their minds and morals in charge, but for the very same reason that such Nonconformists succeeded in England. They saw how cruelly, heavily, the established rules pressed upon those in the lower social stratum, and they not only sympathised with them but promised reparation in another life.
Feeling ran very high in Jamaica in those times. The Colonial Church Union was formed, and the members behaved in a manner that would have been unseemly in a collection of drunken pugilists, let alone people declaring themselves supporters of the Established Church of the realm. Up and down the land they waged war against the “sectarians,” they visited the houses of these preachers, and on more than one occasion tarred and feathered those they particularly disliked. On one occasion they even wreaked their wrath on Bleby himself. Now I do not think any man should be tarred and feathered, but if any man was going to be, I am really glad it was Bleby. There is something about his book which makes me—who would like to be an impartial historian—thoroughly dislike him. I can quite appreciate the effect he had upon his compeers.
The editor of the Courant, a paper which appears to have been published at Montego Bay, wrote: “The bills against the painters of parson B———— have all been thrown out, and the chapel razers have not been recognised; so they are all a party of ignoramuses! I have only to say for myself, that if a mad dog was passing my way, I would have no hesitation in shooting him; and if I found a furious animal on two legs teaching a parcel of poor ignorant beings to cut my——————- or to fire my dwelling, my conscience would not trouble me one bit more for destroying him, than it would for the destruction of a mad dog.”
There we have the feelings of the two classes in a nut-shell, as quoted by that pestilential person Bleby himself. The planters were very sure that the dissenters by their teaching were inciting the negroes to rebellion, and having read Bleby carefully, I can quite understand how the teaching of men like him undoubtedly widened the breach there must always have been between master and slave.
Most dissenters I fancy came under suspicion. There was a young man called Whiteley, a relation of the absentee proprietor of an estate called New Ground, who had been sent out by his relation with letters to the manager, and a suggestion that he should be given work on the estate. But what he saw there he did not like. He spoke openly of his dislike and incurred the displeasure of the St Ann's Colonial Church Union, and they sent him a deputation of two of their number, stating:—
“1st. That they had heard he had been leading the minds of the slaves astray by holding forth doctrines of a tendency to make them discontented with their present condition.
“2ndly. That he was a Methodist.
“3rdly. That they had a barrel of tar down on the bay to tar and feather him, as he well deserved, and that they would do so by G———!”
Now his offences appear very mild, and hardly deserve such drastic treatment, though I think the young man was a little smug.
Here are the offences:—
1st. He acknowledged he had written a letter to the Rev. Thomas Pinnock, a Wesleyan missionary, asking him to help him in getting other employment away from the estate. Surely quite the proper thing to do, since he did not like the way the estate was conducted.
2ndly. In a letter written to the attorney of New Ground, he had said, “The Lord reward you for the kindness you have shown me, and grant you in health and wealth long to live!”
I really can't see that that called for tar and feathers.
3rdly. That he had said to a slave who had opened a gate for him at a certain place, “The Lord bless you!”
4thly. That he had asked the drivers of the workhouse gang questions respecting the offences of negroes of that gang. And surely that was harmless enough.
5thly. That he had made private remarks about the manner in which he had seen Mr M'Lean the overseer treat the slaves.
Here one of the deputation, Dicken, who was overseer at Windsor, a neighbouring estate, told him that he had two negroes at that moment in the stocks; and added with a brutal oath, if he would come over in the morning he would let him see them properly flogged.
I wonder how many unfortunates got an extra flogging, not because they deserved it, but just to show those who were bent on helping the negro that the other side, who were pledged to slavery and things as they were, defied them and all their works.
The last accusation the young man declared had not a particle of truth in it. He had never preached to 150 slaves at one time, though to all the other offences he pleaded guilty.
It shows how high party spirit ran, how the planting class objected to raising the status of the slave, when we find that these planters managed to get that dangerous young man banished the island before he had been there fourteen weeks. He was sowing the seeds of disaffection in a soil already ripe.
“These extracts,” says Bleby, “show... the almost rabid hostility of the planters to everything, and to every person who had the most distant connection with the religious instruction of their slaves.”
Again and again the Colonial Church Union shut up the chapels, razed them to the ground, and drove out and often tarred and feathered the preachers. Their very lives according to Bleby were in danger. At last these doings attracted the attention of the Governor, the Earl of Mulgrave, afterwards the Marquess of Normanby, and he took the strong measure of dismissing from his regiment Colonel Hilton of St Ann's Western Regiment, not exactly for being a member and leading spirit in the Colonial Church Union, but because he, the colonel of a regiment of militia, had dared to put his name to resolutions censuring the conduct of the Captain-General—the Earl of Mulgrave—upon a most important point of military discipline. “He has no choice,” wrote the Governor's secretary, “but to remove you from the command of the St Ann's Western Regiment; and I have therefore received his commands to notify you that your commission is accordingly cancelled.” And the letter is addressed “James L. Hilton, Esq., St Ann's.”
We can imagine the slap in the face this must have been to the planters. The Governor himself, who should have upheld the ruling classes in everything, actually ranging himself with dissenters, dissenting parsons and slaves! That is what James Hilton and men of his ilk doubtless said to each other over their rum punch, when a royal proclamation was issued declaring the Colonial Church Union to be an illegal association. But the Governor stuck to his point, a circular was addressed to the custodes, the chief magistrates of each parish, calling upon them to do their duty, and he expressed his determination to deprive those who continued to adhere to the Union of all appointments they might hold under the Crown; also declaring that neither actual violence towards missionaries, nor a repetition of illegal threats would be allowed to pass unpunished.
But the Colonial Church Union had many friends. I can quite see those planters meeting and cursing the foolishness of the Governor, who actually interfered on behalf of these unspeakable dissenting parsons. They said he could not possibly understand in what manner the chapel preachers upset the negroes. The man who took the command of the St Ann's Regiment in place of Mr Hilton, a Mr Hamilton Brown, at the first muster declared in emphatic language he was in entire agreement with their late colonel. He was sure that not only the regiment, but everyone in the island whose opinion was worth having would be with him.
He reckoned without his host.
“Lieut.-Col. Brown was on the ground at the head of his regiment,” says Madden, writing of the Colonial Church Union—and Madden was one of the special magistrates sent out at the Abolition, a particularly fair and farseeing man, “when the Governor, Lord Mulgrave arrived. His Lordship addressed the regiment, and Lieut.-Col. Brown was ordered by him to sheath his sword and consider himself removed from the regiment. Upon his dismissal three-fourths of the regiment broke and quitted the ranks; some of the officers tore off their epaulets and trampled on them; the men were however re-collected in the ranks and marched past in review order under the command of the officer next in rank not, however, without every attempt, by persuasion and abuse alternately from the mutinous officers, to induce the men to refuse to perform their duty. A stone of large size was thrown at the Governor, which fortunately fell short of his person; the officer, however, who was charged with this disgraceful outrage denied having committed it, and no further investigation took place. Thus ended the memorable review at Huntly Pastures.”
It was not only the officers of the St Ann's Regiment who were in agreement with the Colonial Church Union, for they say that actually eleven magistrates were dismissed before its power was broken.
I suppose they held the last redoubt in the cause of slavery. And Jamaica must have been rather an exciting place to live in while that last defence was held. The slave-holders were all the more bitter that their power was slipping from them, and it was some little time before the dissenting ministers were allowed to preach as they wished and without interference. Some of the custodes had a hard time protecting them. Many of them asked for trouble.
A Mr Greenwood applied at the Quarter Sessions of the Parish of St Ann to take the oaths. The custos was S. M. Barrett, and there was a big assembly in the Courthouse, a large number of persons being connected with the former Church Union. No sooner did Mr Greenwood make his appearance in the Court than there was a loud uproar. These angry gentlemen vented their wrath upon him.
“Methodist parson among us!” they shouted. “Turn him out! Turn him out! We will have no Methodists here!” They were on their own ground. One magistrate shouted: “I protected one of the wretches before at the hazard of my life! I will not protect this one!” And Mr Hamilton Brown, his dismissal from his regiment still rankling, called upon the custos “to order Mr Greenwood out of the Courthouse forthwith! Forthwith!”
But the custos was made of sterner stuff. Though without sympathy for the preacher, he declared he was going to administer the law without respect of persons.
“So long as a doubt remained as to what law or laws were in force here affecting dissenters, I have allowed all the advantages of that uncertainty to popular prejudice; but now that it has been shown and decided that the Toleration Act is in force in this island, I am bound, it is imperative on me, to admit Mr Greenwood to qualify and take the oaths.”
But his listeners would not believe him.
They shouted, “It has never been decided.” In fact they didn't like the Methodists, and finally, each one feeling the support of his fellows, it came to “We set the law at defiance!”
At the hazard of his own life that custos defended the parson of whom he disapproved highly, and finally, getting open the door of the room of the grand jury, he advised the minister to escape through the window, for he could no longer defend him!
I like this story. It must have been such a stirring scene. It is told by Bleby to illustrate the brutality of the planters. We of another age can look on with a smile, as elders smile at and enjoy the fallings out of children. The riot was brought to the notice of the Governor, who promptly ordered an investigation, which led to a prosecution of Messrs Brown and Rose, two of the principal leaders, a prosecution and a triumph; for the grand jury acquitted them I doubt not as planters who had upheld waning rights and were worthy of all the honour their fellows could give them. I expect they all thought things would be better in the future, and their sons would see their actions justified.
But things were nearing the end. The long, long martyrdom of slavery was drawing to a close. In a few short months came Abolition, and the slave was free to worship when and where he chose.
