For background to this piece I just copy something from several years ago:
By the mid-nineteenth century martial law was widely thought to be against the English constitution. Different principles were applied in the colonies however, and arguments over their application in Jamaica formed the basis of the Governor Eyre controversy.
In 1865 a relatively minor rebellion in Jamaica had been met with the declaration of martial law & with force amounting to outright brutality:
In the course of the pacification of the island by the army, during a month-long reign of terror, a thousand homes were burnt, nearly five hundred Negroes were killed, & more than that number were flogged & tortured[Semmel,B, 1962: The Governor Eyre Controversy, London, MacGibbon & Kee]
George Gordon, a member of the Jamaican legislature, who had taken no part in the riots but was considered to be guilty of stirring up trouble, was taken by the Governor from Kingston to the site of the uprising & executed
'A kind of litmus paper for political assumptions' [Rose,P 1994 Parallel Lives London Vintage], the case opened up the fault lines in English society, particularly intellectual society. At issue were questions of race, science, authority, law and the 'natural' order.
The Jamaica Committee, led by John Stuart Mill, campaigned for Governor Eyre to be tried for murder, while the Eyre Defence Fund, chaired by Carlyle, argued that he was a hero defending civilisation
Mill & Carlyle had already clashed on The Negro Question. In 1849 Carlyle, incensed by reports that sugar plantations in Jamaica & Demerara were suffering from shortages of labour, published an intemperate satirical rant in Fraser’s Magazine.
Emancipated slaves were unwilling to work for the kind of wages on offer; it is also interesting, in the light of current debates on job insecurity, that former slaves considered that contracts which tied them to an employer day after day for indefinite periods were little better than slavery: farming on smallholdings or cooperatives was considered a much superior way of life.
Carlyle argued that they had a duty to work; the State required them to produce sugar, & if they were unwilling to comply, to be 'servants to those that are born wiser than you, that are born lords of you; servants to the Whites, if they are (as what mortal can doubt they are?) born wiser than you' [Carlyle,T 1869 Collected Works Vol 6: The Nigger Question London Chapman & Hall], then those who were superior had the right to force them to do so.
Mill quickly replied with a letter to the editor of Fraser’s Magazine. He argued that if society should ever find it necessary to enforce a general duty to work, it should apply to whites as well as blacks; that differences between whites & blacks were due to environment not nature, but in any case, even the inherently superior had no right to impose their will by force. 'Though we cannot extirpate all pain, we can, if we are sufficiently determined upon it, abolish all tyranny' [1850 The Negro Question in Robson,JM (ed) 1984 JS Mill: Collected Works Vol XXI U Toronto Press].
Carlyle’s response was to publish an expanded version of his article as a pamphlet, this time using the deliberately more offensive title ‘The Nigger Question’ [Robson,JM (ed) 1984 JS Mill: Collected Works Vol XXI Toronto U Toronto Press p lxi]
First reactions to the news from Jamaica were mostly of horror. The Colonial Office set up a commission of enquiry, Governor Eyre was suspended and eventually recalled.
This was not enough for the Jamaica Committee who waged a long campaign. Darwin, Lyell, Huxley & Bright were among its members, while the Defence committee was more literary, including as it did Ruskin, Tennyson, Dickens & Kingsley. [Walpole,S 1904 The History of 25 Years Vol 2 1865-70 London Longmans, Green p127].
Mill in particular was determined not to let the matter drop, but after 3 attempts, which all resulted in juries refusing to return indictments, the case finally came to a close in 1868. As the Spectator (then a Liberal journal) summed it up:
The upper & middle class of the English people, especially the latter … are positively enraged at the demand of negroes for equal consideration with Irishmen, Scotchmen, & Englishmen … proceedings which would have cost the most well-meaning of weak-judging men his head if they had taken place in the United Kingdom … are heartily admired as examples of "strong government" when they take place in the British West Indies [quoted in Semmel]
One final outcome of all this was the end of John Stuart Mills’s parliamentary career. His opponents from the Eyre Defence Committee joined a vigorous campaign against him in his constituency of Westminster. Amidst a Liberal landslide, when every other London constituency returned a Liberal member, Mill lost badly to a Tory
I had felt quite queasy & startled to find the offensive title of Carlyle’s essay in the library catalogue and, in multiple editions, on the library shelves. But this was history & it had happened
Then I went to search out the reply from John Stuart Mill, in the impressive Collected Works published by the University of Toronto
I could not find this particular piece at first, but with a bit of diligence tracked it down under the title ‘The Negro Question’. I have to say that my first reaction was: Has modern North American political correctness trumped academic & editorial fidelity? But a bit more digging & I found the footnote which explained the sequence of events
Academic scrupulosity had prevailed
But the issue which so enraged Carlyle reverberates, in some form, to this day. Part of the planters’ case was that they could not afford to pay higher wages because they had to compete with slave-produced sugar from Brazil & the USA
The great sugar shortage in this country of 1973/4 was caused by rows about the effect of EEC entry on the West Indian sugar trade, as it does still in international trade negotiations (though the passion seems to be generated more by bananas now)
And the decision by the British government to use indentured labour from the Indian sub continent to replace slave labour caused racial tensions & unrest which are with us still
The great sugar shortage in this country of 1973/4 was caused by rows about the effect of EEC entry on the West Indian sugar trade, as it does still in international trade negotiations (though the passion seems to be generated more by bananas now)
And the decision by the British government to use indentured labour from the Indian sub continent to replace slave labour caused racial tensions & unrest which are with us still
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