BLACK REBELLION: FIVE SLAVE REVOLTS
From "Travellers and Outlaws"
Episodes In American History
By Thomas Wentworth Higginson
With An Appendix Of Authorities
[TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: This text contains five chapters of T.W. Higgison's 'Travellers and Outlaws'. This collection is commonly referred to as 'Black Rebellion: five slave revolts'.]
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
The author would express his thanks to the proprietors and editors of the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, and the Century, for their permission to reprint such portions of this volume as were originally published in those periodicals.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
CONTENTS
THE MAROONS OF JAMAICA
The Maroons! it was a word of peril once; and terror spread along the skirts of the blue mountains of Jamaica when some fresh foray of those unconquered guerrillas swept down from the outlying plantations, startled the Assembly from its order, Gen. Williamson from his billiards, and Lord Balcarres from his diplomatic ease,—endangering, according to the official statement, "public credit," "civil rights," and "the prosperity, if not the very existence, of the country," until they were "persuaded to make peace" at last. They were the Circassians of the New World, but they were black, instead of white; and as the Circassians refused to be transferred from the Sultan to the Czar, so the Maroons refused to be transferred from Spanish dominion to English, and thus their revolt began. The difference is, that while the white mountaineers numbered four hundred thousand, and only defied Nicholas, the black mountaineers numbered less than two thousand, and defied Cromwell; and while the Circassians, after years of revolt, were at last subdued, the Maroons, on the other hand, who rebelled in 1655, were never conquered, but only made a compromise of allegiance, and exist as a separate race to-day.
When Admirals Penn and Venables landed in Jamaica, in 1655, there was not a remnant left of the sixty thousand natives whom the Spaniards had found there a century and a half before. Their pitiful tale is told only by those caves, still known among the mountains, where thousands of human skeletons strew the ground. In their place dwelt two foreign races,—an effeminate, ignorant, indolent white community of fifteen hundred, with a black slave population quite as large and infinitely more hardy and energetic. The Spaniards were readily subdued by the English: the negroes remained u