Erik Loomis: This Day in Labor History: December 27, 1831. The Baptist Rebellion began in Jamaica. This slave rebellion of up to 60,000 people, put down over the next couple of weeks, also was the final straw that moved the United Kingdom toward outlawing slavery in its colonies!!!

This Day in Labor History: December 27, 1831. The Baptist Rebellion began in Jamaica. This slave rebellion of up to 60,000 people, put down over the next couple of weeks, also was the final straw that moved the United Kingdom toward outlawing slavery in its colonies!!!

By the early 1830s, the slave system in the British colonies was under attack from a number of fronts. First, there was a large abolitionist movement in Britain, led by William Wilberforce. This was known to slaves in the Caribbean.

Second, the British religious denominations had engaged in large-scale missions among the slaves in the previous decades.

In the United States, planters kept very tight control over slaves’ religious world, or at least as much as possible, with white preachers teaching subservience to the slaves on isolated plantations.

In the British colonies, this was less in the hands of individual planters and more concentrated in missionaries themselves.

Presbyterians, Methodists, and Anglicans made up a lot of the missionaries, but so did Baptists and they had more success among the slaves in Jamaica.

In a nearly all-African descent society, very unlike the United States, certain classes of slaves could have more autonomy and given that there weren’t that many Baptist missionaries in Jamaica, the black deacons had a lot of ability to lead.

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