An Audit of Explicit and Implicit Mentions of Stroud and the Five Valleys
Contained within the Pages of
The Interest
How the British Establishment Resisted
the Abolition of Slavery
By Michael Taylor
1. Introduction: Demerara, 1823: ‘At Success, the British were humiliated. When the rebels stepped out from the main house to encounter the redcoats, the cavalry panicked and fled. Some rode for a mile without pausing; some did not rest until they met with reinforcements; and others fell from their steeds into the canal that marked the plantation’s boundary.’
2. ‘The next Friday, eleven days after the rebellion had broken out, a hunting-party mustered at dawn … Marching along the canal trenches, a detachment of militiamen led by two redcoat officers and a posse of Indian guides drove deep into the South American wilderness.’
3. Jamaica: a colour illustration: ‘James Hakewill was an English architect who toured Jamaica in 1820 and 1821. These are his engravings of Kingston’s Harbour Street …’ Redcoats can be seen in full uniform sauntering down the street.
4. Jamaica December 1831: ‘Just as in Demerara in 1823, the rebels were outgunned … Besides their muskets and bayonets, the redcoats had … rockets, massive sheet-iron missiles …that had a range of more than a mile.’ On another occasion, in another battle, ‘Had the rebels maintained … position, on higher ground and sheltered by the tropical canopy, they might have held off the redcoats.’ Later in this chapter, Michael Taylor comments on how some Maroons were used: ‘… likely, they were paid to find rebels and report their whereabouts to the redcoats … At Great Valley, one rebel begged for and received the pardon of the redcoat Captain Oates only to be shot in the back minutes later by a disgruntled militiaman.’
5. This so-called Christmas Rebellion was later renamed ‘the Baptist War’ – plantation owners blamed Baptist preachers for teaching the wrong sort of Christianity. And they particularly hated Thomas Burchell, who originated from Nailsworth. (see https://sootallures.wixsite.com/topographersarms/post/from-nailsworth-to-montego-bay)
6. ‘As Jamaica descended into something close to civil war, the Whig ministry in London charged a new man with ending the colonial conflict. This was … the Earl of Musgrave … when Mulgrave heard rumours of a jailbreak, he marched … sixty miles from Spanish Town at the head of a redcoat regiment …’
7. This next point is speculative but possibly worthy of investigation by someone with time and motivation. It’s about the High Church movement, the Anglo-Catholic revival, and the Oxford Movement. Michael Taylor writes about the onset of abolition in 1833: ‘… the imminent delivery of slave freedom was provoking fresh ardour among Britain’s most ardent conservatives … Froude was a young clergyman whose contempt for reform had won him friends in fellow theologians John Keble and John Henry Newman. Together, they founded the Oxford Movement … the most important politico-religious group in Victorian Britain … Froude hated the abolitionists … he was explicitly racist …’ I wonder if Thomas Keble up at Bisley might have entertained similar viewpoints … A couple of paragraphs on the second page of this link could make someone curious to discover more: http://www.bisleybenefice.org.uk/Thomas%20Keble_lifehistory.pdf More from Michael Taylor: “In December 1835, the Oxford clergyman John Henry Newman had preached a sermon entitled ‘Slavery allowed not encouraged under the Gospel’ in which he alighted on ‘a slave’s Christian duty of allegiance and submission to his masters and to the established order’. Taking 1 Corinthians 7:21 … Newman argued that slavery was ‘a condition of life ordained by God …’ ... it was ‘not a duty to make slaves free and not a sin to have slaves …’ … abolitionists were ‘the blind leading the blind’ … New man was not the only ‘Tractarian’ thus inclined, and his editors have noted that his sermons articulated ‘the typical Tractarian attitude towards slavery and … the status quo’.”
8. Addendum: also brief mentions for Lord Bathurst (Colonial Secretary: an ‘ameliorist’, not an abolitionist); Christopher Codrington (‘the scion of the slaveholding dynasty’… ‘The Codrington Library at All Souls College, Oxford, was financed by and named after the same Codrington dynasty which owned plantations on Barbados and slandered Buxton’), and David Ricardo the economist, who ‘Amid further rumours of conspiracy … withdrew’ from a syndicate meeting with the Whig government and ‘syndicates of leading bankers’ about how to raise the loan to pay for the colossal compensation to be paid to slaveholders.
