Miles Ogborn | Burning of Moor Park Estate

The Jamaican Emancipation War of 1831-2 (Sam Sharpe’s rebellion) was marked more by the burning of plantations than by direct attacks on the island’s white inhabitants. During the rebellion, over 100 plantations had buildings destroyed in St James parish alone. In contrast, only 14 white people were killed, compared to more than 500 of the enslaved who died in the reprisals and judicial killings that followed.

Burning the plantations directly hit the slaveholders’ business interests when the mill houses, boiling houses, trash houses (for storing cane trash as fuel), and sugar curing houses were destroyed. The fires were also signals of defiance and action sent to other rebels, and to the plantation owners and overseers who had fled to the coast. Burning the estates demonstrated commitment to the cause, and pushed the plantations’ enslaved inhabitants to further involvement in the freedom struggle. Finally, burning the Great Houses was an attack on the plantation owners’ claims over the island. It was an attack on those who lived comfortable lives on the backs of the enslaved. Burning their property would remove them from Jamaica’s landscape.

EVIDENCE

This can be seen in the evidence given at the trials that followed the uprising. On February 28, 1832, William Stennett and Virgil, enslaved men from George Gordon’s Moor Park Estate in St James, were tried at Montego Bay. Edward Mills, an enslaved man, testified that on the Wednesday after Christmas, he “saw William Stennett break open the Busha’s [overseer’s] Store and set fire to a Puncheon of Rum that was in it – he then went to the Works and opened the Herring Store and took fire with some Trash and put it [in] the Cask of Tar and the fire burn down the Works”.

Eliza McGriggor, ‘a female slave of colour’ on the estate, gave evidence of Stennett’s further plans. She saw him “come to the Great House with a cord, and he said he brought it to tie Mr George Gordon”. She reported that Stennett had said that he had set fire to all of “the Buildings at the Works” designed for sugar production, saving only the ‘Hot House’ – where the enslaved were confined with sickness or for punishment – “to put Mr Gordon in and then he would light it up”. Another witness, Mary Gordon, ‘a free person of colour’, elaborated on Stennett’s trail of destruction and his plan to kill his former master, saying that “he said he had burnt the Overseer’s House and the book keepers barracks, kitchen, and buttery and that he had left the Hot House for Mr George Gordon, whose hands he would tie with the cord and put him into the Dungeon in the Hot House and then…set fire to it. And that he William Stennett did no[t] care if he died for it”.

DESTROY

Unable to find Gordon, and with the plantation buildings burning, Stennett focused on the Great House. The witnesses agreed on his determination to destroy the Gordon’s domestic comfort, economic power and social status:

Eliza McGriggor: “I saw him then go to the Office and set it on fire, after this I saw him go upstairs into Master’s Room and I saw the nett on fire. Prisoner then brought down a Mattrass half burnt into the Office, the House was then in flames and I then left the Yard and went away. ”

Mary Gordon: “I then saw him with a Fire Stick and he went into the Office and set fire to it – he had also a Hammer in hand with which he was breaking all the Sash Windows in the office. I saw the Office on fire shortly after he went in. I saw him then go into one of the Bed Rooms in the House and was breaking the Sash Windows there the same as he was doing in the Office – the Office is in the Great House, which was burnt down. ”

Edward Mills: “After this he went to the lying in Room Piazza and took a fire stick and carried it into Masters Office in the House and set fire to the office – he first set fire to the Papers and then to a Bed which he brought from upstairs he then went upstairs and carried some dry Grass with him and put it on the Bed and set fire to it – he then came down and went to the Horse Stable and set fire to that – he then carried fire to the lying in Room and set that on fire, then to the Corn House and Trash House and all were burnt down.”

William Stennett then celebrated in the light of the flames. As Mills told the court: “After he had burnt everything, he was jumping about the place with his Shirt off saying he had done what he wanted.”

Yet he did not act alone. Two of the witnesses also gave evidence against Virgil. Edward Mills said, “William Stennett drink Rum and Gunpowder” to swear a binding oath to join the war, and that “he bargained with Virgil to burn the place”. Subsequently, Mills “saw Virgil at the Busha’s House with a Mache[te] in his Hand, he broke an Ant’s Nest and set fire to it, and then he took it and set fire to the House”. While Eliza McGriggor had not seen Virgil actually setting a fire, she said that he “was there with other Negroes when the House and Estate were on fire” and that she “heard Virgil say that they burnt the place to make the White people go off the country”. In contrast, others on the plantation, even those close to the two men, tried to stop them. Mills, under cross-examination, told the court that “Every Body begged Prisoners not to put fire, but the[y] would do so. … Virgil’s wife begged him not to burn the place and he cursed her and said he would”.

There was both righteous anger and directed know-how – such as using tar and a termite nest for kindling – in the burning of the plantation works, the white employees’ homes, and the Great House ‘to make the White people go off the country’. Stennett and Virgil attacked George Gordon’s business, way of life and power to control others. They systematically destroyed what he had and they did not: home comforts, foodstores and the paper-filled office from which the plantation was run. They also went looking for him.

Yet this powerful act of resistance had repercussions that some on the plantation had feared. William Stennett and Virgil were convicted and executed on the estate that they had burnt.

Miles Ogborn is professor at Queen Mary University of London. Send feeback to reparation.research@uwimona.edu.jm.