Sam Sharpe

Samuel Sharpe was born into slavery in Saint James Parish, Jamaica, in 1801. He was the property of his namesake master Samuel Sharpe of the Hazelymph estate. He was unusually literate for an enslaved person — he learned to read in his early teens — and rose within the Native Baptist tradition of Jamaican Christianity to the position of class leader, the rank of lay preacher with disciplinary authority over a congregation.

He organized the largest slave rebellion in British Caribbean history. In December 1831 he convened a network of Native Baptist class leaders across western Jamaica and proposed a sit-down strike on the twenty-seventh of December 1831 — Boxing Day — at which the enslaved would refuse to work and demand wages. The strike was intended to be peaceful. White planters responded with violence; the strike became the Baptist War (also called the Sam Sharpe Rebellion). Approximately sixty thousand enslaved people were involved across western Jamaica — roughly one in five of the enslaved population of the entire island.

The rebellion was suppressed within ten days. Approximately five hundred enslaved people were killed in the suppression itself; over three hundred more, including Sharpe, were executed in the months that followed. Fourteen white people died.

Sharpe was tried, convicted, and hanged at the Charles Square in Montego Bay on the twenty-third of May 1832. He was thirty-one. His last recorded statement was: "I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live for a moment more in slavery."

The political shock of the Baptist War in Britain — far more than the abolitionist arguments of the Clapham circle — produced the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which freed every enslaved person in the British Empire by 1838.

He is honored here as the Baptist preacher whose strike forced abolition through the British Parliament.