Reassessing “Tacky's Revolt”: Slaves' Uses of Violence in Jamaica during the Seven Years' War

Adopting the term coined by Jamaican colonial administrator and historian Edward Long, modern scholars know as “Tacky’s revolt” the widespread slave unrest that roiled Jamaica for a year and a half beginning in 1760.  In his 1774 History of Jamaica, Long applied the name of a single slave from St. Mary parish to the myriad acts of autonomy and aggression perpetrated by a thousand enslaved blacks across the island.  In relating the multivalent series of events as a unified insurrection of bellicose Akan warriors against their owners, Long rendered the most extensive slave-initiated violence in eighteenth-century British America intelligible and potentially preventable.  Such a narrative suited Long’s purposes, but historians’ adoption of it has obfuscated the meaning of the diverse array of enslaved blacks’ actions in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica.  This paper draws upon new evidence and contends that Jamaica did not experience a single slave rebellion in 1760, as the name “Tacky’s revolt” implies and as Jamaica’s politicians and planters at the time believed.  Individual slaves exploited the atmosphere of anxiety and fear that radiated throughout white Jamaican society following an initial outbreak of violence in varying ways and to distinct ends.  While some slaves utilized force to affirm ethnic, gender, or religious affiliations of African origin, others capitalized upon and even fostered the panic to attain valuable perquisites as martial allies of the island’s slaveholders.  Enslaved blacks seized upon the diffusion of Jamaica’s military strength to assert their military and political authority, but they did so to confirm or to establish divergent associations.