What I Am Reading: "Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War" by Vincent Brown

I promised more black history books, so here's one. This book, newly released, is an academic history of Tacky's Revolt and the Coromantee War, slave uprisings in Jamaica in 1760 - 61. This event is important in Jamaican history, and Prof. Brown's thesis is that, beyond just being a local event, it is in fact part of a network of overlapping Atlantic wars: an extension of the warfare in East Africa at the time, a war between black slaves and white slave-owners, a war between different factions of the enslaved, and the Seven Years War. The slaves involved in the rebellion did not leave any records of their own, so analysis of them and their motivations must be extrapolated from existing records and histories made by slave-owners.

The analysis starts in West Africa, on the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast. A wartorn region at the time, the war fueled the region's slave export economy, in a sort of positive feedback loop whereby captives from the war were sold into slavery, slavery drove the engines of imperial commerce on the other side of the Atlantic, and the European empires foment more conflict as a result. The militarized African polities in the region evolved from the existence of the slave trade: Oyo, Dahomey, Asante, the Fante confederation, and other states engaged in a perpetual war of shifting alliances, diplomacy, and betrayals. Europeans, and especially the British, sat in their fortified coastal compounds, and crafted their own alliances. Over the course of the century, the wars heated up from small, ritualized skirmishes to scorched-earth total war with European weaponry. To demonstrate the connectivity of the regions across the Atlantic, Brown discusses three players: John Cope, a scheming British agent at one of the trading centers, Apongo (later given the name Wager), a local African martial leader, and Arthur Forrest, a Royal Navy captain. Cope would later retire to Jamaica, where Apongo would be sold into slavery; serving along the way on a Royal Navy ship at the behest of Forrest, his owner. We do not know the precise identity of Apongo, but Brown covers a few options gleaned from records of trade in Africa at the time. All of our official biographical of Apongo knowledge on the Jamaican side is from Thomas Thistlewood, a slave overseer on who kept a diary at the time of the uprising.

Jamaica at the time was a highly militarized society, with a hyper-masculine white slave-owner class that lived in perpetual fear of internal and external threats. After taking the island from the Spanish, the British had to contend with (in addition to those competing European empires) "maroons," armed former slaves who had been left behind as a nuisance guerrilla force. These forces gave the British a considerable headache until they were subdued by treaty in the 1730s; a way for the planters to establish control over the mountainous interior, not just the plantations and ports. Jamaica overcame its strife and the devastation of a massive earthquake in 1692 to become an extremely prosperous colony, the linchpin of the overseas economic empire that set the prosperous path of Britain to this day (and whose beneficiaries are having their statues toppled as we speak). The British war machine at the time was centered on Jamaica, as violence was directed not only constantly against slaves (more on that later), but against French and Spanish targets as far away as Senegal. Many British forces who fought in the Seven Years War cut their teeth fighting Jamaican uprisings or on raids against French-allied tribes in Africa. Apongo was brought to this hub by Forrest, and left there in 1748, where Apongo re-encountered Cope. His own identity was complicated enough to encompass having been a former African military leader, a British sailor, and now a plantation slave. The slave group most prized by the slave owner class were the Coromantees (spelled many different ways), a “loosely-structured organization of co-nationals” comprised of those enslaved during the wars in West Africa, made up of different and overlapping ethnic, national, and religious groups. Apongo and other eventual rebel leaders and rebellion-participants were Coromantees.

Division among slaves was an important component of white rule. At the middle of the 18th century, the Jamaican population was about 90% slave, with between half and three-quarters of that number from Africa. Coromantees made up the largest contingent, but there were slaves taken from all over the continent. Brown says that slaves had many different identities they could take on - relating to their old African identities, their relationships with their fellow slaves, their relations with their white owners - and these identities shaped what political action was possible. Some were given positions of relative power and respect by their owners, and were thus relied upon as part of the planter hierarchy. Slaves were also of course traded between European powers, with trade even taking place between powers that were otherwise belligerent. Spain was not allowed to import, and could only be a customer in the slave trade at this point. In the meanwhile, smaller powers whom today we do not think as large geopolitical powers were involved, including the Danish. Slave trade between European powers also shaped slave identity, and spread information on politics and tactics. An interesting example given here is the uprising on Danish St. John island in 1733, whereby:

"...an army of "Aminas" from the eastern Gold Coast took and held the island for several months. While few planters would have been aware of it, the rebel Africans were the remnants of the Akwamu political-military aristocracy, recently defeated on the Gold Coast by Akyem. Danish officials received aid from French troops stationed at Martinique...thereby preventing the resurrection of Akwamu in the Caribbean." (Ch. 1)

This is an interesting sidenote because of how African politics survived through the diaspora and were directly applied in a different context: another fully Atlantic slave war. Slaves rebelled often, including on Jamaica. Geography, which Brown pays particular attention to, often affected the rebel tactics: slaves rebelled on ships when they were within sight of shore, on docks when many people were coming and going, or escaped out into the bush where the planter elite didn't have full control. Some of these escaped slaves joined the maroons in Jamaica, though after the treaty, the maroons would return escaped slaves for payment - another applied example of different identities. The Atlantic network was immensely complicated, as cultural affinity, migratory experience, and social struggle all mixed together, and slaves figured out who to identify with as they went along.

On to the rebellion in question: Tacky's Revolt started in April of 1760. Tacky himself doesn't appear in the book as much as Apongo does earlier; he seems to have been a slave from the area of Accra, and his name was the term in Ga for a member of a royal family. As a side note, Brown does a lot of work on the slave names in the book, often returning them to their traditional African roots to eliminate the slave-owner spelling corruptions - Quashie back to Kwesi, Cudjoe to Kojo, Quack to Kwaku, and so on. Anyway, by 1760, Jamaica was low on food as a result of the Seven Years' War, new slave routes were bringing slaves from West Central Africa and not Coromantees from the Gold Coast, and the maroons controlled their own mountainous spaces in the interior of the island, allied to the British authorities. On April 8th, 1760, slaves seized an undefended fort in St. Mary's Parish, on the windward side of the island. Slave-owners were confused, but think of it as a local problem, hence why it was just Tacky's Revolt and not identified in a larger Atlantic context. The rebel slaves quickly raided local plantations with their new weapons; they recruited from the slaves they found; though not all were trusted, and some even sided with their masters to the point of dying fighting for them. The rebel group came to encompass about 400 men; they used spiritual practices, known as Obeah, to establish group loyalty and confidence. Their goals were unclear: were they seeking a social revolution, subaltern in character? Or, like the “Aminas” in the Danish West Indies, did they want to establish their own polity, with their own elite and commerce with their neighbors? Brown analyzes that the latter was a possibility, as their tactics showed pursuit of territorial control, not just evasion. After the top-heavy planter militia proved useless in a fight, the governor declared martial law, mobilized regular troops, and established a naval quarantine of the island. The regular military and the maroons did a lot of guerrilla fighting, especially after the main rebel force was broken (and their leaders killed) while trying to maintain control over a small pirate cove. Holdouts negotiated a surrender, the uprising lasted a few weeks. The slave-owning authorities instituted a reign of terror, with interrogations and executions of any slave suspected of involvement; there was a fear that the revolt was the prelude to a larger uprising.

As it turns out, it is very possible that they were accidentally right. Some tortured slaves indicated that an uprising was planned for Whitsunday, but went off over Easter instead. This may be a post hoc rationalization or oversimplification, but the planters established a narrative that Tacky went too early, "because he was drunk" and other such excuses. It is possible that the rebellion was planned and then botched in this way, or it is possible that the rebels were merely opportunistic. In any event, at the end of May, slaves rose in Westmoreland Parish, on the leeward side of the island, an area much wealthier than St. Mary's and less rugged. Again, the motives of the slave rebels were unclear: establish a maroon-style mountain redoubt? Their own black state, possibly with slaves? Maybe something in between, or maybe there was no agreement as they negotiated among themselves, reflecting different identities and different priorities. Again, the slaves started raiding plantations with great effectiveness while setting up camp in the mountains, and the governor declared martial law when the militia was too sloppy to get the job done. The military mobilization sent ripples through the Atlantic, as the flagship docked in Port Royal was the nerve center for an entire military theater of operations, which now had fighting close to home to attend to. Again, the maroons and the marines overran the fortified rebel camp in the mountains (in another example of a larger Atlantic war, some of the same marines who had fought the French-aligned tribes in a raid on Senegal in 1758). The rebels were dispersed, but an entire summer of guerrilla warfare followed. Some slave-owners were in favor of harsh discipline on captured slaves (and it was certainly carried out in many, many cases, including on Apongo, who died on the gibbet before he could be burned alive); some owners, however, quietly looked the other way as their slaves returned to work. Identities could be complicated for the planter elite as well, as some were mixed-race; and many mixed-race freedmen lived and worked in the larger towns, as well as many Jews. The racial makeup on the island was thus complicated, and this carried over to the rebellion as many black and mixed-race soldiers and slaves fought against the rebels. After Apongo's death two slaves named Simon and Agyeo took command of the rebels, both thought to be former African elites as well. Simon led his band south, into more rugged terrain in the next parish, and tried to cause economic damage through arson in the dry season. He died in combat in 1761, marking the effective end of the rebellion. Brown speculates that Simon was from a more inland African polity, due to his apparent skill in mountain combat. He was a shrewd user of both physical and social geography, as he apparently convinced local maroons to ignore him, while knowing which plantations (those of the rich, absentee owners) probably had not complied with scorched earth orders and still had food available.

Laws were tightened in the aftermath of the rebellion: no weapons for slaves, no Obeah, tighter restrictions on travel and assembly, and so on. Jamaica continued to prosper over the decades, but there was always slave unrest. Brown relates both pro-slavery John Locke and contemporary freed slave and abolitionist writer Olaudah Equiano as saying that slavery was a permanent state of war, part of why Jamaica was such a garrison state. Intellectually, some theorists thought that slave importations should wind down, in favor of perpetuating domestic growth of slaves. Historians of the revolt demonized slaves of turned them into noble savages, but in both cases supported the institution of slavery itself. As noted, they localized the history, despite also centering the leadership of Coromantees, by definition a trans-Atlantic group. This loose political group was soon obsolete, as by the end of the century, Asante established primacy in the Gold Coast area, and expanded to less warlike areas in the north, sending those people as slaves instead of Gold Coast POWs. Brown describes a shift in Caribbean slave rebellion from "African style" to "creole style," as those born into slavery, and thus with a different identity than those born free in Africa, pursued a more universalist and Enlightenment-inspired rebel path, such as that taken by the rebellion in Haiti at the turn of the century. Memory of the Jamaica rebellion however lived on, and was passed to newly-arrived slaves still decades later, which slave-owners found ominous. The French in St-Domingue were happy to take former rebels being sent away from Jamaica, so maybe inspiration passed to Toussaint Louverture through veterans of Tacky's revolt? Despite this, it doesn’t receive as much scholarly attention as it should, since it doesn’t quite fit with the Enlightenment-inspired rebellions of the era.

In a note at the end, Brown talks about why he wrote this book: he grew up in San DIego, itself a garrison city, and his military friends always thought of war as something that happened elsewhere. 9/11 brought home the fact that war is everywhere, and was interconnected in a network. This book is all about that subject, how war is not simply localized. It tackles many questions of geography - who owns what space, how they conceive of that space and of enemy-owned or liminal spaces, and how that influences their planning. It waxed a bit philosophic on geography at some points, but it is a good topic to encompass in a robust, modern, anti-colonial history such as this one, jam-packed with interesting historical detail and analysis.