In the days leading up to Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion, and in a circulated letter written after the initial violence outside the Morant Bay courthouse on October 11, Black Native Baptist deacon Paul Bogle called on other residents of St. Thomas-in-the-East to join him in fighting for the rights of the parish’s Black residents. He framed the events that were unfolding as a race war and urged others to join the cause, “Skin for skin!” Chapter 2 traces the interpretive history of this slogan, drawn from Job 2:4, and shows how it came to be used within the international anti-slavery movement. In using the phrase, Bogle aimed at a Black alliance that would cut across ethnic, religious, and class lines and that would be willing to meet White violence with a violent Black response. Although the rebellion was crushed, Bogle’s vision has lived on, shaping the experience of race in Jamaica today.

On behalf of the Edinburgh Ladies Emancipation Society, Quaker reformer Eliza Wigham drafted a public letter of condolence to Maria Jane, wife of George William Gordon, who had been executed for his alleged involvement in Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Wigham applied Matthew 25:40 – “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” – to George William Gordon. Chapter 5 shows how this text reflected a central pillar of the logic of the international anti-slavery movement. As deployed in sermons, speeches at public meetings, and argumentative pamphlets and books, including some penned by Wigham, this biblical text encoded a hierarchy that valued White heroism while delegitimizing Black agency in resisting White power. The chapter thus reckons with the fact that in the years and decades after the rebellion Bogle and other Black Jamaicans who died with him were viewed, even by White liberals, as misguided, or even barbarous.

Chapter 1 recounts some of the main events of Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Compared to other historical reconstructions, the chapter emphasizes the influence of the end of the American Civil War and debates about Reconstruction on the rebellion and its coverage in the press. The chapter offers a basic narrative framework within which to understand the arguments presented in Chapters 2 through 6.

Having been found guilty of treason, George William Gordon spent his last hour writing to his wife a letter containing personal goodbyes, business notes, and a firm protestation of innocence. Thanks to the newspaper-savviness of his mother-in-law Ann Shanon and his acquaintance Louis Chamerovzow, the letter was published in dozens of papers around the world. It fell like a thunderclap, helping to turn the tide of public opinion against the Jamaica government and the island’s White English governor, Edward John Eyre. Chapter 3 examines Gordon’s use of biblical language in his final letter. Enslaved at birth on the Cherry Garden estate, and rising to become an elected member of the House of Assembly, the island’s highest legislative body, Gordon invoked 2 Timothy 4:17 – “I have fought a good fight” – to present an alternative to Paul Bogle’s vision of a Black alliance prepared to meet White violence with a violent Black response. For Gordon, Black advancement would come only through what he considered legitimate forms of protest, namely political agitation and the shaping of public opinion in newspapers.

Chapter 6 sets the book’s four detailed case studies within broader patterns of public discourse around Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Jamaican Jewish newspaper editor Sydney Levien, White American abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, Black American Baptist missionary Samuel Ward, White English Baptist leader Edward Bean Underhill, Black American abolitionist and physician Sarah Parker Remond, and dozens of others this chapter mentions appealed to biblical slogans as they discussed race relations in Jamaica and their implications for the United States. The chapter illustrates the range of opinions expressed and affirms the importance of the Bible to debates about race relations after emancipation.

Having opposed Jamaica’s largely White plantocracy as an elected member of the House of Assembly, the island’s highest elected legislative body, and as a journalist and publisher, mixed-race Jamaican Robert Alexander Johnson migrated to New York in July 1865, where he joined the editorial staff of the Tribune. Chapter 4 recovers Johnson’s body of writing on Jamaica and the Morant Bay rebellion published in the Nation, the Evening Post, the Tribune, and Hours at Home in 1865–6. Johnson adopted the position that the events of October 11 were a riot, not a planned, organized rebellion. How, then, could Johnson account for the brutal government suppression? He quoted Hebrew 11:4 – “he, being dead, yet speaketh” – which summarizes Cain’s murder of Abel. Johnson, like a long line of Black interpreters this chapter traces, looked to the Cain and Abel story to provide an etiology of the inexplicable savagery of White violence. Johnson warned readers contemplating Reconstruction not to entrust the rights of free Black Americans to their former White enslavers.

The Conclusion summarizes the book’s arguments and contextualizes them within broader patterns of public discourse in which Jamaica was conceptualized as especially revealing about race, and in which biblical slogans were used to encode universal claims about race. The conclusion analyzes a speech given by English lawyer and politician Charles Savile Roundell, who had served as secretary to the Royal Commission of Inquiry appointed to investigate Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. Addressing the Tenth Annual Meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, held in Manchester, England, Roundell proposed taking Jamaica as a crucial instance, a term taken from Francis Bacon’s program for a new scientific method. And he cited the Bible as he made claims about how the races could and should relate to one another.

The Introduction frames the book’s argument by analyzing coverage of Jamaica’s 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in the American Missionary (New York), published by the American Missionary Association. The editors invoked Ecclesiastes 7:7, “Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad,” to blame Jamaica’s largely White plantocracy for pushing Black laborers to breaking point. They drew out the implications of this lesson on race for the United States – White Americans who had participated in the system of slavery should not be entrusted with safeguarding the rights of free Black citizens. This book shows how Jamaicans, Britons, and Americans understood Jamaica as a prime example, a test case that shed light on great questions about race and race relations occupying the Atlantic world at the end of the American Civil War. It argues that they used biblical slogans to encode a wide variety of claims about race and race relations. This Introduction relates the book’s argument to work by historians on Jamaica, the British Empire, and abolitionism, on the one hand, and work by biblical and religious studies scholars on the Bible and race, on the other.