1865 Morant Bay Rebellion Analysis

If there were few people to talk seriously about the 1857 mutinous Sepoys as victims and British forces as being unnecessarily ruthless in their repression, the main protagonists of the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion greatly divided opinions in Britain. The logic according to which people disagree with what they opponents agree with meant that someone's hero was someone else's villain. Paul Bogle, a Black Jamaican, was depicted by supporters of philanthropy as a pious preacher spreading Christianity and striving for the improvement of the living conditions of his fellow islanders. Far from seeing him in the same favourable light, people who disapproved of the riot saw him primarily as a ruffian who had been rightfully hanged for rousing a bloodthirsty
Gordon was a defender of Black rights who encouraged people to have their voices heard by the government as subjects of the Empire. He was therefore depicted in Britain as either a model of tolerance and loyalty to the values of the Crown, or as a dangerous subverter. Unlike Bogle who had unquestionably led the rebels, Gordon had not even been present at the riots; during the repression he was actually dragged by the British forces from Kingston to the town of Morant Bay so that he could be judged – martial law had been declared in Morant Bay only, and was therefore not applicable in Kingston in connection to the rebellion. Gordon was found guilty on very thin evidence and quickly hanged. More than Bogle, he was therefore seen as an innocent martyr by philanthropic organisations and became a symbol of the shameful and unfair repression of the
‘Work to live but do not live to work’ could sum up Mill's thinking, whereas Carlyle's would be that work is a vital element as it is what gives people their human dignity and separates them from animals. What we would call slavery nowadays was also Mill's perception of it as denying someone the status of human being by forcing them to live and work in terrible conditions. For Carlyle, if this situation was not always ideal, it was nonetheless not the most pressing issue that should be addressed at the time. For him, real slavery was to have no permanent master, but rather either to be unemployed, or to be forced to hire oneself for a fixed period of time with no guarantee of being re-hired afterward. Instead, he called for the establishment of a form of medieval serfdom in which workers were attached to a fixed land and not so much to a particular