Tacky's rebellion
Tacky's Rebellion or Tacky's War , also known as Easter Rebellion in English , was the largest slave rebellion in the history of Jamaica and the second largest in the entire Caribbean after the Haitian Revolution . The uprising began in the city of Port Maria in May 1760 and ended in July of the same year.
history
The revolt began in Port Maria in May 1760. Jamaica was part of the British Empire at the time . The uprising was led by a slave named Tacky , already infamous among the English , who had been a tribal chief of the Fante people before he was abducted from Africa . Even as a slave, he was a notorious leader of the so-called Coromantee people . The name is derived from the coastal town of Kormantse in what is now Ghana .
Tacky and a group of supporters broke into Port Maria harbor the night before Easter Monday and stole muskets, gunpowder and bullets. Hundreds of slaves had joined him the following morning. They moved inland, pillaging and destroying one hated plantation after another. They killed most of the plantation owners and many fair-skinned residents. During the revolt, the insurgents captured several ammunition depots in and around Port Maria.
After more than a month of rebellion, the British leadership sent two complete companies that bloodily suppressed the uprising with an overwhelming force of soldiers. The leader Tacky was reportedly shot from behind in combat. After the revolt failed, many of the insurgents and other slaves tried to escape the English soldiers. They fled to the nearby mountains and joined the Maroons who lived there . However, about 300 slaves were executed after the rebellion.
literature
- Burnard, Trevor: Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World , Chapel Hill 2004: The University of North Carolina Press, pp. 170-172, ISBN 0-8078-5525-1 .
- Rodriguez, Junius P. (editor): Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion , Westport 2006: Greenwood.
- Brown, Vincent: Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War , 2020, Belknap Press, ISBN 978-0674737570 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d History of Port Maria at VisitJamaica.com ( Memento of the original from July 15, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
