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Just over a hundred years ago, the case of Governor Eyre split English society into fiercely opposing factions: one led by Carlyle and Ruskin included Dickens and Tennyson; in the other J. S. Mill was supported by Darwin and Huxley.
The slave-based prosperity of Jamaica in the eighteenth-century had given place by the early 1860s to an economic decline, the white sugar-planters easily outdistanced by foreign competitors, the negroes now mostly working their own land, but discontented and seeking more. Droughts, disease and the American Civil War had brought the latter’s discontent to a head. The national Assembly was unrepresentative, venal and inefficient. In this delicate situation the task of ruling as Governor was one which called for very exceptional qualities. To this assignment Edward John Eyre was appointed in 1862; Eyre had been an emigrant and explorer in Australia, where he had done much to protect the aborigines. He had been seven years Lieutenant-Governor of New Zealand, six years Lieutenant- Governor of St Vincent, and then Governor of the Leeward Islands. Able and humane, Eyre was obstinate and tactless, and he soon became unpopular in Jamaica.
On 9th October, 1865, a rebellion broke out at Morant Bay, led by a negro demagogue called Bogle. His men killed the German custos and about twenty others, mostly Volunteers, wounding thirty-odd as well. In the next few days sporadic outbreaks took place in neighbouring parishes. Eyre promptly declared martial law in the troubled district, and sent troops there. They found the rebels dispersed or hidden, and there was no organized resistance.
