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A Jamaica of the Mind: Gender, Colonialism, and the Missionary Venture
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
Mary Ann Middleditch, a young woman of twenty in 1833, living in Wellingborough in Northamptonshire and working in a school, confided in her letters her passionate feelings about Jamaica and the emancipation of slaves. The daughter of a Baptist minister, she had grown up in the culture of dissent and antislavery and felt deeply identified with the slaves whose stories had become part of the books she read, the sermons she heard, the hymns she sang, the poems she quoted, and the missionary meetings she attended. In 1833, at the height of the antislavery agitation, Mary Ann followed the progress of William Knibb in Northamptonshire. Knibb, who was born in nearby Kettering, had gone to Jamaica as a Baptist missionary in 1824 and been radicalized by his encounter with slavery. In the aftermath of the slave rebellion of 1831, widely known as the Baptist War because of the associations between some of the slave leaders and the Baptist churches, the planters had organized against the missionaries, burnt their chapels and mission stations, persecuted and threatened those whom they saw as responsible. Faced with the realization that their mission could not coexist with slavery the Baptist missionaries in Jamaica sent William Knibb, their most eloquent spokesman, to England to present their case. Abandoning the established orthodoxy that missionaries must keep out of politics, Knibb openly declared his commitment to abolition. The effect was electric and his speeches, up and down the country, were vital to the effective organization of a powerful antislavery campaign which resulted in the Emancipation Act of 1833.
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References
1 This essay is part of a much longer study. I am grateful to the ESRC and to the Nuffield Foundation for the support which they have given me.
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