Abstract
Grenada 1795. On the morning of Wednesday 4 March at around half past ten, a washerwoman came running into Grenada’s little capital St Georges, convinced that ‘the enemy’ was marching on the town. Others followed her from the river claiming that they too had heard distant drums and had even seen troops moving into position up the road. According to one observer, the militia had steeled themselves to either ‘defend their lives and properties’ or ‘meet a glorious death’ trying. It was, according to the chronicler, ‘a chaotic and most melancholy scene’.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
D.G. Garraway, A Short Account of the Insurrection That Broke Out in Grenada in 1795 (C. Wells and Son, Grenada, 1877), p. 9.
R.P. Devas, The History of the Island of Grenada 1650–1950 (Justin James Field, St Georges, 1964), pp. 110–13;
see also Gordon Turnball, A Narrative of the Revolt and Insurrection in the Island of Grenada (Verner and Hood, London, 1796), pp. 9–10.
Michael Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War Against Revolutionary France (Clarendon, Oxford, 1987), pp. 133–4 and 142–3;
Michael Duffy ‘The French Revolution and British Attitudes to the West Indian Colonies’, in David Barry Caspar and David Patrick Geggus (eds), A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1997), pp. 84–5;
E.L. Cox, Free Coloureds in the Slave Societies of St Kitts and Grenada, 1763–1833 (University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1984), pp. 76–91.
For the specific advancement of rights in the region, see Melanie Newton, The Children of Africa in the Colonies: Free People of Color in Barbados in the Age of Emancipation (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 2008);
and Carl Campbell, Cedulants and Capitulants: The Politics of the Coloured Opposition in the Slave Society of Trinidad 1783–1838 (Paria Publishing, Port of Spain, 1992).
The best most comprehensive original source is Jean-Baptiste Philip, A Free Mulatto (Callaloux Publications, Port of Spain, 1996, original edition, 1824).
For St Domingue, see also Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Harvard University Press, 2010) and for Jamaica,
see Gad Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics and the Free Coloureds of Jamaica 1792–1865 (Greenwood Press, Westport, 1981).
This chapter is indebted to the research carried out on the Philip family by Lorna McDaniel in ‘The Philips: A “Free Mulatto” Family of Grenada’, Journal of Caribbean History, 24(2) (1990), pp. 178–94.
The rebellion was also covered by Beverley Steele, Grenada: A History of its People (Macmillan Caribbean, Oxford, 2003), pp. 115–47. In the last 40 years, though, there have been only a couple of small articles that cover the rebellion in detail, the most useful being Edward Cox’s piece for the Journal of Negro History in 1982: ‘Fedon’s Rebellion 1795–1796: Causes and Consequences’, Journal of Negro History, 67(1) (Spring 1982), pp. 7–19. On the web there is even less. Most saliently is an unrefereed article written by Curtis Jacobs on the life of Julien Fedon and his extended family, ‘The Fedons of Grenada, 1763–1814’: www.cavehill.uwi.edu/BNCCde/grenada/conference/papers/jacobsc.html (date accessed 11 February 2012). There is not even a Wikipedia entry for the Fedon Rebellion — just a line or two from the main entry for Grenada. Even the mountain upon which Belvidere was perched (and known in the years following the uprising as ‘Morne Fedon’) has been demoted by Grenadian authorities to just ‘Fedon’s Camp’. While it remains a folk legend on Grenada, most visitors to Fedon’s Camp these days go for the view. Even when the rebellion is given coverage, as in the article by Jacobs, it is inflated into a near-run thing, which he described as ‘almost successful’, and a revolt requiring ‘ten thousand troops, a corps of military slaves and a crack German unit to restore slavery and British rule’. Lorna McDaniel later inflated this further into being ‘one of the most successful revolutionary wars fought by slave and freemen forces against the British … to hold the British in military confrontation for 16 months in the hills of Grenada’ (‘The Philips’, p. 187). Of course, a quick look at the military situation in 1795 tells a different story. While Mckenzie and the others holding out in St Georges may have been nervous, Victor Hughes was far too engaged to offer any real support to the rebels. See Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower, Chapter 6, ‘The Year of Insurrection’, pp. 136–47.
Joel Montague, Mariam Montague and Shahnaz Montague, ‘The Island of Grenada in 1795’, The Americas, 40(4) (1984), pp. 531–7. The Montagues have collated all the private letters of Samuel Cary, an American living on Grenada at the time of the rebellion. His views provide an important extra source of detail. In a letter written to Joseph Marryat — the Planter representative in London for the Windward Islands — on 6 May 1795, he wrote ‘The Negroes more in awe of the enemy’; on 10 May, ‘Four Negro men had been killed on their estates by the rascals. I believe because none of them would join their party’; on 12 May, ‘The English Negros have all gone into the woods being afraid to venture’ and ‘the Negros came running toward us (out of fear) from different bushes and cane pieces’. Cary also writes about the difficulties experienced in the capital over the housing of refugee slaves picked up wandering the roads or fleeing into the town.
This division is elucidated by C.L.R. James in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’ouveture and the St Domingue Revolution (Secker and Warburg, London, 1938). See also Cox, ‘Fedon’s Rebellion’, p. 11.
Complicating our understanding of free coloureds at this time has been the groundbreaking work of Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antibellum South (New Press, New York, 1974).
For works more specific to the Caribbean, see Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770–1820 (Oxford University Press, 1971);
Jerome Handler, The Unappropriated Freedmen in the Slave Society of Barbados (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1974);
and Arnold Sio, ‘Race, Colour Miscegenation: The Free Coloureds of Jamaica and Barbados’, Caribbean Studies, 16(1) (1976), pp. 5–21. In addition, there has been relatively recent work by Heuman, Between Black and White; Cox, Free Coloureds in the Slave Societies of St Kitts and Grenada;
Arnold Sio, ‘Marginality and Free Coloured Identity in the Caribbean Slave Society’, Slavery and Abolition, VIII (1987), pp. 166–82;
Campbell, Cedulants and Capitulants; and David Barry Caspar and Darlene Clark Hine (eds), Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas (University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 2004);
Pedro Welch, ‘Red’ and Black Over White: Free Coloured Women in Pre-Emancipation Barbados (Carib Research Publications, Bridgetown, 2000);
Pedro Welch, ‘“Crimps and Captains”: Displays of Self-Expression Among Freed Coloured Women, Barbados, 1750–1834’, Journal of Social Sciences, IV(2) (1997), pp. 89–116. See also very recent work by Newton, The Children of Africa; and Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions.
J.W. Fortesque, The History of the British Army, Vol. IV (Macmillan, London, 1906), pp. 494–5; Duffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Seapower, pp. 236–40.
Two letters specifically mention the Canadian settlement: N.A. CO 101/28, Matthew to Sydney, 25 August 1788; N.A. CO 101/32, Henry Dundas to Ninian Home, 5 October 1792. See also Jacobs, ‘The Fedons of Grenada’, p. 22; and P.J. Marshall, ‘British North America, 1760–1815’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 378.
McDaniel, ‘The Philips’, p. 187. See also Carl Campbell, ‘The Rise of the Free Coloured Plantocracy in Trinidad 1783–1813’, Boletin de Estudios Latinoamericas y del Caribe, 29 (1980), pp. 33–53; and Jacobs, ‘The Fedons of Grenada’, pp. 20–1.
Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial of the British West Indies (London, 1819; AMS Press, NewYork, 1966 edn), pp.75–6.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2012 Kit Candlin
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Candlin, K. (2012). What Became of the Fedon Rebellion?. In: The Last Caribbean Frontier, 1795–1815. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030818_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137030818_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34620-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-03081-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)