Shame of Empire

JAMAICAN BLOOD & VICTORIAN CONSCIENCE by Bernard Semmel. 188 pages. Houghton M/ffl/n. $4.50.

The British, having conscientiously freed most of their colonial subjects, now feel entitled to view with horror the spectacle of Birmingham police turning loose police dogs and fire hoses on protesting Negroes. But in the flush days of Queen Victoria's empire, the British conscience was not always so sensitive. In this lively book, Historian Bernard Semmel recounts the brutal re action of the British authorities when a handful of Jamaicans revolted in 1865.

At the behest of the governor of Jamaica, a bloodthirsty Blimp named Edward Eyre, British troops slaughtered 500 Jamaican Negroes, some without benefit of court-martial; they flogged and tortured 1,000 others, many of them women and children. The British met no real resistance, did not lose a single man. "Hole is doing a splendid service shooting every black man who cannot account for himself," one officer gaily wrote. "Nelson at Port Antonio hanging like fun by court-martial. I hope you will not send any black prisoners. Do punish the blackguards well."

The Jamaican massacre was one of the ugliest episodes in the history of the British Empire. Even so, in an earlier era it would probably have passed unnoticed by the homeland. But in the England that Queen Victoria presided over for so long and controlled so little, democracy was on the rise. Radicals, who were demanding universal suffrage and an end to upper-class privilege, decided to make an issue of Eyre. How well they succeeded is the subject of this book.

Poets Y. Philosophers. Colonel Eyre quickly became a symbol of tyranny to the radicals, of empire to the imperialists. A Jamaica Committee was formed to bring Eyre to justice, and an Eyre Defense Committee was formed to vin dicate him. In general, the working classes identified the Jamaicans' cause with their own. The upper classes were determined to keep.the working men, as well as the Jamaicans, in their place.

But the picture was not all that ideologically simple. Some of England's greatest literary figures, who wrote so warmly of the poor and oppressed, flocked to the defense of Eyre. Thomas Carlyle could not speak of Jamaican Negroes without being insulting: "Sitting with their beautiful muzzles up to their ears in pumpkins, imbibing sweet pulps and juices; their grinder and incisor teeth ready for every new work while the sugar crops rot." Only slightly less violent were Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Ruskin and Charles Dickens; Novelist Charles Kingsley proposed that Eyre should be elevated to the peerage.

The Jamaica Committee, on the other hand, attracted scientists and philosophers. Charles Darwin was passionately involved, even though his own theory of the survival of the fittest had been bor rowed by the imperialists. Darwin was joined by John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer and Charles Lyell. Thomas Henry Huxley was moved to sardonic eloquence: "I daresay Eyre did all this with the best of motives, and in a heroic vein. But if English law will not declare that heroes have no more right to kill in this fashion than other folk, I shall take an early opportunity of migrating to Texas or some other quiet place where there is less hero worship and more respect for justice."

Radicals Routed. For three years the battle over Eyre raged. His defenders argued that if he were punished, all other colonial peoples would be encouraged to rebel. The Jamaica Committee retorted that if Eyre were not punished, English liberties would be everywhere in jeopardy. The committee tried to bring Eyre to trial for murder, but they could never get an indictment, even though the Lord Chief Justice declared that Eyre had broken the law. Eventually the committee gave up. John Stuart Mill, Eyre's most implacable foe, was defeated for re-election to Parliament.

But the imperialists won a Pyrrhic victory. The fight over Eyre, writes Semmel, had pricked the conscience of the nation. It had launched a dialogue between the supporters of empire and the supporters of democracy that would culminate eventually in a victory for democracy--and in Great Britain's liquidation of the world's greatest empire.

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