Jamaica's Morant Bay Rebellion of October 1865…

Jamaica's Morant Bay Rebellion of October 1865 brings about the end of the old representative assemblies.

The "rebellion" is really a protest of rural black peasants in the southeastern parish of St. Thomas.

The conflict has unmistakable racial and religious overtones, pitting George William Gordon and Paul Bogle, who are black Baptists, against the custos (senior vestryman), a German immigrant named Baron Maximilian von Ketelholdt; the rector of the established church, the Reverend S.H. Cooke; and the governor of the island, Edward John Eyre, a hostile incompetent with limited intelligence but long service in minor colonial posts.

The original demonstrators are protesting what they believe to be unjust arrests at the courthouse in Morant Bay when, failing to obey an order to disperse, they are fired on by the militia, and seven protesters are killed.

The crowd now riots, burning the courthouse and killing fourteen vestrymen, one of whom is black.

Bogle and Gordon, arrested in Kingston, are tried by court-martial in Morant Bay and hanged. (In 1965 the Jamaican government—an independent and representative entity—will declare the two to be its first "national heroes.")

Altogether, Governor Eyre orders nearly five hundred peasants executed, six hundred brutally flogged, and one thousand houses burned by the troops and by the Maroons, descendants of former runaway slaves with whom the government has a legal treaty.

In December 1865 the House of Assembly abolishes itself, making way for crown colony government.

The act is the final gesture of the old planter oligarchy, symbolizing that it does not wish to share political power in a democratic way with the new groups.

Eyre is recalled for brutality; his successor, John Peter Grant, enacts a series of social, financial and political reforms while aiming to uphold firm British rule over the island, which becomes a Crown Colony in 1866.

In 1872 the capital is transferred from Spanish Town to Kingston.