Jamaica in 1850

A reporter's firsthand portrait of formerly enslaved Jamaicans in the years after emancipation

John Bigelow’s Jamaica in 1850 provided an important document in the antislavery movement in the United States and Great Britain. Jamaica’s economy had collapsed after the 1838 emancipation. American supporters of enslavement used the Jamaican example to argue that abolition at home would unleash economic and social chaos. Bigelow’s vivid eyewitness reporting undermined that widely held view by proving Jamaica’s problems originated in the incompetence of absentee white planters and an obsolete colonial system. As Bigelow showed, many once-enslaved Jamaicans had in fact become successful small-scale landowners in the twelve years after emancipation while the large plantations languished.