Tacky's War

On the morning after Easter Sunday in 1760, a slave known as Tacky led a revolt in St. Mary that would reverberate around northeastern Jamaica until September of that year. The uprising became known as Tacky's Rebellion or Tacky's War.

Tacky was an overseer on Frontier Plantation outside Port Maria, giving him the limited freedom necessary to strategize and organize the rebellion at both Frontier and bordering Trinity plantations. A former chief in his homeland of Ghana, Tacky had the confidence and clout to amass wide support for what was meant to be an island-wide overthrow of the British colonial masters.

Tacky and about 50 of his followers awoke before dawn that morning and easily killed the master of Frontier Plantation before raiding the armory at nearby Fort Haldane, where they killed the storekeeper and took guns and ammunition. The owner of Trinity Plantation escaped on horseback to warn the surrounding estates. But with newfound artillery, the ranks of the rebel army began to swell, and they quickly took nearby Haywood and Esher plantations and began to celebrate their early success. A slave from Esher plantation, however, slipped away to call in the authorities, and before long a militia of soldiers from Spanish Town and Maroons from Scott's Hall were sent to quell the uprising.

The rebels' confidence had been bolstered by Obeah men (witch doctors) among their ranks who spread incantations and claimed the army would be protected and that Obeah men could not be killed. This confidence took a blow when the militia, learning of these claims, captured and killed one of the Obeah men. Nonetheless, the fighting would last months and take the lives of some 60 whites and 300 rebels before it was diffused. Tacky himself was captured and beheaded by the Maroons from Scott's Hall, who took his head to Spanish Town on a pole to be displayed as dissuasion for any further resistance.

The legend of Tacky spread across the island, giving inspiration to other resistance movements that would come in the later years of slavery and after emancipation. Many of Tacky's followers committed suicide rather than surrendering, while those who were captured were either executed or sold and shipped off the island. Ringleaders were either burned alive or starved in cages in the Parade in Kingston. It was during Tacky's War that the British authorities first learned of the role African religion played behind the scenes in these uprisings, and Obeah thus became part of the official record with a 1770 law passed to punish its practitioners by death or transportation, at the court's discretion.