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4 unusual facts about Jamaica Committee


Charles Kingsley

Kingsley sat on the 1866 Edward Eyre Defence Committee along with Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens and Alfred Lord Tennyson, where he supported Jamaican Governor Edward Eyre's brutal suppression of the Morant Bay Rebellion against the Jamaica Committee.

Jamaica Committee

More radical members of the Committee wanted him tried for the murder of British subjects (Jamaica was at that time a Crown Colony), under the rule of law.

The counsel to the Jamaica Committee was James Fitzjames Stephen, who held that the defendants were guilty of legal murder, but extended considerable sympathy to them and intimated that they were probably morally justified.

Peter Alfred Taylor

With John Stuart Mill he was a parliamentary spokesman for the Jamaica Committee, formed in response to Edward John Eyre's brutal suppression of riots in Jamaica during the Morant Bay rebellion.



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