The Demerara Rebellion of 18 August 1823 was a seminal event in the history of enslaved resistance in British Guiana and in the colonial world. Its exposure of the horrors of slavery, along with the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica on 17 December 1831, involving 60,000 enslaved persons, 400 of whom died, and an area of 750 square miles, speeded up its demise. Jack Gladstone was the Rebellion’s principal organizer and leading militant but his contribution to the abolition of slavery in 1838 and the advancement of freedom is little known and had not been fully acknowledged until Professor da Costa’s book, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood – The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (1997).
The two most prominent figures who emerged from the Rebellion are Quamina and the Rev. John Smith. Quamina was a skilled carpenter at Plantation Success. Like all the other enslaved, he had suffered severe punishment but had become a Christian and had been appointed a deacon. He was trusted and was a proud and dignified man and a dedicated worker. Rev. John Smith, a man of ‘modest origins,’ arrived at Le Ressouvenir in British Guiana in February, 1816, with his wife Jane, to replace Rev. John Wray. Missionaries were being influenced by the abolition movement and Rev. John Smith’s sentiments sympathetic to the conditions of the enslaved were strengthened by their ‘helplessness.’
