Local whites helped precipitate the 1831 Jamaican slave rebellion by spreading emancipation rumors

Evidence

Mavis Campbell argues: “Many of the whites, it was later discovered, had actively encouraged the slaves to believe that they had received their freedom.” Campbell, The Dynamics of Change in a Slave Society, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Rutherford, 1976, p. 171. James Stephen, the Colonial Office lawyer, had made similar remarks, declaring in a Memorandum of 22 March 1832, that “the charge of having fomented discontent among the slaves by a series of wilful, systematic and public misrepresentation of the designs of the English Government, by a course of agitation pursued in defiance of the most evident danger, and by the concealment from the authorities of the indications of the approaching calamity is preferred on grounds which it seems impossible to controvert.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2071

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that planters/whites actively encouraged revolt rumors is surprising and worth chasing: whose political ends did this serve, and how typical was this in other slave colonies?