Slave rebellion made maintaining slavery costlier than abolition.

Evidence

From among them, maroon units were formed and for two months, long after the suppression of the Black Regiment, they continued to resist the military, and the now emboldened colonial militia. Given the framework of the trial records we know too little of these slaves’ activities beyond the fact that many of them ended up like David Atkinson, “the Shell Blower,” whose trial disposition read: “Hanged by the Neck, til he is dead, dead, dead.” Just how many can never be known. But the official parish returns were horrible enough: 626 tried, 312 executed, 300 flogged, imprisoned for life or transported. In this tragic record, however, the slave societies of the West Indies had also written their own end. In their brutal repression, their flirtations with treason against the Empire, and their ruthless campaigns against the missionaries, they had overplayed their hand, lending their own resources to the cause of the slaves. By 1838, slavery in the British Empire had been officially abolished by a Parliament now “reformed” to enhance the power of industrial capital. “The slaves,” Mary Reckord reports, “had demonstrated to some at least of those in authority that it could prove more dangerous and expensive to maintain the old system than to abolish it.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 817

Categorization

• SEED: The account of the maroon units holding out for two months after the main rebellion was crushed, and the brutal official reprisals (312 executed), is potent material for a war-crimes or resistance-history article.
• DEEPTHINKING: The plantocracy’s overplaying of its hand—its brutality and treason against the Empire converting repression into the slaves’ own political instrument—is a dense account of how resistance forces its oppressors into self-defeating escalation.