entertainments, and were admitted at the social board, and were on terms of intimacy with the younger branches of families.[1]
The intermediate colors between the whites[A] and pure blacks, were denominated as follows: A Sambo is the offspring of a mulatto woman by a black man; a mulatto is the child of a black woman and white man; a quadroon is the offspring of a mulatto by a white man, and a mestee is that of a quadroon woman by a white man. The offspring of a female mestee by a white man being above the third in lineal descent from the Negro ancestor, was white, in the estimation of the law, and enjoyed all the privileges and immunities of Her Majesty's white subjects; but all the rest, whether mulattoes, quadroons, or mestees, were considered by the law as mulattoes or persons of color.
Although the people of Jamaica represented to the home government that the slaves were satisfied and happy, and would not accept their freedom were it offered them, a revolt of the blacks took place in 1832. More than fifty thousand were engaged in this effort to obtain the long-wished-for boon.
The man with whom the insurrection originated,—Samuel Sharp,—was a slave, and a member of the Baptist Church in Montego Bay. He was born in slavery, but he had never felt anything of the bitterness of slavery. He was born in a family that treated him indulgently; he was a pet, and was brought up as the playmate of the juvenile members of the family, and had opportunities of learning to read and for mental cultivation, to which very few of his fellow-slaves had access; and Sharp, above all this, was possessed of a
- ↑ Phillippo.
