Paul Bogle and several hundred people walked to the courthouse at Morant Bay, where the vestry was sitting; petitions had already been sent, and answered with nothing. The militia fired, the courthouse burned, and in the weeks of suppression that followed the Royal Commission of 1866 counted 439 dead, with hundreds more flogged and homes destroyed. Eyre was recalled, and the argument over him divided opinion in Britain for years after 1865. The courthouse stands again now, white with a red porch, a statue of Bogle in front of it.
The argument reached the writing desks as well: Mill chaired the Jamaica Committee pressing for prosecution, and Dickens and Carlyle were among those who defended Eyre. Reading the pamphlets from 1866 now, you can hear people deciding what they believed in public.
Bogle was a deacon at the Native Baptist chapel at Stony Gut, and those congregations largely governed themselves: they chose their own leaders, kept their own discipline, read scripture without a minister sent from elsewhere. A good deal of the organising that got people to Morant Bay had been done in that building first.