Historical Organization
Council and Assembly
Council and Assembly
Details
Organization Timeline
The Jamaican assembly passes its first comprehensive slave code
📅 2 November 1664The code required written tickets for travel, prescribed punishments for resistance, and treated enslaved people as inheritable property. The archive notes that it closely copied Barbados’s 1661...
A new Jamaican law again denies freedom through Christian baptism
📅 5 September 1683The law required tickets for travel and described enslaved people as property available to satisfy debts. It explicitly said that becoming Christian did not make an enslaved person free. Those rules...
The assembly frees Jack Pearson after his role in suppressing the 1760 revolt
📅 1 December 1763A Jamaican act freed Jack Pearson, who had been enslaved by the estate of William Ricketts. The statute said Pearson supplied information about a 1760 rebellion in Westmoreland and helped pursue...
The assembly frees York and Cuffee after the 1765 Whitehall uprising
📅 21 December 1767A statute freed York and Cuffee, whose actions colonial lawmakers said helped suppress the 1765 uprising in St Mary. York was credited with saving his enslaver’s widow; Cuffee with disclosing a...
The assembly frees Will for helping investigate a murder
📅 23 December 1772A Jamaican statute freed Will, who had been enslaved by the estate of William Jones. It said Will helped investigate the disappearance and murder of overseer Andrew Ross and directed an annual payment...
Jamaica makes private manumission conditional on lifelong provision
📅 24 December 1774A Jamaican act restricted who could legally manumit an enslaved person. Except for the island’s legislature, an owner had to provide security for an annual £5 payment to the freed person for life...
A Jamaican statute confirms the inheritance of enslaved people through wills
📅 22 December 1775The assembly confirmed that wills could transfer enslaved people as property, including some wills that did not meet the English Statute of Frauds. It set a future standard for wills to be properly...
The assembly limits how recently manumitted people could be tried
📅 23 December 1784A Jamaican act required people who had been enslaved when an alleged offense occurred to be tried under the rules applied to enslaved people, even if their owner later granted manumission. A person...