Jordon, Edward

December 6, 1800
February 8, 1869

Edward Jordon, a free colored (of mixed African and European ancestry), was born in Jamaica's slave society. His father, also named Edward and colored, came from Barbados, where his progressive views had alienated him from the white planter class. Jordon's mother, Grace, was likely a local free colored.

Edward Jordon belonged to the urban middle group of free colored artisans and professionals, who, although more privileged than the mass of enslaved peoples, were barred from enjoying basic civil rights because of their nonwhite status. Accordingly, they could not vote, give evidence in their own defense, nor hold public offices, and in a society where landed property guaranteed status and privilege, the extent of property they could inherit was restricted.

Jordon grew to manhood during a period of great upheaval in the history of the Americas, as the established order of slavery and colonial domination was being challenged by the Haitian Revolution and the independence struggles in Spanish America. From 1793 to 1830 these developments, as well as the growing abolitionist tide in Britain, had emboldened the Jamaican free coloreds, who determinedly campaigned for the acquisition of the civil liberties enjoyed by whites in the slave society.

After a short period as an apprentice tailor, Jordon worked as a clerk in a Kingston mercantile establishment and joined the free colored campaign for civil rights when he was twenty, but he was dismissed from his job because of his political sentiments. After a short stint as a liquor retailer, he switched to printing and journalism, and with his close friend and lifetime political ally, Robert Osoborn, Jordon opened a bookstore in Kingston. Further, in 1828 they established the Watchman and Jamaica Free Press, a newspaper that vigorously supported the campaign of the free coloreds who were victorious in 1830, and also championed the abolition of slavery that came in 1834.

In the postslavery period, Jordon abandoned his radical profile and transformed the Watchman into the more moderate Morning Journal, which consistently supported policies for incremental change. In the assembly, where he represented Kingston from 1834 to 1864, Jordon was the leader of the colored professionals who regarded themselves as Creole "nationalists" who opposed the planters' reactionary programs. In 1861 he was the first nonwhite to be elected speaker of the assembly, and in 1854 he was the first colored man to be elected mayor of Kingston. He also held senior administrative positions that previously had been the exclusive preserve of whites. Accordingly, he was appointed to the Legislative Council in 1852, and in 1864 he was appointed receiver general, then island secretary in 1865.

Jordon's career underscored the coloreds' expanding social and political influence. This alarmed the white planter and mercantile classes, and in their hysteria after the Morant Bay rebellion in 1865, they surrendered Jamaica's near two-hundred-year-old representative constitution and embraced the introduction of crown colony government in 1866, thereby snuffing out all elements of elected politics and reintroducing the practice that barred coloreds from holding senior administrative posts.

Edward Jordon died in 1869, disappointed and embittered by this reactionary development in Jamaica's governance structure. In 1875 his statue, commissioned by his admirers to mark his struggles against racial discrimination, was unveiled in Kingston.

See also Free Blacks, 1619-1860; Haitian Revolution; Morant Bay Rebellion

Bibliography

Heuman, Gad. Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.

Campbell, Mavis. The Dynamics of Change in a Slave Society: A Sociopolitical History of the Free Coloreds of Jamaica, 1800–1865. Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975.

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