The missionary Hope Masterton Waddell encountered slaveholders’ defence of Jamaican slave society at first hand. He arrived in Jamaica in 1829 and remained there throughout the slave uprising and turbulent months that followed. Over thirty years later, he recounted how the plantation owner and attorney George Gordon had refused him permission to preach to enslaved people on an estate in the parish of St James. While challenging Waddell's desire to preach, Gordon offered his views on evangelism. On learning that religious instruction for the enslaved people under his management would require the provision of ‘additional time’, he exclaimed to Waddell, ‘Extra time! I am one of those that would not give five minutes for any such purpose. I want the people to work.’ Waddell recalled that, on hearing these words, he looked at Gordon ‘for a moment in silence, then turned on my heel, took my hat, walked to the door, and called for my horse’. Taking his leave of Gordon, Waddell ‘bowed to him without another word’, but he said to himself, ‘Well, Mr. G., you are breaking your own neck. That way of treating slaves and missionaries will never do.’

Waddell recounted this story with the benefit of hindsight and told it in a way that he hoped would cast him in a good light. Even so, his words underline the tensions in Jamaican slave society that contributed to the ending of slavery during the 1830s. To men like Gordon, it was difficult to reconcile the conversion of enslaved people by evangelicals from the metropole with the cause of maintaining subordination and discipline on plantations and other properties. From their perspective, evangelism was a threat both to production on the estates and to social order in the colony. The uprising that began at the end of 1831, just a few miles from where Gordon and Waddell had met, helped to reinforce those ideas in the minds of the Jamaican master class. In the view of most white colonists, missionaries and the enslaved converts who had participated in the uprising were culprits of treason.