During the early 1830s, as calls for emancipation intensified in Britain, anxieties and uncertainties about the future were rife throughout Jamaica. With the example of the Haitian Revolution ever-present in their minds, slaveholders predicted that British antislavery campaigning would spark a Jamaican slave rebellion, and these apprehensions were fuelled by the fact that enslaved communities across the island manifested growing signs of discontent. Enslaved people were also anxious about the future and hoped that the opportunity that intensified abolitionist campaigning brought might result in a change to their condition. In April 1831, fires occurred on estates in western Jamaica. Slaveholders blamed enslaved incendiaries for blazes in St James and Westmoreland, and the St Jago de la Vega Gazette reported fires throughout the summer. In late August, when the trash houses of Belmont estate in Trelawny caught light, the Cornwall Courier proclaimed that ‘the calamity was the work of an incendiary’ and attributed it to the influence of ‘the sectarian parsons, who preach sedition to the negroes’.

In the highly charged political atmosphere of 1831, some colonists romanticized the social and economic world over which they presided as they feared for its future. That mood was summarized in a letter in the Glasgow Courier, reprinted in Jamaica by the St Jago de la Vega Gazette. The author, a colonist on Content estate in the parish of St James, gave a view of the situation in Jamaica: