Marching into Port Maria, a British fort in St. Mary’s Parish, on Monday, April 7, 1760, Tacky and his men killed a guard and stole arms and weapons. Leaving the fort, the force of about one hundred slaves split into smaller bands, taking the major waterways that controlled the major ports of St. Mary’s Parish and leading surprise attacks on the major plantations of the area.
Hundreds of followers had joined Tacky and his men by the next morning. They moved from estate to estate, murdering the owners, collecting supplies, and burning the sugar plantations to the ground. As Tacky’s forces paused at Ballard’s Valley to celebrate, a slave from one of the estates they razed escaped and warned others of the rebellion. On April 9, Lieutenant Governor Henry Moore sent one hundred militia on horses to quell the uprising, but it was too late. News of Tacky’s Rebellion had spread outside of St. Mary’s Parish, which led other slaves to form their own insurrections.
The leaders of the isolated rebellions across the island used obeahmen to convince others to join them. Obeah, the term for voodoo in the British Caribbean, was the religious glue that held the rebels together, and many slaves feared its power. Obeahmen claimed that they were immortal, and they sprinkled themselves and other rebels with powder to protect them from injury, which gave the men the bravery they needed to continue the rebellion.
The rebellions moved further towards the interior of the island, taking plantations and hauling the owners from their beds to the slaughter, leaving the dead where they fell. To end the unrest, the British government enlisted the help of the maroon communities, giving maroon soldiers and officers a daily wage for each day of service and a commission for every runaway slave they captured. Groups from three maroon communities moved through the island with soldiers from the 74th West India Regiment and the 49th West India Regiment to put down the rebellions across the island.
The British and maroon forces had a special objective: they needed to strike at the spirit of the rebellion to end the unrest. After discovering that the obeahmen were convincing other slaves to join them by bragging that they could not be killed in battle, the English knew they had found a way to crush the spirit of the uprising. Some British soldiers executed an obeahman, hanging his body for all to see. This display had the desired effect: many of the rebels returned to their destroyed plantations, devastated that an obeahman had been murdered, their protection from the gods in question.