Edwin Palmer Serving until your Work is Done

                                                                                  Edwin Palmer

Five years after emancipation in Jamaica, Edwin Palmer, a member of the Baptist Church in Spanish Town, commenced intra-mural preparation for the pastoral ministry at Calabar Theological College in Trelawny. Graduating in 1847, after four years at Calabar, Palmer, received and accepted a call to serve as pastor of the Stacey Ville (now Staceyville) Baptist Church in Clarendon. Palmer spent five years at Staceyville after which he assumed the pastorate of the Hanover Street Baptist Church in Kingston, where he served from 1852 until his death in 1892.

While at Hanover Street, Palmer also gave pastoral oversight to Yallahs Baptist Church in the parish of St. David, neighbouring parish of St Thomas in the East. The death of Robert Graham, the pastor of the Yallahs Baptist Church, led to Palmer assuming pastoral oversight of the Baptist church in Yallahs. Published accounts of an early morning baptismal service that Palmer conducted at Yallahs on Christmas Day, 1870, and at Hanover Street on Christmas Sunday, 1870, reflect the evangelistic zeal and pastoral commitment that Palmer displayed. The baptisms took place in the sea at both locations, the one at Hanover Street taking place in the nearby seaside community of Rae Town. Each of the baptismal services started at 6:00 a.m. and was preceded by a corporate prayer meeting beginning at 4:00 o’clock.   

Palmer met and married Olivia Johnson, the daughter of Rev. Francis Johnson, an early graduate of Calabar College who was pastor of the Baptist Church at Clarksonville in southern St Ann. Edwin and Olivia Palmer had a long and effective partnership in the Gospel ministry at Hanover Street Church. Olivia’s brother, Amos Johnson, became a minister of religion and was a pastor in Missouri, USA. Amos assisted his brother-in-law at Hanover Street during Edwin Palmer’s eight months of ill health preceding his death.

A man with a strong ecumenical commitment, Palmer, a Black Jamaican, collaborated with the mostly British pastors, such as W. J. Williams (Methodist Connexion), W. Clarke Murray (Presbyterian), C. A. Wookey (Congregationalist), Enos Nuttall (Anglican), James Roberts (United Methodist Free Church); and J. Seed Roberts of East Queen Street Baptist Church and Calabar, in united witness in the city of Kingston starting in 1878. These men were members of the Kingston Evangelical Union, which influenced the formation of the Union of Evangelical Churches in Jamaica in 1895.

Palmer had a strong commitment to God’s mission through the Church. It is not surprising that, when Joseph Jackson Fuller, his former fellow member of the Spanish Town (now Phillippo) Baptist Church, was in the last week of his furlough in Jamaica, Palmer arranged a Farewell Service for this veteran missionary to Africa. This was providentially Fuller’s final opportunity to address his fellow Jamaicans at a service in his home country. The people gathered in the Hanover Street Baptist Church on September 24, 1884 heard the Farewell Address as Fuller prepared to resume his ministry in Cameroon.

Edwin Palmer’s name appears in several studies in Jamaican history because of the injustice meted out to him in the aftermath of the Morant Bay uprising in 1865. Jamaica’s Governor Edward John Eyre, a former sheep farmer in Australia, whose British father had been a vicar in the Church of England, initiated a cruel and unjust response to the 1865 uprising when members of the Jamaican peasantry pushed back against racial supremacy, desperate economic hardship and the absence of concern for the poor by the governing authorities. Everyone associated with persons who were implicated fairly or unfairly in the uprising was targeted for violent treatment, including physical personal attack, swift execution, their houses being burnt down, etc. Although Palmer lived in Kingston, perhaps partly because his charge included the Yallahs church in the civil parish neighbouring St Thomas in the East where the Morant Bay uprising took place, Eyre marked him out for inclusion in his collective punishment scheme. Perhaps, additional reasons existed for Palmer being caught up in the collective punishment meted out to Black people who had even the most tenuous link with the justice seekers who participated in the Morant Bay uprising.

Early in the year of the uprising, Kingston’s mayor, Edward Jordan had called a meeting on May 3, 1865 to seek people’s opinions on the state of Jamaica and Palmer was one of the speakers at the meeting. An account of what transpired at the meeting had been sent to Edward Cardwell, British Secretary of State for the colonies and to Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) Secretary, Edward Underhill. Undoubtedly, Eyre had knowledge of the meeting that painted a picture of the devastating social and economic situation in Jamaica, where Black people who were poor were suffering hopelessly.  However, Palmer had had nothing to do with the Morant Bay uprising. That he was a Jamaica Baptist of African descent who had compassion on the suffering poor in Jamaica put Palmer in harm’s way.

On October 20, 1865, almost six months after the Morant Bay riots, the authorities had Palmer arrested without a warrant, while insinuating that he had used seditious language prior to the riots and might have helped incite those involved in the riot itself. Palmer’s hands were tied behind his back and he was marched through the streets of Kingston under guard of a detachment of armed soldiers. Then, Palmer’s persecutors cut his hair, confiscated his boots and locked him in a dark cell in confinement. Afterward, Palmer was handcuffed, taken to a wharf in Kingston and handed over to the cruel master of a boat who placed him in irons and took him to Morant Bay, where martial law was in force.

Palmer arrived in Morant Bay on November 2 to the taunts of the marines. He was shown the gallows, ropes, and other instruments of torture and was advised of a plan to execute him at seven o'clock the following morning.  He was forced to watch two fellow prisoners lashed to a post and severely beaten. Palmer’s trauma knew no bounds. After thirty-four days of imprisonment and ill-treatment, he was released and ordered to go to Kingston for trial before a Special Commission. He was charged, found guilty of using seditious language and sentenced to two months’ imprisonment. An innocent man was sent to prison and, in the end, Governor Eyre, who had described Baptist ministers in Jamaica as “political demagogues and dangerous agitators,” was recalled to England and excluded from further colonial service. He died at Devon in England 1901.

Edwin Palmer, who outlived Edward Eyre, exemplifies the suffering a servant of God may have to face. However, his life was also full of opportunities to share the Gospel of salvation and to help people find deliverance from slavery to sin. It was during his pastorate at Hanover Street that members of his church started a Christian mission that later received the name Tarrant Baptist Church.

After some four decades of service in the Hanover Street community, Palmer’s health began to fail. After prolonged illness, he breathed his last at 1:00 a.m. on January 18, 1892. Customary rites at the Hanover Street Mission House, which was at the corner of Hanover and Barry Streets in Kingston, preceded his funeral at what people referred to as “Palmer’s church” where Rev. Windsor Burke, pastor of the Lucea Baptist Church officiated. Palmer’s final resting place was the May Pen Cemetery in Kingston.

Olivia Palmer remained a widow for some 13 years that ended in an unexpected way. On Sunday, September 10, 1905, she was in her usual seat in the Hanover Street Baptist Church at the 11:00 o’clock service. The preacher at the service on that fateful day was Adjutant William Raglan of the Salvation Army. Earlier, on that fateful September day, Mrs. Palmer had attended the 6:00 a.m. prayer meeting, arranged as part of the evangelistic emphasis the Hanover Street Church was observing during that week. Suddenly, at about 11:20 a.m., when a prayer was being offered, Mrs. Palmer fell from her seat and lost consciousness. Shortly after this, a Dr. Henderson pronounced her dead. Her death was apparently the result of the cardiac troubles that had afflicted her for some time. Rev. E. A. Bell, Edwin Palmer’s successor at Hanover Street, preached the sermon at Mrs. Palmer’s funeral.

Incidentally, after ending his association with the Salvation Army, William Raglan served with the JBU, working as pastor of the Arcadia Baptist Circuit in St Thomas in the East. Soon, however, he combined with Mary Louise Coore, formerly of the Brown’s Town Baptist Church, to form the City Mission Church in Jamaica.

To return to Edwin Palmer, five years after his death, the members of the Hanover Street Baptist Church started a drive to raise sufficient funds “to erect a tablet in the chapel in memory of their late sainted pastor, Rev. Edwin Palmer.” Unfortunately, if the tablet was erected, it no longer adorns any of the walls of the Hanover Street Church. It would be fitting to have it complementing those that were installed in honour of Joshua Tinson and E. A. Bell. Yet, in Palmer’s ministry God answered the prayer included in the tablet placed in honour of  Tinson. It states, “This monument is erected … with the sincere prayer that the ardour of [Tinson’s] zeal in the cause of Christ may live in his successors when this marble shall have crumbled into dust.”