The Amistad Rebellion (16 page)

Meade’s account of the capture was strongly shaped by his own material interest in the case. He and his commanding officer, Thomas Gedney, would apply to the court for salvage rights, that is, for payment of a portion of the value of the ship and its cargo that they had “saved” for the owners, which might include the immensely valuable human commodities, the former slaves. Indeed, they may have chosen to tow the vessel to Connecticut, rather than New York, because slavery was still legal there. Such matters were clearly on Meade’s mind from the beginning of the encounter. In another article he apparently wrote for the
New London Gazette,
he observed that Cinqué was a strong, “well built” man “who would command, in New Orleans, under the hammer, at least $1,500.” The auction block was on his mind.
⁷²

Cinqué’s comrades cheered his words of resistance after capture and “leapt about and seemed like creatures under some talismanic power.” Fearing an uprising, Meade ordered the sailors to put Cinqué in manacles, separate him from his countrymen, and transport him to the
Washington
. On his way there, “the hero moved not a muscle, but kept his eye fixed on the schooner.” Aboard the brig, the leader sat belowdecks, manacled and incarcerated for a third time in recent months, expecting reenslavement or death. At that moment it must not have seemed that he had arrived in a “free country.”
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In any case, the planning and execution of the rebellion—and no less the long, dangerous, even tortuous voyage afterward—were historic achievements. Based on shared African experiences of work, culture, and self-organization, and on the fictive kinship that grew out of their common struggles in slave factory, barracoon, and ship, the fifty-three rebels aboard the
Amistad
did what few of the millions before them had done: they carried out a successful uprising aboard a slave ship, then sailed the vessel to a place where they might secure the freedom they had fought for and won. They did not choose their
way into the dilemma that confronted them aboard the
Amistad
, but they did, collectively, choose their way out. Their movement from below, onto the main deck of the slaver, where they would wage and win an armed struggle for emancipation, would now trigger a larger historic social movement ashore.

L
ocked belowdecks in the hold of the
Amistad
, with armed white men standing guard above them, the Africans felt the tug of forward motion as the
Washington
began to tow their vessel across Long Island Sound toward New London, Connecticut. The hold was once again a place of abject misery: many were sick and emaciated, some had bloated limbs, a few were dying. Their American captors had, without hesitation and without question, taken the side of the slaveholders José Ruiz and Pedro Montes when they boarded the vessel, freeing the white Cubans and incarcerating the Africans. Separated from their leader Cinqué, who lay manacled and chained on the brig ahead of them, the Africans once again had no idea where they were going or what would become of them. For all practical purposes, they had been reenslaved, or so it must have seemed.

When the
Washington
and the
Amistad
arrived at New London on August 27, the naval vessel docked at Lawrence Wharf, while what was now effectively a prison ship was anchored several hundred yards off shore, “in the bay near the fort,” for the sake of security. Federal Marshal Norris Wilcox took formal possession of the captives, while Lt. Gedney went ashore to send an express message to Judge Andrew Judson of the district court in New Haven, notifying him of the crimes of piracy and murder that had, in his view, been committed. Word of the arrival of the
Amistad
rebels began to buzz around the waterfront, spreading rapidly, locally and throughout Connecticut,
north to Boston, and south to New York and Washington. Spectators flocked to the docks in the thousands to see the so-called pirate ship and its fearsome black crew.
¹

What they saw offshore was a ghost ship, with torn, tattered sails and a foul hull, covered with barnacles and sea-grass. One of the first to go aboard saw “a sight as we never saw before and never wish to see again.” The vessel’s “Ethiop crew” were “decked in the most fantastic manner in the silks and finery pilfered from the cargo, while others in a state of nudity, emaciated to mere skeletons, lay coiled upon the decks.” Cargo lay scattered around “in the most wanton and disorderly profusion.” The visitor at one point rested his hand “on a cold object,” only to discover that it was the naked corpse of a man who had died the night before, his face frozen and mouth open in “the ghastly expression of his last struggle.” Nearby sat Konoma, described by the visitor as “the most horrible creature we ever saw in human shape.” His teeth projected from his mouth at right angles and his eyes held a savage look. He was surely a cannibal. At last the visitor eagerly disembarked because of “the exhalations from her hold and deck”—the characteristic stench of a slave ship.
²

Judge Judson arrived in New London the morning of August 29 to conduct a judicial investigation and to determine if the
Amistad
Africans should be charged with piracy and murder. Judson was a former congressman known for his racist opposition to schoolteacher Prudence Crandall’s efforts to educate African American children in Canterbury, Connecticut, in 1833. President Andrew Jackson had appointed this member of the American Colonization Society and determined opponent of racial “amalgamation” to the federal bench in 1836. Judson decided to hold his hearings on the vessels, first on the
Washington
, where Ruiz and Montes gave their testimony about the rebellion, subsequent voyage, and capture by the navy, then on the
Amistad
. Lt. Meade, who spoke Spanish fluently, translated for the Spaniards, and added his own testimony about the encounter at Culloden Point. Judson apparently solicited no testimony from any of the Africans, perhaps because he himself could not communicate with them directly, perhaps because he felt he could learn all he needed to know from the
white men. He did, however, order Cinqué to be brought, in chains, to the commanding officer’s cabin aboard the
Washington
.
³

Cinque’s appearance gave a clue as to how he saw the legal proceeding. Wearing a red flannel shirt and white duck pantaloons he had found in the hold of the vessel, he also had “a cord round his neck, to which a snuff box was suspended.” The witness who offered the description did not understand what he was looking at, nor did any of the American officials at the hearing. The “snuff box” was actually a “
greegree
bag”—a container of sacred objects, charms or amulets charged with spiritual power, designed in Mende country to protect the person who wore it. Sometimes called “medicine,” these objects were believed to ward off bad fortune—“sickness, trouble, death.” Small bags or boxes containing objects such as cloth, graveyard dirt, a bit of iron, leopard skin, and perhaps a Quranic inscription on parchment, were important to warriors in southern Sierra Leone as they entered battle, especially what they called “big war.” Unable to understand the English and Spanish in which the white men spoke, Cinqué, according to an eyewitness, gazed at his accusers with fearless intensity, maintaining a “hero-like expression.” He knew his life was at stake. The warrior hoped the powerful objects in his greegree bag might help him in the “big war” against slavery.
⁴

At the first hearing Judson listened to the testimony and inspected the
Amistad
’s papers: a license for carrying slaves from Captain-General Joaquín de Ezpleta of Havana; certificates for the working sailors aboard the vessel; and a customs house clearance, which listed the Spanish names for the Africans, to make it appear that they were acculturated “ladinos” rather than “bozales” recently, and therefore illegally, imported from Africa. The main issues before Judge Judson were piracy and murder, but Ruiz and Montes had petitioned to recover what they considered to be their slave property. Charles Ingersoll represented the United States District Attorney, supporting the Cuban masters and expressing the hope that the former slaves would be returned to them.

Judson then moved to the
Amistad
for a second hearing, not to get testimony from the Africans, but so that Antonio, the cabin boy, who
saw the entire rebellion (when Ruiz and Montes did not) might specifically point out, during his testimony, precisely who had killed his master, Captain Ramón Ferrer, and the slave-sailor Celestino. With Meade serving as translator, Antonio described the uprising and pointed out three as the murderers: Cinqué and two others the correspondent did not name, probably Moru and Kimbo. At the end of the day Judson ruled that the Africans would be tried for “murder and piracy on board the Spanish schooner
Amistad
” in the Circuit Court of Hartford on September 17, 1839. He issued an order that they be held in the New Haven jail, to which they would be transported on August 30.
⁵

Government officials, naval officers, the Cubans, and the Africans were not the only people aboard the
Washington
and the
Amistad
during the hearings. Of special importance were an artist, J. Sketchley, an unnamed newspaper correspondent, and a local abolitionist named Dwight Janes. Drawn to the slave ship revolt that had taken place eight weeks earlier by the popular interest in it, these three visitors would strongly shape the evolution of the
Amistad
case in the aftermath of the hearing, in ways neither the Africans nor anyone else could have foreseen.

Birth of a Hero

Sketchley produced for popular consumption the first graphic image of the
Amistad
Rebellion, dated August 30, 1839: Cinqué stands on the deck of the vessel in a sailor’s frock (what is today called a buccaneer’s shirt) and a pair of duck pantaloons, striking a gallant pose, with his cane knife at the ready. Below the image of the swashbuckling hero is a caption: “Joseph Cinquez, Leader of the Piratical Gang of Negroes, who killed Captain Ramon Ferris and the Cook, on board the Spanish Schooner Amistad, taken by Lieut. Gedney, commanding the U.S. Brig Washington at Culloden Point, Long Island, 24th Augt 1839.” Beneath the caption was a speech delivered by Cinqué in which he exhorted his mates to fight back against slavery. The leader acts, talks, and looks like a Roman hero.
⁶

An arresting color lithograph was produced from this image soon
thereafter: Cinqué appears in the red flannel shirt and the white duck pantaloons he actually wore to the judicial investigation. He is not a fearsome cannibal or “primitive” savage, but a handsome dark-skinned man in European garb. A man who was soon to stand trial for piracy and murder is depicted at the scene of the crime with the deadly weapon in his hand, as transcendently good and noble in his cause. Indeed, he appears as an executioner of justice, a slayer of tyrants. His history of resistance is simultaneously celebrated and commodified in the form of an image to be bought and sold.
⁷

“Joseph Cinquez, Leader of the Piratical Gang of Negroes”

A related image, drawn by another New London artist named Sheffield, appeared as a broadside the following day, August 31, 1839, four days after the
Amistad
came into port. It contained another sympathetic image of Cinqué, dressed in the same frock, but this time with more explicit antislavery commentary: “JOSEPH CINQUEZ, the brave Congolese Chief, who prefers death to Slavery, and who now lies in Jail in Irons in New Haven Conn. awaiting his trial for daring for freedom.” Below the caption appeared another stirring speech
Cinqué gave to his comrades. The image and text, in broadside form, were hawked in the streets of the cities, spreading the sensational news of heroic revolt.
⁸