The Amistad Rebellion (17 page)

“Joseph Cinquez, the brave Congolese Chief”

A fourth image produced about the same time represented the rebellion and its aftermath by depicting not only Cinqué, but all of the Africans: “Joseph Cinquez Addressing his Compatriots on board the Spanish Schooner AMISTAD 26th Augt 1839.” The engraving chronicled a specific moment: the officers and sailors of the U.S. brig
Washington
have captured the vessel, and Cinqué, who had been separated from the others, has returned to give a speech designed to inspire collective resistance against their American captors. He strikes a classic orator’s pose, his right hand and eyes raised to the heavens. He explains to all that it would be better to “be killed than live many moons in misery.”
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The main deck of the
Amistad
appears as a theatrical stage from which Cinqué delivers his lines. Standing by from right to left are the cast: “Señor Montes” smoking a cigar; Lt. Meade, his sword at the ready; the young Don José Ruiz; and Antonio the cabin boy. At the far left are three armed sailors, two with cutlasses drawn, all with pistols in their belts. They are at ease and one is smoking a short pipe. In the foreground are the “three children slaves of Montes” and beyond
them, the
Amistad
men, in motley attire. They look at Cinqué with eager eyes and rapt attention. Although he speaks about resistance, the scene has a peaceful, even transcendent, communal feel. The original artist was likely Sketchley, who drew Cinqué in the same style, and in the same clothes, in the second portrait above.
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“Joseph Cinquez Addressing his Compatriots on board the…AMISTAD
”

These glorifications of armed struggle were not, as they might appear, the work of an underground group of militant abolitionists. They were, rather, commissioned by, advertised in, and distributed by the penny paper the
New York Sun
. Moses Yale Beach, editor of the
Sun
, sensationalized the case and appealed to the popular appetite for heroic sea-robbers to sell newspapers and prints to a mass public. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. He and his fellow editors of the
Sun
were shocked by how popular the images became. After publishing portraits of Cinqué on Saturday, August 31, 1839, they noted the following Monday that the supply of prints had been exhausted immediately and that they had been unable to meet the clamor for more. They announced to their readers that they would, “by an early hour this morning, have another and a very large edition printed, and shall be prepared, on the opening of our office, to supply demands for any number.” They explained that they had printed enough on Saturday to satisfy “any
ordinary
demand,” but encountered a “tremendous
run for them” for which they were not ready. This “was as unexpected to us as it was astonishing in itself.” They printed the image on “thick, fine paper, in a style of excellence,” suitable for framing. They also noted that the print had been republished in the Sunday editions of other newspapers. They were clearly proud of what they had done.
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The
New York Sun
’s correspondent, who was also present at the judicial investigation in New London, created the textual equivalent of these images in what was probably the single most influential article published the first week the
Amistad
Africans were brought ashore, entitled “The Long, Low, Black Schooner.” Republished in the
New York Journal of Commerce
and several other newspapers, including an edited version as far south as the
Charleston Courier
, the long article (5,700 words) initiated a process that would continue for the next two years, with great historical effect: it created and disseminated widely a heroic and romantic image of Cinqué and hence of the entire rebellion.
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The article begins by noting the intense public excitement caused by the arrival of the schooner in New London, then mentions the availability of the “splendidly lithographed” image of Cinqué. Early in a long summary of the rebellion, the voyage, and the capture, the article sketches the history and character of the leader of the revolt, identified as “the son of an African chief.” He is no ordinary man. He is, rather, “one of those spirits which appear but seldom.” Possessed of “sagacity and courage,” he is physically strong, able to endure privation; he has “a full chest, large joints and muscles, and built for strength and agility.” He has thick lips, beautiful teeth, and nostrils that flare with anger. His eyes convey “the cool contempt of a haughty chieftain” or “the high resolve which would be sustained through martyrdom,” as he wished. In repose his countenance “looks heavy, but under excitement it assumes an expression of great intelligence.” His bearing is free of levity, and “many white men might take a lesson in dignity and forbearance from the African Chieftain, who although in bondage, appears to have been the Ozeola of his race.” Compared to Osceola, a recently killed leader of the Second Seminole War being fought in Florida at that very moment, Cinqué was, in short, the perfect man to “become the leader in such an event as that which has
thrown him on our shores.” By the time he had stepped off the
Washington
, he was, courtesy of the
New York Sun
, on his way to celebrity, soon to be embraced by an incipient social movement.
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The Abolitionist Movement in 1839

Another person who came aboard the
Washington
and the
Amistad
on August 27, 1839, was not a journalist, a lawyer, or a law enforcer, but a rank-and-file political activist, Dwight Janes. He was a grocer who knew the docks and the coming and going of ships. He went aboard the vessels, where he saw Ruiz, Montes, and the sickly Africans. He quickly gathered the essential facts: the name of the ship and its slaveholders; the variety and value of the cargo; and what had happened in the rebellion. He talked to Ruiz and Antonio, from whom he garnered important evidence. He learned that the Africans had not been in Havana long enough to become subjects of Spain and that “none of them can speak any thing but their native language.” He understood that finding Africans in America who could communicate with those of the
Amistad
would be crucial to the case. He realized that the ship’s papers had been fabricated. Perhaps most importantly, he knew that Spain’s slave trade was now illegal and argued, presciently, that “the blacks had a perfect right to get their liberty by killing the crew and taking possession of the vessel.” This was a natural opportunity for a national campaign. Humanity and justice, thought Janes, would move many to defend these “Citizens of Africa.”
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Janes wrote a flurry of urgent letters in which he conveyed both critical information and strategic perspective to leading abolitionists, soliciting their involvement in a case he immediately recognized as extremely important. He wrote to Joshua Leavitt, a minister and editor of the
Emancipator
, Lewis Tappan, a wealthy silk merchant and New York businessman, and Roger S. Baldwin, a distinguished Connecticut attorney. In a short time, when time was of the essence, Janes anticipated the entire abolitionist strategy for the case and quickly activated the movement. He embodied and expressed the strength of abolitionism from below.
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Janes and his antislavery comrades flew into action, along the waterfront and up and down the eastern seaboard, causing a correspondent for the
New York Morning Herald
to write of the
Amistad
captives on September 2, “the Abolitionists are moving heaven and earth to effect their release; several members of the society have left town for Connecticut to see them, to employ the most able counsel in their behalf, and to contest every point inch by inch; and, judging from appearances, we should say that there are general preparations making in all quarters for a grand explosion in this matter of slavery and the slave trade.” The powder would be mixed in jail.
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Janes was part of a movement that was growing dramatically in the 1830s, around the world and in the United States, in opposition to a dynamic American and Atlantic slave system. The global movement was strongest in Great Britain, where it already boasted two major victories: the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the abolition of slavery in all British colonies in two stages, in 1834 and 1838. At the same time, a national polarization on the issue of slavery was taking shape in the United States, pitting firebrands in the South, who increasingly saw slavery as a “positive good,” against abolitionists who saw it as pure evil. Janes saw the main chance presented by the
Amistad
rebellion and he seized it.
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The two primary antislavery organizations of the day were the New England Anti-Slavery Society, formed in 1831, and the larger national group, the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833. Inspired by the moral perfectionism of the Second Great Awakening and based largely in northern churches, both were to some extent interracial and committed to nonviolent “moral suasion”—seeking to convince the nation that slavery was a sin and that it must, for moral reasons, be abolished. In 1837 the American Anti-Slavery Society had 145 local societies in Massachusetts, 274 in New York, and 213 in Ohio. In 1838 it had 1,350 affiliates and a membership of 250,000. In a nation of seventeen million people, the abolitionists were modest in number, but they were committed, outspoken, and growing.
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By 1839 abolitionist societies had created a strong, durable network of communication and material support. They had their own
newspapers and journals such as the
Emancipator
(New York), the
Liberator
(Boston), and the
Pennsylvania Freeman
(Philadelphia), which they published, along with other antislavery pamphlets and books, using their own printing presses. In 1835 they had organized a postal campaign in which they mailed a huge volume of antislavery literature to a hostile, defensive South. They organized massive petition campaigns, delivering hundreds of thousands of signatures opposing slavery to Congress and prompting southern politicians to effect a “gag rule” in 1836 to evade them. The abolitionists had their own lecture circuits, their own means of publicity and fund-raising, their own lawyers to employ on behalf of the
Amistad
prisoners.
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The abolitionist movement crossed lines of race and class, and its full variety was reflected by those who gravitated to the
Amistad
case. They were black and white, male and female, middle-class and working-class, enslaved and free. They included businessmen such as Tappan, whose home had been trashed by an anti-abolition mob in 1834. They included ministers such as Simeon Jocelyn, who preached to an interracial congregation in New Haven; “enlightened” figures such as Professor Josiah Gibbs, a scholar of oriental languages at Yale University; artisan-artists such as John Warner Barber and Nathaniel Jocelyn; black sailors such as James Covey; Lydia Maria Child, an eminent writer and feminist; and former slaves such as James Pennington, the runaway “fugitive blacksmith” who became a leading black minister in Hartford, and Isabella Baumfree, who would become known as Sojourner Truth, a leading figure in the women’s movement who asked, “Ain’t I a Woman?”
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Slave rebels themselves played a crucial part in the abolitionist movement, on the
Amistad
and elsewhere. Their actions throughout the Western Hemisphere shaped the battle against slavery on plantations, in cities, and even in rural areas where no slavery existed. The
Amistad
struggle took its place alongside contemporaneous slave conspiracies, revolts, and mass escapes in Mobile, Alabama; Lafayette and St. Martinsdale, Louisiana; Anne Arundel and Charles County, Maryland; and Purrysburg, South Carolina. Slave incendiaries were said to be active in Charleston, New Orleans, Mobile, and Natchez, Mississippi. Many
of the uprisings took place in sugar-producing regions in the United States, Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil. Meanwhile, the fires of resistance raged in Florida, where many self-emancipated slaves fought in the Second Seminole War.
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Running away from slavery was an ever-brighter flashpoint in the struggle. Indeed, the year 1839 was the very moment when the reality and the name of the Underground Railroad came into existence. Most people of African descent who escaped slavery, it should be noted, did so on their own, without the assistance of organized middle-class abolitionists. A large portion of them got away by sea, as stowaways on ships, with the assistance of proletarian dockworkers and sailors. The Underground Railroad for the movement of former bondspeople remained important, as sources of hope among the enslaved and as provocations to southern slaveholders, who railed fiercely against it. Three main routes had begun to evolve by 1839: from Missouri to Illinois; from Kentucky to Cincinnati and Oberlin College in Ohio; and from Virginia and points south to Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. All three went on to Canada by various routes.
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