The Amistad Rebellion (20 page)

The
Amistad
rebellion detonated a bomb in American popular culture, inspiring prints, drawings, newspaper articles, a play, and long lines of admission-paying visitors to the jail, all during the first week the rebels were ashore, all
before
the abolitionists organized their campaign. The Amistad Committee would now work with the rebels to enhance, direct, and control the popular interest in the case. Radical action taken by the Africans would inspire a new movement against their enslavement, which would in turn strengthen an older, larger movement against slavery in general. What had been, for many people, an abstract issue would now become concrete as the
Amistad
Africans
and their allies waged a war for freedom. The struggle against slavery had suddenly acquired a human face: a dignified, heroic warrior named Cinqué, who was being transformed by writers and artists into a revolutionary symbol before he ever stepped onto American soil.

T
he
Amistad
Africans arrived at the New Haven jail on August 30, 1839, the latest link in a transatlantic chain of incarceration. The first link was the slave factory at Lomboko; the second, the lower deck of the
Teçora
; the third, the barracoons of Havana; the fourth, the hold of the
Amistad
. Following their successful rebellion, freedom voyage, and capture by the United States Navy, they were forced belowdecks again on the vessel they had seized, and now they had arrived at another place of confinement. The material reality of unfreedom in the
Amistad
case was Atlantic: a slave factory in Africa, a ship on the Atlantic, a slave pen in Cuba, a schooner in the Caribbean, and a jail on the shores of North America.

The
Amistad
Africans had exercised their political will in the rebellion and in sailing their vessel from the “slave country” of Cuba to the “free country” of New York and Connecticut, capturing the popular imagination and mobilizing abolitionists along the way. Now that they were incarcerated again, their agency would be circumscribed, its setting reduced from the wide Atlantic to several small rooms in a jail. They were, in essence, political prisoners before the term had been invented. (It would be coined a few years later, in 1860, by Charles Dickens in a short story called “The Italian Prisoner.”) From the moment the sailors of the U.S. brig
Washington
captured the
Amistad
rebels off Culloden Point, Cinqué and his comrades expected death. Now, charged by the federal government with piracy and murder,
both punishable by execution, they had good reason. The closest African parallel to the latest captivity would have been “prisoner of war,” a pervasive reality in their conflict-riven homelands. Enclosed in a small space and shadowed by death, they would search for new ways to shape their destiny.
¹

How the African insurrectionists would relate to American abolitionists amid a burst of popular interest would be a key to achieving their ultimate goal of free return to their native lands. The two groups that met in the New Haven jail represented the main wings of the antislavery movement in the United States and around the world. The parties would discover how to communicate, learn from and influence each other, and cooperate toward common ends, legal and political. Trust would develop slowly, as would an antislavery alliance. What happened in jail would shape what happened in the courtroom and the case more broadly. If the abolitionists wanted to make “political capital” of the
Amistad
case, the Africans would be the labor to make it possible.
²

The meeting of slave rebels and abolitionists in jail had a history, and indeed had already produced an idea central to the movement. “Immediatism,” a personal commitment to end slavery immediately, not gradually, and with no compensation to slaveholders, had emerged from an experience of incarceration earlier in the decade. In 1830, William Lloyd Garrison, a fiery young abolitionist born of a Boston sailor, attacked merchant Francis Todd in print for a connection to the illegal slave trade. Todd in turn filed a libel suit and got Garrison locked up in the Baltimore jail. There the budding activist had his first close encounter with slavery: he met captured runaways as well as enslaved Africans awaiting sale. He talked with them. They made the horrors of slavery real to him and deepened his opposition to the “peculiar institution.” Arthur Tappan (brother of Lewis) read the young editor’s defiant account of his jailing and immediately bailed him out. Garrison then toured New England to spread the gospel of immediatism, which he now, thanks to the jail experience, linked to the issue of black equality. The same political issues would be raised anew in the New Haven jail.
³

The African Story

On the morning of Tuesday, September 10, Lewis Tappan and a host of associates arrived at the home of Marshal Norris Wilcox for an important meeting. The most crucial member of Tappan’s entourage was James Ferry, the recently discovered Kissi man who spoke Vai and was therefore able to communicate with the
Amistad
Africans through Bau. Five other men arrived with Tappan and Ferry: two professors from Yale University, Josiah Gibbs, a linguist, and Denison Olmsted, a physicist and astronomer; two Congregationalist ministers, Leonard Bacon of New Haven and Henry G. Ludlow of New York; and Roger S. Baldwin, an eminent attorney from a powerful New Haven political family. All were committed abolitionists. Indeed, the homes of two of them, Tappan and Ludlow, had been trashed by anti-abolition mobs.
⁴

The purpose of the meeting was a formal interview with Cinqué and Bau, who would now, with Ferry’s assistance, begin the all-important process of telling the African story of the
Amistad
rebellion. Up to this moment, public accounts of the uprising had been based primarily on the testimony of the white Cuban slaveholders José Ruiz and Pedro Montes. Ruiz’s ability to speak English (he had been educated in Connecticut) and Lt. Richard W. Meade’s ability to speak Spanish, coupled with the inability of anyone to understand the many languages of the Africans (until the discovery of Ferry), had assured that only one side of the tale of rebellion was being told at a time when everyone was fascinated by the case and determined to know what had happened.
⁵

When Wilcox brought Cinqué and Bau into the room, probably in manacles and shackles, the prisoners were filled with uncertainty, for they still expected to be executed. They had met Tappan, Gibbs, and Baldwin the previous Sunday evening in the New Haven jail, but they did not know the others, nor did they know why they had been summoned to a strange place for a meeting. Cinqué was “under some apprehension,” but still he moved with confidence and dignity, filling the room with his magnetic presence.
⁶

Speaking through Ferry, Tappan tried to put the men at ease: “We
endeavored to impress upon their minds, in the first place, that we were their friends, and that they must speak the truth.” The latter concern produced what may have been the first “God palaver,” or religious discussion, between the
Amistad
Africans and the American abolitionists. Tappan noted that “both of them appeared to have some idea of a good Spirit, and also of an evil Spirit.” Through Ferry they explained that “if they told lies, the evil Spirit would take them somewhere, they did not know where.” Tappan asked Cinqué if he knew that God would punish him if he did not speak the truth. The
Amistad
leader answered yes, and “added in his own language—‘me tell no lie; me tell the truth.’” Asked where God lived, “he pointed upward,” no doubt to nods of approval from the onlooking Christians. This would be a “private examination,” but Tappan clearly wanted it to have public credibility and perhaps legal force, hence his emphasis on truthfulness.

Cinqué and Bau then began to unfold their personal histories to the gentlemen through John Ferry. A master storyteller in the Mende tradition, Cinqué warmed to the occasion and relished the opportunity. Sensing that the persons in the room were “friendly to him,” he began to tell “his story” in an animated manner. He relayed the details of his life and the calamity that had brought him to New Haven. Occasionally he “would shake hands with the interpreter, and laugh very heartily,” building into his narrative human connection and humor.
⁷

Cinqué and Bau began with the free lives they led in southern Sierra Leone, establishing their identities first and foremost through their families, which was the traditional way in their homelands. Cinqué “left his father, mother, wife and three children” in Mani, where his father was “a leading man.” Two of his children were “a little larger than the African girls who are prisoners, and the other about as large,” which would have put him in his early thirties. He was kidnapped and marched to Genduma, the capital of King Siaka’s slaving empire, about fifteen miles from the coast. Siaka in turn sold him to “a great man” named Fulekower, who sold him to the Spaniards at Lomboko.
⁸

Bau—“sober, intelligent looking, and rather slightly built”—left a wife and three children in the Mende country. Four men captured
him as he was on his way to the rice fields, tied his left hand to his neck, and marched him for ten long days to Lomboko, where he probably met Cinqué and many others who would be his shipmates. Both men had the skills of warriors: “They had been in battles, in their own country, using muskets.”
⁹

From their arrival at Lomboko, Cinqué and Bau shared a common history of incarceration, shipment, and resistance. Brought to the coast, they “were chained when put on board the slaver, which was a brig. It was crowded with slaves—200 men, 300 women, and ‘plenty of children.’” At this point Cinqué “sat down on the floor, walked about on his knees, and bent his head beneath the imaginary deck above, all to dramatize the cramped conditions he and his comrades experienced on the lower deck.” Their sufferings on the eight-week Middle Passage were great; many of their shipmates died.

Cinqué and Bau were put ashore in Havana “in the night.” They were “ironed hand and foot” and “chained together at the waist and by the neck.” Ten days later they boarded the
Amistad
in the evening and sailed around midnight. Once at sea, their irons were taken off, although the two seamen kept watch with muskets. Some of the Africans slept below, the rest on deck. Captain Ferrer, they emphasized, was “very cruel,” beating them routinely and keeping them “almost starved.” They decided that they “would not take it, to use their own expression, and therefore turned to and fought for it.” Once they had captured the vessel, they told the Spaniards to take them to Sierra Leone, but, according to Cinqué, “They made fools of us.” Because Cinqué officially faced execution for murder, he and Bau discreetly stated that “they were down in the hold, and did not see the fight.” So much for the spirits and their punishments.

Despite Ferry’s translation, confusion remained. Tappan and his colleagues continued to think that Cinqué and most of the others were Mandingo, from Senegambia, rather than Mende, and that a few were Congo rather than Kono. Tappan understood that the quality of communication left something to be desired and therefore, at the end of his published account of the interviews, he made an appeal to “native Africans in this city, or elsewhere in this country, who were born near
the sources of the river Niger, or in Mandingo, or who can converse readily in the Susoo, Kissi, Mandingo, or Gallinas dialects” to call on the Amistad Committee at 143 Nassau Street in New York. He also made a request for books and pamphlets that might illuminate the history and cultures of that part of Africa from which the prisoners came.

The African story of the rebellion thus emerged, through John Ferry, in an interaction that featured abolitionist questions and prisoner answers, shaped by native traditions of storytelling. The narrative of the uprising began with freedom in Africa, where families were torn asunder, the storytellers violently enslaved and forced into a gruesome Middle Passage, incarcerated in the barracoons of Havana, and mistreated on the
Amistad
, where they finally launched a rebellion in order to achieve their ultimate objective: to go home to the freedom where their tale began. The Africans offered a narrative of freedom to slavery to freedom—a coherent, compelling story that would captivate people throughout the United States and beyond.

Romance Denied

As the
Amistad
Africans spent their second week in jail, and as they began to tell their story to the abolitionists who would represent them in court, the public uproar over the case and their presence in New Haven, continued unabated. Those who visited the prisoners included a cross-section of mid-Atlantic and New England society. In addition to Tappan, Gibbs, Olmsted, Bacon, Ludlow, and Baldwin, other visiting luminaries in coming months would include the Reverend George E. Day (divinity) and Benjamin Silliman (chemistry and natural history), both from Yale. Day and several others—Robert C. Learned and Benjamin Griswold of the Theological Seminary, S. W. Magill, and, of special importance, Sherman Booth, a senior at Yale University—instructed the captives in jail. The Irish abolitionist/British diplomat Richard Robert Madden came all the way from Havana, speaking to several of the
Amistad
Africans in Arabic and estimating the ages of several others. Former president, current member of Congress, and
future attorney for the
Amistad
Africans John Quincy Adams made what he described as a pleasurable visit, remarking afterwards that the “clothing, bedding &c of the Africans are not what they ought to be.” Even United States District Court judge Andrew Judson visited the
Amistad
Africans in jail, twice. Phrenologists such as L. N. Fowler were busy studying and measuring the heads of the Africans, to deduce their temperaments and characters. Artists entered the place of confinement with pencils and brushes to sketch and paint portraits. Among the throngs in jail a newspaper correspondent saw “the finest looking women there that ever God made.” Some of these women were determined abolitionists.
¹⁰