The Amistad Rebellion (25 page)

The brute geographic and political facts of being incarcerated and subjected to an alien legal process demanded certain responses from the Africans. With simple eloquence Cinqué took his abolitionist teachers
to the heart of the matter, stressing the equality and the political necessity of the jailhouse encounter: “If you were in my country and could not talk with any body, you would want to learn our language; I want to learn yours.” He assured the abolitionists that his comrades “will apply themselves to learning.” From beginning to end, education in jail entailed a struggle to communicate. Even after translators had been found, teacher Benjamin Griswold had “great difficulties in making them [the
Amistad
Africans] understand his instructions.”
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Everyone agreed that the captives approached their studies with abiding enthusiasm and commitment. As Covey put it in a letter to Lewis Tappan, “Our African friends love to read.” They had a special interest in geography, as expropriated and displaced people might. They expressed curiosity about the “countries beside Mendi and America,” even as these two no doubt loomed in equal importance above all others. Other interests included almanacs, grammar, and the Bible. Covey requested a “big dictionary” for himself and his fellow Africans, in order to “look out hard words.” Visitors to the jail saw many men “intently engaged with books and slates.” Their teacher summarized their attitude to learning: “Their whole souls are absorbed in their studies, to which they give their undivided attention. They are the most attentive pupils I have ever saw and never get tired of learning. They are very inquisitive, and manifest great joy when they gain a new idea.—They are affectionate, grateful, and warm in their attachment.”
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The commitment of the
Amistad
Africans to education was more than a matter of good attitude. Studying became something they could do among and for themselves, for the purpose of emancipation. They realized early on that learning, and demonstrating what they had learned, would be a key to cementing the alliance with the abolitionists, who had organized the jailhouse as a school. The Africans then made the project their own, as they made clear by their actions on numerous occasions. They used their own money, given as gifts by visitors to the jail or earned through acrobatics, to buy Bibles and other books. One stormy morning when their teacher did not show up for class, Cinqué gathered the group for self-instruction and study.
Commitment to education eventually enabled the
Amistad
Africans to contribute to the legal strategy of their case and to express in English their own political ideas.
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Informal teaching and learning in the jail began immediately. The first steps were the teaching and learning of primary numbers, one through ten, and the use of body parts to create vocabulary—eyes, nose, ears, mouth—as the little girls taught the “gentlemen” soon after they arrived in the New Haven jail. The presence of Yale professors added a systematic component to the process of learning. Josiah Gibbs took down Kissi, Vai, and Mende words to create vocabularies he published in leading scientific journals. George Day brought images to teach vocabulary, so that the
Amistad
Africans might “pronounce the name upon seeing either the picture or the printed word.” Some of the pictures reflected the abolitionist imagination of exotic Africa—wild beasts such as lions, tigers, and elephants, which the rebels sometimes recognized as creatures of their native lands. Other images included tools and implements. By these means they were “acquiring a good stock of English words.” The learning proceeded so quickly that Professor Day soon ran out of pictures.
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Initial instruction in reading and writing began in October 1839, and became more intensive and systematic after the January 1840 court hearings. Teacher Sherman Booth eventually organized his students into three groups of ten to twelve each, based on what he perceived as ability. The top class (which included Cinqué, Kinna, and Fuli) read the Gospels, concentrating on the Book of Luke; studied a spelling book; and did exercises in arithmetic. The youthful Kale was the star pupil of this group, which was, by late 1840, “using pen and paper, and expressing their own thoughts, in our language, quite intelligibly.” At the same time a second class studied spelling and had covered seventy pages of Lowell’s “first class book.” A third class, still working on the alphabet and the discipline of writing letters and words, were showing “some weariness” in their studies. Abolitionist teachers were especially pleased when books and slates replaced “native games,” as they apparently did after a few months of study.
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Because most abolitionists were religious, and some, like Lewis
Tappan, were evangelical, devotional services were a significant part of jailhouse education. Ministers as well as laymen preached and commented on a huge array of Biblical passages and subjects. Tappan wrote a fellow abolitionist: “Every Sabbath divine service has been held at the prison, and the Africans had the prayers and instructions interpreted to them by Covey. They behaved quite orderly and apparently took much intent at the services.” Professor Gibbs gave an example of Covey’s translation of a prayer:

One of the abolitionists wrote, “We have preaching, or a palaver, tomorrow, with the Africans, on the subject of the religion of the white men.” It was one of many.
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Eventually the
Amistad
Africans learned to speak the language of Christianity, which is evident in each and every surviving letter they wrote. In writing a letter to Miss Juliana Chamberlain, who had contributed $5 to the Amistad Committee fund, Kale managed, in a single paragraph, to rehearse his entire recent study of Christianity. He mentioned the love of “Great God,” who “sent his beloved son into the world to save sinners who were lost” and “sent the Bible into the world to save us from going down to hell.” He noted that Jesus had “made the sick well he made the lame walk he made the dumb speak and deaf hear.” He expressed the hope that God would help and bless the benevolent Miss Chamberlain, give her a “new Soul,” and “take her up to Heaven when she dies.” He concluded, “All Mendi people thank you for your kindness and hope to meet you in heaven,” but he was quick to add to his godliness a political demand: “I want you to pray to the Great God make us free and go our home and see our friends in African Country.”
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It is difficult to know what the
Amistad
Africans heard, found significant, and remembered from the “God palavers,” but one passage
of the Bible seems to have had a special resonance: Psalm 124:7, which the rebels themselves used to explain their ordeal of enslavement and emancipation. Cinqué, Kale, and Kinna wrote, “We read in this Holy Book, ‘If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us, then they had swallowed us up quick, when their wrath was kindled up against us. Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us a prey to their teeth. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowler; the snare is broken and we are escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made Heaven and Earth.’” As people whose skill at catching birds on New Haven Green amazed onlookers, they drew a metaphor directly from their own experience. The “men who rose up against us” were the slave catchers and traders. Slavery itself was likened to being eaten alive, preserving memory of the threat of cannibalism through a Biblical parable.
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“Speaking Christian” reflected how the
Amistad
Africans understood their allies and acted to secure their long-term cooperation and commitment. But it was only one means among many. They also understood, and quickly, how much the abolitionists detested the slave trade and slavery. Shortly after coming ashore, Cinqué and others “performed slavery” in acts of guerilla theater, in courtrooms and in jail. After translator James Ferry made it possible for them to tell their own stories, Cinqué and his fellow rebels emphasized the violence of enslavement, their separation from wives and children, and the destruction of their families, all of which tapped into central, highly emotional messages of the abolitionist movement, and indeed into one of its greatest propaganda victories, the successful broad popular agitation against the slave trade as epitomized by the nightmarish Middle Passage.

The
Amistad
Africans went out of their way not to offend the people whose help they needed. They somehow grasped the Christian hostility to the polygyny that was widely practiced in their own societies. Burna told the abolitionists that he lived with his mother, and did not mention that he was married, least of all to seven different women. Several other men probably had more than one wife as well, but only one of the
Amistad
Africans admitted as much: Fabanna said he had
two. Another example of sensitivity to cultural difference occurred when Tua died on September 11, 1839. The Africans remained in the background while abolitionist minister Leonard Bacon performed the service. After he had finished his eulogy, Shule stepped forward, stood at the head of the corpse, and “muttered a sort of prayer of address,” which took “four or five minutes.” As he spoke, “his companions responded in short ejaculations,” in the communal African style, with great feeling. The
Amistad
Africans later explained to their teacher that the ceremony “was not a Mendian burial rite, as was published at the time in the papers, but an imitation of American customs.”
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It is impossible to tell to what extent Christian language was a matter of belief and to what extent it was a matter of strategy. It was undoubtedly a combination of both. By March 1841, Lewis Tappan hoped that three or four might have been converted to Christianity and seemed relieved that the rest were still willing to be instructed in the faith. All that can be said with certainty is that the
Amistad
Africans understood the importance of Christianity within the worldview of the abolitionists and acted to accommodate it, within the larger context of their own main objective: to go home.
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The Art of Rebellion

As the
Amistad
Africans studied reading, writing, and religion, they met artists who wanted to connect their cause to people beyond the jailhouse. The artists were interested most of all in the rebellion, assuming, correctly, it seems, that it was what fascinated the public about the case above all else. The artists John Warner Barber, Sidney Moulthrop, and Amasa Hewins all visited the
Amistad
Africans in the New Haven jail during the first few months of 1840. Barber produced an engraving and a pamphlet, Moulthrop a set of wax figures, and Hewins a massive painting, all depicting and interpreting the rebellion. Barber wrote, “The capture of the Amistad with her cargo of native Africans, and the peculiar circumstances of the case, have excited an unusual degree of interest in this country, and in Europe.”
The artists sought to capitalize on the public captivation, which was bound to intensify as the case made its way toward the Supreme Court. All three artists would use their direct contact with the Africans in jail to establish their credentials to represent the rebellion. The artists would give “accurate,” “factual,” and “real life” images to a hungry public.
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By 1840 Barber was well known as an engraver of New England’s historic buildings and landscapes. A native of New Haven, he got caught up in the local excitement surrounding the
Amistad
case. He noted in his diary that he attended the court hearings of January 7–13, 1840, and was present when Judge Andrew Judson ruled that the Africans were recently, and therefore illegally, imported to Cuba, and hence not to be returned to their so-called owners, Ruiz and Montes. On April 1, Barber began to visit the
Amistad
Africans in jail. Over the next two months he would create drawings and engravings of them to illustrate a thirty-two-page pamphlet,
A History of the Amistad Captives: Being a Circumstantial Account of the Capture of the Spanish Schooner Amistad, by the Africans on Board; Their Voyage, and Capture Near Long Island, New York; with Biographical Sketches of Each of the Surviving Africans; Also, an Account of the Trials had on Their case, Before the District and Circuit Courts of the United States, for the District of Connecticut
, self-published in June 1840 by E. L. and J. W. Barber, in New Haven. The popular pamphlet cost twenty-five cents.
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Compiled from “authentic sources,”
A History of the Amistad Captives
reproduced newspaper articles from the
New London Gazette
and the
New York Journal of Commerce
; court records, including depositions by Ruiz, Montes, Richard Robert Madden, and Francis Bacon, a traveler to the Gallinas Coast; African narratives of the Middle Passage; an account of the culture of the Mendi people; diplomatic correspondence; and most importantly a section of Barber’s own original creation: illustrated biographical sketches of the Africans, based on “personal conversation with them, by means of James Covey, the Interpreter.” During his visits to the jail, Barber drew portraits, from which he would engrave silhouettes of the Africans, including Covey.
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Barber added several other illustrations to the portraits: a map of
“Mendi country, with regard to other portions of Africa,” on which the Gallinas River and Fort Lomboko were located, between Sierra Leone and Liberia; a depiction of nine of the
Amistad
Africans as they sat cramped and huddled together on the lower deck of the slave ship that carried them from Lomboko to Havana; and a representation of a Mende village, adapted from a similar illustration by African “explorer” Richard Lander and “recognized by the Africans as giving a correct representation of the appearance of villages in their native country.”
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