The Amistad Rebellion (28 page)

Based on Nathaniel Jocelyn’s painting, John Sartain produced a mezzotint engraving, “Cinque: The Chief of the Amistad Captives.”

The painting features Cinqué in traditional Mende dress, a white cotton cloth thrown over his left shoulder, holding a staff, a symbol of leadership among his people. Jocelyn probably got the ideas for both symbols directly from Cinqué, as he would not have known about Mende culture. But Jocelyn cleverly built double meanings into both: viewers of the painting might see the African leader as wearing a toga, like a virtuous Roman republican citizen, or as Moses, staff in hand, having led his compatriots back to the Promised Land. A direct-action abolitionist such as Robert Purvis might imagine the staff as a spear, a weapon of self-defense.

Jocelyn’s portrait of Cinqué was a commercial transaction, between patron and artist, but unlike the artwork of Hewins, Moulthrop, and
Barber, it was not meant to make money—until Purvis had John Sartain of Philadelphia make an engraving and lithograph of the same image, which would then be sold for $2 per copy, the proceeds to go to the Pennsylvania Antislavery Association. This gave the image a much broader, even transatlantic circulation, as copies of it ended up in Bristol, England, among other places, through abolitionist circuits.
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The art of Barber, Moulthrop, Hewins, and Jocelyn served a common vital purpose, keeping the
Amistad
struggle before the public during an otherwise quiet time of incarceration. These artists had met the prisoners and heard their stories of the rebellion. Through their art they helped not only to publicize the struggle, but to project antislavery ideas to people inside and outside the movement. The biographical element that all artists included, by text or portraiture, gave a human face to the struggle for freedom, for the “Mendi People,” and indeed all enslaved people.

The Collective

The abolitionists who went to the New Haven jail sought to turn those who had engaged in communal armed struggle into peaceable, disciplined Christian individuals. The
Amistad
Africans cooperated in this work, but their own project was in a fundamental way the very opposite: to create and preserve a disciplined sense of the collective, to hold everyone together for the sake of survival and the accomplishment of what remained the primary goal from the beginning of the ordeal to the end: to return to Africa. The fictive kinship that began to grow at Lomboko expanded on the
Teçora
, in the barracoons of Havana, aboard the
Amistad
, and came to full fruition in the jail of New Haven. The bonding eventually took a novel collective form called “the Mendi People.”

The original power of the collective took the form of successful rebellion. A second achievement was a 1,400-mile voyage aboard the
Amistad
. The collective reared its head again on board the
Washington
,
where Cinqué tried to inspire his comrades to another round of resistance. American authorities recognized the threat of solidarity and sought to weaken it by segregating the leader from his mates. The power of the collective was once again made clear by the laughing, screaming, weeping, and rejoicing that was audible and visible to all every time he was reunited with his shipmates.
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Burna also played an important role in knitting and keeping the group together. Unable to go to Hartford for the first hearing because he was sick, Burna was upset to be separated from his shipmates, “the more so,” one observer noted, “because two of the three little girls are his sisters.” They were not, of course, his biological sisters, but they were sisters within his own idiom. He manifested the same sensibility months later in Farmington, in an exchange with abolitionist A. F. Williams, who sought the help of the
Amistad
Africans when a “Mr. Chamberlain, a young gentleman of intelligence and worth,” disappeared into the river; it was feared that he had drowned. Burna replied, “Me think me hear you say your brother in water, me no sleep, we come find.” Williams did not understand the system of fictive kinship, so he felt compelled to correct Burna: “You are mistaken, said I, not my brother, my friend.” Burna answered, “Well, we look, we find.” At great peril to themselves as they dove into “the loaming water below the dam,” Burna and his shipmates recovered the lifeless body of Williams’ “brother” and returned it to him for a funeral and burial. Burna was also known to manifest strong feeling when discussing his multiethnic shipmates who had died, especially the Bullom man Tua who passed away in New Haven after the freedom voyage.
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The
Amistad
Africans came from societies in which the common good of the group almost always came before individual preference, advantage, and advancement. Because their survival in jail, and indeed throughout their entire Atlantic ordeal, depended on group solidarity, they organized themselves accordingly, on the model of the Poro Society. As the Rev. James Steele, one of the missionaries who accompanied the
Amistad
Africans back to Sierra Leone, noted, they “were under great restraints, especially in America; they thought if
one did anything evil it would be charged upon the whole, and this with a desire to secure friends in a strange land, made them very watchful over each other.”
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Tensions

The emphasis on maintaining a united front did not mean that there were no tensions within the group. The relationship between Cinqué and Burna, for example, was fraught with stress. They had clashed during and after the rebellion. According to several reports, Cinqué apparently wanted to kill Ruiz, Montes, or both, and on more than one occasion Burna stayed his machete-wielding hand. Cinqué seems not to have trusted Burna, and he may have been right in not doing so: Burna was the only
Amistad
African who criticized Cinqué for his treatment of Ruiz and Montes. It was rumored that Burna was afraid of Cinqué.
⁴⁴

Why Cinqué and Burna clashed is not easy to discern. They may have had cultural differences: Cinqué was Mende; Burna was Gbandi. They had strong personalities and may have had differing approaches to their common dilemma. Part of it was surely that Burna was the only person among the rebels who knew some English and could therefore communicate with Ruiz, who had been educated in Connecticut, and through him with Montes. Was Cinqué insecure that he could not understand what the three men were talking about? He seems to have been worried that Burna was cooperating in a plan to return the vessel to Havana. As Antonio testified before the district court in January 1840, “Sinqua thought when Burnah talked with Pedro they take Sch[ooner] back to Havana. He wanted to go to Africa.”
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A disturbing possibility fueled the mistrust and insecurity. Had Burna learned to speak English while working in the slave trade in Sierra Leone? There is no direct evidence that he had, but there are hints. As the correspondent of the
New York Morning Herald
noted after interviewing Burna, his “language is an odd melange of English and Spanish, with an occasional French word, and a slight sprinkling of
some African lingo.” This was a pidgin language, designed to facilitate trade between Europeans and Africans on the coast, suggesting the circumstances in which Burna acquired his language skills. It would have been difficult to have been involved with Spanish, French, and English traders on the Gallinas Coast in the 1830s without having been involved in the slave trade. Moreover, it turned out that Burna was quite a rich man in his native land. He had seven wives, a sure sign of wealth. If Cinqué knew or suspected any of these things, he may have had good reason to worry about the conversations between Burna and the Spaniards, and about Burna’s commitment to their collective freedom.
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More important than any tension within the group was the long, formative struggle between the Africans and jailer Stanton Pendleton. He diminished the collective when he moved Margru, Kagne, and Teme from the jail to his household, then tried to keep them there after the rest of the
Amistad
Africans were moved from New Haven to Westville in September 1840. This aggravated tensions that had been roiling between the jailer and his charges for months over issues of labor, discipline, and racism. Abolitionists may have held a favorable opinion of Pendleton, but the
Amistad
Africans took a decidedly different view, leading to explosive confrontations in February 1841.

One of the first hints of conflict was reported in the
Hartford Courant
and the
Boston Courier
in early September 1840: “One of them [the
Amistad
Africans] was put in irons the other day, for an attempt to assault his keeper, who restrained some of his ‘largest liberty.’” The source of the conflict was not disclosed, though perhaps a clue can be found in reference to some of the African attitudes: “Their notions of property are entirely Agrarian: ‘What’s yours is mine, and what’s mine is my own.’” The conflict may have spurred the abolitionists to make arrangements to move the captives to a jail in Westville, which happened less than a week later.
⁴⁷

When, a few months later, one of the proslavery newspapers resorted to racist stereotypes to suggest that the
Amistad
Africans were lazy and shiftless and refused to work, Cinqué, in a conversation with his teacher, Sherman Booth, revealed a previous history of
conflict over labor issues: “My people work for Pendleton plenty and he never pay.” They worked on the roads, in taverns, and elsewhere around New Haven. So valuable was their labor that Pendleton told Tsukama to wash his clothes on his own time, on Sunday, so that he would be available for other work on weekdays. Tsukama objected to “working on the Sabbath” (Christianity had material advantages), to which Pendleton replied, “What does a ‘nigger’ care for Sunday?” Pendleton also required the
Amistad
Africans to do their own cooking and woodcutting. Cinqué indignantly asked, “We no work?! Man no work, he no eat—he die, he no work.” Reflecting his rising knowledge of the gospel of “free labor” and the labor theory of value, he stated: “We all work, if men pay; but no pay, we no work.” He and his comrades insisted on choice in the labor market: “We no work any more for Mr. Pendleton [even] if he pay.” Still, Cinqué would not reduce all to an economic logic: “We work for [abolitionists] Mr. Tappan and Mr. Townsend without pay, because they good friends.”
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James Covey also clashed with Pendleton, partly because his translations had made possible the arrest of Ruiz and Montes, with whom Pendleton apparently sympathized. Covey also refused to treat Pendleton “with the Defference and respect [to] which his station entitles him.” The jailer retaliated by limiting Covey’s access to the Africans until the abolitionists could smooth the matter over.
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A big confrontation with Pendleton occurred in early February 1841, after the move to the less populous Westville, just northwest of New Haven, which would have limited the income the jailer received in New Haven for admission to see the popular prisoners. The
Amistad
Africans and their abolitionist allies had begun their efforts to remove Margru, Kagne, and Teme from the jailer’s household, and to reattach them to the group, which made him furious. Pendleton spread what Cinqué called a “bad rumor,” which was the subject of much “jail talk” among the “Mendi People.” Pendleton claimed that the abolitionists were not telling the truth about their plans for the
Amistad
Africans: “they tell you lie: Mendi people not go to Mendi.” They would go to Havana. Worse, Pendleton said of Tappan, for whom he had a special dislike, “he all destroy you.” Cinqué responded to
Pendleton’s allegation with Christian patience, saying, “Mr. Tappan in New York, he was very good man and Mr. Townsend, and God will bless them.”
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Lurking behind the “bad rumor” was a history of antagonism that had been building during a yearlong term in the New Haven jail. Cinqué alleged, “When we in New Haven, he whip Mendi people too hard.” Now the angry jailer had arrived in Westville cursing, with chains in his hands, and he was threatening to do so again. At this moment Cinqué the warrior seemed to be having trouble with the Christian command to “love thy enemies.” But in a letter to Baldwin in which he explained the confrontation, he said dutifully, “We forgive him and he curse us and he whip us and all he do that is not better for us.” He wanted Baldwin’s assurance that Pendleton would not do this again.

The Africans also wrote a group letter to Tappan, alleging frankly that Pendleton was a violent, racist, exploitative, ungodly man. He had whipped Fuli and Kinna and he had threatened to “kill the Mendi People,” all of them. He said “all black people no good”; they “stink.” He sought “to make all black people work for him.” He was, in short, a “wicked man,” the very kind denounced in the Bible. He and his entire family were “all bad—do not love God.” It was clearly time to remove the girls from his household.
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The Mendi People

During the winter of 1840–1841, almost two years after their initial enslavement in Africa and about seventeen months after they had been confined in American jails, the
Amistad
Africans began to think of themselves and to represent themselves in a new way in the letters they wrote in greater numbers as their studies of the English language advanced. They now proudly called themselves “the Mendi People.” That this was a collective decision was made clear in a newspaper article that appeared under the headline “The Mendi People.” The first line read, “Thus the Africans, late of the schooner Amistad, call themselves.”
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The new name represented an apotheosis of their long-standing
fictive kinship. Drawing on the additive nature of Mende and other surrounding cultures, they achieved a new level of social bonding through a two-sided process that took place inside the jail: the linguistic and cultural assimilation of the non-Mende people to the ways of the numerically dominant Mende among them, and the creation of a new “we,” a collective identity, against a newly perceived “they” in the external world. In a real sense, a language community became a political community. The collective would use its new name to make claims—about who the group was and what its future should be.