The Amistad Rebellion (40 page)

21
.
The Palm Land
, 202–14; “Liberated Mendians,”
PF
, August 18, 1841.

22
. Barber, 8–14.

23
. Anthony J. Gittins,
Mende Religion: Aspects of Belief and Thought in Sierra Leone
(Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1987), 166;
Thompson in Africa
, 300;
The Palm Land
, 197; Kenneth Little,
The Mende of Sierra Leone: A West African People in Transition
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951, rev. ed. 1967), 70–80; Jones, 62. The relationship between the slave trade and rice production is explored well by James F. Searing,
West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

24
. Rankin, vol. II, 241–43.

25
.
The Palm Land
, 129;
Thompson in Africa
, 212; Forbes, 58; Laing, 201–04.

26
. The information about urban origins was provided in May 1841 by Sherman Booth, who had worked for many months as the primary teacher of the
Amistad
Africans and who had therefore spent more time in conversation with them than anyone: “They lived in cities, most of which were of about the size of New Haven; adjacent to their cities, they cultivated farms, grew cotton, manufactured cloth, &c.” See the
Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier
, May 29, 1841. The size of many Mende towns and cities is unknown because of the lack of surviving evidence, but travelers frequently mention concentrations of several thousand people. George Thompson was convinced, based on local conversations, that much larger cities, with tens of thousands of people, existed further east, distant from the reach of the slave trade, which had depopulated coastal areas (
The Palm Land
, 428–29). Yet the cities were probably not as large as suggested here. This may have been because the
Amistad
Africans did not realize how large New Haven was, or they may have exaggerated the size of their own cities. It should also be noted that abolitionists wanted to present the
Amistad
Africans as denizens of advanced, “civilized” societies in Africa.

27
. Testimony of Francis Bacon,
New Haven Palladium
, n.d. (January 1840), copy in the Baldwin Family Papers. See also “The Liberated Mendians,”
PF
, August 18, 1841.

28
.
Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier
, May 29, 1841;
ARCJ
, June 1, 1841.

29
. Richard Robert Madden estimated the ages of eight of the Amistad Africans, but seems to have suggested that they were younger than they actually were. For comparative ages of a sample of Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone, see P.E.H. Hair, “The Enslavement of Koelle’s Informants,”
Journal of African History
6 (1965): 194–95. Kale was described as being eleven years old in 1841, after he had learned to speak English well, hence the estimate of nine in 1839.

30
. Norton Papers, Diaries, vol. III: entry for Thursday, March 18, 1841, box no. 3, folder 18, MS 367.

31
.
The Palm Land
, 282;
Emancipator
, September 23, 1841. On the connections among the Mende, Loma, and Gbandi languages within the “South-Western Mande” language group, see Valentin Vydrine, “Note on Current Use of Manding and Mande Ethnonyms and Linguonyms,” available at http://mandelang.kunstkamera.ru/. On the localized nature of political power in the region surrounding Freetown, see Philip Misevich, “The Sierra Leone Hinterland and the Provisioning of Early Freetown, 1792–1803,”
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
9 (2008).

32
. Kenneth L. Little, “The Role of the Secret Society in Cultural Specialization,”
American Anthropologist
, n.s., 51 (1949): 202; F.W.H. Migeod, “The Poro Society: The Building of the Poro House and Making of the Image,”
Man
16 (1916): 102. An important study of how secret societies moved from the Cross River region of present-day Nigeria to Cuba is Ivor L. Miller,
Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba
(Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009).

33
. Jones, 19; Little,
The Mende of Sierra Leone
, 8–9, 97–99, Forbes, 60; Barber, 13; Hannah Moore to William Harned, October 12, 1852, ARC. On the relationship between the degree of scarification and Poro standing, see Kenneth. L. Little, “The Political Function of the Poro, part I,”
Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute
35 (1965): 359, 360.

34
. Jones, 179; Laing, 99. For a valuable exploration of the Atlantic migration of cultures, including spiritual beliefs, see Walter Hawthorne,
From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

35
. W. T. Harris and Harry Sawyerr,
The Springs of Mende Belief: A Discussion of the Influence of the Belief in the Supernatural Among the Mende
(Freetown: University of Sierra Leone Press, 1968), 111; Little,
The Mende of Sierra Leone
, 184.

36
.
The Palm Land
, 418; Laing, 93–95; Jones, 48, 187. It should be noted that some Poro Societies were also known to have been involved in slave trading.

37
. Jones, 179; Forbes, 61;
Thompson in Africa
, 418–19.

38
. Forbes, 60; Rankin, vol. II, 82; Arthur Abraham,
Mende Government and Politics under Colonial Rule: A Historical Study of Political Change in Sierra Leone, 1890–1937
(Freetown: Sierra Leone University Press, 1978), 159–60.

39
. Rankin, vol. I, 259–60; Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle,
African Native Literature
(Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck–U. Verlagsantalt, 1968. First published 1854 by Church Missionary Society, London), vii;
The Palm Land
, 38; Laing, 206–7.

40
. Little,
The Mende of Sierra Leone
, 197; Donald Cosentino,
Defiant Maids and Stubborn Farmers: Tradition and Invention in Mende Story Performance
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Marion Kilson,
Royal Antelope and Spider: West African Mende Tales
(Cambridge, MA: Press of the Langdon Associates, 1976).

41
.
Thompson in Africa
, 61; Koelle,
African Native Literature
,
xiii.

42
.
Thompson in Africa
, 169, 194, 244;
The Palm Land
, 237; Forbes, 66; Barber, 8.

43
. Abraham,
Mende Government and Politics
, 15–16;
Thompson in Africa
, 127.

44
.
Thompson in Africa
, 105, 108.

45
. Clarke,
Sierra Leone
, 163;
Thompson in Africa
, 225–26, 237; Christopher Fyfe,
A History of Sierra Leone
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1962), 246.

46
. Abraham,
Mende Government and Politics
, 7; S. W. Koelle,
Outlines of a Grammar of the Vei Language, Together with a Vei–English Vocabulary and an Account of the Discovery and Nature of the Vei Mode of Syllabic Writing
(Westmead, UK: Gregg International Publishers, 1968. First published 1854 by Church Missionary House, London), iii;
The Palm Land
, 293; Adam Jones, “Who Were the Vai?”
Journal of African History
22 (1981): 159.

47
. Abraham,
Mende Government and Politics
, 3; Jones, 65; Little,
The Mende of Sierra Leone
, 84, 176.

48
. “The Mendians,”
Vermont Chronicle
, June 8, 1842; Barber, 10. See also “Goterah, African Warrior,”
ARCJ
15 (1839): 290–94. On the geopolitical context of Goterah’s mercenary war making, see Svend Holsoe, “A Study of Relations Between Settlers and Indigenous Peoples in Western Liberia, 1821–1847,”
African Historical Studies
4 (1971): 331–62.

49
.
ARCJ
, 18 (1842): 300;
Thompson in Africa
, 308. Harris and Sawyerr wrote: “Ambuscades were naturally only successful in dark nights, as moonlight would always expose attackers to the view of the defenders” (
The Springs of Mende Belief
, 119), while Forbes added, Africans
“never fight in the day time, and seldom in the night unless the opposite party is asleep in a town” (102). See also Rankin, vol. II, 237. On the traditions of warfare in the region, including fighting at night, see A. P. Kup,
A History of Sierra Leone, 1400–1787
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 167–70, and John Thornton,
Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800
(London: Routledge, 2000),
chap. 2
.

50
. Abraham,
Mende Government and Politics
, 20; Jones, 19; Rankin, vol. II, 76; Barber, 10.

51
. Walter Rodney,
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
(Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1972), 141–43; Rankin, vol. II, 74, 224; Laing, 217. For subsequent history, see John J. Grace, “Slavery and Emancipation Among the Mende in Sierra Leone, 1896–1928,” in Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds.,
Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 415–31.

52
. The world market sprouted other local roots when Susu traders, armed with bows and arrows poisoned with snake venom, manned their fearsome war canoes in the 1850s to capture slaves along the Boom and Kittam rivers. They carried them north to work on their own plantations, where they grew peanuts for export to England, France, and the United States;
The Palm Land
, 186, 187. The presence of tobacco in the region may have predated the slave trade.

53
. Jones, 89–91. See also Laing, 127, and the articles by Rashid in note 12 above. On the early history of the slave trade see Toby Green,
The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

54
. Jones, 21, 24–25, 37, 43–44; Testimony of Bacon,
New Haven Palladium
; Rankin, vol. II, 74; Adam Jones, “White Roots: Written and Oral Testimony on the ‘First’ Mr. Rogers,”
History in Africa
10 (1983): 151–62. Other important slave-trading families in the region included the Caulkers, Clevelands, Coles, and Tuckers. It is difficult to square the figures available through the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database about slave shipments from Sierra Leone during the 1830s with the evidence provided by people who visited the region at the time, including the British naval officers whose job it was to gauge the nefarious commerce. The former suggests exports of about 2,000 slaves per year, while the latter almost all agreed that the number was closer to 10,000. Sierra Leone’s governor, Sir John Jeremie, reported that the slave traders on the Gallinas Coast had shipped “upwards of thirteen thousand” during the year 1840 (“Destruction of African Slave Factories,”
Bury and Norwich Post
, April 14, 1841). Much of the discrepancy can no doubt be accounted for by the illegal nature of the trade: the slavers, such as the
Teçora
, made it their business to create no records, hence there is no documentation about many of them to include in the database.

55
. Madden, Report on Sierra Leone, 25; Forbes, v–vi; Theophilus Conneau,
A Slaver’s Logbook, or 20 Years’ Residence in Africa
,
ed. Mabel M. Smythe (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976), chap. 15. On Conneau, see Svend E. Holsoe, “Theodore Canot at Cape Mount, 1841–1847,”
Liberian Studies Journal
4 (1972): 163–81; Bruce L. Mouser, “Théophilus Conneau: The Saga of a Tale,”
History in Africa
6 (1979): 97–107; and Adam Jones, “Théophile Conneau at Galinhas and New Sestos, 1836–1841: A Comparison of the Sources,”
History in Africa
8 (1981): 89–105. On the anti-slave-trade squadron, see Marika Sherwood,
After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade After 1807
(London: I. B. Taurus, 2007), 114–20 and Allen M. Howard, “Nineteenth-century Coastal Slave Trading and the British Campaign in Sierra Leone,”
Slavery and Abolition
27 (2006): 23–49.

56
. Rankin, vol. II, 78, 80;
The Palm Land
, 245; Barber, 12–15; Moore to Harned, October 12, 1852, ARC. The experiences of enslavement among the
Amistad
Africans were in many ways similar to those of 179 Africans interviewed by linguist Sigismund Koelle in Sierra Leone around 1850, 34 percent of whom had been captured in war, 30 percent kidnapped, and the remaining 36 percent enslaved for crime, debt, or other reasons. See Hair, “The Enslavement of Koelle’s Informants,” 193–203.

57
. A. F. Williams to Lewis Tappan, Farmington, September 23, 1841, and S. W. Booth to Lewis Tappan, Farmington, October 4, 1841, ARC.

58
. Barber, 10.

59
. Cinqué “had never seen a white man until he was sold a slave into their hands.” See Amos Townsend Jr. to Lewis Tappan, New Haven, November 13, 1839, ARC.

60
. Jones, 1, 5–6; Rankin, vol. II, 206; Clarke,
Sierra Leone
, 7–8, 18, 20;
The Palm Land
, 122, 188–89, 266; Forbes, 124–25; Laing, 78; “Sketches of the Colony of Sierra Leone and Its Inhabitants, by Robert Clarke, Surgeon, late of Her Majesty’s Colonial Service; formerly
Member of the Executive and Legislative Councils of the Gold Coast; Acting Judicial Assessor; Corresponding Member of the Ethnological Society, etc. With pictorial Illustrations, from original drawings by Mrs. Clarke,”
Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London
2 (1863): 322–23.

61
. Forbes, 13–15; Clarke, “Sketches of the Colony of Sierra Leone,” 329; Madden, Report on Sierra Leone, 4, 8. Important work on the Liberated Africans includes Rosanne Adderley,
“New Negroes from Africa”: Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007); Philip R. Misevich, “On the Frontier of ‘Freedom’: Abolition and the Transformation of Atlantic Commerce in Southern Sierra Leone, 1790s to 1860s,” Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 2009; Sharla M. Fett, “Middle Passages and Forced Migrations: Liberated Africans in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Camps and Ships,”
Slavery and Abolition
31 (2010): 75–98; and Robert Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize: Journeys in Slave Ships Taken as Prizes by the Royal Navy,”
Slavery and Abolition
31 (2010): 99–115.