Outlaws of the Atlantic

by Marcus Rediker

  Abolitionist attorneys argued that the Amistad rebels were not pirates, were not slaves, and that the United States government must not turn them over to Montes, Ruiz, Cuba, Spain, or anyone else for that matter. They should instead go free. Against a backdrop of the newspaper articles and images described above, and amid calls from proslavery newspapers that the US government return the African pirates to face their just punishments, a series of anonymously authored articles of learned legal opinion were published in early September, ten days to two weeks after the Amistad came ashore. These articles parsed the definitions of piracy and concluded that the Amistad rebels did not, indeed could not, fit any of them. They had no goal of enrichment in seizing the vessel and they attacked no other ships. They were merely seeking liberty and exercising their right to self-defense.46

  Yet the abolitionists shrewdly noticed—and took advantage of—a new addition to the law of piracy since the “golden age” of freebooting in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. A US federal law of 1820, sponsored by Virginia Federalist Charles Fenton Mercer and supported by abolitionists to attack illegal slave trading that went on after formal abolition in 1808, stated that any citizen of the United States who engaged in the slave trade “shall be adjudged a pirate” and if convicted “shall suffer death.” (This actually happened only once: Captain Nathaniel Gordon was hanged in New York for slave trading in 1862.) Spain’s treaties with Great Britain agreeing to end the trade in human beings by May 30, 1820, strengthened the association of slave trading and piracy.47

  Who, asked the abolitionists, are the pirates here? Not the Amistad rebels but rather the slave traders, in this case, Montes and Ruiz, and by implication the deceased Captain Ramón Ferrer. Even though the law technically applied to American, not Spanish, citizens, it nonetheless allowed the abolitionists to turn the tables: the Spaniards who held the Amistad Africans illegally in bondage were the real pirates. The main attorney of the Amistad captives, Roger Baldwin, stated that his clients “were not pirates, nor in any sense hostes humani generis.” Their objective “was—not piracy or robbery—but . . . deliverance . . . from unlawful bondage.” They were in fact themselves the “helpless victims of piracy.” The idiom of piracy had become a primary means of fighting the legal battle as well as the cultural one.48

  The abolitionists won a first victory in this battle on September 23, 1839, when Judge Smith Thompson, noting that “the feelings of the community were deeply involved” in the case, ruled that the United States Circuit Court did not have the jurisdiction to try the Amistad rebels as pirates and murderers. Judge Andrew Judson ruled on January 13, 1840, that the District Court did have jurisdiction and that the defendants were illegally enslaved Africans, which superseded the allegation of piracy and made it irrelevant.49

  Yet the legal issue of piracy remained alive because the United States government challenged Judson’s ruling and appealed the case to the Supreme Court. Beginning February 23, 1841, Attorney General Henry D. Gilpin argued anew that the Amistad Africans were pirates. They had committed a crime against property by seizing themselves. John Quincy Adams then had some fun with the contradictions of the argument. Both the American and Spanish governments had insisted on treating the Amistad Africans as both “merchandise,” as passive property, that is to say, as slaves, and at the same time as “pirates and robbers,” who were active, aggressive human agents. Referring to the Treaty of 1795, Adams remarked before the Supreme Court, “my clients are claimed under the treaty as merchandise, rescued from pirates and robbers.” But who were the merchandise and who were the robbers? “According to the construction of the Spanish minister, the merchandise were the robbers, and the robbers were the merchandise. The merchandise was rescued out of its own hands, and the robbers were rescued out of the hands of the robbers.” Adams then turned to the Justices and asked, no doubt with a glint of mischief in his eyes: “Is this the meaning of the treaty?” Roger Baldwin added, dryly, “It is believed that such a construction of the words of the treaty is not in accordance with the rules of interpretation which ought to govern our courts.” The Supreme Court justices agreed with Adams. Judge Joseph Story, writing for the 7–1 majority, ruled on March 9, 1841, that the defendants had been “kidnapped” in Africa and that “there is no pretense to say that they are pirates or robbers.” The Amistad rebels were neither property nor pirates. They were now officially free people.50

  Slave, Pirate, Commodity

  When the rebels on the ghost ship appeared off the coast of Long Island and then came ashore in New London in late August 1839, how could Americans of all classes have seen them, understood them, conceived of their activities? The options were limited. They could have seen them simply as the latest in a long line of Africans who rose up in rebellion aboard the slave ships. These acts of resistance had been chronicled by American newspapers for more than a century and were well known. But those stories almost always ended badly: the rebels were killed in battle or tortured in the aftermath, often executed to terrorize the survivors. The individual voyage and the larger slave trade, legal or illegal, went on as before. There were few examples of successful slave revolts at sea to make this way of understanding the Amistad rebels salient.51

  A related option would have been to see the Amistad Africans more broadly as slave rebels, fighting an entire Atlantic institution of bondage. This was a timely image in the 1830s, after African American radical David Walker had made his appeal to the “Colored Citizens of the World” to rise up and follow the example of the Haitian Revolution. Some seemed to have taken him up on the proposition: Nat Turner in Virginia, 1831; Sam Sharpe and his “Baptist War” in Jamaica, 1831–1832; and enslaved Muslims in the Malê Revolt, Bahia, Brazil, in January 1835. Add to the mix the upheaval of British slave emancipation in 1834 and 1838, and suddenly slaveholders all around the Atlantic had plenty to be nervous about. Fear of revenge and retribution was of course undergirded by guilt, as everyone knew that slavery was based fundamentally on violence and terror. When an autonomous, armed group of black men who also happened to be in control of a tall ship, one of the most sophisticated technologies of its day, was spotted off American coasts in late August 1839, it was a fearsome thing.52

  These fears operated in the early reports, which claimed that the rebels had murdered all the white people aboard the Amistad. In truth they had killed, first and foremost, an enslaved Afro-Puerto-Rican sailor and cook, who had threatened to kill them, and Captain Ferrer, in self-defense, because he had killed one or two of them.53 None of the other four whites aboard were killed. Two sailors jumped over the side with a canoe and returned to Cuba; Montes and Ruiz came safely to Connecticut. The fantasized race massacre had never happened.

  The main alternative in the early phase of the Amistad affair was to see the rebels as “black pirates.” The image of the pirate, which was no less rebellious in its way, projected something completely different—dreams of golden doubloons and liberty, a combination of wealth and freedom aggressively seized by poor men on the high seas, beyond the control of family, religion, and state, the main institutions of social discipline. These autonomous, armed men, many of them black, inspired a different reaction: not fear, but hope.54

  The pirate fantasy also operated in the early newspaper reports, in which the Amistad rebels were said to be wearing belts of gold and to have in the hold of their vessel tons of money and jewels. As it happened, the trunks thought to contain gold were actually filled with metal parts for plantation machinery, which, with human labor, were meant to produce gold in a different way. A thorough search of the Amistad later revealed that “not one dollar of gold or silver has been found among her goods.”55

  Did the appellation “black pirates” ultimately make a difference in the Amistad case? It certainly increased the level of popular interest in, and awareness of, the freedom struggle, which was truly extraordinary by the standards of the day. The newspaper coverage, the play, the prints, the engravings, the paintings,
the wax figures, the pamphlets, the long lines leading to the doors of the jail and the courtroom, even the legal treatises—all depended to some extent on the image of the pirate and its place in popular culture. Taken together, these created an unusual atmosphere, which may have influenced the judges in the District, Circuit, and Supreme Courts, all of whom made rather surprising decisions favorable to the Amistad Africans and their claims of freedom. Circuit Court judge Andrew Judson was known to be hostile to people of color, and a majority of the Supreme Court justices were Southerners. The judges themselves were not likely swayed by the pirate image but by the popular mobilization it helped to create. Indeed, all ruling judges acknowledged in their written opinions the extraordinary degree of popular interest on the case.

  By folding the nightmarish image of the violent, rebellious slave into the ambivalent and, to many, attractive image of the violent, rebellious pirate, the purveyors of popular culture helped to create a more favorable context for the liberation of the Amistad Africans. As they transformed resistance into a commodity using the pirate motif, they made the entire case safer for popular consumption and support. Literary and visual evidence—Zemba Cinques the mutineer, Cinquez the leader of a “Piratical Gang of Negroes,” and Jingua the Barbary corsair—demonstrate the powerful process at work. This was critical to the celebration and eventual liberation of insurrectionists who had killed a white figure of authority during a rebellious time when fears of revolt were soaring.

  This strange and contradictory process did not go unnoticed, or uncriticized, at the time. A writer for the Herald of Freedom, Nathaniel Rogers of the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society, observed the aggressive entry of the market into the Amistad case and remarked, “Our shameless people have made merchandise of the likeness of Cinque” and his “countrymen.” He resented the “wood-cut representation of the royal fellow,” even though he thought it a good likeness. He considered it “effrontery” that artists had studied the “lion-like” face of the “African hero” to draw the image that was now for sale. He detested the intrusion of money and profits into the realm of high principle, but he may have underestimated how much “making merchandise” of resistance helped his cause.56

  Abolition from Below

  A successful rebellion aboard a small Cuban slaving schooner, depicted as piracy, echoed around the Atlantic, not least because it was part of a larger cycle of rebellion that tore through slave societies in the 1830s. The drama cried out for representation—on the stage, on the printed page, and in the courtroom. One of the most remarkable things about the many and varied piratical portrayals of the revolt was their antislavery content. The popular depictions of the Amistad rebellion reflected, and in turn advanced, the growing power of a worldwide antislavery movement.57

  The Long, Low, Black Schooner made Cinqué the mutineer its hero, including an account of his personal history early in the drama in order to create sympathetic identification among the audience. The play also highlighted the horrific Middle Passage, already made infamous by the abolitionist movement, by going below decks to the hidden space where the “wretched slaves” lay jumbled together and where they would begin their conspiracy. The appearance of the play alongside Three-Finger’d Jack, The Slave, and The Gladiator, proves theater historian Bruce McConachie’s point that the “political anxieties” of the era were enacted on the stage, even if obliquely at times. The play about the Amistad confronted slave revolt directly because, as everyone knew, it concerned not bondsmen and rebellion in a distant time and place, but living, breathing, acting rebels, who sat in jail not far from the Bowery Theatre.58

  The pirate-shaped images produced by the New York Sun likewise played up the drama of the rebellion, gave voice to its leader, conveyed strong antislavery messages, and actively sought to enlist public sympathy for the rebels and their cause. Echoing the American revolutionary leader Patrick Henry—and the African American revolutionary leader Gabriel, who planned an uprising in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800—the text that accompanied the images of Cinqué repeatedly expressed his insistence on “Death or Liberty.” Here was a bold, swashbuckling hero who “dared for freedom” and justice. Significantly, the antislavery images and text produced by the Sun appeared, like The Long, Low, Black Schooner, within a week of the arrival of the Amistad Africans in New London, before Tappan, Baldwin, and other abolitionists had worked out the legal strategy to represent them as freedom fighters. Perhaps the elite abolitionists learned from the penny press, which in turn had learned from the emergent romantic literature on pirates, and from the rebels themselves.59

  The pamphlet A True History of the African Chief Jingua and His Comrades, which pictured Cinqué as a Barbary corsair, also expressed antislavery ideas. Its title page proclaims:

  Liberty is Heaven born,

  ’Twas man that made the slave.

  The author refers to the “unfortunate victims” of the slave trade as Mandingoes, who are “cheerful, inquisitive and humane,” with “moral virtues . . . strongly developed.” A sympathetic (if largely invented) biography of Cinqué follows, emphasizing his “great intelligence, industry, and courage.” Special emphasis is given to the enslavement of the hero, his march to the coast, and his placement, with five hundred others, including pregnant women and infants, “between the decks of a vessel with hardly room to set up right, and to undergo all the horrors of the ‘middle passage.’” In a similar vein, The Book of Pirates, edited by Henry K. Steele, offered a sympathetic portrait of the Amistad Africans, using abolitionist sources, arguments, and sentiments. Steele also noted the horrors of the Middle Passage aboard the slave ship Teçora (where the Africans “suffered terribly”), and he too sought to give voice to the rebels, drawing heavily in his text on the testimony of two of the rebels, Grabeau and Bau.60

  The antislavery movement in 1839 consisted of a rebellious and sometimes insurrectionary wing of enslaved rebels, a reform wing of various, often quarreling, mostly white middle-class abolitionists, and a growing antislavery public. The Amistad rebellion and its popular representation as piracy helped to connect the first two and to expand the third by circulating antislavery images and ideas into new social domains—into the streets, where stories of the revolt would circulate to free and enslaved urban laborers alike; onto the waterfront, where Vigilance Committees in New York and Philadelphia were already undertaking direct action in the struggle against slavery; and into factories, where workers contributed to the defense campaign.61

  The popular images of the Amistad rebels as pirates stood in sharp contrast not only to the racist anti-abolitionist images of the day, but to long-standing paternalist depictions by abolitionists that suggested either grateful deference among supplicant slaves—“Am I not a Man and a Brother?”—or their status as sentimentalized victims of atrocity. Sarah Grimké wrote that these images expressed the “speechless agony of the fettered slave.” By contrast, the black pirates of the Amistad appear as powerful, independent actors, not as those who are acted upon by others. They inspired admiration, not condescension, benevolence, or pity. They were not “helpless victims”—of piracy or anything else.62

  The popular freebooting images may help to account for another curious aspect of the Amistad case. In a decade notorious for urban riots against African Americans and abolitionists—one of which, in 1834, resulted in an attack that moved from the Bowery Theatre to the home of Lewis Tappan—there was a signal lack of violence, or even the threat thereof, directed against the rebels or their supporters. Certainly the opportunities for such violence were many, whether in jail as the thousands filed through, or on the New Haven Green, where the Amistad Africans routinely went for exercise and fresh air. An even more likely moment was in May 1841 when a group of the recently freed prisoners went on a highly publicized East Coast fund-raising tour to raise funds for their repatriation to Sierra Leone. They held public events in places where anti-abolitionist mobs had been most violent—New York and Philadelphia, among others. It is of course h
ard to be sure why something did not happen, but it may be that the positive images and the wider publicity surrounding the case, much of it based on the idiom of piracy, protected the Amistad rebels and their supporters against the racist violence frequently used in this period by rampaging white mobs.63 A New York woman commented on the change: “some years ago,” she explained to the British abolitionist Joseph Sturge, large public meetings like those featuring the Amistad Africans “would have excited the malignant passions of the multitude, and probably caused a popular outbreak.” Now the gatherings caused “a display of benevolent interest among all classes.”64

  A final, longer-term significance of the Amistad rebellion and its representations as piracy lay in the strengthening of what has been variously called “militant,” “aggressive,” “radical,” or “physical force” abolitionism. As Stanley Harrold has written, “The slave revolts aboard the Amistad in 1839 and the Creole in 1841 were central to the sense of crisis among abolitionists,” to the growth of a more militant and confrontational approach, especially among African American activists, and to abolitionist “Addresses to the Slaves,” which now acknowledged the significance of resistance from below. The advance of this tendency from the time of the Amistad to the Civil War can be followed through the growing power and popularity of a phrase that originated with Lord Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (Canto II, Stanza 76):