52. Charles Patrick Neimeyer, America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army (New York: New York University Press, 1996), chap. 4; Quarles, Negro in the American Revolution, 15–18; Frey, Water from the Rock, 77–80; Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007).
53. James Madison, “Republican Distribution of Citizens,” National Gazette, Mar. 3, 1792, republished in The Papers of James Madison, vol. 14 (1791–1793), 244–46; David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Dr. Lemuel Hopkins, The Anarchiad: A New England Poem (1786–1787), ed. Luther G. Riggs (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1967), 29, 56, 38, 69, 14, 15, 34.
54. Madison’s notes and Abraham Yates’s notes, June 26, 1787, in The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937), 1:423, 431.
55. Staughton Lynd, “The Abolitionist Critique of the United States Constitution,” in Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 153–54.
56. James D. Essig, The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals against Slavery, 1770–1808 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 132.
57. Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (1990): 101; Frey, Water from the Rock, 234–36. Adams quoted in Schlesinger, “Political Mobs,” 250.
58. Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, rev. ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 68–69; Forrest McDonald, “The Relation of the French Peasant Veterans of the American Revolution to the Fall of Feudalism in France, 1789–1792,” Agricultural History 25 (1951): 151–61; Horst Dippel, Germany and the American Revolution, 1770–1800: A Sociohistorical Investigation of Late Eighteenth-Century Political Thinking, trans. Bernard A. Uhlendorf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 228, 236.
59. Arthur N. Gilbert, “The Nature of Mutiny in the British Navy in the Eighteenth Century,” in Naval History: The Sixth Symposium of the US Naval Academy, ed. Daniel Masterson (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1987), 111–21; Richard B. Sheridan, “The Jamaican Slave Insurrection Scare of 1776 and the American Revolution,” Journal of Negro History 61 (1976): 290–308; Julius Sherrard Scott III, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution,” PhD diss., Duke University, 1986, 19, 204, 52.
60. Lord Balcarres to Commander-in-Chief, July 31, 1800, CO 137/104, quoted in Scott, “Common Wind,” 33; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom.
61. Rediker, Slave Ship, 321–22.
Chapter Six
1. Silas Told, An Account of the Life, and Dealings of God with Silas Told, Late Preacher of the Gospel . . . (London: Gilbert and Plummer, 1785), 22–24. For the voyage of the Loyal George see David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, The Transatlantic Slave-Trade Data Base (www.slavevoyages.org), no. 16490 (hereafter TSTD).
2. William D. Piersen, “White Cannibals, Black Martyrs: Fear, Depression, and Religious Faith as Causes of Suicide Among New Slaves,” Journal of Negro History 62 (1977): 147–59.
3. Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (1976; repr. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
4. Antonio T. Bly, “Crossing the Lake of Fire: Slave Resistance during the Middle Passage, 1720–1842,” Journal of Negro History 83 (1998): 178–86; Richard Rathbone, “Resistance to Enslavement in West Africa,” in De la traite à l’esclavage: Actes du colloque international sur la traite des noirs, ed. Serge Daget (Nantes, 1988), 173–84.
5. John Riland, Memoirs of a West-India Planter (London, 1827), 52; Testimony of James Morley, 1790, in House of Commons Sessional Papers of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Sheila Lambert (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1975) (hereafter HCSP), 73:160–61.
6. Testimony of Isaac Parker, 1790, HCSP, 73:124–25, 130; TSTD, no. 91135.
7. Edward Fentiman v. James Kettle (1730), HCA 24/136; TSTD, no. 76618; Testimony of James Towne, 1791, HCSP, 82:21; “The Deposition of John Dawson, Mate of the Snow Rainbow,” 1758, in Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, ed. Elizabeth Donnan, vol. 4, The Border Colonies and Southern Colonies (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1935), 371–72.
8. T. Aubrey, The Sea-Surgeon, or the Guinea Man’s Vade Mecum (London, 1729), 128. For another judgment that violence did not work against the will of the enslaved, see “Information of Janverin” in Substance of the Evidence of Sundry Persons on the Slave Trade . . ., ed. Thomas Clarkson (London, 1789), 249.
9. William Snelgrave, A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave Trade (London, 1734), 190; “Anecdote IX” (author unnamed), in Clarkson, Substance of the Evidence, 315–16; Jones v. Small, Law Report, Times (UK), July 1, 1785.
10. “Voyage to Guinea,” Add. Ms. 39946, f. 8 (TSTD, no. 75489); Memoirs of the Late Captain Hugh Crow of Liverpool . . . (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1830), 44; James Hogg to Humphrey Morice, Mar. 6, 1732, Humphrey Morice Papers, Bank of England Archives, London.
11. Connecticut Journal, Feb. 2, 1786; Testimony of Falconbridge, 1790, HCSP, 72: 307–8; “Extract from a Letter on Board the Prince of Orange,” Apr. 7, 1737, Boston News-Letter, Sept. 15, 1737.
12. Testimony of Isaac Wilson, 1790, HCSP, 72: 281; Testimony of Claxton, HCSP, 82:35–36; Pennsylvania Gazette, May 21, 1788. Clarkson retold his story in a letter to Mirabeau, Dec. 9, 1789, Papers of Clarkson, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. On the Zong, see Granville Sharp to the Lord Commissioners of the Admiralty, London, July 2, 1783, “Documents Related to the Case of the Zong of 1783,” Manuscripts Department, National Maritime Museum, REC/19, fo. 96.
13. Testimony of Wilson and Falconbridge, both in HCSP, 72: 279, 300; log of the brig Ranger, Captain John Corran, Master, 1789–1790, 387 MD 56, Liverpool Record Office; [ John Wells], “Journal of a Voyage to the Coast of Guinea, 1802,” Add. Ms. 3,871, f. 15, Cambridge University Library; Testimony of Mr. Thompson, Substance of the Evidence, 207.
14. Extract of a letter to Mr. Thomas Gatherer, in Lombard Street; dated Fort-James, River Gambia, Apr. 12, 1773, Newport Mercury, Dec. 27, 1773; Independent Journal, Apr. 29, 1786; Newport Mercury, Mar. 3, 1792; Newport Mercury, Nov. 25, 1765; Connecticut Journal, Jan. 1, 1768; “The Log of the Unity, 1769–1771,” Earle Family Papers, Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool, D/EARLE/1/4; Providence Gazette and Country Journal, Sept. 10, 1791.
15. “Extracts of such Journals of the Surgeons employed in Ships trading to the Coast of Africa, since the first of August 1788, as have been transmitted to the Custom House in London, and which relate to the State of the Slaves during the Time they were on Board the Ships,” Slave Trade Papers, May 3, 1792, HL/PO/JO/10/7/920; “Log-books, etc. of slave ships, 1791–7,” Main Papers, June 17–19, 1799, HL/PO/JO/10/7/1104; “Certificates of Slaves Taken Aboard Ships,” 1794, HL/PO/JO/10/7/982, all in the House of Lords Record Office, Westminster. It should be noted that not all surgeons listed causes of death; therefore these archives contain more than the eighty-six journals analyzed here. Some of these journals formed the empirical base of a study by Richard H. Steckel and Richard A. Jensen, “New Evidence on the Causes of Slave and Crew Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Journal of Economic History 46 (1986): 57–77.
16. For the legal ruling, see Jones v. Small, Law Report, Times (UK), July 1, 1785. Like other forms of resistance, “reports of the action of jumping overboard circulated from the Atlantic back to the metropolis, where vario
us writers immortalized the decision of death before dishonorable slavery in poetry. A well-known abolitionist poem, “The Negroe’s Complaint,” jointly but anonymously written by Liverpool patricians William Roscoe and Dr. James Currie, said of African protagonist Maratan: “Tomorrow the white-man in vain / Shall proudly account me his slave! / My shackles, I plunge in the main—/And rush to the realms of the brave.” See Dr. James Currie to Admiral Sir Graham Moore, Mar. 16, 1788, 920 CUR 106, Papers of Dr. James Currie, Liverpool Record Office. The poem was originally published in the World and was later republished in the United States. See the Federal Gazette, and Philadelphia Evening Post, Apr. 8, 1790. The same conceit appears in Roscoe’s The Wrongs of Africa (London, 1788). See James G. Basker’s magnificent compilation, Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).
17. Testimony of Ellison, HCSP, 73:374.
18. Testimony of Arnold, HCSP, 69:130.
19. Times, July 1, 1785; “Log of the Unity,” Earle Family Papers, D/EARLE/1/4; Connecticut Journal, Feb. 2, 1786; Testimony of Robert Hume, 1799, in House of Lords Sessional Papers, ed. F. William Torrington (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1974), 3:110; Testimony of Trotter, HCSP, 73:87; John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West Indies (London, 1735), 72–73. For boys, see extract of a letter to Mr. Thomas Gatherer, Apr. 12, 1773, The Newport Mercury, Dec. 27, 1773.
20. William Butterworth, Three Years Adventures of a Minor, in England, Africa, the West Indies, South Carolina and Georgia (Leeds, 1822), 96; Snelgrave, A New Account, 77; Testimony of Fountain, HCSP, 68:273; John Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800 (New York: Routledge, 1999), 140.
21. Pennsylvania Gazette, May 16, 1754; Lieutenant Governor Thomas Handasyd to the Board of Trade and Plantations, from Jamaica, Oct. 5, 1703, in Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History, 2:4; Boston News-Letter, May 6, 1731 (also Boston Gazette, Apr. 26, 1731); Bath Journal, Dec. 18, 1749; Boston Gazette, Oct. 4, 1756; Pennsylvania Gazette, May 31, 1764; New London Gazette, Dec. 18, 1772; Newport Mercury, Dec. 27, 1773; William Fairfield to Rebecca Fairfield, Cayenne, Apr. 23, 1789, in Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History, 3:83; Providence Gazette and Country Journal, Sept. 10, 1791; Massachusetts Spy: Or, the Worcester Gazette, Apr. 4, 1798; Federal Gazette & Baltimore Daily Advertiser, July 30, 1800; Newburyport Herald, Mar. 22, 1808.
22. William Smith, A New Voyage to Guinea (London, 1744), 28. On the Coromantee, see Thomas Trotter, Observations on the Scurvy (London, 1785), 23; Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (London, 1788), 70. See also Snelgrave, New Account, 168–69, 177–78.
23. Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, Mar. 24, 1753.
24. Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to African Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 123.
25. Newburyport Herald, Dec. 4, 1801.
26. Boston Post Boy, Aug. 13, 1750.
27. Pennsylvania Gazette, Nov. 9, 1732; Atkins, Voyage to Guinea, 175–76; see also Butterworth, Three Years Adventures, 103.
28. Boston News-Letter, Sept. 18, 1729; TSTD, no. 77058; Bath Journal, Dec. 18, 1749; TSTD, no. 90233.
29. American Mercury, Jan. 31, 1785.
30. Testimony of Ellison, HCSP, 73:375; Snelgrave, New Account, 167, 173; “Anecdote I” (author unnamed), in Clarkson, Substance of the Evidence, 311; Testimony of Arnold, HCSP, 69:134.
31. Testimony of Towne, 1791, HCSP, 82:21; David Richardson, “Ship-board Revolts, African Authority, and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (2001): 82–90.
32. Boston News-Letter Sept. 9, 1731; Richardson, “Shipboard Revolts,” 74–75.
33. Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly The African, translated from a Latin Dissertation, . . . (London, 1786; repr., Miami, FL: Mnemosyne Publishing, 1969), 88–89.
34. Newburyport Herald, Dec. 4, 1801; Clarkson to Mirabeau, Dec. 9, 1789, ff. 1–2, Papers of Clarkson, Huntington Library.
35. Piersen, “White Cannibals, Black Martyrs,” 147–59.
36. “Anonymous Account,” Add. Ms. 59777B, ff. 40–41, British Library; Testimony of John Douglas, 1791, HCSP, 82:125: Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and British Caribbean, 1736–1831 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 66–69; Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, 147.
37. “Voyage to Guinea,” Add. Ms. 39946, ff. 9–10; Testimony of Millar, HCSP, 73:394; Hawkins, A History of a Voyage to the Coast of Africa, 108; Clarkson, Essay on the Slavery, 143–44. For other references to the belief, see Times, Feb. 2, 1790; Atkins, Voyage to Guinea, 175–76.
38. “Anonymous Account,” Add. Ms. 59777B, ff. 40–41.
39. Testimony of Claxton, 1791, HCSP, 82:35; Snelgrave, New Account, 183–84; Memoirs of the Late Captain, 26.
40. Clarkson to Mirabeau, Dec. 9, 1789, f. 1, Papers of Clarkson, Huntington Library.
41. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 195.
42. Butterworth, Three Years Adventures, 80–82; Testimony of William James, HCSP, 69:49; Testimony of Wilson, HCSP, 72:281–82; Testimony of Arnold, HCSP, 69:50, 137–38; Testimony of Trotter, HCSP, 73:97, 99–100.
43. John Matthews, A Voyage to the River Sierra Leone, on the Coast of Africa (London, 1788), 153; Information of Bowen, Clarkson, Substance of the Evidence, 230.
44. Thomas Winterbottom, An Account of the Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone (London, 1803), 1:212; Butterworth, Three Years Adventures, 126.
45. Testimony of Falconbridge, HCSP, 72:308; Testimony of Ellison, HCSP, 73:381.
46. Testimony of Trotter, HCSP, 73:88; Information of Bowen, Substance of the Evidence, 230; “Extract of a letter from Charleston to the Editor of the Repertory, dated March 8th,” Massachusetts Spy, or Worcester Gazette, Apr. 4, 1804.
47. Testimony of Thomas King, 1789, HCSP, 68:333; Testimony of Arnold, HCSP, 69:50.
Chapter Seven
1. New York Morning Herald, Aug. 24, 1839. All quotations in this and the following paragraph appear in this article.
2. New York Morning Herald, Aug. 26, 1839; New York Journal of Commerce, Aug. 28, 1839; New York Morning Herald, Sept. 2, 1839; New Orleans Bee, Sept. 4, 1839.
3. Richmond Enquirer, Oct. 25, 1839. The “The Long Low Black Schooner” was the title of the article published in the New York Sun, Aug. 31, 1839, and republished in various forms by at least nine other newspapers, from Essex, Massachusetts, to Charleston, South Carolina, to New Orleans, Louisiana over the following two weeks. On the rise of the penny press, see James L. Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989), chap. 2. See page 22 for Bennett’s founding comment about reaching “the great masses of the community.”
4. New York Commercial Advertiser, June 16, 1840; New York (Morning) Herald, Oct. 3, 1847.
5. Arthur Abraham, The Amistad Revolt: An Historical Legacy of Sierra Leone and the United States (Washington, DC: US Department of State International Information Programs, 1998); Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Iyunolu Folayan Osagie, The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000).
6. On June 28, 1839, the Amistad set sail from Havana to transport fifty-three enslaved Africans (forty-nine men, four children) three hundred miles eastward to Puerto Príncipe, Cuba. The Africans revolted, killing the captain and one sailor, Celestino, the ship’s cook. Two white passengers, Pedro Montes and José Ruiz, were kept alive to steer the vessel back to Sierra Leone, the African homeland of the enslaved. Montes, however, sailed the vessel east by day, toward the sun, w
est and north by night, hoping to be captured, as indeed the vessel was, by the US brig Washington on August 26, 1839. Taken to New London, Connecticut, Cinqué and his comrades were charged with piracy and murder. Abolitionists rallied to the cause and organized a popular and legal defense campaign. A series of dramatic court cases resulted in a Supreme Court ruling in March 1841 freeing the Amistad captives, who returned to Sierra Leone in November of that year.
7. For a revealing comparison, see Stanley Harrold, “Romanticizing Slave Revolt: Madison Washington, the Creole Mutiny, and Abolitionist Celebration of Violent Means,” in Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, ed. John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 89–107.
8. On celebrity in this period, see Paul Johnson, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004).
9. A True History of the African Chief Jingua and his Comrades, with a Description of the Kingdom of Mandingo, and of the Manners and Customs of the Inhabitants—An Account of King Sharka, of Gallinas, A Sketch of the Slave Trade and Horrors of the Middle Passage; with the Proceedings on Board the “Long, Low, Black Schooner” (Hartford, New York, and Boston: 1839); Colored American, Oct. 5, 1839.
10. New York Morning Herald, Aug. 29, 1839.
11. James Fenimore Cooper, The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea (New York, 1823); Cooper, The Red Rover: A Tale (Philadelphia, 1828); Richard Henry Dana, Two Years before the Mast (New York, 1840); Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, Cannibal Old Me: Spoken Sources in Melville’s Early Works (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009); Lord Byron, The Corsair (London, 1814); Sir Walter Scott, The Pirate (London, 1821); Frederick Marryat, The Pirate (London, 1836); Frederick Engels, “The Pirate,” Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 2: 557–71; “The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read,” Waldie’s Select Circulating Library (1833); “From the New Novel—Blackbeard,” New York Mirror, June 6, 1835.
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