12. Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 173.
13. Boston News-Letter, Apr. 4, 1723; Rediker, Villains of All Nations, 53–56. See also Kenneth J. Kinkor, “Black Men Under the Black Flag” in Bandits at Sea: A Pirates Reader, ed. C. R. Pennell (New York: New York University, 2001), 195–210.
14. Lawrence A. Peskin, Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785–1816 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Frederick C. Leiner, The End of Barbary Terror: America’s 1815 War against the Pirates of North Africa (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006); Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Hester Blum, “Barbary Captivity and Intra-Atlantic Print Culture,” in her The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 46–70.
15. See A Report of the Trial of Pedro Gilbert (Boston: Russell, Oridorne and Metcalf, 1834), which proved so popular that it went into second and third editions immediately; Trial of the Twelve Spanish Pirates of the Schooner Panda, A Guinea Slaver . . . For Robbery and Piracy, Committed on Board the Brig Mexican, 20th Sept. 1832 (Boston: Lemuel Gulliver, 1834); and A Supplement to the Report of the Trial of the Spanish Pirates, with the Confessions or Protests, Written by Them in Prison (Boston: Lemuel Gulliver, 1835).
16. Public Ledger, June 6, 1838; Connecticut Courant, Jan. 9, 1841; Army & Navy Chronicle, Mar. 14, 1839; Ben Bobstay, “The Chase,” The Hesperian: or, Western Monthly Magazine, Jan. 1839. See also (Baltimore) Sun, July 3, 1839.
17. The book published by Strong was an update of Thomas Carey, The History of the Pirates, Containing the Lives of Those Noted Pirate Captains, Misson, Bowen, Kidd, Tew, Halsey, White, Condent, Bellamy, Fly, Howard, Lewis, Cornelius, Williams, Burgess, North, and Their Several Crews . . . (Haverhill, MA, 1829). It was republished in Hartford in 1829, and again in 1834 and 1835. See Philip Gosse, A Bibliography of the Works of Captain Charles Johnson (London: Dulau and Company, 1927), 53–64. See also Blum, View from the Masthead, 35, 47.
18. Henry K. Brooke, comp., Book of Pirates, Containing Narratives of the Most Remarkable Piracies and Murders, Committed on the High Sea: Together with an Account of the Capture of the Amistad, and a Full and Authentic Narrative of the Burning of the Caroline (Philadelphia: J. B. Perry and New York: N. C. Nafis, 1841), 184–96; quotations at 185, 196, x (emphasis in original).
19. Gosse, Bibliography, 50–51; Charles Ellms, The Pirates’ Own Book; or, Authentic Narratives of the Lives, Exploits, and Executions of the Most Celebrated Sea Robbers, with Historical Sketches of the Joassamee, Spanish, Ladrone, West India, Malay, and Algerine Pirates, iii. Strong’s volume was republished in 1837, 1839, 1847, 1849, 1850, 1851, 1855, and 1860; Ellms’s every year from 1841 to 1846 and again in 1855, 1856, and 1859; Brooke’s in 1845, 1846, and 1847.
20. David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 149; Bank, Theatre Culture, 159.
21. The playbill is in the Harvard Theatre Collection. New York Commercial Advertiser, Sept. 4, 1839, New York Sun, Aug. 31, 1839. See Bruce A. McConachie, “‘The Theatre of the Mob’: Apocalyptic Melodrama and Preindustrial Riots in Antebellum New York,” in Theatre for Working-Class Audiences in the United States, 1830–1980, ed. McConachie and Daniel Friedman (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 17–46; the same author’s Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992); and Peter Reed, Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
22. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986), 89, 90, 93–95; McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 122; Reed, Rogue Performances, 9, 11, 15; Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 84; Peter George Buckley, “To the Opera House: Society and Culture in New York City, 1820–1860,” PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984, 181–82.
23. Philadelphia Inquirer, Sept. 2, 1839; New York Mirror, Sept. 14, 1839, which listed the play as one of the successes of the season. The estimated revenue comes from a well-researched but undocumented article by Perry Walton, “The Mysterious Case of the Long, Low, Black Schooner,” New England Quarterly 6 (1933): 360. He also notes that the play was performed at the Park Theatre, the National Theatre, and Niblo Garden, as well as the Bowery. I have not been able to confirm the revenue or the other venues in primary sources. The last newspaper mention of the play was in the New Orleans Bee, Sept. 17, 1839.
24. New York Commercial Advertiser, Sept. 4, 1839; New York Morning Herald, Feb. 28, 1840; Public Ledger, Apr. 11, 1839; Bank, Theatre Culture, 72.
25. The name Zemba apparently came from a story, “Tales of the Niger: Zemba and Zorayde,” published in The Court Magazine, containing Original papers by Distinguished Writers (London: Bull and Churton, 1833), vol. 3 (July–Dec. 1833), 71–74, republished in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Jan. 2, 1838.
26. The use of the hold of the schooner as a setting made the play unusual. Heather Nathans has noted that the Middle Passage “virtually disappeared” from the American stage at mid-century as the slave trade was rethought as something internal to the nation’s borders. See her Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 129–30.
27. Peter Reed writes that a staged execution was not likely and that a more common plot outcome at the time would have been a reprieve for the hero. Personal communication to the author, Dec. 14, 2010.
28. Bank, Theatre Culture, 96; Supplement to the Royal Gazette, Jan. 27, 1781–Feb. 3, 1781, 79, cited in Diana Paton, “The Afterlives of Three- Fingered Jack,” in Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the Abolition Act of 1807, ed. Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson (London: D. S. Brewer, 2007), 44; McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 70–71, 142, 143; and Reed, Rogue Performances, 21, 37, 100, 122, 159–60.
29. Reed, Rogue Performances, 5, 13 (quotation), 43; McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 97–100.
30. “Private Examination of Cinquez,” New York Commercial Advertiser, Sept. 13 1839; New York Sun, Aug. 31, 1839.
31. Reed, Rogue Performances, 10, 175–85; Jonas B. Phillips, Jack Sheppard, or the Life of a Robber! Melodrama in Three Acts founded on Ainsworth’s Novel (1839).
32. Joseph Cinquez, Leader of the Gang of Negroes, who killed Captain Ramon Ferrers and the Cook, on board the Spanish Schooner Amistad, Captured by Lieutenant Gedney of the US Brig Washington at Culloden Point, Long Island, Aug. 24th 1839, hand-colored lithograph, Stanley Whitman House, Farmington, Connecticut.
33. Joseph Cinquez, Leader of the Piratical Gang of Negroes, who killed Captain Ramon Ferris and the Cook, on board the Spanish Schooner Amistad, taken by Lieut. Gedney, commanding the U.S. Brig Washington at Culloden Point, Long Island, 24th Augt 1839, Drawn from Life by J. Sketchley, Aug. 30, 1839, lithograph by John Childs, New Haven Colony Historical Society.
34. Joseph Cinquez, The brave Congolese Chief, who prefers death to Slavery, and who now lies in Jail at New Haven Conn. awaiting his trial for daring for freedom, Library of Congress. A second, smaller version of the image—perhaps a handbill—is in the Frances Manwaring Caulkins Scrapbook, reference 029.3 Scr 15, Misc. American, 1830–1850, New London County Historical Society, New London, Connecticut. The New York Sun of Aug. 31, 1839, identified “James Sheffield of New London” as the artist, but it appears the main maritime artist of New London in this period was Isaac Sheffield (1798–1845). See H. W. French, Art and Artists in Connecticut (Boston, 1879), 60.
35. “Portrait of Cinquez” from the Monday, Sept. 2, 1839 edition, reprinted in the New York Sun, Sept. 7, 1839, Country Edition, Wee
kly—No. 147.
36. New York Morning Herald, Sept. 17, 1839; Oct. 9, 1839.
37. New York Sun, Aug. 31, 1839; New York Journal of Commerce, Sept. 10 1839; New York Commercial Advertiser, Sept. 13, 1839; New Hampshire Sentinel, Oct. 2, 1839; Colored American, Oct. 5, 1839.
38. Among the works quoted and, more commonly, plagiarized are Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa: Performed in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (London, 1799); Richard Lander, Journal of an Expedition to Explore the Course and Termination of the Niger (London, 1832); Joseph Hawkins, A History of a Voyage to the Coast of Africa, and Travels into the Interior of that Country (Troy, NY, 1797); Captain J. K. Tuckey, Narrative of an Expedition to Explore the River Zaire (London, 1818); and Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, The African Slave Trade, and its Remedy (London, 1839). On the visitors to Hartford, see New York Commercial Advertiser, Sept. 20, 1839.
39. New York Commercial Advertiser, Sept. 6, 1839.
40. The author probably drew on an article in the New York Sun (Sept. 10, 1839), in which Lewis Tappan incorrectly identified the captives as Mandingo.
41. The author draws on a chapter entitled “History of the Adventures, Capture, and Execution of the Spanish Pirates,” in Ellms, Pirates Own Book.
42. The final paragraph of A True History is taken from the African Repository and Colonial Journal 8 (1832): 121 (quotation).
43. The 1820s and 1830s witnessed a popular fascination with “Moorish culture,” not least because of Byron’s influence.
44. “Records of the U.S. District and Circuit Courts for the District of Connecticut: Documents Relating to the Various Cases Involving the Spanish Schooner Armistad,” Folder II: U.S. v. Faqnannah et. Al, September 1839 term, RG-21 USCC CT (United States Circuit Court, Connecticut), Frederick C. Murphy Federal Records Center, Waltham, MA.
45. Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad, 50–53.
46. New York Commercial Advertiser, Sept. 4, 1839; New York Journal of Commerce, Sept. 4, 1839; New York Journal of Commerce, Sept. 5, 1839; Emancipator, Sept. 14, 1839.
47. New York Journal of Commerce, Sept. 5, 1839. See also Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad, 138–44, and Douglas R. Egerton, Charles Fenton Mercer and the Trial of National Conservatism (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), 179–81.
48. New York Journal of Commerce, Sept. 14, 1839.
49. The African Captives: Trials of the Prisoners of the Amistad on the Writ of Habeas Corpus, before the Circuit Court of the United States, for the District of Connecticut, at Hartford, Judges Thompson and Judson, September Term, 1839 (New York, 1839), 44.
50. New York Journal of Commerce, Mar. 17, 1841; Argument of John Quincy Adams Before the Supreme Court of the United States in the Case of the United States, Appellants, vs. Cinque, and others, Africans, captured in the schooner Amistad, by Lieut. Gedney, Delivered on the 24th of February and 1st of March 1841 (New York: S. W. Benedict, 1841), 23; Argument of Roger S. Baldwin, of New Haven, before the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Case of the United States, Appellant, vs. Cinque, and Others, Africans of the Amistad (New York: S. W. Benedict, 1841), 20. See also Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad, chap. 10.
51. See the wide array of newspaper articles about revolts on slave ships cited in Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking Penguin, 2007).
52. David Walker, Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, To the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (Boston, 1829); Peter Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Kenneth S. Greenberg, ed., Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
53. See Kale to John Adams, Jan. 4, 1841, reprinted in New York Journal of Commerce, Mar. 20, 1841.
54. The pirate image was important in the early, formative stage of Amistad case but would be eclipsed by abolitionist arguments over time.
55. New York Morning Herald, Sept. 9, 1839.
56. The article from the Herald of Freedom was republished in the Colored American, Oct. 19, 1839.
57. An important work on abolitionism from below is Merton L. Dillon, Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and the Allies, 1619–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).
58. Reed, Rogue Performances, 11; McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 97–100.
59. Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 40, 51, 109; Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
60. The couplet would later appear in the Chartist Circular, published in Glasgow, May 1, 1841, in a poem entitled “Liberty! Universal Liberty!” by “Argus.” See True History of the African Chief, frontispiece.
61. Mary Cable, Black Odyssey: The Case of the Slave Ship “Amistad” (New York: Penguin, 1971), 121.
62. Phillip Lapsansky has written: “As part of their effort to defuse fears of violence, the antislavery movement did not produce representations of black violence, self-assertion, or control.” See his “Graphic Discord: Abolitionists and Antiabolitionist Images,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 218–21. See also Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), chap. 5, and Nathans, Slavery and Sentiment, 129–30, 202.
63. One minor instance of violence occurred in Farmington, Connecticut, after the Supreme Court decision, when several of the Amistad Africans got into a fight with a gang of local toughs and apparently beat them up. See John Pitkin Norton’s account of the fight in the John Pitkin Norton Papers, MS 367, Diaries, Volume III: June 29, 1840–Sept. 15, 1841, Box No. 3, Folder 18, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, entries for Tuesday, Sept. 7, 1841, and Wednesday, Sept. 8, 1841. In Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), Leonard L. Richards notes the decline of antiabolition mobs in 1838–1839 (see chap. 6). See also David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998).
64. “Joseph Sturge’s Visit to the United States,” Edinburgh Journal, Apr. 1842.
65. Stanley Harrold, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004), 37–38, 155; Henry Highland Garnet, “An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America” (1843), republished in Harrold, Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism, 179–88. On Ruggles, see Liberator, Aug. 13, 1841, quoted in Herbert Aptheker, “Militant Abolitionism,” Journal of Negro History 26 (1941): 438–84; and Graham Russell Gao Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). See also Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, “Black Power—The Debate in 1840,” Phylon 29 (1968): 19–26, republished in Patrick Rael, ed., African-American Activism before the Civil War (New York: Routledge, 2008), 50–57.
66. Marcus Rediker, Amistad Rebellion, 171, 206–8.
67. New York Morning Herald, Aug. 26, 1839.
Epilogue
1. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), 24.
2. Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Boston: Little, Brown, 1942); Morison, John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography (New York: Time-Life Books, 1959).
&n
bsp; 3. Jesse Lemisch, “The American Revolution Seen from the Bottom Up,” in Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History, ed. Barton J. Bernstein (New York: Vintage, 1967), 29.
4. Pennsylvania Gazette, Sept. 20, 1759; Boston Weekly News-Letter, Aug. 24, 1769.
Index
Please note that page numbers are not accurate for the e-book edition.
Page numbers followed by an f indicate a figure.
abolitionist movement: antislavery content in the Amistad rebellion, 171–72, 222n57, 222n60; and arguments for human freedom, 105–6; circulation of revolutionary ideas in port cities, 105; connection between antislavery rebels and intellectuals, 172–73, 222n62; contribution of sailors’ yarns to, 26–27; in England, 98–99, 118; impetus for a more radical movement, 173–75; legal arguments against slavery, 98–99, 165–67; Otis’s speech advocating emancipation, 103; political effects of slave resistance, 105; rally around Amistad rebels, 148–49, 165–67, 215n6; slave resistance’s relation to Afro-Christianity, 104–5; Tacky’s Revolt and, 102–3, 104; view of slavery as contrary to humanity and equality, 102–3
Abraham, Arthur, 148
Adams, John, 103, 109, 110, 112, 116
Adams, John Quincy, 167
Adams, Samuel, Jr., 94–95, 107, 111, 114, 177
Adventures of Roderick Random, The (Smollett), 25–26
Africa, 65, 118. See also African rebels; Africans
Africa (ship), 128
African Americans: Amistad rebellion and, 173, 174–75, 222n63; communities formed aboard slave ships and, 145; contribution to the revolutionary movement, 97, 106, 110–11, 115, 117–19; fight against press gangs, 107; formation of an African American identity, 91–92; impetus for a more radical abolitionism, 174–75; multiethnicity of motley crews, 91, 99, 109, 111, 151; multiethnicity of pirate crews, 151; uprisings led by, 168, 171
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