The Amistad Rebellion
Page 18
“Speaking Christian” reflected how the Amistad Africans understood their allies and acted to secure their long-term cooperation and commitment. But it was only one means among many. They also understood, and quickly, how much the abolitionists detested the slave trade and slavery. Shortly after coming ashore, Cinqué and others “performed slavery” in acts of guerilla theater, in courtrooms and in jail. After translator James Ferry made it possible for them to tell their own stories, Cinqué and his fellow rebels emphasized the violence of enslavement, their separation from wives and children, and the destruction of their families, all of which tapped into central, highly emotional messages of the abolitionist movement, and indeed into one of its greatest propaganda victories, the successful broad popular agitation against the slave trade as epitomized by the nightmarish Middle Passage.
The Amistad Africans went out of their way not to offend the people whose help they needed. They somehow grasped the Christian hostility to the polygyny that was widely practiced in their own societies. Burna told the abolitionists that he lived with his mother, and did not mention that he was married, least of all to seven different women. Several other men probably had more than one wife as well, but only one of the Amistad Africans admitted as much: Fabanna said he had two. Another example of sensitivity to cultural difference occurred when Tua died on September 11, 1839. The Africans remained in the background while abolitionist minister Leonard Bacon performed the service. After he had finished his eulogy, Shule stepped forward, stood at the head of the corpse, and “muttered a sort of prayer of address,” which took “four or five minutes.” As he spoke, “his companions responded in short ejaculations,” in the communal African style, with great feeling. The Amistad Africans later explained to their teacher that the ceremony “was not a Mendian burial rite, as was published at the time in the papers, but an imitation of American customs.”14
It is impossible to tell to what extent Christian language was a matter of belief and to what extent it was a matter of strategy. It was undoubtedly a combination of both. By March 1841, Lewis Tappan hoped that three or four might have been converted to Christianity and seemed relieved that the rest were still willing to be instructed in the faith. All that can be said with certainty is that the Amistad Africans understood the importance of Christianity within the worldview of the abolitionists and acted to accommodate it, within the larger context of their own main objective: to go home.15
The Art of Rebellion
As the Amistad Africans studied reading, writing, and religion, they met artists who wanted to connect their cause to people beyond the jailhouse. The artists were interested most of all in the rebellion, assuming, correctly, it seems, that it was what fascinated the public about the case above all else. The artists John Warner Barber, Sidney Moulthrop, and Amasa Hewins all visited the Amistad Africans in the New Haven jail during the first few months of 1840. Barber produced an engraving and a pamphlet, Moulthrop a set of wax figures, and Hewins a massive painting, all depicting and interpreting the rebellion. Barber wrote, “The capture of the Amistad with her cargo of native Africans, and the peculiar circumstances of the case, have excited an unusual degree of interest in this country, and in Europe.” The artists sought to capitalize on the public captivation, which was bound to intensify as the case made its way toward the Supreme Court. All three artists would use their direct contact with the Africans in jail to establish their credentials to represent the rebellion. The artists would give “accurate,” “factual,” and “real life” images to a hungry public.16
By 1840 Barber was well known as an engraver of New England’s historic buildings and landscapes. A native of New Haven, he got caught up in the local excitement surrounding the Amistad case. He noted in his diary that he attended the court hearings of January 7–13, 1840, and was present when Judge Andrew Judson ruled that the Africans were recently, and therefore illegally, imported to Cuba, and hence not to be returned to their so-called owners, Ruiz and Montes. On April 1, Barber began to visit the Amistad Africans in jail. Over the next two months he would create drawings and engravings of them to illustrate a thirty-two-page pamphlet, A History of the Amistad Captives: Being a Circumstantial Account of the Capture of the Spanish Schooner Amistad, by the Africans on Board; Their Voyage, and Capture Near Long Island, New York; with Biographical Sketches of Each of the Surviving Africans; Also, an Account of the Trials had on Their case, Before the District and Circuit Courts of the United States, for the District of Connecticut, self-published in June 1840 by E. L. and J. W. Barber, in New Haven. The popular pamphlet cost twenty-five cents.17
Compiled from “authentic sources,” A History of the Amistad Captives reproduced newspaper articles from the New London Gazette and the New York Journal of Commerce; court records, including depositions by Ruiz, Montes, Richard Robert Madden, and Francis Bacon, a traveler to the Gallinas Coast; African narratives of the Middle Passage; an account of the culture of the Mendi people; diplomatic correspondence; and most importantly a section of Barber’s own original creation: illustrated biographical sketches of the Africans, based on “personal conversation with them, by means of James Covey, the Interpreter.” During his visits to the jail, Barber drew portraits, from which he would engrave silhouettes of the Africans, including Covey.18
Barber added several other illustrations to the portraits: a map of “Mendi country, with regard to other portions of Africa,” on which the Gallinas River and Fort Lomboko were located, between Sierra Leone and Liberia; a depiction of nine of the Amistad Africans as they sat cramped and huddled together on the lower deck of the slave ship that carried them from Lomboko to Havana; and a representation of a Mende village, adapted from a similar illustration by African “explorer” Richard Lander and “recognized by the Africans as giving a correct representation of the appearance of villages in their native country.”19
Barber stressed his impartiality in presenting a “correct statement of the facts of this extraordinary case,” but he himself opposed slavery. Yet the pamphlet was not an abolitionist tract. Although Barber made use of the work of Josiah Gibbs, George Day, and Benjamin Griswold, who worked closely with the captives and the Amistad Committee, there is no evidence that the leaders of the defense campaign (Tappan, Joshua Leavitt, and Simeon Jocelyn) played any role in making the pamphlet. Indeed, they would not have approved of the central image, The Death of Capt. Ferrer, which depicted the insurrection. Nonetheless it became the most famous representation of the rebellion. The engraving circulated widely with the pamphlet and as a broadside, some copies of which were hand-colored, presumably by Barber himself.20
Barber’s image featured nine of the Amistad Africans, five of them armed with cane knives; Captain Ferrer, who is cut, bleeding, and dying; a worried Ruiz; and Antonio, watching as he climbs up the shrouds. The corpse of Celestino lies on the deck in the background. Because Barber drew the portraits of the Amistad Africans “from life” in jail and sought to represent them accurately, it is possible to identify specific individuals in the image. With a cane knife at left is Cinqué, preparing to strike the killing blow, as he and three others surround the captain. The other three are probably meant to be Moru, Kimbo, and Faquorna, who were known to have carried out the attack with Cinqué—although Warner would not have known what Faquorna looked like, as he had died before the engraver entered the jail. At the far right is Burna, who is not armed and was known in the story of the uprising for his merciful defense of the Spaniards. He raises his hand as if to try to stop the violence of the armed Konoma, who rushes toward the Spaniards and is identifiable by his so-called tusk-like teeth.
“Death of Capt. Ferrer, the Captain of the Amistad”
Barber may have had antislavery sympathies, but he used racialized tropes of savagery in representing the Amistad Africans. In composition and title, he seems to have drawn upon The Murder of Jane McCrea, a painting and print widely circulated at the time. In this set piece of frontier hostility two cruel, demonic Native Ame
rican warriors armed with tomahawks slay a young white woman. Like McCrea, Captain Ferrer is the central figure, commanding the sympathetic attention of the viewer. In a diary entry for April 27, 1840, Barber described the image using clipped, racially charged language: “Drawing Massacre Amistad.” A gang of black men slaughter a single defenseless white man. In the hand-colored versions of the image, blood pours from the wounds on Ferrer’s head.21
Despite the graphic violence, Barber’s engraving projects an oddly peaceful, almost tranquil mood. The Africans are not possessed by rage as were the Native Americans as they killed Jane McCrea. Barber softened the faces of the rebels, making them reflect not fury, but calm determination. They stand in contrast to the gruesome image of the only other slave rebels to be graphically represented in the United States before the Civil War, in the Horrid Massacre in Virginia, which depicted Nat Turner’s uprising in Virginia in 1831. Barber’s image of the rebellion reflected necessity—what the Amistad rebels had to do “in order to gain their freedom,” as the artist described their purpose in the engraving’s caption.22
Cinqué and three fellow warriors surround Captain Ramón Ferrer (above), as Konoma joins, and Burna tries to limit, the attack (right).
Slavery Waxed
“The thrilling and unprecedented events connected with the capture of the Amistad, which have excited so much public attention, not only in this country, but throughout the civilized countries of Europe, furnishes a subject of uncommon interest.” So began an advertisement by Peale’s Museum and Portrait Gallery, located opposite city hall on Broadway in New York, inviting the public to see “the accurate likeness of 29 of the Africans” in life-size wax figures. Artist Sidney Moulthrop repeated the rationale of John Warner Barber as he explained the public value of his art. Like Warner, he cast and arranged the figures at the peak moment of rebellion, when Cinqué and others surrounded and killed Captain Ferrer. He too thought this was what the people wanted to see.23
Moulthrop thought right. Beginning June 16, 1840, the exhibition was originally slated to run for a week, but the crowd that flocked to see it, and “the urgent desire for its continuance by several who have not yet had an opportunity,” caused the manager to hold it over. Newspaper advertisements appeared in the column “Amusements,” and the wax figures shared gallery space with live performers: the magician Signor Antonio Blitz, the pianist S. W. Bassford, and the fancy glassmaker Mr. Owens. The show would circulate to Armory Hall in Boston, Town Hall in Norwich, Connecticut, and finally, several years later, to Phineas T. Barnum’s American Museum. Barnum, himself known as an abolitionist, included the wax figures in a show with a live orangutan and a performance by black men in blackface, the “Ethiopian Serenaders,” whom Frederick Douglass thought “may yet be instrumental in removing the prejudice against our race.” The price of admission to see the rebellion in wax was usually twenty-five cents.24
Like Barber, Moulthrop lived in New Haven and visited the Amistad Africans in jail. He somehow managed to convince them to allow him to take molds of their faces and even to give him some of their hair, which he used to enhance the realism of his sculptures. Perhaps he paid them, or perhaps the Africans were simply interested in his project and freely supported it. The museum announced, “By means of this process, a perfect exhibition of the form of each face, embracing every wrinkle, &c., is given.” Each wax figure was constructed to “exact height and form.” The display also featured painted portraits of all of the “surviving Africans, drawn from life, to each of which is attached their history.” The “history” was in all likelihood based on the biographical sketches collected in Barber’s A History of the Amistad Captives, copies of which were on sale at the exhibition. Indeed, Barber and Moulthrop had worked together in making their images of rebellion. Barber had drawn his profiles using a pantograph, a mechanical copying machine, on the busts made by the wax artist.25
Moulthrop’s centerpiece was “a sinking representation of the death of Captain Ramón Ferrer, the Spanish Captain of the Amistad.” Cinqué and several others, armed with knives, rush up on the captain, “who is seen falling mortally wounded.” Again, the corpse of Celestino, the slave sailor, lies in the background. “A correct likeness of the boy Antonio, the slave of Captain Ferrer, is given,” as Burna appears “saving the lives of Ruiz and Montez.” Moulthrop added a wax figure of James Covey, the sailor-translator, who had not been aboard the Amistad but was playing a large part in the contemporary drama, and hence was of interest to the public. Covey had probably translated for Moulthrop as he had done for Barber.26
A correspondent for the African American newspaper the Colored American, who had not been able to visit the jail in New Haven to see “the great originals” of the Amistad drama, had been told that the “counterfeits, done in wax” are “perfect likenesses: every muscle, every lineament of countenance is portrayed with all the appearance of life.” He urged readers to go to Peale’s Museum to witness the wax figures that “possess a fidelity to nature which is truly astonishing.” The Workingman’s Friend also gave the exhibit a warm reception, encouraging its readers, “Go and see them and take a friend or two with you.” A writer for the Norwich Aurora thought, “No pen can do justice to this exhibition. Nothing of the kind has ever come near it.” It appears that even the Amistad Africans got to see the life-size reproductions of themselves, because, as one correspondent noted, “When the real and the representative figures have been placed together, persons could not distinguish the one from the other.” What the real figures made of the wax ones is not known. It must have seemed to them that ta-mo ko-lin-go (the white man) was clever but strange.27
Rebellion Magnificently Painted
Boston artist Amasa Hewins created the most monumental work of art inspired by the Amistad Rebellion—a 135-foot panorama, more than twice as long as the Amistad itself. He took a crooked path to the jail. Born in Sharon, Massachusetts, in 1795, he tried his hand at West Indian commerce, failed, then turned to painting portraits in the 1820s. In 1830 he toured Europe during dramatic times: he was in Italy and France during the revolutions of that year, and he kept a journal of his travels. Hewins was a committed republican, hence his sympathies were with the people in struggle against the aristocracy and the church, although the “rabble” in various towns in Italy seem to have made him nervous. In 1839–1840 he had no studio and apparently made a living as an itinerant artist, working in Boston, in various towns in Connecticut, and as far south as Baltimore and Washington, DC, no doubt painting portraits. He modestly entitled his grandest work The Magnificent Painting of the Massacre on board the schooner Amistad!! It circulated to various venues, including Denslowe Hall in Hartford and the Phoenix Building in New Haven, where the artist installed the gigantic canvas and charged admission to those eager to see the uprising on a human scale.28
Alas, the painting has been lost. Simeon Eben Baldwin, son of Amistad attorney Roger S. Baldwin, noted in an article published in 1886 that it was at that time in the possession of the New Haven Colony Historical Society. How something so huge could have been lost is an interesting question to ponder. In any case, efforts in recent years to find it have failed, but fortunately numerous written descriptions of the painting, some by the artist himself, survive and permit its reconstruction as both image and interpretation of the rebellion.29
Because Hewins had visited the jail and painted individual portraits of the Amistad Africans, he could claim that the larger work, “strikes the beholder as real life.” Some reviewers of the work had also been in the jail and agreed: “The likenesses of many of the blacks will be readily recognized.” A writer for the New Haven Herald noted that the painting offered “a view of the vessel and every person on board, many of which are portraits, particularly those of Cinquez, and Grabeau.” Hewins apparently showed the painting to the Amistad Africans themselves at some point, for he used their approval in a broadside he prepared and distributed far and wide in order to publicize the display of his painting: “It
s faithfulness to the original [event] has been attested by those who participated in the awful tragedy.”30
Following Barber and Moulthrop, Hewins dramatized the moment at which Cinqué and his comrades killed Captain Ferrer. He described the content of the painting: “The Scene represents the rise and struggle of the Africans, in which Capt. Ferrer and the cook lost their lives, and Don Pedro Montez, one of the owners of the Slaves, was dangerously wounded.” Hewins depicted the Cubans and about twenty of the Africans, most of whom were armed, and, according to another viewer, dressed in “cloth or skins fastened round the waist & extending to the knees.” At the center of the huge canvas was Captain Ferrer, surrounded by Cinqué, Grabeau, Konoma, and several others. Celestino’s corpse lies in the background. Pedro Montes, blood streaming from a wound to his temple and a look of “Terror…in his countenance,” surveys the scene and “seems to say, this catching and carrying negroes is bad business—not a very comfortable situation.” He looks for a “hiding place.” Ruiz stands nearby, in fear and misery. Antonio has climbed up the shrouds, and looks down on the uprising.31
At the center of the tumult stood Cinqué, in the group amidships, armed with a cane knife, his eye on the Spaniards. He attacks Captain Ferrer, who “has one cut upon his head & another upon his breast” and “has fallen partially, rests upon one knee, his head drooping, his left arm hanging powerless.” As Cinqué prepares to strike the killing blow, two or three of his comrades attempt “to check his hand & restrain him.” Possessed by “the wildest rages,” with a desperate, even demonic, expression on his face, he struggles to escape them.