The Amistad Rebellion

by Marcus Rediker

  Ferrer is beset on other sides by Konoma “the cannibal,” who grips his right wrist and “points a dagger at his bosom,” and Grabeau, whose “right hand is elevated, firmly grasping a cane-knife, with which he appears about to strike.” Like Cinqué, Grabeau is “transported with anger.” In the background, Fuli looks upon the scene “with hellish satisfaction” and a “countenance expressive of deep malignity.” The youth Ndamma stands back from the rebellion, “his hand upon his breast, his eyes raised to heaven,” with much “veneration…in his countenance.” His was the only “commendatory representation” in the entire group.32

  The similarities to Barber’s engraving are clear, in both form and content. Hewins also depicted the Amistad Africans as “savages”: Konoma was a “cannibal,” Cinqué appeared demonic, all but one of the Africans were represented as outraged and brutal; the entire scene was a “massacre.” Hewins also drew on The Murder of Jane McCrea. Like McCrea, whose wrist is gripped by one of the barbarous warriors, the vulnerable Captain Ferrer, clutched by Konoma, stood at the center of the canvas.

  Savage or not, the painting also contained a message of antislavery, as the artist himself was quick to explain to abolitionist Benjamin Griswold, divinity student at Yale University and one of the main teachers of the Amistad captives in the New Haven jail. Griswold wrote to Lewis Tappan that Hewins “seems to feel an interest in these men] to sympathize with them, & their friends, to hope that they will be suffered to return to their own country, if they wish.” Indeed, Hewins went further, arguing that their cause was, in American terms, both honorable and revolutionary: “He compares the act of Cinque in liberating himself & companions to the efforts of the man who led the armies of the U.S. in her struggle for independence, & thinks that he has shown as much of the hero, considering the sphere in which he has acted.” By depicting what he described as “the rise and struggle of the Africans” and by comparing its leader to George Washington, Hewins produced a painting that might be seen—could we but see it—as a contradictory American equivalent of Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, the greatest work of art to come out of the revolutions of 1830.

  The Abolitionist Dilemma

  Hewins may have held antislavery beliefs, but his decision to depict the most violent moment of rebellion upset abolitionists close to the case. At a time when they increasingly described the Amistad Africans as “hapless victims” who had been miraculously “cast upon our shores”—as if they had made neither the rebellion nor the freedom voyage to Long Island—Hewins reasserted a militant, indeed revolutionary view of the case. Griswold, who had extensive, direct, personal knowledge of the individual prisoners, wrote a long, detailed letter to Lewis Tappan describing the painting and offering his own thoughts about it. More than any other document produced in the era of the Amistad case, Griswold’s letter revealed the liberal abolitionist dilemma in the representation of slave revolt.33

  Griswold’s complaints about the painting were many. The artist got the character of several of the individual Africans all wrong (the “kind-hearted” Fuli appeared in the painting with a malignant look); he did a poor job in rendering physical appearance (“none with the exception of Konomo & possibly Grabeau bear the most distant resemblance to the men in the New Haven jail”); his depiction of the uprising contained several factual mistakes (Ndamma appears angelic, removed from the fray, but he bore a scar on his head that suggested an active role in the attack).

  The biggest worry, however, was the emphasis on violence, the killing of Captain Ferrer, and the effect this might have on the public. In short, Griswold believed Hewins to be dangerously misguided. The artist may have hoped that the Amistad Africans would be freed, but his painting would not help the struggle. Griswold wrote, “I have no reason to doubt his sincerity—the soundness of his judgment I may be permitted to question. The moral effect of the painting, so far as it has any, I do think will be bad—perhaps I err.” So worried was Griswold about the painting that he hesitated to publish his critique of it, fearing that it would draw attention to the violent representation and thereby do “injury” to “the cause of humanity,” that is, to the sacred struggle against slavery. He wrote Tappan, “I do not know whether it is best to broach anything about it in public or not.” He left the matter up to Tappan, who apparently decided against it.

  Abolitionists fretted about the popular depictions of the Amistad rebellion, but in truth they themselves had originally done much to encourage them. As soon as the rebels were brought ashore, Dwight Janes had proclaimed that “the blacks had a perfect right to get their liberty by killing the crew and taking possession of the vessel.” He added, uncertainly, “I mean a legal right,” referring to Spain’s agreement with Great Britain to end the slave trade. Janes was thus the first to address the dilemma: how would abolitionists, many of them committed to nonviolence, depict and defend a violent slave revolt in a society where there was a broad fear of such events and where they themselves were considered by many to be dangerous, fanatical extremists in their opposition to slavery?34

  Abolitionists flocked to the Amistad case and defended the rebels and their actions as if nonviolence had never crossed their minds. If they were to use the case to attack the institution of slavery—and the opportunity seemed to them nothing less than providential—they would have to come up with arguments to justify the rebellion. Following the lead of Janes, they did so: the Amistad rebels, they would proclaim repeatedly over the next two and a half years, had the fundamental right, shared by all people, to resist tyranny and to seize their own liberty, by force if necessary. If this meant killing a tyrant—a slave ship captain—so be it. That act would not constitute murder, no matter how loudly slaveholders in Cuba or the United States might howl in protest. This radical argument would become a big part of the public debate on the Amistad rebellion and a centerpiece of the abolitionist defense.35

  The argument possessed a deep ambiguity. What kind of right allowed the Africans to kill their oppressor and seize their freedom? Here the abolitionist movement was of two minds. The more conservative approach was to insist that the right was, narrowly, a legal right. Because the Spanish slave trade had been made illegal by treaty, the Africans aboard the Amistad had a right to rise up, kill Captain Ferrer, and seize the vessel. This was the argument of attorneys as they represented the Amistad Africans in court, and a persuasive argument it was. Other abolitionists took a more radical approach. They reached back to an argument that originated with Tacky’s rebellion in Jamaica in 1760, after which a man in London known as J. Philmore defended the rebels and articulated the “higher law” doctrine that would become central to the antislavery cause. Enslaved rebels had a “natural right” to their freedom, no matter what man-made law said on the matter. In contrast (and contradiction) to the legal approach stood what might be called an antinomian argument: rebels who took radical, direct action were right to take the law into their own hands as long as it served the noble cause of freedom.36

  Some abolitionists took the idea further than others, African American opponents of slavery leading the way. Their preferred image of the Amistad Africans was not that they were citizens doing what was proper and legal, but that they were free people doing what was glorious and right. Like Amasa Hewins, they repeatedly likened Cinqué to George Washington, and endlessly compared the Amistad rebellion to the American Revolution. The actions of the rebels were “in the highest degree noble,” as the Colored American explained:

  The spirit that prompted Patrick Henry to exclaim on a memorable occasion, ‘Give me liberty, or give me death,’ that same spirit fired the bosom and nerved the arm of this daring yet generous African. Joseph Cinquez is more than a hero. He is, emphatically, one of God’s noblemen. And by all the reasons and principles on which we eulogize George Washington and his brave compeers, for resisting unto blood the attempts of Great Britain to subdue our people to political slavery, by all those principles and reasons, and by many others superadded, are w
e bound to laud Joseph Cinquez and his comrades, for resisting unto blood the miscreants that would doom them to personal slavery.

  This radical statement makes clear that not all abolitionists worried about the popular depictions of rebellion; some applauded them. Still, those conducting the defense campaign, who were uncomfortable with depictions of the rebellion, had to decide how to translate their own political commitments into images that would shape the public debate and affect the judgment in court.37

  Jocelyn’s Portrait

  The abolitionist dilemma of representation was finally resolved by Nathaniel Jocelyn, the best known of the artists who went into the New Haven jail, and the one most firmly connected to the movement. Born in 1796 in New Haven into an artisanal family (his father was a clockmaker and engraver), Jocelyn was apprenticed to a watchmaker but soon took up drawing, engraving, and painting. His sensibilities about slavery were affected by the two years (1820–1822) he spent in Savannah, where he worked as a portrait painter for the Georgia aristocracy. He made his view of the world clear in 1833, when he painted a sympathetic portrait of William Lloyd Garrison, about which, the controversial abolitionist noted, its accuracy would be doubted as it had “no horns about the head.”38

  By 1840 Jocelyn had become an active abolitionist, working in the nascent Underground Railroad in Connecticut. His brother Simeon was also a committed abolitionist: he had been the pastor at the predominantly African American church on Temple Street in New Haven, a victim of attack by an anti-abolition mob in 1837, and one of three founding members (with Joshua Leavitt and Lewis Tappan) of the Amistad Committee. Living and working in New Haven, Nathaniel Jocelyn was, like the other artists, close to the epicenter of the struggle. His antislavery views and activism, expressed in his commitment to break the Amistad Africans out of jail by force in January 1840, connected him to the man who commissioned the painting. The African American abolitionist Robert Purvis was a leading member of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee in 1840 and likewise involved in assisting runaways as they made their way toward freedom. The skilled, radical, and activist Jocelyn was just the man to paint the “official,” soon to become iconic, abolitionist portrait of Cinqué.39

  Jocelyn’s painting could hardly have been more different from the images produced by Barber, Moulthrop, and Hewins. Painted during the winter of 1840–1841, the leader is composed, at rest, not on the ship or in jail, but at home in an idealized African environment. The moment appears to be sunset, with gentle clouds and a reddish sky above majestic mountains. Cinqué is not fighting for freedom in an act of slave rebellion; he is free, and has always been free. The artist imagines him in the happy home to which the abolitionists wanted him to return. The entire portrait radiates serenity. The eyes of the leader are not demonic, but rather soft, intelligent, compassionate, liquid. The left hand is relaxed and almost aristocratic in appearance. Jocelyn manages to represent the famous leader of a violent revolt in a way that suggests no violence at all. He presents the abolitionist movement and its goals to the public in a profoundly peaceful way, embodied in a single individual rather than an armed collective.

  Based on Nathaniel Jocelyn’s painting, John Sartain produced a mezzotint engraving, “Cinque: The Chief of the Amistad Captives.”

  The painting features Cinqué in traditional Mende dress, a white cotton cloth thrown over his left shoulder, holding a staff, a symbol of leadership among his people. Jocelyn probably got the ideas for both symbols directly from Cinqué, as he would not have known about Mende culture. But Jocelyn cleverly built double meanings into both: viewers of the painting might see the African leader as wearing a toga, like a virtuous Roman republican citizen, or as Moses, staff in hand, having led his compatriots back to the Promised Land. A direct-action abolitionist such as Robert Purvis might imagine the staff as a spear, a weapon of self-defense.

  Jocelyn’s portrait of Cinqué was a commercial transaction, between patron and artist, but unlike the artwork of Hewins, Moulthrop, and Barber, it was not meant to make money—until Purvis had John Sartain of Philadelphia make an engraving and lithograph of the same image, which would then be sold for $2 per copy, the proceeds to go to the Pennsylvania Antislavery Association. This gave the image a much broader, even transatlantic circulation, as copies of it ended up in Bristol, England, among other places, through abolitionist circuits.40

  The art of Barber, Moulthrop, Hewins, and Jocelyn served a common vital purpose, keeping the Amistad struggle before the public during an otherwise quiet time of incarceration. These artists had met the prisoners and heard their stories of the rebellion. Through their art they helped not only to publicize the struggle, but to project antislavery ideas to people inside and outside the movement. The biographical element that all artists included, by text or portraiture, gave a human face to the struggle for freedom, for the “Mendi People,” and indeed all enslaved people.

  The Collective

  The abolitionists who went to the New Haven jail sought to turn those who had engaged in communal armed struggle into peaceable, disciplined Christian individuals. The Amistad Africans cooperated in this work, but their own project was in a fundamental way the very opposite: to create and preserve a disciplined sense of the collective, to hold everyone together for the sake of survival and the accomplishment of what remained the primary goal from the beginning of the ordeal to the end: to return to Africa. The fictive kinship that began to grow at Lomboko expanded on the Teçora, in the barracoons of Havana, aboard the Amistad, and came to full fruition in the jail of New Haven. The bonding eventually took a novel collective form called “the Mendi People.”

  The original power of the collective took the form of successful rebellion. A second achievement was a 1,400-mile voyage aboard the Amistad. The collective reared its head again on board the Washington, where Cinqué tried to inspire his comrades to another round of resistance. American authorities recognized the threat of solidarity and sought to weaken it by segregating the leader from his mates. The power of the collective was once again made clear by the laughing, screaming, weeping, and rejoicing that was audible and visible to all every time he was reunited with his shipmates.41

  Burna also played an important role in knitting and keeping the group together. Unable to go to Hartford for the first hearing because he was sick, Burna was upset to be separated from his shipmates, “the more so,” one observer noted, “because two of the three little girls are his sisters.” They were not, of course, his biological sisters, but they were sisters within his own idiom. He manifested the same sensibility months later in Farmington, in an exchange with abolitionist A. F. Williams, who sought the help of the Amistad Africans when a “Mr. Chamberlain, a young gentleman of intelligence and worth,” disappeared into the river; it was feared that he had drowned. Burna replied, “Me think me hear you say your brother in water, me no sleep, we come find.” Williams did not understand the system of fictive kinship, so he felt compelled to correct Burna: “You are mistaken, said I, not my brother, my friend.” Burna answered, “Well, we look, we find.” At great peril to themselves as they dove into “the loaming water below the dam,” Burna and his shipmates recovered the lifeless body of Williams’ “brother” and returned it to him for a funeral and burial. Burna was also known to manifest strong feeling when discussing his multiethnic shipmates who had died, especially the Bullom man Tua who passed away in New Haven after the freedom voyage.42

  The Amistad Africans came from societies in which the common good of the group almost always came before individual preference, advantage, and advancement. Because their survival in jail, and indeed throughout their entire Atlantic ordeal, depended on group solidarity, they organized themselves accordingly, on the model of the Poro Society. As the Rev. James Steele, one of the missionaries who accompanied the Amistad Africans back to Sierra Leone, noted, they “were under great restraints, especially in America; they thought if one did anything evil it would be charged upon the whole, and this with a desire to secur
e friends in a strange land, made them very watchful over each other.”43

  Tensions

  The emphasis on maintaining a united front did not mean that there were no tensions within the group. The relationship between Cinqué and Burna, for example, was fraught with stress. They had clashed during and after the rebellion. According to several reports, Cinqué apparently wanted to kill Ruiz, Montes, or both, and on more than one occasion Burna stayed his machete-wielding hand. Cinqué seems not to have trusted Burna, and he may have been right in not doing so: Burna was the only Amistad African who criticized Cinqué for his treatment of Ruiz and Montes. It was rumored that Burna was afraid of Cinqué.44

  Why Cinqué and Burna clashed is not easy to discern. They may have had cultural differences: Cinqué was Mende; Burna was Gbandi. They had strong personalities and may have had differing approaches to their common dilemma. Part of it was surely that Burna was the only person among the rebels who knew some English and could therefore communicate with Ruiz, who had been educated in Connecticut, and through him with Montes. Was Cinqué insecure that he could not understand what the three men were talking about? He seems to have been worried that Burna was cooperating in a plan to return the vessel to Havana. As Antonio testified before the district court in January 1840, “Sinqua thought when Burnah talked with Pedro they take Sch[ooner] back to Havana. He wanted to go to Africa.”45

  A disturbing possibility fueled the mistrust and insecurity. Had Burna learned to speak English while working in the slave trade in Sierra Leone? There is no direct evidence that he had, but there are hints. As the correspondent of the New York Morning Herald noted after interviewing Burna, his “language is an odd melange of English and Spanish, with an occasional French word, and a slight sprinkling of some African lingo.” This was a pidgin language, designed to facilitate trade between Europeans and Africans on the coast, suggesting the circumstances in which Burna acquired his language skills. It would have been difficult to have been involved with Spanish, French, and English traders on the Gallinas Coast in the 1830s without having been involved in the slave trade. Moreover, it turned out that Burna was quite a rich man in his native land. He had seven wives, a sure sign of wealth. If Cinqué knew or suspected any of these things, he may have had good reason to worry about the conversations between Burna and the Spaniards, and about Burna’s commitment to their collective freedom.46