The conflict with Pendleton concluded in court, when a judge ruled to remove the girls from the jailer’s household and to make abolitionist Townsend their legal guardian. The judgment was reached after Cinqué had been allowed to address the girls in Mende in a New Haven courtroom: “His eyes blazed and his voice was elevated in its tone—and his action passionate.” In “one of the finest specimens of Mendee eloquence,” he explained that the Pendletons were not to be trusted. They would do as they had many times threatened to do: they would “send them away and sell them.” Tensions boiled over again as the sheriff removed William Pendleton from the courtroom, “by order of the Judge, for striking one of the Africans in court.” The struggle to keep the collective together had been won. Kinna wrote Tappan to say how “very glad” and “joyful” the “Mendi People” were now that the little girls had been freed from the clutches of the wicked Pendleton.21
The Supreme Court upheld the lower-court ruling that Antonio should be returned to Cuba and the heirs of the deceased Captain Ferrer. The boy himself had requested as much, to the delight of proslavery journalists, soon after the Amistad came ashore. Marshal Wilcox assigned Antonio to the care of Pendleton, who received $2.50 per week from the government for his room and board and who nonetheless forced the teenager to work “without wages,” all the while forbidding him to be educated with his shipmates. By the time the district court ordered his delivery to Ferrer’s widow as her rightful property in late March 1841, Antonio had begun to think differently about his future.22
A writer for the Colored American noted that when the Supreme Court ruled that the Amistad Africans were free, Antonio “thought it better to be free also.” As “a species of property which thinks, reasons, and wills,” he decided to “walk off” from the marshal and the jailer. In New Haven he stole aboard a steamboat appropriately named the Bunker Hill and made his way to New York, where he stayed at the home of an African American friend of Lewis Tappan. The New York Vigilance Committee then “took charge of Antonio & have conveyed him away.” It was noted that he “rejoiced to be at liberty, and is desirous of laboring for wages.”23
Antonio traveled by night “to Canada, by the usual route” of safe houses on the Underground Railroad. One of the stops was Enosburgh, Vermont, about fifteen miles from the Canadian border, where Elias S. Sherman housed the “jolly and good natured” young man, who gratefully helped his host family with the cooking. Antonio told Sherman’s seven-year-old son the dramatic stories of the “capture of the Amistad, and his escape through the kindness of friends.” A night or two later, Antonio disappeared as mysteriously as he had appeared. He soon arrived in Montreal, where, a local abolitionist announced proudly, he is “now beyond the reach of all the slaveholders in the world.” Captain Ferrer had branded Antonio’s shoulder with a hot iron so that he might be known as his slave, but he was a slave no more. Thy prey, abolitionists told the slaveholders, “hath escaped thee.”24
The “Mendian Exhibitions”
Without resources of their own, and hoping to capitalize on their fame, the Amistad Africans went on what might be called a “victory tour” in May 1841, to raise funds for their lodging and education. In November they went on a second tour to raise money for their repatriation. The Amistad Committee organized all events and drew heavily on abolitionist networks of cooperation and publicity. The “Mendi People” performed eight times on the first tour, in New York and Philadelphia, and at least sixteen times on the second, primarily in New England, with five meetings in Boston and usually single meetings in smaller towns such as Andover, Hampton, Haverhill, Northampton, Lowell, and Springfield, Massachusetts, and Nashua, New Hampshire. They also held farewell meetings in Hartford and Farmington, Connecticut, and two final meetings in New York just before they boarded the Gentleman to return to Sierra Leone on November 27, 1841. Dozens of newspapers around the nation covered one or more of these events.25
The venues varied from the Broadway Tabernacle, a hive of antislavery activity located at the corner of Houston and Thompson streets in New York, where four of the meetings were held to overflow crowds of as many as twenty-five hundred people, with many turned away, to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on Church Street in New York and the large Melodeon Concert Hall in Boston, which hosted two meetings each. Organizers scheduled most of the events in churches. Turnout was extraordinary everywhere. Observers described the buzzing scenes as “crowded,” “overflowing,” and “immensely large.” The crowds were made up of “blacks and whites, and every intermediate hue and color,” by provocative design. In the disapproving words of the New York Morning Herald, “On one seat was a negro fellow, as black as the ace of spades, with a mulatto wife, and a couple of children, a shade whiter than the mother, and next to them, well dressed white ladies and gentlemen, all mingling together, regardless of the oder [sic] exhaled by their neighbours, and happy to receive their colored brethren and sisters on terms of perfect equality.” Ticket prices were usually twenty-five cents. The funds raised would have amounted to roughly $4,000—a little more than $100,000 in 2012 dollars.26
A large part of the draw was the sheer celebrity of the people who had been in the news and in the larger circuits of American popular culture since late August 1839 and who had recently won their case before the highest tribunal in the land. Gallons of ink and paint and wax had been spent on the African freedom fighters. Not surprisingly, people wanted to see them in the flesh. When the Amistad Africans entered the Broadway Tabernacle on the very first exhibition, an excited tumult ensued: “So eager were the audience to see them, that they rose in great numbers, and many rushed towards the desk to get a nearer look of the blacks.” Those people blocked the view of everyone else, who cried out, “Sit down there in front…we can’t see through you.”27
Cinqué in particular, the “hero of the revolution” as he was called by the New Hampshire Sentinel, was a special attraction. At the Marlboro Chapel in Boston, a youthful audience greeted him with “a tremendous shout of applause.” When Lewis Tappan tried to translate what the hero had said in the Mende language, the young people “made so much noise that he could not succeed.” At the Broadway Tabernacle, every time Cinqué rose to address the crowd, “great bursts of applause resounded from all parts of the house.” The Colored American urged all to turn out to shake hands with the great man; “hundreds on hundreds” seized the opportunity.28
Early events, such as the first one at the Broadway Tabernacle, featured sixteen of the Amistad Africans, but the number slowly dropped over time, to twelve, then ten in later performances. Cinqué led the group into the hall, each person clutching an octavo Bible given them by the American Bible Society. They appeared happy and healthy, well dressed in American clothing, and they had a physical presence: they were “finely built, and possess great physical strength.” A reporter for the abolitionist Pennsylvania Freeman noted that they had “intelligent countenances and dignified and manly bearing—showing that they never had their spirits broken by the yoke.” They had survived their many incarcerations with their self-respect and political will intact.29
All events followed a basic pattern. A local minister led the assembled in prayer, then a member of the Amistad Committee, usually Lewis Tappan, provided a brief introduction, with a statement about the three main purposes of the event: “to show to the public the improvement which the Africans had made;—to excite an interest in a religious mission to Mendi, their country;—to raise money to defray the expense of supporting and educating them here, and of returning them to their country.” The meetings lasted about two hours.30
Tappan introduced Sherman Booth, the main teacher of the Amistad Africans in jail and during their residence in Farmington following their liberation. Booth served as a sort of master of ceremonies for the event, providing “interesting facts relative to the improvement and conduct of his pupils” and making observations about Mende culture. He assisted as several of the Amistad Africans recounted their own personal
histories—where they were from and how they were forced into Atlantic circuits of slavery. Booth then gave his charges Bible verses to recite as well as words and sentences to spell, in order to demonstrate their knowledge, and invited the audience to ask questions of Kale, Kinna, and Fuli, the best English-speakers. The queries usually concerned their understanding of Christianity and how they would use it when they returned to Africa. The Africans then sang a Christian hymn and a couple of “native songs.” Kinna recounted for the audience, in English, their recent history as a prelude to the grand finale: Cinqué told, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, acted out the story of the Amistad rebellion. He always spoke in Mende. The meeting concluded with another hymn, the audience joining the Amistad Africans in song.31
The heart of the program had emerged from an antislavery meeting in Bloomfield, Connecticut, attended by Kinna and Cinqué, in April 1841. They listened to the speakers with great interest, and at the end of the meeting were asked if they would like to address the group. Kinna “arose in a very dignified manner” and told their story. Abolitionist A. F. Williams noted that “before he sat down I saw many around me in tears.” Cinqué then spoke for fifteen minutes in Mende, Kinna translating. The audience was dazzled by a talk that was “truly grand and sublime.” After this meeting Sherman Booth advised Lewis Tappan that Kinna and Cinqué should speak in precisely these ways during the exhibitions. The rest of the program was likely the result of negotiation between the abolitionist organizers and the “Mendi People,” some of whom did not originally embrace the idea of performing their “progress” before large audiences. Cinqué in particular could be a tough negotiator. Abolitionist George Day recalled him as a “turbulent fellow, hard to manage.” Eventually the leader and his comrades agreed to do the tour, in large part because it was presented to them as a requirement for going home—they had to help raise the money for their return voyage. They said they would do it gladly.32
The content of the program on the tour reflected the nature of the alliance between the Africans and the American reformers as it had developed in jail prior to the Supreme Court ruling. The abolitionists wanted the freedmen to show the American public that they had become “civilized” Christians, which the hardworking students were willing to do as long as they could simultaneously enact and explain their own independent African identity. They sang their own songs and recited their own history in their own language, even if the audience could not always understand precisely what was being sung or said to them. Those attending the events would, in fact, understand something more important than specific words: they would see a sovereign political entity called the “Mendi People” in action.
Booth emphasized to the audience that the Africans came from an inland area of the continent where “a higher degree of civilization prevails…than was generally supposed.” The condescension contained within it important facts. The Africans lived in towns and cities and engaged in manufacture, weaving in particular, examples of which he displayed, holding up a “number of specimens of cloth, in the shape of napkins…which the Africans had cut out and fringed after the African style.” Members of the audience purchased these after the performance “at liberal prices.” Booth added that the Amistad Africans were multiethnic and multilingual: they consisted of six different culture groups; one individual (probably Burna the younger) spoke Temne, Kono, Bullom, and Mende. Booth also commented on the moral characteristics of his students, who had worked hard and distinguished themselves by a “remarkable honesty.” Booth then introduced the Amistad Africans, a few of whom spoke about their personal histories—where they were from, how they were enslaved, how they reached Lomboko—reciting the narratives they had told in court, in the newspapers, and through popular publications for many months now. Their individual life stories dramatized the human ordeal of slavery. Woven into these accounts were comments by the “Mendi People” that they wanted, more than anything else, to go home.33
Booth assigned individuals passages to read from the Bible, usually from the books of Matthew and John, and words to spell. Some of the performers were nervous and had mixed success. The engaged audience offered encouragement, cheering the readers and spellers no matter how they performed. Young Kale, already known as the correspondent of John Quincy Adams, was the star of this portion of the program, reading the longest passages and spelling the most difficult words and sentences. The people who had come ashore in the United States unable to “say a word for themselves,” now read, spelled, spoke, and conversed in what they called the “Merika language.”34
Booth then invited members of the audience to ask questions. Many concerned Christianity: How will you explain God to your countrymen in Africa? How do you know the Bible is God’s truth? The Africans gave thoughtful, dutiful answers. Someone asked Kinna if he could “love his enemies” as a good Christian should. Kinna replied that he would pray to God to forgive his enemies their transgressions. Asked if the slaveholder José Ruiz “should come to Mendi, and should you meet him alone in the bushes, what would you do?” Kinna replied, “I let him go, I no touch him.” But knowing the ways of slavers, he added, quickly and spontaneously, “But if him catch our children—him see what he catch!” This answer brought a “loud shout of laughter and applause from the crowded audience,” who shared his perhaps unchristian “instinct of retaliation.”35
The Amistad Africans then sang “If I Could Read My Title Clear,” an old hymn that was a staple in the abolitionist musical pantheon. Based on lines of a poem by the antislavery poet William Cowper, the song combined the ideal of self-improvement by learning to read with the promise of a homestead in heaven, hinting that God’s poor might eventually find justice and even the land they had lost to expropriation and enslavement—which is one reason why the song passed into the African American musical tradition. The Amistad Africans sang it well, “in perfect time,” with their “sweet voices.”36
If the singing of a Christian hymn brought forth universal approbation from the audience, the singing of African songs earned a mixed reaction. Led by Sessi, who sang in a “high pitch,” the others joined in as a chorus, modulating their voices “from loud to soft expression” and from “rapid to slow movement,” growing quiet at the end of one verse, then bursting forth in sound with the next. It was done “in wild and peculiar measure,” said one listener. “It was wild and irregular, but not unpleasant,” added another. Booth had advised Tappan not to list the native song on the program. In the actual performance he translated the first verse of the African song, an appeal to a deity, as “Help me today, and I will serve you to-morrow.” This seemed to illustrate Kinna’s claim that the Mende acknowledge a “Great Spirit,” but they do not worship him. A second song was “an African welcome to newly arrived guests.” It asked, in a soft, friendly, and melodious way, “Will you stay? Will you stay?” The chorus answered, “I love you, and will stay with you.”37
The next part of the program featured the eighteen-year-old Kinna, an excellent student. The feminist abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who attended the final meeting at the Broadway Tabernacle, thought Kinna “the most intelligent and interesting” of the entire group. He sometimes explained how education worked among his comrades, but more commonly he concentrated on the history of the “Mendi People” as he had done in the abolitionist meeting—“their condition in their own country, their being kidnapped, the sufferings of the middle passage, their stay at Havana, the transactions on board the Amistad, &c.” This was a prelude to the event’s dramatic climax.38
Cinqué was the “great man of the evening.” When his comrades whispered to him, “he replied with a dignified bend of the head, not even turning his eyes.” When he rose to speak, the crowd greeted him with stormy applause. He was the undoubted leader of the Amistad Africans, the symbol of their cause. He had played the leading role in the revolt, and he was the keeper of the common story about it, around which the Amistad Africans had built a new collective identity as the “Mendi People
.” Like Kinna, he recounted “a history of their capture” and the “various stages of their history” up to the present, but, as Lewis Tappan noted, he “related more minutely and graphically the occurrences on board the Amistad.” The battle was the centerpiece of the warrior’s story, as it would have been back in Mende country. He always addressed the audience in his native tongue.39
Knowing that Cinqué would give an active and energetic performance at one of the churches in Philadelphia, the organizers “thought prudent to remove the pitchers and tumblers that were on a table before him, lest he should sweep them off.” He began his speech slowly, speaking with a “deep and powerful voice” and using “a restrained action of the right arm, which moved from his elbow downwards, and increased in frequency and rapidly as he progressed, till at length his whole frame was excited; he moved quickly from side to side—now addressing the audience, and now appealing to his countrymen, who would answer his appeals with a low guttural exclamation.” Child wrote that his eloquence was “perfectly electrifying.” He moved rapidly around the pulpit, “his eyes flashed, his tones were vehement, his motions graceful, and his gestures, though taught by nature, were in the highest style of dramatic art. He seemed to hold the hearts of his companions chained to the magic of his voice. During his narrative they ever and anon broke forth into spontaneous responses, with the greatest animation.” He recalled the fateful moonless night aboard the Amistad.40
Precisely what Cinqué said about the rebellion is unknown, for no one in the numerous audiences translated his words for publication. Perhaps no one but James Covey could have done so. Yet Lewis Tappan, who saw and heard him deliver his speech numerous times and knew the story he told, provided a detailed summary. Cinqué described his origins in Mende country, how he was enslaved and sent to Fort Lomboko. He narrated the horrors of the Middle Passage aboard the Teçora and the dismal time he and his comrades spent in the barracoons of Havana. He recounted the harsh conditions of life on the Amistad, especially the struggle over water. He gave special emphasis to Celestino’s threat and the collective decision to rise up in revolt.41
The Amistad Rebellion Page 22