For a few, there was no going home again. This was especially true for the children, who simply could not fend for themselves in an insecure world of warfare and continuing enslavement. Kagne, Teme, Margru, and Kale all stayed with the missionaries. They and several of the men signaled the seriousness of their cultural transformation by taking English/American names: Kagne became Charlotte; Teme, Maria; Margru, Sarah Kinson; and Kale, George Lewis. Steele wrote, “Those who remain are the very best of the company (except Cinque) and they had at their own request assumed English names, and thoroughly adopted civilized habits.” Yet even several of those who stayed, oscillated into and out of the mission over time. Ba, who took the name David Brown, stayed at the mission for more than two years, although some of the time he lived apart, much to the disapproval of William Raymond, who eventually excommunicated him for living “in adultery” and for having “taken some of the articles belonging to the mission and put them into the hands of his paramour.” Raymond had “required him to leave the woman or to leave me, and he chose the latter.” He was, the missionary solemnly intoned, “no longer one of my people.” The men who stayed basically became wage laborers at the mission, performing a variety of tasks in the crafts, agriculture, or manufacturing. They were “hard to manage” and they had fitful relationships to Christianity. Raymond himself believed that only Margru was a “true Christian.”78
In April 1842, Fuli wrote to Lewis Tappan that he, Cinqué, Burna, and James Covey had gone to Bullom country to look for land for the mission, and added that “all the rest gone away to Mendi to see their parents.” He thought many of them “will come again,” but he was not certain, and he assured Tappan that God would punish them if they did not. Most apparently did not return, for within four months, by April 1842, the number of the “Mendi People” at the mission had dropped to ten men and the three little girls. The number remained the same twenty months later, after the mission had moved in 1843 to Kaw Mende, about halfway between Freetown and Monrovia. A few, like Kinna and Cinqué, came and went according to the vicissitudes of their lives, coming when they had fallen on hard times and needed assistance, going when familial or working commitments called.79
In the end, perhaps the single most important thing those free people called the Amistad Africans did upon returning to Sierra Leone was to strengthen the struggle against slavery, the pervasiveness of which was obvious to one and all. The missionaries and the Africans not only saw hundreds of slaves, some domestic, some meant for Atlantic markets, they also encountered people such as Thomas Caulker of the infamous mulatto slave-trading family that had originally “sold two of our company” into slavery, noted Steele. To make matters worse, some of the Amistad Africans got caught up in the wars that surrounded the slave trade. Three of them were caught in Fuli’s hometown, Mperri, when it was attacked by the army of King Kissicummah. Fuli and Tsukama escaped, but Sa was killed. James Covey was likewise killed in war a short time later. His Mende name, Kaweli, which meant “war road”—that is, the path opened by war to the coast for the transit of slaves—predicted his own tragic end.80
Homecoming
The human meaning of the return was perhaps most poignantly expressed when Burna encountered his mother after a long and mysterious absence of more than three years. Leaving early to catch the flood tide, Burna and James Steele arrived by canoe at the woman’s small home of wattle and thatch while she was gathering wood in the bush. The men took a seat in the shade of orange trees to await her return. They soon heard a deep sigh and then a crash as the large bundle of wood the woman had carried upon her head fell to the ground. They caught sight of her as she came around the house, walking toward them slowly, with her hands raised to the level of her face, her “open palms presented.” Tears streamed down her “furrowed face” and soon she began to moan “most piteously.” The look on her face suggested that she had “seen one returned from the land of spirits.” The son she had long thought dead now “sat in full view before her.”81
She did not approach him directly. She walked around him, to the side from which she had first come, “continually weeping and moaning” and uttering exclamations in Gbandi. Burna himself did not move, but rather sat “like one petrified with the intensity of his feelings.” He placed his elbow on his knee, his head in his hand, and he too began to weep.
Eventually his mother came to stand directly in front of him, whereupon her “maternal feelings” rushed upon her “at once like a torrent.” She threw herself at his feet in the sand and embraced one of them, rolling from side to side, “still uttering her mournful cries,” in seeming “perfect agony.” The intensity of the moment was so great the missionary had to turn his face away. He wrote, “I had never before seen such an expression of nature’s own feelings, unrestrained by art or refinement.” After a considerable time, the mother began to sing the seno, a song of welcome, as she and her long-lost son joyously rubbed the palms of their right hands in the traditional way. The cold, ruthless hand of slavery had been replaced by the tender warmth of the mother’s palm. Burna, known for his strong feeling for his shipmates, probably thought of Foone, who on the other side of the Atlantic had so dearly longed to see his own mother.82
CONCLUSION
Reverberations
During the fall of 1841, Madison Washington, a self-emancipated former slave from Virginia, knocked on the door of Robert Purvis in Philadelphia as he was on his way back south to assist his wife’s escape from bondage. Washington had certainly come to the right place. Purvis had been active for several years in the Vigilance Committee and the Underground Railroad. He remembered, years later, “I was at that time in charge of the work of assisting fugitive slaves to escape.” Purvis already knew Washington because he had helped him gain his freedom by getting to Canada two years earlier. Washington had since “opened correspondence with a young white man in the South,” who had promised to ferry his wife away from her plantation and to bring her to an appointed place so that the two of them could then escape northward. Purvis did not like the plan. He had witnessed others undertake such dangerous labors of love and fail. He was sure that his visitor would be captured and reenslaved. Washington, however, was determined to carry on.1
By coincidence Washington arrived at the abolitionist’s home on the very same day a painting was delivered: Nathaniel Jocelyn’s portrait, “Sinque, the Hero of the Amistad,” as Purvis called it. It so happened that Cinqué and twenty-one other Amistad Africans had also been in Purvis’s large, majestic home on the northwest corner of Sixteenth and Mount Vernon streets, when they visited Philadelphia on their fundraising tour of May 1841. (Cinqué later sent a message, “Tell Mr. Purvis to send me my hat.”) Purvis had long been inspired by the Amistad struggle and in late 1840–early 1841, as the Supreme Court prepared to rule on the case, he commissioned Jocelyn to paint the portrait.2
Washington took a keen interest in the painting and the story behind it. When Purvis told him about Cinqué and his comrades, Washington “drank in every word and greatly admired the hero’s courage and intelligence.” Washington soon departed, headed southward in search of his wife, but he never returned, as he had hoped to do in retracing his steps toward Canada. Someone betrayed him, as Purvis had predicted (and only learned some years later). Washington was “captured while escaping with his wife.” He was clapped into chains again and placed on board a domestic slave ship called the Creole, bound from Virginia to New Orleans in November 1841.3
As the Creole set sail, Washington remembered Cinqué’s story—the courage and the intelligence, the plan and the victory. Working as a cook aboard the vessel, which allowed him easy communication with his shipmates, Washington began to organize. With eighteen others he rose up, killed a slave-trading agent, wounded the captain severely, seized control of the ship, and liberated a hundred and thirty fellow Africans and African Americans. Wary of trickery, Washington forced the mate to navigate the vessel to Nassau in the Bahama Islands, where the British had abolished s
lavery three years earlier. In Nassau harbor they met black boatmen and soldiers, who sympathized with the emancipation from below and took charge of the Creole, supporting the rebels and insuring their victory.4
Representatives of the federal government literally screamed bloody murder, just as those of Spain had done two years earlier, following the rebellion aboard the Amistad. They demanded the return of the slaves, who must, they insisted, be tried in the United States for rising up to kill their oppressors. U.S. officials self-righteously defended the institution of slavery and called for all property to be restored to its rightful owners. The British government, however, refused to comply with the order. Madison Washington and many of his comrades gained their freedom, boarded vessels bound hither and yon around the Atlantic, and left no further traces in the historical record.5
The reverberations of the Amistad rebellion were beginning to be felt in the wider world of Atlantic slavery, as predicted by abolitionist Henry C. Wright, an associate of William Lloyd Garrison. He foresaw that Purvis’s painting, properly displayed, would confront slaveholders and their apologists with a powerful message about successful rebellion against bondage. To have it in a gallery would lead to discussions about slavery and the “inalienable” rights of man, and convert every set of visitors into an antislavery meeting.
Wright did not imagine a meeting of only two people, one of them a rebellious fugitive, nor could he have known that the painting would inspire radical action on another slave ship, which would result in both a collective self-emancipation and an international diplomatic row between the United States and Great Britain. The combination of the Amistad and Creole rebellions had a major impact on the antislavery struggle, pushing activists toward more militant rhetoric and practices. As Purvis concluded many years later, “And all this grew out of the inspiration caused by Madison Washington’s sight of this little picture.”6
To Africa
Three weeks after the Creole emancipation, the Amistad Africans made their way to Freetown and other parts of West Africa, including Vai, Temne, and Mende country. They carried a potent history with them, as revealed when William Raymond, James Steele, and several of the rebels met with local kings, chiefs, and big men, hoping to secure land for the Mende Mission and support for the spread of Christianity. The missionaries apparently had not considered that the makers of a successful revolt against slavery would not be welcomed by African rulers who owned and traded slaves. “Who are the friends of these men!” Steele asked of the repatriated African rebels. He answered, not the rulers of West African societies with whom they were meeting, but “principally the poor, the oppressed, and the slaves.” They and their like were commoners, always in danger of being enslaved in war-torn Sierra Leone. Steele then used a telling comparison to explain his dilemma in using the Amistad Africans in his ministry: “Let me ask what reception the mutineers of the Creole would meet with if they should return with missionaries to Virginia?” It was a good question. The veterans of armed struggle against slavery on one side of the Atlantic did not advance his cause among slaveholders and slave-traders on the other. He would have been better off without them, he explained.7
The original action of the Africans aboard the Amistad and their hard work of cooperation with abolitionists while in jail in New Haven propelled the American antislavery struggle back to Africa, where it took its place alongside indigenous struggles—the escapes, marronage, and revolts, including the Zawo War, in which enslaved people fought King Siaka and, after him, his son Crown Prince Mana, over many years beginning in the late 1820s. The Mende Mission, according to historian Joseph L. Yannielli, became “a transatlantic extension of the Underground Railroad,” a new place of cooperation between (missionary) abolitionists and those seeking to escape or overthrow slavery. William Raymond and, later, George Thompson turned the mission into something of a “liberated zone,” to which those fearing or escaping enslavement might flee.
Raymond himself liberated war captives, buying them from slave traders and settling them at the mission. Those who studied there gained protection as “no slave-trader will buy a man who speaks the English language.” Thompson wrote that “the Mission was a ‘City of Refuge’ to the surrounding inhabitants, when fleeing from their burning towns and deadly pursuers.” As the news of the Mende Mission spread up and down the coast of Sierra Leone, and as far as two hundred miles inland through the travels of Cinqué and others, along with it spread the dramatic news of successful rebellion against slavery in America. The Amistad Africans had become transoceanic symbols of insurrection against bondage.8
In America
The Amistad rebellion also reverberated powerfully throughout the United States, primarily along two tracks: the first was American popular culture; the second was the American abolitionist movement. The result was to expand and radicalize the movement against slavery, to strengthen what we might call “abolitionism from below,” involving the enslaved, the African American community more broadly, and those who wanted to take militant action to bring bondage to an end.
One of the remarkable features of the images of the Amistad rebellion in American popular culture was their anti-slavery message. The Long, Low Black Schooner made Cinqué its hero, recounting his personal history early in the drama in order to create sympathy in the audience. The play also highlighted the horrific Middle Passage, already made infamous by the abolitionist movement, by going belowdecks to the hidden space where the “wretched slaves” lay jumbled together and where they would begin their conspiracy. The title page of the pamphlet, A True History of the African Chief Jingua and his Comrades, explained that
Liberty is Heaven born,
‘Twas man that made the slave.
The author referred to the “unfortunate victims” of the slave trade, offered a sympathetic (if largely invented) biography of Cinqué, and chronicled the horrors of his enslavement, march to the coast, and Middle Passage. The popular Book of Pirates did likewise, using the testimony of Grabeau and Bau and other abolitionist sources, arguments, and sentiments to render a compassionate portrait of the Amistad Africans.9
The images of Cinqué produced by the New York Sun likewise played up the drama of the rebellion, gave voice to its leader, conveyed strong antislavery messages, and actively sought to enlist public sympathy for the rebels and their cause. The text that accompanied the images of Cinqué repeatedly expressed his insistence on “Death or Liberty,” echoing the revolutionary cry of Patrick Henry. Here was a bold, romantic, even swashbuckling hero who “dared for freedom” and justice. Significantly, the antislavery images and text produced by the Sun appeared, like The Long, Low Black Schooner, within a week of the arrival of the Amistad Africans in New London, before Lewis Tappan, Roger S. Baldwin, and other abolitionists had worked out the legal strategy to represent them as freedom fighters. Perhaps the elite abolitionists learned from the penny press, which in turn had learned from the rebels themselves.10
John Warner Barber, Sidney Moulthrop, and Amasa Hewins lent their artistic hands to the cause, dramatizing the insurrection as a struggle for freedom. Hewins likened Cinqué to George Washington. These artists moved beyond the individual portraits of Cinqué produced by the commercial artists of the New York Sun to depict, by popular engraving, wax figures, and monumental painting, images of collective armed struggle. Nathaniel Jocelyn returned to the individual hero in his serene, noble portrait. “This little picture” produced radical results in the Creole rebellion.
The popular images of the Amistad rebellion stood in sharp contrast not only to the racist antiabolitionist images of the day, but to long-standing paternalist depictions by abolitionists that suggested either grateful deference among supplicant slaves—“Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”—or their status as sentimentalized victims of atrocity. Sarah Grimké wrote that such images expressed the “speechless agony of the fettered slave.” By contrast, the rebels of the Amistad appeared as powerful, independent actors, not as individuals acted upon by
others. They inspired admiration, not condescension, benevolence, or pity. They certainly were not “helpless victims,” as attorney Baldwin described them in court.11
Institutions of a rapidly commercializing popular culture transformed resistance into a commodity, to be consumed in playhouses, pamphlets, newspapers, galleries, and museums. The images humanized the rebels and evoked popular sympathy. Literary and visual evidence—Zemba Cinques the mutineer, Cinquez the leader of a “Piratical Gang of Negroes,” Jingua the Barbary corsair, Cinqué as freedom fighter and revolutionary—whether on stage, in print, in wax, or in paint demonstrate the process at work. It did not go unnoticed, or uncriticized, at the time. Nathaniel Rogers, leader of the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society, noted in the Herald of Freedom the aggressive entry of the market into the Amistad case and remarked, “Our shameless people have made merchandise of the likeness of Cinque” and his comrades. Rogers resented the “wood-cut representation of the royal fellow,” even though he thought it a good likeness. He considered it “effrontery” that artists had studied the “lion-like” face of the “African hero” to draw the image that was now for sale. He detested the intrusion of money and profits into the realm of high principle, but he may have underestimated how much “making merchandise” of resistance helped his cause.12
The popular images, and the celebrity that resulted from them, may help to account for a curious feature of the Amistad case. In a decade notorious for urban riots against African Americans and abolitionists—one of which, in 1834, resulted in an attack that moved from the Bowery Theatre to the home of Lewis Tappan—there was a signal lack of violence, or even the threat thereof, directed against the rebels or their supporters. Certainly the opportunities for such violence were many, whether in jail as the thousands filed through, or on New Haven Green, where the Amistad Africans routinely went for fresh air and acrobatics. Even more likely moments were May and November 1841, when the Africans went on their fund-raising tours, especially to New York and Philadelphia, where antiabolitionist mobs had been most violent. It is hard to be sure why something did not happen, but it may be that the positive images and the larger publicity surrounding the case protected the Amistad rebels and their supporters against the racist violence frequently used in this period by rampaging white mobs. A New York woman commented on the change: “some years ago,” she explained to the British abolitionist Joseph Sturge, large public meetings like those featuring the Amistad Africans “would have excited the malignant passions of the multitude, and probably caused a popular outbreak.” Now the gatherings caused “a display of benevolent interest among all classes.”13
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