The Amistad Rebellion

by Marcus Rediker

  The antislavery movement in 1839 consisted of a rebellious and sometimes insurrectionary wing of enslaved people, a reform wing of various, quarreling, mostly white middle-class abolitionists, and a growing antislavery public that crossed many social and economic lines. The popular representations of the Amistad rebellion helped to connect the first two and to expand the third by circulating antislavery images and ideas into new social domains—into the streets, where boys hawked the images and newspapers to urban workers, and where the stories of the revolt would circulate to free and enslaved laborers alike; on the waterfront, where Vigilance Committees in New York and Philadelphia were already undertaking direct action in the struggle against slavery; into factories, where workers contributed to the defense campaign; and into African American churches, where interest in the case ran high. The Amistad rebellion helped to change the social composition of the antislavery movement.14

  The popular nature of the movement to free the Amistad Africans is revealed by its funding. It has long been assumed that the wealthy Lewis Tappan bankrolled the entire operation, but his own punctilious accounts as treasurer of the Amistad Committee tell a different story. The committee itself made several public appeals for funds. A broad-based response from people of all classes sustained the long and uncertain struggle, and in the end made possible the free return to Africa.15

  The Amistad Africans played the single largest role in raising money for their own education, lodging, and repatriation, earning $4,000 or more through the “Mendian Exhibitions” described in chapter 6. Antislavery groups, civic organizations, and churches made a range of smaller, still significant contributions. The Montpelier, Vermont, Female Anti-Slavery Society, for example, gave $10, while the “Color’d Citizens of Cincinnati” sent $90 to the Amistad Committee. Members of the Congregational Church of Farmington, Connecticut, where the Africans lived from the time of the Supreme Court ruling in March 1841 until their departure in late November, pledged an extraordinary $1,337.21 (more than $32,000 in 2012 dollars).16

  A huge portion of the money came from thousands of private citizens, most of them from the Northeast, who made modest contributions. Many of the donations were of twenty-five and fifty cents, sometimes combined into gifts of a dollar or two. Mary Ann Parker, “a mute,” gave twenty-five cents. Former seaman and African American abolitionist J. B. Vashon of Pittsburgh sent $1. A nine-year-old boy in Oswego County, N.Y., gathered $2 from his Sunday School classmates and sent it in support of the cause. An anonymous “Anti-Abolitionist” gave $5. Henry Post and thirteen others who worked at an iron foundry on Elm Street in New York added $9.87. When the mother of missionary William Raymond heard the story of the Amistad Africans, she “out of a full heart exclaimed, ‘I have no money to give, but I will give my son.’” In the same spirit Raymond himself added, “I go,—I have not money to give, but I give myself.” To be sure, Tappan gave generously of his own fortune and time, but so did many others of limited means. After the federal government appealed the favorable ruling of January 1840 and extended the long jail sentence of the Amistad Africans, the Emancipator wondered, “Will the public sustain the defense?” Many voices, including those of the Amistad Africans themselves, answered with a determined yes.17

  Another sign of the growth of the antislavery movement was the number and variety of people who supported the Amistad campaign while insisting that they were not abolitionists. The effects of the images in popular culture can be seen in a note accompanying a contribution to the Amistad Committee in early September 1839: “A friend of ‘human rights,’ but no Abolitionist, desires your acceptance of the enclosed Five Dollars, for the benefit of ‘Joseph Cinquez’ and his African comrades, who nobly and righteously liberated themselves from illegal and involuntary bondage.” The editor of the New London Gazette likewise announced, “We are no abolitionist, though we are an enemy to slavery in all its shapes.” Soon thereafter a writer named “Humanitas,” a “true friend” to the Africans, worried that abolitionists would “prejudice the public mind against them” and in the end get them all hanged. The movement in support of the Amistad Africans and the abolitionist movement were never identical.18

  In an article of 1842 entitled “What the Mechanics of the Country Think,” Samuel Thompson of Poughkeepsie, New York, reported to Joshua Leavitt, editor of the Emancipator, that the Amistad and Creole rebellions had gained “general approval” among his fellow workers. He noted that “one gentleman of influence” expressed his hope at a public meeting that “every time they attempted to ship slaves to the south they would kill every individual concerned in the deed.” The speaker then swore to God that “he was no abolitionist.” The room full of mechanics “all endorsed his sentiment.” As they made their resolution, merchants in Virginia worried that the murder of their employees was growing, and disrupting the domestic slave trade.19

  Abolitionism itself evolved in the wake of the Amistad rebellion. As the mechanics suggested, the combination of the Amistad and Creole rebellions strengthened “abolitionism from below,” especially its most militant parts. As historian Stanley Harrold has written, “The slave revolts aboard the Amistad in 1839 and the Creole in 1841 were central to the sense of crisis among abolitionists,” to the growth of a more militant and confrontational approach, especially among African American activists, and to abolitionist “Addresses to the Slaves,” which now acknowledged the agency of the enslaved and the great significance of resistance from below. The advance of this tendency from the time of the Amistad to the Civil War can be followed through the growing power and popularity of a phrase that originated with Lord Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (canto II, stanza 76) in 1818:

  Hereditary Bondsmen! know ye not,

  Who would be free themselves must strike the first blow?

  In the stirring climax of a speech to the National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo, New York, on August 16, 1843, the once-enslaved black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet remembered “the immortal Joseph Cinque, the hero of the Amistad” and Madison Washington, “that bright star of freedom.” They were “Noble men!” Their very names, “surrounded by a halo of glory,” were an inspiration as Garnet proclaimed a coming jubilee that could be brought about only by resistance from below. “No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance,” he thundered. Garnet repeated Cinqué’s claim that it was better to “die freemen than live to be slaves.” His message was clear: “Brethren, the time has come when you must act for yourselves. It is an old and true saying that, ‘if hereditary bondmen would be free, they must themselves strike the blow.’”20

  The phrase was popular among the most radical abolitionists. The street fighter David Ruggles had urged striking the first blow in 1841 in an open letter announcing a black antislavery convention, which itself had been partially inspired by the Amistad rebellion, and the militant Martin R. Delany would place it on the masthead of his journal The Mystery, which began publication in Pittsburgh in 1843. The phrase would achieve its classic expressions when John Brown and his fellow insurrectionists “struck the first blow” at Harper’s Ferry in 1859, to inspire slave revolts throughout the South, and when Frederick Douglass’s broadside Men of Color, to Arms used the phrase to encourage enlistment in the Union army in 1863. Advocated primarily by African American abolitionists in the aftermath of the Amistad and Creole rebellions, collective armed struggle against slavery had become the order of the day.21

  The militant effects of the Amistad rebels were not simply a matter of rhetoric. In January 1840, in defiance of the law, abolitionists planned a jailbreak and escape for the Africans had the court ruling gone against them and the Van Buren administration tried to load the prisoners onto the Grampus for a quick return to Cuba before an appeal could be made. More significantly still, abolitionist John Treadwell Norton wrote to Lewis Tappan in February 1841 that “many here,” around Farmington, were “ready forcibly to interfere” on behalf of these “brethren” should the Supre
me Court rule against them. He added, “If such a step could ever be justified it would be in this case, where injustice is apparent at every step”—and where there existed broad popular support for the cause. As tensions rose, so did local militancy, wrote Norton two weeks later: “Many of the good friends here are very desirous to get the Africans out of the hands of the oppressors at once; and some are willing to go so far as to shoulder a Musket, or to turn Mohawks for this purpose.” One armed struggle inspired another: rank-and-file abolitionists now wanted to free the very people who themselves had risen under arms to escape their oppressors. Norton and his “good friends” invoked the memory of the Boston Tea Party, in which people took the law into their own hands as “Mohawks” and tomahawked casks of tea, and thereby wrapped the Amistad struggle in the glorious mantle of the American Revolution.22

  In an effort to restore the Amistad Africans to their rightful place in their own story, this history has returned to Henry Highland Garnet’s observation about the relationship between white abolitionists and his own people of color, enslaved and free, in the nineteenth century: “They are our allies—Ours is the battle.” But what extraordinary allies they were! Lewis Tappan may have been a condescending Christian paternalist, but his devotion to the Africans was exceptional, his commitment of time, energy, and money to the cause exemplary. Roger S. Baldwin and John Quincy Adams made singular contributions to the struggle, winning a tense and dramatic battle against the United States government before the Supreme Court. The role played by rank-and-file abolitionists such as Dwight Janes and the unnamed militants in Farmington who were prepared to pick up the gun must also be acknowledged. The alliance of the African insurrectionists and the American abolitionists was essential to the victory.

  The reverberations of the Amistad rebellion in American popular culture made a difference to the outcome. The peculiarities of the case made it easier for Americans of all walks of life to embrace: the rebels of the Amistad were African, not African American, and the slaveholders were Cuban, not American. Yet here was a group of black men who had killed a white figure of authority during a fearful time of widespread slave revolt, and Americans showed a level of interest and support that was extraordinary by the standards of the day. The newspaper coverage, the play, the prints, the engravings, the paintings, the wax figures, the pamphlets, the long lines leading to the doors of the jail and the courtroom—all created a charged atmosphere in which district, circuit, and Supreme Court judges made what were, at the time and in retrospect, surprising decisions favorable to the Amistad Africans and their claims of freedom. District court judge Andrew Judson was known to be hostile to people of color; one abolitionist called him “Andrew Sharka Judson” after the Vai king who ruled a slave-trading empire. A majority of the Supreme Court justices had southern backgrounds. All of the judges who issued written rulings on the case acknowledged the extraordinary degree of popular interest in the case.23

  An unnamed abolitionist rightly gave credit for the Amistad victory to the antislavery movement, with “no thanks to the Supreme Court” and “No thanks to American law.” Without the resolute efforts of the rebels, and without the translators, legal assistance, publicity, and fundraising provided by the abolitionists, the Supreme Court surely would have done the bidding of President Martin Van Buren and American slaveholders, delivering “these people up to the anacondas whose throats were stretched for them.” The author concluded, “Thanks to God only, and to the anti-slavery movement, His instrumentality.” Many regarded the Amistad victory as the movement’s greatest achievement, as the Anti-Slavery Standard and the Emancipator announced: “Let those who ask what we have done, look at the generous excitement, the universal public sentiment, in behalf of the Amistad captives.” Never had an American antislavery campaign been so popular—or so victorious. Winning, first on the deck of the Amistad, then in the chambers of the Supreme Court, changed everything.24

  The victory in the Amistad case contributed to a broad set of changes in the complex and evolving struggle against slavery. It strengthened the “political” abolitionists, led by Arthur and Lewis Tappan, as well as African American and other increasingly militant activists, led by the likes of Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. John Brown noted that he was inspired by the “personal bravery” of “Cinques, of ever lasting memory.” The victory also helped to broaden and integrate the movement, which became increasingly interracial after 1840. It answered the call for a “Black Warrior” or a “Black Spartacus” who could wage war against slavery and win, thereby expanding the pantheon of liberators, adding Cinqué and, by his example, Madison Washington, to the names of David Walker, Toussaint Louverture, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. It helped to establish and popularize the theme of legitimate armed self-defense by those seeking freedom. Although it would take years for these changes, and others, to create a revolutionary overthrow of the entire slave system, it may be said that in their own day and after, the Amistad rebels contributed to a shift in thinking about what might be possible in the war against slavery.25

  A small band of multiethnic Africans aboard the Amistad succeeded against all odds. Enslaved in their homelands and shipped to Cuba, they planned and executed a revolt, worked their way to a “free country,” cooperated and allied themselves with a small, much-despised group of antislavery activists, then overcame the opposition of two powerful governments, Spain and the United States, to gain their freedom and go home, accomplishing precisely what they had always wanted to do. They carried out the entire epic cycle of loss, quest, and recovery. From beginning to end, their odyssey was unprecedented in the annals of New World slavery.

  Cinqué’s revolution in miniature aboard the Amistad reverberated around the Atlantic. Abolitionist Henry C. Wright noted in April 1841 that “his name and his deeds have been heralded in every paper in this nation and in England—have stirred every heart and been the theme of every tongue.” Even when confined in a prison for nineteen months, he and his comrades commanded debate and discussion in the United States, Spain, England, and France. Cinqué’s name “will be the watchword of freedom to Africa and her enslaved sons throughout the world.” Through a long, heroic struggle in which insurrectionists and reformers cooperated to create an interracial movement of great power, he had come to symbolize a revolutionary future, that “bright and glorious day” on which slavery would be overthrown.26

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The origins of this book lay in the work I did on The Slave Ship: A Human History, published by Viking Penguin in 2007. That book, about a malevolent machine central to an entire phase of modern history, was hard to write. I studied how enslaved Africans made many a heroic revolt under extreme circumstances, only to fail repeatedly and to suffer, in the aftermath, almost unimaginable torture, terror, and death at the hands of the slaver’s captain. In such a grisly context, the Amistad Rebellion stood out as one of the very few successful uprisings ever to take place aboard a slaving vessel. I wanted to know how it happened, this hopeful counterpoint to a gruesome history.

  Because this book is a companion to The Slave Ship, I wish to acknowledge once again the many people and institutions that helped me in the earlier work. To their names I gratefully add many others. I thank the staffs at the Stanley-Whitman House in Farmington, Connecticut (especially Lisa Johnson); the New London County Historical Society (Tricia Royston and Edward Baker); the New Haven Colony Historical Society (James Campbell); the Beneicke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library, Yale University (George Miles); the Department of Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University; the G. W. Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport, Mystic, Connecticut (Paul O’Pecko); the Canton Historical Museum, Collinsville, Connecticut (Gordon Harmon); the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut (Barbara Austen and Rich Malley); Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (Margaret McAleer); National Archives at Boston, Frederick C. Murphy Federal Center, Waltham, Massachusetts;
the Boston Athenaeum, Boston, Massachusetts; the Amistad Research Center, New Orleans; the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the National Archives of the United Kingdom (Guy Grannum); the Department of Manuscripts, National Library of Ireland (Gerry Long); the British Library; and Rhodes House Library, Oxford. Special thanks to the staff at my own Hillman Library at the University of Pittsburgh, especially Pat Colbert and Philip Wilkin.

  I thank Tim Murray and the Fellows of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, where I spent a happy, productive term in the spring of 2009 and where I made the first presentation on this project. Conversations with Edward Baptist, Margaret Washington, Barry Maxwell, and Eric Cheyfitz were especially useful, as were meetings with Cornell graduate and undergraduate students who took a course I offered on the Amistad Rebellion.