The Amistad Rebellion

by Marcus Rediker

  Warm thanks to the following colleagues who gave me opportunities to discuss the ideas of this book through invited lectures: Tony Bogues and Tricia Rose at Brown University; Mary Lindemann and Michael Miller at the University of Miami; Vincent Brown at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University; Eric Roorda and Glenn Gordinier at Mystic Seaport; Graham Hodges at Colgate University; Paul Youngquist at the University of Colorado; Christina Heatherton and Heather Ashby at the University of Southern California; Jennifer Gaynor at the University at Buffalo; Alan Gallay at the Ohio State University; Antoinette Burton at the University of Illinois; Michael Zeuske at the University of Cologne; Leos Müller at the Vasa Museum and the University of Stockholm; Marco Sioli and Giovanni Venegoni at the University of Milan; and Raffaele Laudani at the University of Bologna.

  It was my good fortune to deliver the Lawrence A. Brewster Lecture in the Department of History, East Carolina University (2009); the Gilbert Osofsky Lecture in the Department of History, University of Illinois-Chicago (2010), and the John Kemble Lecture, Huntington Library, San Marino, California (2010). Special thanks to John Tucker and Mona Russell, James F. Searing, and Robert C. Ritchie for these exceptional occasions. I also wish to thank the many people who attended all of the events above and participated in the discussions, from which I learned much.

  Four outstanding historians—Ira Berlin, Steven Hahn, Douglas Egerton, and Jeremy Brecher—read the entire manuscript and gave me the benefit of probing, tough-minded responses. All made signal contributions to these pages, to context, narrative, and conclusion. James Brewer Stewart and Stanley Harrold shared their enormous knowledge of the American abolitionist movement with me, and I am much the better for it.

  A host of talented historians of West Africa have helped me with that crucial part of the story. My friend and colleague Patrick Manning has been stalwart in his support since the very beginning of the project. James F. Searing provided useful commentary early in the work and again late, for which I am most grateful. Joseph Opala, who knows the history of Sierra Leone like few others, gave friendly encouragement that I was on the right track. Philip Misevich and Konrad Tuchscherer have helped me tremendously, and in numerous ways, by sharing their research and expertise about Sierra Leone and the Mende people in particular, and by helping me to think through important interpretive issues. Thanks to both for reading the manuscript and offering many valuable suggestions.

  Other helpful people have included the sailor-writer William Gilkerson, who offered his deep knowledge of early-nineteenth-century schooners, and Sean Bercaw, captain of the reconstructed Amistad based at Mystic Seaport, who gave me a fascinating tour of the vessel in 2010. Emma Christopher, Joseph L. Yannielli, and Michael Zeuske kindly shared their research on related topics, and many fine scholars answered questions of various kinds: thanks to Roquinaldo A. Ferreira, Manolo Florentino, Walter Hawthorne, Mary Karasch, Henry Lovejoy, Paul Lovejoy, Beatriz Mamagonian, Leonardo Marquez, Joseph C. Miller, Peter A. Reed, João José Reis, and Jaime Rodrigues. My friends Forrest Hylton, Peter Linebaugh, and Ken Morgan also helped out in various ways.

  It was my great good fortune to work with a group of talented research assistants. Isaac Curtis, Veronica Szabo, and Levi Raymond Pettler not only found important materials, they posed discerning questions about what they found, thereby shaping the nature of the research itself. Likewise did Melissah Pawlikowski, a superb researcher who did yeowomen’s work on the Pennyslvania Freeman.

  I have received much help, of many kinds, from friends and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh. Kirk Savage kindly invited me to speak on the images of the Amistad Rebellion in the History of Art and Architecture Department, then gave me valuable advice about their genesis and meaning. Other colleagues at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University provided valuable fora for presentation and discussion: Kathleen DeWalt and the members of the Perlman Roundtable; Jonathan Arac and the Humanities Center; Holger Hoock and the Eighteenth Century Studies Group; and Edda Fields-Black and the African Studies Research Consortium. Five different talks on the same project must have tried everyone’s patience, but good manners, critical engagement, and genuine encouragement prevailed, for which I am grateful. Bruce McConachie helped me to understand the play The Long, Low Black Schooner, treated in chapter 3. Jim Burke once again applied his photographer’s art to various materials that appear in the book. Thanks to an enthusiastic group of undergraduates who studied the Amistad case with me in the spring of 2010 and to a gang of lively Atlantic history graduate students who gave both the manuscript and its author a vigorous workout in the spring of 2012. I owe special gratitude to N. John Cooper, Bettye J. and Ralph E. Bailey Dean of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. His support of my work and, indeed, of my entire department, has been foundational.

  Some people have workplaces that offer civility but little intellectual engagement; others have engagement but little civility; many, unfortunately, have neither. In the department of history at the University of Pittsburgh I have both, for which I feel lucky indeed. I thank the members of our “collective” for the things they do, large and small, that make ours a good place to study and to teach, to think and to act. Thanks to Alejandro de la Fuente for discussion of the Cuban dimensions of the Amistad case and to the other members of the Atlantic group for stimulation and support: Reid Andrews, Seymour Drescher, Van Beck Hall, Holger Hoock, Patrick Manning, Lara Putnam, and Rebecca Shumway. I must add, Grace Tomcho, Molly Estes, Patty Landon, and Kathy Gibson have helped me a hundred different ways.

  My dear friend and colleague Rob Ruck not only engaged the ideas of the book, he recognized my occasional need to escape them. He’d always say, “Time to get serious. What are the match-ups?” and off we went to a land of joy called Pitt basketball. Thanks too to Coach Jamie Dixon, my former student Assistant Coach Brandin Knight, the rest of the staff, and the players, who by their character, hard work, and achievement continue season after season to make the University of Pittsburgh a better place to live and work.

  Thanks to the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency—Elise Capron, Andrea Cavallaro, Elisabeth James, and Sandy herself, who helped me to figure out that this was the book to write and then encouraged me at every step thereafter. It has been a pleasure to work again with the creative gang at Viking. Ted Gilley and Noirin Lucas did an expert job copyediting the manuscript; Carla Bolte brought a sensitive intelligence to bear on the design of the book; Paul Buckley and his staff in the art department designed an arresting cover; Maggie Riggs did all kinds of helpful things; and my editor, Wendy Wolf, proved once again that she is an unrivaled master of her craft. She gives lie to the adage that the relationship between editor and author is the relationship between knife and throat. Her wise judgment has shaped the project from idea to book.

  Finally, thanks to my son, Zeke, and daughter, Eva, for their forbearance and good humor about a father who stays up late into the night reading strange documents and putting black marks on paper. My wife, Wendy Goldman, discussed every bit of this book with me over days, weeks, months, and years. Like no one else I know, she has an ability to go straight to the heart of the matter at hand. I dedicate the book to her, with love.

  NOTES

  Abbreviations

  AFASR American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter

  ARC Sierra Leone Papers, American Missionary Association, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, Louisiana

  ARCJ African Repository and Colonial Journal

  Baldwin Family Papers Baldwin Family Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University

  Barber John Warner Barber, 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 C
ourts of the United States, for the District of Connecticut (New Haven, CT: E. L. and J. W. Barber, 1840)

  CA Colored American

  CHS Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut

  Forbes Frederick E. Forbes, Six Months’ Service in the African Blockade, from April to October, 1848, in Command of H.M.S. Bonetta, by Lieutenant Forbes (Originally published London, 1848, reprinted London, Dawsons, 1969)

  Jones Adam Jones, From Slaves to Palm Kernels: A History of the Galinhas Country (West Africa), 1730–1890 (Wiesbaden, Germany: F. Steiner, 1983)

  Laing Major Alexander Gordon Laing, Travels in the Timmannee, Kooranko, and Soolima Countries in Western Africa (London: John Murray, 1825)

  LC Library of Congress, Washington, DC

  NA National Archives, Kew Gardens, United Kingdom

  NAB National Archives at Boston, Frederick C. Murphy Federal Center, Waltham, Massachusetts

  NHCHS New Haven Colony Historical Society, New Haven, Connecticut

  Norton Papers John Pitkin Norton Papers, MS 367, Manuscript and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University

  NLG New London Gazette

  NYCA New York Commercial Advertiser

  NYJC New York Journal of Commerce

  NYMH New York Morning Herald

  NYS New York Sun

  The Palm Land George Thompson, The Palm Land; or, West Africa, Illustrated. Being a History of Missionary Labors and Travels, with Descriptions of Men and Things in Western Africa. Also, a Synopsis of All the Missionary Work on that Continent (Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach, Keys & Co., 1859)

  PF Pennsylvania Freeman

  Rankin F. Harrison Rankin, The White Man’s Grave: A Visit to Sierra Leone in 1834 (London: Richard Bentley, 1836), two volumes

  Tappan Papers Lewis Tappan Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

  TAST Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, available at www.slavevoyages.org

  Thompson in Africa Thompson in Africa; or, an Account of the Missionary Labors, Sufferings, Travels, and Observations of George Thompson in Western Africa, at the Mendi Mission, ninth ed. (Dayton, OH: Printed for the author, 1857; originally printed 1852)

  Introduction: Voices

  1. This work owes much to Levi Raymond Pettler, “Education and The Amistad: Black Agency, the American Left, and Spielberg’s Amistad,” unpublished paper; and Jesse Lemisch, “Black Agency in the Amistad Uprising, or, You’ve Taken Our Cinque and Gone,” in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 1 (1999): 57–70. I have chosen to use the name “Cinqué,” which grew from the freedom struggle in America, rather than the Mende name Sengbe. My decision was based on the fact that Cinqué himself embraced the name and used it in daily life, signing his letters that way, for example, no doubt because the name, the person, and the cause had become famous in the course of the struggle.

  2. Julie Roy Jeffrey, “Amistad (1997): Steven Spielberg’s ‘True Story,’” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21 (2001): 77–96; Marouf Hasian Jr. and A. Cheree Carlson, “Revisionism and Collective Memory: The Struggle for Meaning in the Amistad Affair,” Communications Monographs 67 (2000): 42–62. Novels include Barbara Chase-Riboud, Echo of Lions (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1989); Alexs D. Pate, Amistad (New York: Signet, 1997); and David Pesci, Amistad (Marlowe and Co., 1997). A poetic reflection on the history and meaning of the case is Kevin Young, Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).

  3. The Amistad Rebellion has attracted many fine writers and scholars over the years. The first major work was a historical novel, based on extensive research and therefore sometimes mistaken for history: William A. Owens, Black Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner Amistad (New York: John Day Co., 1953). Mary Cable’s Black Odyssey: The Case of the Slave Ship “Amistad” (New York: Viking Press, 1971) is a brief, lucid account of the mutiny and its aftermath. Two studies by literary scholars are Maggie Montesinos Sale, The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997) and Iyunolu Folayan Osagie, The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). The latter stresses the meanings of the Amistad case in American popular culture and in recent West African history, especially in the author’s own war-torn Sierra Leone during the 1990s. The pinnacle of scholarship, to which I am much indebted, is Howard Jones’s Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Jones used extensive research to offer a thorough and insightful exploration of the legal, diplomatic, and political aspects of the case. Other important scholarship includes James A. Miller, ed., “The Amistad Incident: Four Perspectives,” Occasional Papers of the Connecticut Humanities Council 10 (1992); Arthur Abraham, The Amistad Revolt: An Historical Legacy of Sierra Leone and the United States (Washington, DC : U.S. Department of State International Information Programs, 1998); and David Brion Davis, “The Amistad Test of Law and Justice,” in his Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 1.

  4. Henry Highland Garnet’s An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America was delivered before the National Convention of Colored Citizens, Buffalo, New York, August 16, 1843, then published in Henry Highland Garnet, Walker’s Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life, and also Garnet’s Address to the Slaves of the United States of America (New York: J. H. Tobitt, 1848); Peter Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989; orig. publ. 1938); Kenneth S. Greenberg, Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Joaô José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Robert L. Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict Between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988); James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996).

  5. “Motín en alta mar, piratería, y asesinatos,” Noticioso de Ambos Mundos, August 31, 1839.

  6. The best, and most poetic, account of the struggle against slavery and its long aftermath remains Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1981).

  7. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), chap. 9. Other scholars whose work has been especially valuable in including enslaved rebels in the abolitionist movement include Merton L. Dillon, Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Their Allies, 1619–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Stanley Harrold, American Abolitionists (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001); and Douglas R. Egerton, “The Scenes Which are Enacted in St. Domingo: The Legacy of Revolutionary Violence in Early National Virginia,” in Jack R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold, Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 41–64.

  8. I would also like to acknowledge the recent and forthcoming work of five talented scholars on one or another dimension of the Amistad rebellion: Orlando García Martínez, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Robert S. Wolff, Joseph L. Yannielli, and Michael Zeuske.

  9. Quoted in Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad, 210. On the radicalism of the waterfront, see Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, chaps. 7 and 8.

  10. “Incarcerated Captives,” NYCA, September 6, 1839.


  Chapter One: Origins

  1. “The Amistad Africans,” Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier, May 29, 1841; Forbes, 75–76.

  2. “Fuli,” William H. Townsend (1822–1851), Sketches of the Amistad captives, [ca. 1839–1840], box 1, folder 4, GEN MSS 335, Beneicke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Yale University; “Captives of the Amistad,” Emancipator, December 19, 1839.

  3. Barber, 11.

  4. Barber, 15; “Marqu,” Townsend Sketches, box 1, folder 7. See Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundation of the Calabar Slave Trade,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 332–55, and “The Business of Slaving: Pawnship in Western Africa,” Journal of African History 42 (2001): 67–89. On the experience of Margru and the other children aboard the Amistad, see Benjamin N. Lawrance, “‘All We Want Is Make Us Free’: The Voyage of La Amistad’s Children Through the Worlds of the Illegal Slave Trade,” in Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Child Slaves in the Modern World (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 13–36.

  5. Barber, 12; “Malhue,” Townsend Sketches, box 2, folder 18. Moru played a leading role in the rebellion, suggesting that he was an experienced warrior. Thanks to Konrad Tuchscherer for the identification of the Margona family name, which is often given as Magona.

  6. No Rum!—No Sugar! Or, The Voice of Blood, being Half an Hour’s Conversation between a Negro and an English Gentleman, shewing the Horrible Nature of the Slave-Trade, and Pointing Out an Easy and Effective Method of Terminating It, by an Act of the People (London, 1792). In case readers were disinclined to believe Cushoo, the author of the pamphlet provided footnotes, with eyewitness accounts of Africa, the slave trade, and New World slavery itself to support the argument.