The Amistad Rebellion

by Marcus Rediker

  54. Kale to John Quincy Adams, January 4, 1841, John Quincy Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. The letter was edited slightly and published as “Ka-le’s Letter to Mr. Adams,” NYJC, March 20, 1841. Josiah Gibbs mentioned “Mendi People” in an article of November 28, 1839, but he simply meant people who were from Mende, not a self-conscious collectivity. See “On the Names of the Captured Africans,” Emancipator, November 28, 1839.

  55. Kale to Adams, MHS.

  56. Oberlin Evangelist, April 28, 1841; Cinqué to Roger Baldwin, February 9, 1841, Baldwin Family Papers. Kale also used the phrase in a letter to Juliana Chamberlain, thanking her on behalf of the “Mendi People” for a monetary contribution to the cause. See Kale to Miss Chamberlain, NHCHS.

  57. “The Amistad Africans,” NYCA, January 14, 1841; “Case of the Amistad,” Farmer’s Cabinet, January 22, 1841; Newport Mercury, January 23, 1841; “The Amistad Africans,” NLG, January 27, 1841.

  Chapter Six: Freedom

  1. Amos Townsend Jr. to Lewis Tappan, January 18, 1841, ARC; “Mendis in Jail,” Hartford Daily Courant, March 27, 1841; “Ka-le’s Letter to Mr. Adams,” NYJC, March 20, 1841.

  2. Amos Townsend Jr. to Lewis Tappan, February 22, 1841, ARC; “Washington,” Hudson River Chronicle, January 26, 1841.

  3. “Goleta Española ‘Amistad,’” Noticioso de Ambos Mundos, January 30, 1841, 34; “Portrait of Cinque,” PF, February 24, 1841; “Portrait of Cinque,” CA, February 27, 1841.

  4. Minute Books of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 1839–1868, E2/6, vol. I, February 27, 1839–October 7, 1842, Material Relating to America from the Anti-Slavery Collection in Rhodes House, Oxford, edited by Howard R. Temperley; “The Amistad Africans,” Liberator, December 25, 1840; “Mr. Fox and Mr. Forsyth re. Amistad Case,” NYJC, February 18, 1841. Forsyth responded to Fox, reminding him of the separation of executive and judicial powers under the U.S. Constitution.

  5. The United States, Appellants, v. the Libellants and Claimants of the Schooner Amistad, her Tackle, Apparel, and Furniture, Together with her Cargo, and the Africans Mentioned and Described in the several Libels and Claims, Appellees, January 1841 term, United States Supreme Court (Washington, DC, 1841), 40 U.S. 518; 10 L. Ed. 826; Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad, 50–53.

  6. “The Africans of the Amistad,” NYJC, September 5, 1839; “Spanish View of the Amistad Case,” NYJC, September 14, 1839. See also Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad, 138–44, and Douglas R. Egerton, Charles Fenton Mercer and the Trial of National Conservatism (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), 179–81.

  7. Argument of Roger S. Baldwin, of New Haven, before the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Case of the United States, Apellants, vs. Cinque, and Others, Africans of the Amistad (New York: S. W. Benedict, 1841), 3, 23, 20, 4, 10, 32; “The Captives of The Amistad,” NYJC, February 23, 1841; “Washington,” Connecticut Courant, March 6, 1841.

  8. Argument of John Quincy Adams Before the Supreme Court of the United States in the Case of the United States, Appellants, vs. Cinque, and others, Africans, captured in the schooner Amistad, by Lieut. Gedney, Delivered on the 24th of February and 1st of March 1841 (New York: S. W. Benedict, 1841), 23; “The Captives of the Amistad,” NYJC, February 26, 1841.

  9. “Death of Judge Barbour,” Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics, March 6, 1841; “Late from Liberia,” NYJC, March 2, 1841; “Cheering from Liberia,” NYJC, March 3, 1841; “Aiding the Slave Trade,”NYJC, March 6, 1841. Palmerston quoted in Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 183. The Amistad Africans who were still at the Mende Mission in 1852 remembered Justice Barbour as the judge who, before his death, “was about to condemn them.” See Hannah Moore to William Harned, October 12, 1852, ARC.

  10. Amos Townsend Jr. to Lewis Tappan, January 22, 1841, and John Treadwell Norton to Lewis Tappan, February 10, 1841, ARC.

  11. “From Our Washington Correspondent,” CA, March 6, 1841.

  12. Original trial record as published in the National Intelligencer, republished as “The Case of the Amistad, Supreme Court of the United States,” NYJC, March 17, 1841.

  13. “Amistad Africans,” PF, March 24, 1841.

  14. “Amistad Negroes,” Hartford Daily Courant, March 18, 1841.

  15. “Letter from Mr. Adams,” NYJC, March 12, 1841; “Amistad Africans,” PF, March 24, 1841; “The Mendians,” Youth’s Cabinet, October 14, 1841; “Public Thanksgiving,” PF, March 17, 1841; New Hampshire Sentinel, March 24, 1841; CA, March 13, 1841; D. Jinkins, W. Johnson, J. Bennett and others to Roger Baldwin, March 30, 1841, Baldwin Family Papers; “Correspondence relative to the Amistad case,” Daily Ohio Statesman, May 5, 1841.

  16. “The Africans Taken aboard the Amistad” and “Portrait of Cinque, Chief of the Amistad Captives,” AFASR, March 15, 1841.

  17. Norton Papers, Diaries, vol. III, June 29, 1840–September 15, 1841, box no. 3, folder 18, MS 367.

  18. One issue on which Adams did not do what Kale and the rest had instructed him to do was to tell the court that the Africans had ended up on Long Island by their own labor. Nonetheless the Amistad Africans held the memory of Adams in their hearts. See Moore to Harned, October 12, 1852, ARC. “Accompaniment” is an idea developed by Staughton Lynd about how solidarity can assist struggles from below. See Staughton Lynd, Accompanying: Pathways to Social Change (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012).

  19. James Birney to Lewis Tappan, New Haven, October 2, 1840, and Amos Townsend Jr. to Lewis Tappan, New Haven, October 3, 1840, ARC.

  20. “The Amistad,” New-York Spectator, March 24, 1841; “Anecdotes of the Captured Africans,” PF, February 27, 1840; Kinna to Roger Baldwin, March 12, 1841; Fuli to Lewis Tappan, Westville, March, 1841, ARC. Fuli’s letter was reprinted in the Oberlin Evangelist, April 28, 1841.

  21. “The Amistad,” New-York Spectator, March 24, 1841; “Letter from the Teacher of the Africans,” PF, March 31, 1841; Kinna to Lewis Tappan, Westville, March 20, 1841, ARC.

  22. “Antonio Ferrer,” PF, April 14, 1841.

  23. “The Boy Antonio,” CA, April 10, 1841; Lewis Tappan to Roger Baldwin, April 1, 1841, Baldwin Family Papers; “Antonio Ferrer,” PF, April 14, 1841. On Ruggles and the Vigilance Society see the excellent study by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

  24. John Dougall to Rev. Joshua Leavitt, Montreal, April 26, 1841, ARC; Lewis Tappan to Joseph Sturge, November 15, 1841, reprinted in Joseph Sturge, A Visit To The United States In 1841 (London, 1842), Appendix E, xliv.

  25. Among the newspapers that covered the tour were ARCJ, AFASR, Boston Courier, CA, Connecticut Courant, Daily Atlas, Daily Evangelist, Emancipator, Farmer’s Cabinet, Liberator, Log Cabin, Lynn Record, Mercantile Journal, New England Weekly Review, New Hampshire Sentinel, NYJC, NYMH, New York Observer, New York Tribune, Newport Mercury, Oberlin Evangelist, PF, Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily Courier, Vermont Chronicle, and Youth’s Cabinet.

  26. “Amistad Africans at the Tabernacle,” CA, May 8, 1841; “Mendis Perform,” NYMH, May 13, 1841. It was reported that the tour of Massachusetts towns netted $1,000 after expenses, and that $1,350 had been raised at the Farmington meeting alone. See “The Mendians,” NYMH, November 19, 1841, and “The Mendians,” Vermont Chronicle, November 24, 1841. The first meeting at the Broadway Tabernacle was attended by an estimated 2,500 people who paid fifty cents each admission. Another 2,500 attended a meeting in Hartford, probably at twenty-five cents each.

  27. “Mendis Perform,” NYMH, May 13, 1841.

  28. “Meeting of Freed Africans,” CA, May 1, 1841; “Mendis Perform,” NYMH, May 13, 1841; “The Amistad Negroes,” Farmer’s Cabinet, November 19, 1841; New Hampshire Sentinel, May 19, 1841; “Meetings of the Liberated Africans,” CA, May 22, 1841; “Departure of the Mendians—Farewell Meeting,” CA, December 4, 1841.

  29. “The
Amistad Africans’ Meeting,” Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily Courier, May 25, 1841; New Hampshire Sentinel, May 19, 1841; “Amistad Captives,” PF, May 26, 1841.

  30. “Freed Africans,” NYJC, May 13, 1841; “Meeting of Freed Africans,” CA, May 1, 1841.

  31. “Mendi Meeting,” NYJC, May 13, 1841.

  32. A. F. Williams to Lewis Tappan, Farmington, April 29, 1841 and S. W. Booth to Lewis Tappan, May 3, 1841, ARC; Reverend Alonzo N. Lewis, M.A., “Recollections of the Amistad Slave Case: First Revelation of a Plot to Force the Slavery Question to an Issue more than twenty Years before its Final Outbreak in the Civil War—Several Hitherto Unknown Aspects of the Case Told,” Connecticut Magazine 11 (1907): 126. Williams originally suggested the idea of a fund-raising tour, predicting that the fame of the Amistad Africans might help to raise as much as $100,000 ($2.5 billion in 2012 dollars) for the mission over a year of performances. See A. F. Williams to Lewis Tappan, March 13, 1841, ARC.

  33. “Freed Africans,” NYJC, May 13, 1841; “The Amistad Africans, An Interesting Meeting,” Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily Courant, May 29, 1841; “Interesting Meeting of the Liberated Africans,” PF, May 19, 1841.

  34. “Mendis Perform,” NYMH, May 13, 1841.

  35. “Letters from New York,” PF, December 29, 1841.

  36. “Mendis Perform,” NYMH, May 13, 1841; “Interesting Meeting of the Liberated Africans,” PF, May 19, 1841.

  37. “Mendis Perform,” NYMH, May 13, 1841; “The Amistad Africans,” Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily Courant, May 29, 1841; “Letters from New York,” PF, December 29, 1841.

  38. Ibid.; “The Amistad Africans,” Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily Courant, May 25, 1841; Tappan to Sturge, November 15, 1841, reprinted in Sturge, Visit, Appendix E, xlii.

  39. Ibid., xliii.

  40. “Letters from New York,” PF, December 29, 1841.

  41. Tappan noted that “The transactions of this meeting [at the Marlboro Chapel in Boston] have thus been stated at length, and the account will serve to show how the subsequent meetings were conducted, as the services in other places were similar.” See Tappan to Sturge, November 15, 1841, Visit, Appendix E, xlvi.

  42. Seeing that Cinqué was “a powerful natural orator, and one born to sway the minds of his fellow men,” Tappan grew excited at the prospect of his converting to Christianity, and becoming “a preacher of the cross in Africa.” See Sturge, Visit, xliii.

  43. “Letters from New York,” December 29, 1841; “Mendis Depart,” NYJC, November 27, 1841; “The Amistad Africans,” Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily Courant, May 29, 1841; “Mendis Perform,” NYMH, May 13, 1841, and “Philadelphia,” NYMH, May 29, 1841.

  44. “Letters from New York,” PF, December 29, 1841; “Mendis Depart,” NYJC, November 27, 1841.

  45. A. F. Williams to Lewis Tappan, June 3, 1841, and S. W. Booth to Lewis Tappan, June 4, 1841, ARC.

  46. “The Mendian Mission,” Emancipator, July 1, 1841; “Mendis Perform,” NYMH, May 13, 1841.

  47. “The Mendian Exhibition,” AFASR, July 1, 1840.

  48. “The Amistad Africans—Speeches of Lewis Tappan, and Cinquez,” New-England Weekly Review, November 20, 1841.

  49. Tappan to Sturge, November 15, 1841, reprinted in Sturge, Visit, Appendix E, xlviii.

  50. “Meetings of the Liberated Africans,” CA, May 22, 1841.

  51. “Public Meeting in New York,” CA, May 22, 1841. For more on many of those involved in the Zion Church meeting, see David E. Swift, Black Prophets of Justice: Activist Black Clergy Before the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), especially his observations on the Amistad case, 129–31. For a survey of the political role of black abolitionists in the era of the Amistad case, see Richard Newman, “Not the Only Story in ‘Amistad’: The Fictional Joadson and the Real James Forten,” Pennsylvania History 67 (2000): 218–39.

  52. The African American leaders also thanked the members of the Amistad Committee, who “came forward, spontaneously and unsought, to protect God’s poor from the hands of the oppressor”; Sherman Booth for his good work as teacher; and the “Hon. John Q. Adams, and Roger B. Baldwin, Esq.” for their legal labors. Other resolutions called the arrival of the “citizens of Mendi” in America providential and suggested that their actions proved the “common humanity” of Africans and Americans. A final resolution criticized the executive branch of government for its efforts to undermine the judicial process.

  53. “Public Meeting in New York,” CA, May 22, 1841; “The Amistad Africans, Farewell Meetings and Embarkation,” Connecticut Courant, December 25, 1841; “Letters from New York,” PF, December 29, 1841.

  54. “Public Meeting in New York,” CA, May 22, 1841; “Letters from New York,” PF, December 29, 1841. Important work on the Mende Mission includes Clifton Herman Johnson, “The American Missionary Association, 1846–1861: A Study of Christian Abolitionism,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1958; Clara Merritt DeBoer, Be Jubilant My Feet: African American Abolitionists and the American Missionary Association (New York and London: Garland, 1994); and the forthcoming dissertation by Joseph L. Yannielli, “Dark Continents: Africa and the American Abolition of Slavery,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, forthcoming 2013.

  55. “Captives of the Amistad,” Emancipator, December 19, 1839. The letter from “Beta” was written on November 24, 1839, and reprinted from the New Haven Record.

  56. Lewis Tappan to John Scoble, January 20, 1840, New York, Correspondence, 1809–1872, Tappan Papers; Benjamin Griswold to Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, January 13, 1840, Baldwin Family Papers.

  57. John Hooker, Some Reminiscences of a Long Life, With a Few Articles on Moral And Social Subjects of Present Interest (Hartford, CT: Belknap and Warfield, 1899), 25; Christopher Webber, American to the Backbone: The Life of James W. C. Pennington, the Fugitive Slave Who Became One of the First Black Abolitionists (New York: Pegasus Books, 2011).

  58. Lewis Tappan, History of the American Missionary Association (New York, 1855); “Meeting of the Mendians,” CA, May 15, 1841.

  59. “Call for a Missionary Convention,” CA, July 3, 1841.

  60. This and the following four paragraphs are constructed from these sources: John Treadwell Norton to Lewis Tappan, Farmington, August 9, 1841, and A. F. Williams to Lewis Tappan, Farmington, August 18, 1841, ARC; Austin F. Williams Account Book, 1845–1881, CHS, 12. Williams also thought the Amistad Africans were concerned that their primary teacher, Sherman Booth, “care no more for Mendi People” and that he was contemplating leaving them, as indeed he was.

  61. “The Mendian Negroes,” ARCJ, December 1, 1841. For the practice and meaning of suicide among people of the African diaspora in America, see Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 52–55.

  62. “Missionary Convention,” CA, September 4, 1841.

  63. “Return of the Mendians,” Emancipator, August 26, 1841; “Appeal on Behalf of the Amistad Africans,” Emancipator, September 30, 1841.

  64. William Raymond to Lewis Tappan, October 11, 1841, ARC.

  65. “Amistad Trial—Termination,” Emancipator, January 16, 1840; “The Mendi People,” Emancipator, September 23, 1841; Joshua Coffin, An Account of some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, and others, which have occurred, or been attempted, in the United States and elsewhere, during the last two centuries, With Various Remarks (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860), 33–34.

  66. “Africans of the Amistad,” Emancipator, November 4, 1841; “The Mendians—Amistad Freemen,” Oberlin Evangelist, December 8, 1841; Helen Pratt, “My Grandfather’s Story,” mss HM 58067, fo. 18a, Huntington Library.

  67. Voyage contract between P. J. Farnham & Co. and Lewis Tappan, New York, November 1, 1841, ARC; “The Amistad Africans,” Connecticut Courant, December 25, 1841; Tappan to Sturge, November 15, 1841, reprinted in Sturge, Visit, Appendix E, xlvi.

/>   68. “The Mendians—Amistad Freemen,” Oberlin Evangelist, December 8, 1841; “The Amistad Africans,” Connecticut Courant, December 25, 1841; “Farewell Meeting of the Mendians at Farmington,” November 30, 1841, ARC.

  69. Mary Cable, Black Odyssey: The Case of the Slave Ship “Amistad” (New York: Viking Penguin, 1971), 138–39; 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), 59; Letter from Captain Morris dated February 13, 1842, published in the Daily Atlas, March 10, 1842.

  70. “The Mendian Negroes,” ARCJ, 23 (1841); “Letters from New York,” PF, December 29, 1841.

  71. James Steele to Lewis Tappan, Freetown, February 1, 1842, ARC.

  72. “The Mendians,” Vermont Chronicle, June 8, 1842. The Mende in Freetown tended to live in a multiethnic town called Gloucester or in “Kosso Town” (where Cinqué’s brother Kindi lived). See Samuel W. Booth to Lewis Tappan, October 4, 1841, ARC; Lamin Sanneh, Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 122–23.

  73. Steele letter quoted in the Vermont Chronicle, June 8, 1842; “The Amistad Africans,” ARCJ 28 (1842).

  74. James Steele to Simeon Jocelyn, Freetown, April 19, 1842, published in the AFASR, June 20, 1842.

  75. Emancipator, April 28, 1842.

  76. C.L.F. Harnsel to Lewis Tappan, Quebec, November 22, 1841, ARC; Dr. Madden’s Report on Sierra Leone, 1841, Colonial Office (CO) 267/172, 22-24, NA.

  77. “Late Intelligence from the Mendians,” New-York Spectator, October 5, 1842. This is not the place to rehearse the subsequent history of the Mende Mission. It has been explored well by Osagie in The Amistad Revolt, chap. 3. Joseph L. Yannielli’s “Dark Continents” will take scholarship on the subject to a new level. A preview of his work appeared in an award-winning article, “George Thompson among the Africans: Empathy, Authority, and Insanity in the Age of Abolition,” Journal of American History 96 (2010): 979–1,000, and in Cinqué the Slave Trader: New Evidence on an Old Controversy (New Haven: The Amistad Committee, 2010). See also De Boers, Be Jubilant My Feet.