The Amistad Rebellion

by Marcus Rediker

  78. “The Mendi Mission,” Cleveland Daily Herald, July 11, 1842; William Raymond to Lewis Tappan, York, Sierra Leone, February 19, 1844, published in the Union Missionary, May 1844. See also North American and Daily Advertiser, June 15, 1842, and Marlene D. Merrill, Sarah Margru Kinson: The Two Worlds of an Amistad Captive (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin Historical and Improvement Organization, 2003).

  79. Fuli to Lewis Tappan, April 15, 1842, reproduced in Helen Pratt, “My Grandfather’s Story,” mss HM 58067, Huntington Library. The ten who remained loyal longest were Fuli (George Brown), Kinna (Lewis Johnson), Beri (Thomas Johnson), Ndamma (John Smith), Kali (George Lewis), Tsukama (Henry Cowles), Fabana (Alexander Posey), Sa (James Pratt), Ba (David Brown), and Moru (John Williams). The three little girls were Margru (Sarah Kinson), Teme (Maria Brown), and Kagne (Charlotte, last name unknown). See DeBoer, Be Jubilant My Feet, 106.

  80. “The Mendians,” Vermont Chronicle, June 8, 1842; Osagie, The Amistad Revolt, 64; Barber, 15.

  81. “Letters from New York,” PF, December 29, 1841. After his enslavement Burna spent six weeks in transit to Lomboko, “three and a half moons” (months) at the fortress itself, eight weeks in the Middle Passage, two weeks in Cuba, and eight weeks at sea in the Amistad before he came ashore in New London on August 27, 1839. He met his mother in February 1842 after a period of roughly three years, three months. The encounter is described in letters written by missionary James Steele, published in the Ohio Observer, August 4, 1842, and the Liberator, August 5, 1842, from which the quotations are taken. I assume that “Banna” here was Burna the elder, who was frequently called on by that name, while Burna the Younger was called “Little Banna” or “Banna wulu.” The mother of Burna the younger was deceased. See Barber, 9.

  82. Thompson in Africa, 201.

  Conclusion: Reverberations

  1. Purvis gave this account to a journalist in 1889, a half century after the Amistad rebellion. See “A Priceless Picture,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 26, 1889. Frederick Douglass mentioned the meeting of Purvis and Washington in “Great Anti-Colonization Mass Meeting of the Colored Citizens of New York,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 3, 1849. Later Douglass wrote a novella about Washington and the Creole rebellion entitled The Heroic Slave, a Thrilling Narrative of the Adventures of Madison Washington, in Pursuit of Liberty (Boston: John P. Jewitt & Co, 1852).

  2. “The ‘Hanging Committee’ of the ‘Artists’ Fund Society’ Doing Homage to Slavery,” PF, April 21, 1841. See also the excellent article by Richard J. Powell, “Cinqué: Antislavery Portraiture and Patronage in Jacksonian America,” American Art 11 (1997): 49–73.

  3. “A Priceless Picture,” Philadelphia Inquirer.

  4. Stanley Harrold, “Romanticizing Slave Revolt: Madison Washington, the Creole Mutiny, and Abolitionist Celebration of Violent Means,” in John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold, eds., Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 89–107; Howard Jones, “The Peculiar Institution and National Honor: The Case of the Creole Slave Revolt,” Civil War History 21 (1975): 28–50; Walter Johnson, “White Lies: Human Property and Domestic Slavery Aboard the Slave Ship Creole,” Atlantic Studies 5 (2008): 237–63.

  5. George Hendrick and Willene Hendrick, The Creole Mutiny: A Tale of Revolt Aboard a Slave Ship (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003).

  6. “The ‘Hanging Committee,’” PF, April 21, 1841. Wright spoke of the controversy that surrounded the refusal of the Artists’ Fund Society to include the portrait of Cinqué in an exhibition, out of their fear of violence from an antiabolition mob. Their fears may have been unfounded, as discussed below. See also Roy E. Finkenbine, “The Symbolism of Slave Mutiny: Black Abolitionist Responses to the Amistad and Creole Incidents,” in Jane Hathaway, ed., Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention: Mutiny in Comparative Perspective (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 233–52.

  7. Steele letter quoted in “The Amistad Africans,” Ohio Observer, August 4, 1842.

  8. Joseph L. Yannielli, “Dark Continents: Africa and the American Abolition of Slavery,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, forthcoming, 2013, chap. 1, 14; “The Mendi Mission,” ARCJ, May, 1843; Thompson in Africa, 335; William Raymond to Lewis Tappan, Woburn, Mass., June 15, 1843, ARC. After it became clear that the missionaries had their own agenda and that he would not be the leader he expected to be, Cinqué left the mission and struck out on his own. He soon remarried and became a merchant, trading locally in and around Freetown. He did not abandon the mission entirely, although his relationship with the missionaries remained vexed for years. He nonetheless kept up intermittent contact, and indeed he played a crucial role in acquiring land at Kaw Mende, to which the mission would relocate in 1844. George Thompson noted that Cinqué traveled for a time to Jamaica in 1844 or 1845, perhaps as part of a British initiative to transport Liberated Africans to the colony as workers. He disappears from the historical record for years at a stretch, but finally returned to the Mende Mission when he was near death in 1879. He died there and was buried in the mission graveyard. Like Howard Jones and Joseph L. Yannielli, I have found no evidence to suggest that Cinqué became a slave trader upon return to Sierra Leone, as has long been alleged. See Jones, “Cinqué of the Amistad a Slave Trader? Perpetuating a Myth,” Journal of American History 87 (2000): 923–39, and Joseph L. Yannielli, Cinqué the Slave Trader: Some New Evidence on an Old Controversy (New Haven, CT: The Amistad Committee, 2010). The proslavery NYMH had reported on September 13, 1839, that Cinqué had been a slave trader before he himself was enslaved. This claim was often repeated in the proslavery press, but is unsubstantiated.

  9. Peter Reed, Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 11; Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 97–100. The Long, Low Black Schooner was one of five plays found by Melinda Lawson to represent slave insurrection on the American stage in the early national and antebellum eras. See her “Imagining Slavery: Representations of the Peculiar Institution on the Northern Stage, 1776–1860,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1 (2011): 34. It was the only one to deal with a current event. The couplet would later appear in the Chartist Circular, published in Glasgow, May 1, 1841, in a poem entitled “Liberty! Universal Liberty!” by “Argus.” See The True History of the African Prince Jingua and his Comrades, frontispiece.

  10. Stanley Harrold, “Romanticizing Slave Revolt,” 90, 96; Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 40, 51, 109; Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  11. Arguments 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. Phillip Lapsansky has written: “As part of their effort to defuse fears of violence, the antislavery movement did not produce representations of black violence, self-assertion, or control.” See his “Graphic Discord: Abolitionists and Antiabolitionist Images,” in Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 203; Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), chap. 5; 172–76; Heather Nathans, Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 202. Compare the racist, demeaning “bobalition” images as analyzed by Patrick Rael, Black Identity & Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 72–74.

  12. The article from the Herald of Freedom was republished in the CA, October 19, 1839.

 
; 13. One minor instance of violence occurred in Farmington, Connecticut, after the Supreme Court decision, when several of the Amistad Africans got into a fight with a gang of local toughs and apparently beat them up. See John Pitkin Norton’s account of the fight in Norton Papers, MS 367, Diaries, vol. III: June 29, 1840–September 15, 1841, box no. 3, folder 18, entries for Tuesday, September 7, 1841, and Wednesday, September 8, 1841; A. F. Williams to Lewis Tappan, September 7, 1841, and September 23, 1841, ARC. A minor incident occurred in Springfield, Massachusetts, in November 1841, when some “fellows of a baser sort” insulted Kinna, but used no violence. See Lewis Tappan to Joseph Sturge, November 15, 1841, printed in Joseph Sturge, A Visit to the United States in 1841 (London, 1842), Appendix E, xlviii–xlix. Tappan himself received a letter threatening tar and feathers; see Mr. Johnsting to Lewis Tappan, April 13, 1841, ARC. In Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), Leonard L. Richards notes the decline of antiabolition mobs in the late 1830s; see chap. 6. See also David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998).

  14. Mary Cable, Black Odyssey: The Case of the Slave Ship “Amistad” (New York: Viking Penguin, 1971), 121.

  15. “Funds Appeal,” NYCA, September 5, 1839.

  16. “Farewell Meeting at Farmington,” Emancipator, December 2, 1841.

  17. “The Mendians,” Youth’s Cabinet, December 9, 1841, and December 16, 1841; “In Iron Foundry, Elm Street,” Emancipator, October 28, 1841; Emancipator, January 30, 1840. For accountings of contributions, see “Monies Received for the Amistad Captives,” Emancipator, March 26, 1840; “Received for the Africans Taken in the Amistad,” AFASR, January 1841; “Amistad Fund,” AFASR, February 1, 1841; “Receipts for the Amistad Captives,” AFASR, March 15, 1841; “Receipts for the Liberated Africans Received since the Third Appeal,” AFASR, May 1, 1841; “Receipts for Liberated Africans of Amistad,” AFASR, October 1, 1841; “Africans of the Amistad: Receipts and Disbursements,” Emancipator, November 4, 1841. See also the hundreds of notes and letters that accompanied the contributions in the AMA Archive, ARC.

  18. S.L.H. to S. S. Jocelyn, Bedford, Mass., September 11, 1839, ARC; NLG, September 4, 1839; “Humanitas,” NYCA, September 13, 1839. “Joseph Cinquez” was how Cinqué was named and depicted in the early images published and circulated by the New York Sun.

  19. “What the Mechanics of the Country Think,” Emancipator, March 24, 1842; Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 255, and chap. 8 more broadly. Other examples of how the Amistad campaign strengthened militance against the slave trade were reported in the Connecticut Courant, January 25, 1840, and the North American and Daily Advertiser, January 21, 1841.

  20. 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). The classic work on Garnet remains Sterling Stuckey, “Henry Highland Garnet: Nationalism, Class Analysis, and Revolution,” in his Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 138–92.

  21. Stanley Harrold, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004), 37–38, 155; Garnet, An Address to the Slaves. On Ruggles, see Liberator, August 13, 1841, quoted in Herbert Aptheker, “Militant Abolitionism,” Journal of Negro History 26 (1941): 438–84; Douglass’ Monthly, March 21, 1863; 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). On Delany, see James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 64. See also Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, “Black Power: The Debate in 1840,” Phylon 29 (1968): 19–26, republished in Patrick Rael, ed., African-American Activism Before the Civil War (New York: Routledge, 2008), 50–57.

  22. John Treadwell Norton to Lewis Tappan, Farmington, February 10, 1841, and February 27, 1841, ARC.

  23. “The African Strangers,” Friend of Man, September 21, 1839.

  24. “The Amistad Captives,” Liberator, April 9, 1841; “What Have You Done?” Emancipator, July 22, 1841.

  25. Brown quoted in Harrold, “Romanticizing Slave Revolt,” 102. See also Stanley Harrold, American Abolitionists (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001), 27, 58, 59, 63, 73, 76, 82–83, 101; Carol Wilson, “Active Vigilance Is the Price of Liberty: Black Self-Defense Against Fugitive Slave Recaptors and Kidnapping of Free Blacks,” in McKivigan and Harrold, Antislavery Violence, 108–27. The transformation of the abolition movement into something broader, more inclusive, and more egalitarian began in the early 1830s. See Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 2, 106, 175.

  26. “The ‘Hanging Committee,’” PF, April 21, 1841.

  INDEX

  Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations

  abolitionists, 2, 4, 5, 8–11, 20–21, 104–8, 110, 122, 123, 228–37

  Amistad Africans’ relationship with, 123–27, 153, 155, 183, 199, 209, 217, 227, 235

  appeal of lower court ruling and, 152–53

  and artistic depictions of Amistad rebellion, 168–71

  escape for Amistad Africans planned by, 149–51, 189, 234

  in Great Britain, 105

  immediatism and, 123

  rebellion justified by, 169–71

  slave rebels, 106–7

  Supreme Court Amistad decision and, 191–92

  Abraham, Arthur, 33, 59–60

  Adams, John Quincy, 8, 127–28, 149, 186, 191, 192–92

  Kale’s letter to, 180–83, 192–93, 200

  speech before the Supreme Court, 3, 188, 189–90, 192, 235

  African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, 196, 206, 208

  Alcántara de Argaiz, Pedro, 187

  Aldridge, Ira, 117

  Amara Lalu, 37, 74

  American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, 192

  American Anti-Slavery Society, 105

  American Colonization Society, 44, 97, 148, 208, 214

  American Missionary Association, 53

  American Revolution, 10, 171, 207, 235

  Amistad (film), 4

  Amistad, La:

  arrival in Long Island, 2, 8, 20–21, 87–95

  cargo of, 66–67

  departure from Cuba, 68–69

  description of, 65–68

  food supplies on, 67, 68, 70

  images published of, 99, 101–2

  Montes’ deceptions aboard, 82, 86

  New London arrival, 96

  papers of, 98, 104

  prisoners shackled and chained on, 69, 75, 80

  prisoners transferred to, 64–65

  punishments aboard, 69–71

  rebels as leaders on, 80–81

  voyage after rebellion, 80–88, 122

  water supplies on, 67, 68, 70, 80, 83, 85, 86

  water spirits and, 84–85

  weapons on, 67, 68

  Amistad Africans:

  abolitionists’ relationship with, 123–27, 153, 155, 183, 199, 209, 217, 227, 235

  ages of, 29–30

  appeal of case to Supreme Court, 152, 183

  artistic depictions of, see artistic depictions of Amistad Africans

  athleticism of, 133–34

  captured in Africa, 13–16, 41–43

  captured in America, 91–94, 96, 122

  Christianity and, 12, 120, 125, 135, 154, 156–59, 174, 178, 179, 180, 182–83, 198–201, 204, 208–11, 218–19, 221, 226

  clothing of, 110, 144, 197, 218–19

  cold weather and, 144, 213

  as collective, 174–76, 177

  communication difficulties of, 118–20, 126–27, 135–37, 209

/>   in Cuba, 60–63, 68, 122, 132

  cultural differences and, 158–59, 219

  education of, 8, 12, 139–40, 153–59, 182, 183

  escape plans for, 149–51, 189, 234

  in Farmington, 211–13

  funding for, 231–32

  height of, 30

  illness and death among, 108–9, 112–13, 129, 159, 175, 212–13

  incarceration of, 9–11, 108–13, 116–17, 120, 122–51, 152–59, 174, 176–79, 182, 184

  knives possessed by, 1, 82, 84, 140–42, 161

  lack of violence toward, 230

  legal defense role of, 192–93

  legal hearings on, 97–99, 129–32, 142–44, 145–49, 184

  at Lomboko, 49–50, 52

  as Mendi People, 8, 59, 153, 174–75, 179–83, 199–202, 207

  on Middle Passage, 54–60

  non-abolitionist support for, 232–33

  oral cultures of, 33–35

  origins of, 21–31

  peacemaking ritual of, 89

  Pendleton and, 177–79, 183, 193–94

  press coverage on, 9, 11, 99–104, 118, 120, 128–29, 230–31; see also specific publications

  return to Africa, 3, 196, 216–23, 226–27

  ruling of lower court on, 147–49, 152, 160, 183, 186

  singing of, 200–201, 204

  slavery performances by, 158

  Supreme Court and, 3, 181, 183, 184–95, 225, 234

  Supreme Court decision on, 190–91, 207, 235–36

  on Teçora, 5, 19, 37, 44, 47, 51, 54–61, 63, 65, 68, 74, 122, 189

  tensions among, 176–77

  time-discipline and, 154

  on tours, 3, 196–205, 217, 224–25, 230, 231

  transported to Connecticut, 2, 8

  trial in Circuit Court of Hartford, 99

  visitors to, 10–11, 110–14, 118, 120, 127–29, 153

  voyage back to Africa, 215–17