The Creole Affair

by Arthur T. Downey

  It is impossible to know the range of emotions on that ship during the night of the slave rebellion, while the Creole was hove to, but one can imagine that the nineteen slave mutineers were overjoyed that their audacious plan had been successful—at least so far—and that the crew and passengers were terrified, expecting the worst—brutal beatings and near decapitation (as happened to John Hewell), and perhaps the rape of Mrs. Ensor and her young niece. Apart from the nineteen, the remaining slaves were probably filled with a mix of emotions: amazement that a slave rebellion seemed to have worked, hope that this would lead to their freedom, but worry that the actions of the nineteen would bring dreaded retaliation to all of the slaves. For all, tension must have crackled in the air.

  At daybreak on Tuesday, November 9, the Creole came in sight of Nassau. To reach the port of Nassau, a ship must enter a long, narrowing channel; on the port side was Hog Island, at the western end of which was a red-topped lighthouse.[12] Nassau itself was located on the starboard side, deep into the channel. Overlooking the entire harbor area was the huge Fort Charlotte, built at the end of the American Revolutionary War. Its forty-two heavy cannons protected the entrance to the channel south of the lighthouse.

  The Creole arrived at about 8:00 a.m. and anchored in the westward end of the channel, about a mile from the heart of Nassau. It is customary for a “pilot,” a local authorized guide very familiar with the currents and shallows of a harbor area, to come on board any visiting ship. Thus, a Bahamian ship pilot and his crew—all Negroes—came on board the Creole, mingled with the slaves, and told them “they were free men; that they could go on shore, and never be carried away from there.”[13] The pilot brought the ship into the long, thin body of water separating Hog Island from the main island of New Providence, at the south end of which was the harbor of Nassau, where the ship anchored.

  A Bahamian harbormaster[14] came alongside for the routine inspection of the ship. Since the captain was badly wounded, Gifford, the first mate, took charge and seized the opportunity to jump into the harbormaster’s boat, and to explain that a mutiny had taken place. Gifford asked to be taken ashore, and pleaded that Bahamian officer then watch the vessel and allow no one to disembark. Gifford knew that if the slaves got off the ship and onto land in British Nassau, they would be free. The Bahamian quarantine officer’s boat brought Gifford into the harbor at Nassau. Gifford jumped onto the land, and the quarantine officer conducted Gifford to the local representative of the US government, the American consul, John F. Bacon. Bacon was a native of Massachusetts, but had practiced law in Albany, New York, and had served as clerk of the New York Senate.

  Once again, the emotions and tensions on board must have been at a high level: most of the slaves trying to understand their unsought good fortune, hoping that they would be able to step into freedom on the soil of the British colony; the nineteen mutineers also must have been hoping for freedom they felt they had earned, but undoubtedly they were also worried that the British might throw them in jail or, worse, return them to the United States to face a horrible fate. The fifteen remaining passengers and crew must have clung to the belief that their nightmare would now end, once British authorities took control of the vessel and ensured their safety and the punishment of those slave leaders who took Hewell’s life, wounded others, and stole their possessions. But, clearly, none of the people on the Creole knew for certain what would unfold. They were in uncharted territory.

  Let us now freeze that picture, before we discuss what happened next in Nassau. Let us now step back to understand the larger picture in which this event on the high seas took place.

  1. A brig is a vessel with two square-rigged masts with the main mast aft. It was fast and maneuverable but required a relatively large crew for its size. In the early part of the nineteenth century, a brig was a standard cargo ship, and was larger than a schooner. (A brigantine is a vessel also with two masts, but only the foremast is square rigged.) A barque is a vessel with at least three masts, all of which are square rigged, except for the sternmost. A barque was the most common vessel in the mid-nineteenth century for deep water cargo carrying, because it required relatively smaller crews and therefore was less expensive to operate.

  2. Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855; Eastford, Connecticut: Martino Publishing, 2010), 33.

  3. David Nicholson, “First Slaves First Hope,” American History 48, no. 2 (June 2013): 68. See also Lisa Rein, “Mystery of Va.’s First Slaves Is Unlocked 400 Years Later,” Washington Post, September 3, 2006. The direct slave trade from Africa to North America did not start until the 1700s. For an interesting view of the Jamestown settlement, see Kieran Doherty, Sea Adventure: Shipwreck, Survival, and the Salvation of the First English Colony in the New World (New York: St. Martin’s, 2007).

  4. The fort was decommissioned in 2011, and portions of it were declared a national monument.

  5. John V. Quarstein and Dennis P. Mroczkowski, Fort Monroe: The Key to the South (Mount Pleasant, OK: Arcadia, 2000), 26.

  6. The official logbook of the ship noted that there were 186 slaves. Yet, all parties seem to have agreed that this was simply inaccurate, and that 135 was the correct number.

  7. Interestingly, the famous free northern black, Solomon Northup, who was sold into slavery and carried on a brig from Richmond to New Orleans, also served as the slave cook. He also conspired to take control of his slave ship, perhaps trying to make his way back to New York.

  8. The narratives of Madison Washington typically present as fact a personal history involving his flight to Canada, return to Virginia to rescue his wife, and so forth. One source for this biographical information is a brief unsigned article in the newspaper Friend of Man published in central New York, which was republished on April 4, 1842, in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and in the Liberator of June 10, 1842. There was also an account offered by the black abolitionist, Robert Purvis, half a century later, to a journalist in Philadelphia. Purvis’s version links Madison Washington to the Amistad affair by claiming that Washington was inspired by a painting of Cinque when Washington visited Purvis’s home in the fall of 1841. (Purvis had been involved in Cinque’s legal defense, and so this linkage may have been somewhat self-serving.) See Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2012), 224–26 and 273n1. However, since there is no verifiable support for the accuracy of this information, that biographical story is not repeated here. Chapter 9 reveals much of the fictional history.

  9. This is a nautical procedure, which, by balancing the sails and rudder, leaves the vessel with little or no forward movement. It is generally used to permit the crew to have a break for the night or for a meal.

  10. The description of the events and all the quotations are taken from the formal Protest sworn in New Orleans on December 2, 1842, by Gifford and all the crew members, as transmitted to the US Senate on January 19, 1842, by President Tyler in response to a Senate Resolution requesting copies of all documents relating to the Creole matter.

  11. Quoted in the deposition of Jacob Leitner, sworn before the US consul on November 15, 1841, included in the collection of documents sent to the Senate by President Tyler.

  12. Hog Island today is known as Paradise Island, a tourism area anchored by the Atlantis Resort, which has 4,000 hotel rooms and the largest gambling casino in the Caribbean with 50,000 square feet of gaming.

  13. From the formal protest, sworn on December 7, 1841, in New Orleans, by Gifford and his crew.

  14. The formal protest made in New Orleans on December 2 by Gifford identified the local officer as a quarantine officer, not the harbormaster.

  I

  The Context: Pre-November 1841

  Chapter 1

  The United States

  The Context

  In 1841, the flag of the United States had only twenty-six stars; Michigan was the most recent to be added, four years earlier. The country was compa
ct: from the Atlantic coast to Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana in the west, and from Maine in the north to Georgia in the south. The population centers were concentrated on the Atlantic or the Gulf; only one of the top ten cities in 1840 was located in the inland “west,” Cincinnati.[1] The perimeter of the nation was problematic: the Maine/Canada border was disputed, the Oregon country was under joint US-UK occupation, to the west of Louisiana was the newly independent Republic of Texas, and US territories—not yet states—included Iowa/Wisconsin,[2] Florida, and the vast unorganized territory stretching from the northern border of the Republic of Texas to Canada. In the Florida Territory, acquired from Spain exactly twenty years earlier, the second Seminole War had been under way since 1835.

  The total US population was around 17 million (including 2.5 million slaves), about half the size of Russia, and 65 percent the size of Great Britain (at 27 million). Significant immigration was just beginning. There was very little immigration from 1770 to 1830, in part because of lingering doubts as to the viability of this new country; in 1830, about 98.5 percent of the population was native-born. But during the 1830s immigration more than quadrupled, led by the Irish and the Germans, and so by 1840, almost 5 percent of the population was composed of immigrants. The huge growth in immigration did not occur until much later in the 1840s due to the failed European revolutions of 1848, the dramatic expansion of the US frontier, and the promise of farms and jobs.

  American writers in the 1820s finally won acclaim in Europe: Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, and James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans were well known. In 1841, James Fenimore Cooper published the last of the series of the very popular Leatherstocking tales, The Deerslayer. Cooper focused on historical novels of the frontier and Native American life, which created a unique form of American literature. Also in 1841, Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Murders in the Rue Morgue, recognized as the first detective story, which led directly to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. This new genre reflected the public’s interest in crime, due to rapid urban development and the reports in the press about crime and trials. Poe was the first serious critic of Charles Dickens in the United States. Poe managed to guess the outcome of the murder plot in Dickens’s 1841 serialized historical novel Barnaby Rudge. As a result Dickens eliminated the clues Poe had identified when Dickens later published it in book form.[3]

  In the mid-1830s, the US economy expanded rapidly, and the price of land, cotton, and slaves rose sharply. Significant capital was invested in the United States from Great Britain. Anglo-American banking houses, such as Baring Brothers, served as the engine of much of the westward expansion, financing internal improvements (canals, roads, etc.) that permitted industrial growth. Railroads and canals spread, especially across the Northeast. By 1840, nearly three thousand miles of track had been laid in the United States, more than in all of Europe.[4] The development of the steam engine, first for vessels and then for railroad locomotives, changed transportation. The Mississippi River system involved more than 15,000 miles of navigable waterways; the arrival of steam-driven riverboats “emancipated the Mississippi Valley from its reliance on animal energy.”[5] In 1829, Andrew Jackson came to Washington for his inaugural in a carriage pulled by horses, but when his two terms ended in March 1837, former president Jackson returned to his beloved Hermitage plantation near Nashville in a train pulled by a steam locomotive.[6]

  But the classic “boom and bust” cycle kicked in, and in mid-1837, the United States fell into a deep recession, a financial meltdown known as “the Panic of 1837.”[7] Banks collapsed, businesses failed, wages deflated, and the price of cotton plummeted. In mid-May 1837, all the banks in New York City stopped redeeming paper money in silver or gold.[8] All sections of the country felt the collapse of the economy, but the South probably felt it most, because of its overwhelming reliance on cotton. It was not coincidental that in 1837, just after he was admitted to the Illinois bar, a young attorney in Springfield, Illinois—Abraham Lincoln—spent most of his professional time on debt collection cases. Bank failures in upstate New York in 1837 propelled Joseph Smith Jr. to move his fledging Mormon flock westward.[9] It is not surprising that the first modern federal bankruptcy legislation was adopted in April 1841, the Bankruptcy Act of 1841.[10] That same year, eight states and the Territory of Florida defaulted on their debts; yields for state bonds rose to 12 percent in early 1841 and to nearly 30 percent by 1842.[11] The great recession continued through the entire Van Buren administration and was the outstanding political quandary of Van Buren’s presidency.[12]

  By 1820, the basic political division of the country was no longer large states versus small states; it had become North versus South. A new political compromise was fashioned to deal with the future of slavery, which had become complicated because of all the new lands acquired in the West. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 essentially divided the new lands evenly, according to the presence or absence of slavery; to keep the political balance, free Maine was admitted along with slave Missouri. Also in 1820, the American Colonization Society established the new settlement of Liberia on the African continent.[13] As one scholar noted, antislavery pressure “existed before the 1830’s, but it was tepid and overly concerned with not upsetting the political status quo.”[14]

  The August 1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion in Virginia led to the deaths of more than fifty whites, most of them women and children.[15] In response, Virginian patrollers butchered about one hundred slaves; Turner and twenty-two other rebels were tried and hanged. This bloody rebellion terrified Southern slave owners. The 1833 decision of the British Parliament to abolish slavery gradually in its overseas possessions worried the Southern slave owners as much as it encouraged abolitionists in the North. As one scholar aptly put it, from “the mid-1830s . . . people on each side of the sectional line had reason to believe they suffered from aggressive action against their way of life, interests, rights and sovereignty.”[16] At about that time, abolitionists began to mail their literature to prominent Southern whites who, they hoped, might be open to persuasion. Leaders of the New York Antislavery Society, influenced by the model of the British, mailed antislavery literature to Southern ministers, hoping to convince Southern Christians that slavery was wrong.[17] President Jackson stopped that practice, claiming that such mail might incite slave insurrection; with Jackson’s support, Postmaster General Amos Kendall encouraged local postmasters to censor the mail.[18] Abolitionist literature in the South, therefore, stayed largely undelivered.[19]

  For more than four decades, there had been a religious revival movement in the United States, commonly termed the Second Great Awakening, though it was ebbing. The Methodists and Baptists reflected the movement in a great increase in membership, at the relative expense of the traditional Episcopal and Congregational churches. The movement focused on man’s spiritual equality and the duty of Christians to purify society. In the South, preachers converted slaveholders and slaves, and revivals inspired some slaves to insist on their freedom. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination was established in 1816.

  For some, this religious revival movement, which espoused repairing social evils, flowed naturally into bolstering the ranks of the abolitionists. The American Anti-Slavery Society was formed in late 1833 in Philadelphia; it was a pacifist group demanding the immediate abolition of slavery. (On the other hand, ending slavery did not always equate to a demand for equality; the new Pennsylvania Constitution of 1837 provided for the disenfranchisement of nonwhite men. In March 1838, thousands of African Americans gathered in Philadelphia to protest this regression.)[20] William Lloyd Garrison was one of the early leaders of the American Anti-Slavery Society. By 1839, the society had some 250,000 members. A major break occurred in the society in late 1839, when the Liberty Party was formed by abolitionists who wanted to work within the political system, as opposed to Garrison’s rejection of the political process. The Liberty Party held its firs
t national convention in April 1840 and nominated a slate for the presidential elections of 1840. (Salmon P. Chase joined the party in 1841; he joined Lincoln’s cabinet in 1861 and later became chief justice of the United States.) The party faded away by the mid-1850s, as its ideas were taken over by more mainstream parties.

  The British foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston, had made the elimination of the African slave trade his personal cause, but the Portuguese and Spanish were being difficult, since they had great colonies in the Americas that needed a continuous influx of new slaves. So, in 1839, Lord Palmerston decided to try to enlist the help of Pope Gregory XVI. The papal representatives explained to the British that the pope could not help if it were to appear that he was acting at the request of a Protestant government. Patient diplomacy worked.[21] On December 6, 1839, the pope issued a document, which began with the words “At the Supreme Summit of the Apostolate” (in Latin, In supremo Apostolatus fastigo), published as a pamphlet. In it, the pope wrote to dissuade the faithful from “the inhuman trade in Blacks or any other kind of men.” The slave trade was strictly prohibited.[22]