The Amistad Rebellion (18 page)

Crucial to the early formation of the Underground Railroad was another antislavery organization called the Vigilance Committee, formed in New York in 1835, Philadelphia in 1837, Boston in 1841, and in numerous other places thereafter. Given to direct action, and made up to a large extent of African American men such as former sailor David Ruggles, leader of the New York group, the committees worked, often along the waterfront, to assist free people of color who had been kidnapped or “blackbirded” into slavery as well as runaways trying to escape it. Vigilance Committees tended to attract militant abolitionists, sometimes called “ultras,” who believed that uncompromising direct action would bring slavery to an end. This group was small but growing in importance in 1839.

The waterfront had long been an important and dangerous zone of conspiracy and subversion. Throughout the age of revolution, sailors, slaves, and freedpeople played key roles in uprisings in America, Haiti, and on ships of the Atlantic where mutiny exploded on a
massive scale in the 1790s. Lawmakers continued to fear the circulation of subversion on the waterfront in the 1820s, passing the infamous Negro Seamen Acts beginning in 1822, following former sailor Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina. All black seamen coming into South Carolina ports would be taken off their vessels and held in prison, at the captain’s expense, until departure. This was a policy of revolutionary quarantine: those “whose organization of mind, habits, and associations, render them peculiarly calculated to disturb the peace and tranquility of the State,” would be treated “in the same manner as…those afflicted with infectious diseases.” Over the next twenty years Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana would follow South Carolina’s lead. In 1829, waterfront slopseller and political thinker David Walker gave slaveholders more to worry about when he published his famous
Appeal
…
to the Coloured Citizens of the World
and then sewed it into the clothing of sailors, black and white, who in turn smuggled the incendiary document into Southern ports. Walker appealed to the minds, habits, and associations of enslaved and oppressed people all around the Atlantic. It was no accident that abolitionist Dwight Janes met the insurrectionists of the
Amistad
aboard ships anchored on the waterfront of New London, making a connection that would grow into a powerful alliance.
²³

The New Haven Jail

On the orders of Judge Judson, Marshal Wilcox arranged for transportation of the
Amistad
Africans from New London to New Haven and its jail of six large rooms. Because several arrived in poor physical health, suffering from the “white flux” (dysentery) and prolonged dehydration, Wilcox and his assistant, local jailer Stanton Pendleton, set up one room as a hospital under the supervision of Dr. Edward Hooker. A visitor noted that several of the Africans were almost as thin as Calvin Edson, the curious “living skeleton” who had made a circus-like tour some years earlier. Several of the
Amistad
veterans would not recover: Faquorna, Fa, Tua, Weluwa, Kapeli, Yammoni, Kaba, and one or two others whose names are unknown, died between late
August and mid-December 1839. Several of them were buried in New Haven’s Grove Street Cemetery, located at the corner of Grove and Prospect streets.
²⁴

Special arrangements were also made for the four children—Kale, Margru, Kagne, and Teme—and for Cinqué. The four youths were given a room to themselves, until Pendleton removed the three girls and essentially made them domestic servants in his own household. Fear of Cinqué’s militant influence caused the jailer to isolate him from his comrades: he was placed in a special secure cell, the “strong hold,” with “several savage looking fellows, black and white, who are in jail on various charges.” The jailer worried that these desperate prisoners would try to escape, so the door to that part of the jail was rarely opened and visitors were not permitted inside. Those who wanted to speak with Cinqué had to do so through the “aperture of the door.” The remaining
Amistad
Africans, a majority, were confined together in three rooms, in “gangs.” During the day, they had access “to a very large airy front chamber,” where they could sit by an open window. One of their first priorities would be to engage the jailer in a struggle for the “open air.”
²⁵

Even though the
Amistad
Africans had much experience of incarceration by the time they arrived in the New Haven jail, they must have found the place disorienting and nervewracking. No one understood their languages and they still had no clear idea of where they were, nor of what the future held. The threat of execution hung heavily over their heads. Cinqué “drew his hand across his throat, as his room mates said he had done frequently before, and asked whether the people here intended to kill him.” Decapitation was a common fate for a captured warrior in his native society.
²⁶

To make matters worse, the jail shared features of the slave ship beyond the brute fact of incarceration. Not the least of these was the pungent smell of bondage. A visitor wrote that “the rooms occupied by the Africans are infected with the odor peculiar to jails that are badly ventilated, or not ventilated at all.” The stench was “almost insupportable.” A main reason why were the “necessary tubs,” which were public and located “in the eating and sleeping rooms.” The four
children were jammed into a single bed, the men slept on straw, amid vermin, and the food was poor in quality.
²⁷

Among the curiosities of their new life in the New Haven jail were the clothes the
Amistad
Africans were expected to wear. Accustomed to dressing in a single, light piece of cotton “country made” African cloth, which they wrapped around the body and hung over the shoulder, they were now presented with something different, though not entirely unfamiliar, for they had found, and some, like Cinqué, had worn, European-style clothing on board the
Amistad
. Still, when the jailer brought striped cotton shirts and trousers called “hard times” (prison “fatigues”), woolen stockings, and caps, they had to laugh at the preposterous clothing of white people. According to Lewis Tappan, “The prisoners eyed the clothes some time, and laughed a good deal among themselves before they put them on.” Cinqué in particular did not like them; he thought them too tight and confining. Meanwhile Margru, Kagne, and Teme turned some of their clothing to a purpose all their own: they “made the little shawls that were given them into turbans.” The thing the entire group may have appreciated more than anything else about their attire in the New Haven jail was that it did not include manacles, shackles, or neck-rings.
²⁸

During the confinement of the
Amistad
Africans, the New Haven jail became an extraordinary meetinghouse for all kinds of people, ranging from African slaves of many nationalities to rowdy young boys, to sailors from the waterfront, to respectable middle-class abolitionists, to the rich and high-born. Many came because of the publicity that surrounded the case and to see the insurrectionists who had, with high drama, made a successful revolution, turning the wooden world of the
Amistad
upside down. Others came to indulge their curiosity about Africa and Africans. Some appeared at the jail because they supported the abolitionist movement, others because they opposed it. The jail—a much more open institution in 1839 than it would be later—was “filled with men, women, and children of all ages, colors, and sizes.”
²⁹

No matter why they came in the first place, most of the visitors, claimed Lewis Tappan, who had spent much time in the jail and was
therefore in a position to know, “express much sympathy with these much abused strangers, and utter sentiments of strong indignation against those who have torn them from their native land, or meditated their enslavement.” Many of those who filed through the jail brought gifts. Some came with food, such as confections and “dainty cakes”; some brought the always welcome “baccar” (tobacco); and others gave “coppers,” money, or “trinkets” to the prisoners.
³⁰

In early September 1839 the
Amistad
case was the talk of the town, if not the entire nation. It was “the only topic touched upon in conversation, in the streets, the bar room, the ball room, the boudoir, the bed room, the kitchen, the parlor, and the pulpit.” People came in huge numbers, jamming the New Haven jail to capacity and beyond. On August 31, the first full day the
Amistad
Africans spent in the New Haven jail, two thousand people paid their “York shilling” (twelve and a half cents) to visit. In their first four days, jailer Pendleton took in $500 ($12,000 in 2012 dollars), paid by some four thousand visitors who had come from “New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, and all parts of Connecticut.” The prisoners, reported one newspaper, represented “a golden harvest to the Jailor.” Meantime, another two thousand people were visiting the
Amistad
in New London. Some came out of carnival curiosity, others out of a commitment to antislavery ideals.
³¹

The correspondents of the proslavery
New York Morning Herald
beheld the crowded, tumultuous, enthusiastic scenes in jail and they were appalled. One of them wrote:

The jail had become, in their view, a circus, a world turned upside down, a place the
Amistad
Africans truly enjoyed: “The ingress and egress of visitors furnish abundance of opportunities for them to escape, but so far from wishing to do so, it would be difficult to drive them out of jail.” The place of confinement had become “a sort of fool’s paradise, filled with gaping curiosity, silly men, infatuated women, and happy negroes.”
³²

What did the
Amistad
Africans make of all this? They must have experienced no small amount of sheer bewilderment, as suggested by the
New York Morning Herald
: “The poor blacks themselves are utterly astonished at the prodigious sensation they have created.” Beneath it all lay a deep, nagging fear, as suggested when several of the prisoners, “under much apprehension,” asked a sympathetic visitor “if they were to have their throats cut, passing their hands across their necks when they made the inquiry.” Getting a negative answer, one of the Africans then asked, “If they don’t mean to kill us…why are so many people here to see us?”
³³

Townsend’s Sketches

One of the early visitors to the New Haven jail was a seventeen-year-old artist named William H. Townsend, who drew a series of twenty-two portraits of the incarcerated Africans. These included Grabeau and Burna, two of the leaders of the rebellion, though not Cinqué (probably because he was segregated in a different cell), and two of the four children, Kale and Margru, a boy and a girl who were each about nine years old. Townsend also drew the portrait of Faquorna, who with Cinqué led the attack on Captain Ferrer and had been indicted by the courts for murder. Since Faquorna died in early September, only a few days after the
Amistad
rebels were brought ashore, it appears that Townsend was in the New Haven jail soon after the prisoners arrived there. Faquorna has dark circles under his
eyes and looks like he might have been sick when the portrait was sketched.
³⁴

Very little is known about Townsend, not least because he, like Faquorna, died young. Born in 1822, he lived in New Haven and died in 1851. The young aspiring artist likely got swept up in the excitement when the
Amistad
Africans arrived in town. He visited the jail and decided to try his hand with them. Family lore confirmed that Townsend visited the captives in jail, and suggested that he had some trouble in getting them to pose for his drawings. It was said that he resorted to bribes of candy. “The Amistad Negroes,” as he called them, were finally “drawn from life.” The sketches were modest in size, as small as two by three inches and as large as five by seven inches; most were in between, roughly four inches square.
³⁵

Townsend was not interested in the rebellion, per se, but rather in the individuals who made it. This guiding preoccupation resulted in portraits that were astonishing for their variety, intimacy, depth, and complexity. He depicted Burna with his unusually shaped head, curly eyelashes, and stylish mustache; Shuma, with a long, thin face, a mustache, a beard, and a look of gravity. Little Kale sported a spry look in his eye and a striped stocking hat on his head, ears tucked up under it, hair creeping out below. Townsend’s drawings conveyed a range of moods, from relaxed and bemused (Burna), to tired and stern (Ba), to solemn and dignified (Faginna), to uncertain and a bit overwhelmed (Fuliwulu). The Africans appeared, for the most part, in white shirts and dark jackets, their standard jail dress, it would seem. Some wore hats and a few smoked pipes.

Townsend drew especially evocative portraits of Grabeau and Kimbo. The former appears as a round, friendly face with three or four wrinkles toward the hairline. He had almost no neck, his head sitting on (as known from other sources) a compact, athletic body. His hair was short, his mustache and beard full. His slightly hooded eyes were rather too widely open, suggesting perhaps vulnerability and certainly the playfulness for which he was known. Kimbo was one of the four Africans who attacked and killed Captain Ferrer on the
Amistad
, a fact made quite believable by a portrait that conveys a direct,
uncompromising gaze, psychological intensity, and inner strength framed in a handsome, youthful face. By paying close attention to the individual characteristics and psychology of so many of the
Amistad
captives, Townsend accomplished in his small sketches what the abolitionist movement would try to do over the next two and a half years in American society at large: he humanized the rebels of the
Amistad
.