The Amistad Rebellion (21 page)

As the
New York Sun
and other newspapers reported favorably, even romantically, on the
Amistad
Africans and their struggles, James Gordon Bennett and his colleagues at the proslavery
New York Morning Herald
took a dissenting view. They howled in protest against the sympathetic depictions of Cinqué and his mates and declared the
Sun
to be “the New York penny nigger paper.” During a time of polarization on the issue of slavery, the correspondents for the
Morning Herald
angrily sought “to destroy the romance which has been thrown around [Cinqué’s] character.” They roundly denied that he had the dignified, graceful bearing of Othello. Rather, he was a “blubber-lipped, sullen looking negro, not half as intelligent or striking in appearance as every third black you meet on the docks of New York.” The entire lot of the
Amistad
Africans represented nothing so much as “hopeless stupidity and beastly degradation”—they were likened to baboons. Back in Africa, they had been “slothful and thievish,” and were “sunk in a state of ignorance, debasement and barbarism, of which no adequate conception can be formed.” They were in no way equal to whites. They were “a distinct and totally different race, and the God of nature never intended that they should live together in any other relation than that of master and slave.”
¹¹

The writers for the
Morning Herald
considered the depictions of the Africans in the
New York Sun
to be not only dead wrong, but dangerously egalitarian and subversive. In response they spewed racist invective against the
Amistad
Africans and viciously lampooned those
who visited and supported them while they were in jail: “Parsons go to preach to them, philosophers to experiment on them, professors to pick up a knowledge of their language, phrenologists to feel their heads, and young ladies to look and laugh at them.” These depictions, more extreme than anything that appeared in Southern newspapers, were the textual equivalent of the demeaning “bobalition” prints of the day.
¹²

To Hartford

When Wilcox the marshal and Pendleton the jailer arrived at the New Haven jail Saturday morning, September 14, to take the
Amistad
Africans to Hartford for their second legal hearing, the little girls, Kagne, Teme, and Margru, began to weep bitterly. They did not want go. Neither did the men, one of whom hid in a remote room and could not be discovered for some time. Others tried to escape the jail altogether. Cinqué listened to the upheaval from his isolated cell, for the plan was to take this dangerous prisoner separately, two days later. Burna cocked an ear from the sick room, with Weluwa, who lay near death. They were too ill to travel. None of the others seemed to know where they were going, nor why. Having been in New Haven barely two weeks and assuming that a change could only be for the worse, perhaps their own execution, they were “filled with awful forebodings.”
¹³

The authorities eventually got everyone into a canal boat, bound for Farmington, an “abolition town,” where farmer Roderick Stanley saw them, as he noted in his journal: “38 Afrecans passed here on their way to Hartford to be tryed on an Indightment for Piracy and Murder, they were lately from Afreca—3 small girls, the rest males.” Word had already begun to circulate in abolitionist circles that they were “lately from Afreca” and hence had been illegally enslaved, a positive sign, but unknown to the anxious travelers. In Farmington they shifted to wagons for the final ten miles to Connecticut’s capital city, their mood brightening along the way.
¹⁴

They found in Hartford the same tumultuous, agitated scene they had come to know in New Haven: the city was suddenly “crowded
with strangers,” convinced advocates of abolition, equally determined opponents, and those who had no opinion on the great debate of the times. All had heard of the dramatic rebellion and wanted to get a look at the prisoners. Into the jail strode “many distinguished members of the bar” who had come from all over Connecticut and as far away as New York and Boston. The U.S. Hotel and various other public houses were “full to overflowing” with “politicians, lawyers, judges, sheriffs, reporters, editors, &c., all visiting Hartford to be present at this trial.” Indeed, the most commonly heard question around town at the time was, “Which way is the jail?” Correspondents both hostile and sympathetic to the
Amistad
Africans agreed: the “rush to prison has been immense”; “not less than four thousand have visited them so far this week.”
¹⁵

The appalled editors of the
New York Morning Herald
not only sent a correspondent to Hartford, they commissioned artist Peter Quaint to depict what was going on inside Hartford jail. The correspondent described what the engraving illustrated:

The interest of women in the case (and in the abolitionist movement more broadly) was especially disturbing to the writers of the
Morning Herald
: theirs was “a species of hallucination.” The
Amistad
affair had taken on “all the romance of an eastern fairy tale, and they [women]
consider the black fellows as worthy of as much honor as the colored Moorish Knights of old.” The staunchest and most vocal opponents of the
Amistad
Africans and their abolitionist allies fanned the flaming fears of amalgamation, but their anger and agitation suggested that the heroic images were winning the day.
¹⁷

“The Captured Africans of the
Amistad
: Teaching Philosophy to Lewis Tappen & Co.”

The legal hearing was supposed to begin on Tuesday, September 17, but was delayed for two days until federal circuit court judge Smith Thompson arrived to join district court judge Andrew Judson. Once he did, the courtroom filled every day, “crowded to suffocation.” On the final day of the hearing, Monday, September 23, the court was “thronged to overflowing” by eight a.m. Even a correspondent for the proslavery
Richmond Enquirer
was moved to observe, “A more interested audience—judging from the earnest attention of those present, were never assembled together.”
¹⁸

The judges had a complex welter of issues to adjudicate, first and foremost whether the Africans were to be tried as pirates and murderers. Then came salvage claims by Lt. Gedney and other naval officers; salvage claims by the Long Island hunters Henry Green and Peletiah Fordham; claims by Ruiz and Montes for their slave property; claims by the Spanish consul on behalf of the family of Ferrer for the schooner
and enslaved cabin boy Antonio; and a request by the federal government that all property, both vessel and slaves, be returned to Spain. On a related issue, abolitionist attorney Theodore Sedgwick argued a habeas corpus brief for the three little girls, to remove them from the case altogether, because they were clearly too young to have been in Cuba long enough to predate the treaty that made the slave trade illegal in 1820.
¹⁹

Over four days many gave testimony: Ruiz, Montes, and Meade about the
Amistad
’s voyage, rebellion, and recapture. Ferry translated as Bau (called “Bahoo” by the court) testified about the three little girls. Roger S. Baldwin spoke for two and half hours on behalf of the
Amistad
Africans, making what one of his abolitionist colleagues called a “forcible and ingenious argument” in which he ridiculed the salvage claim of Gedney and asked, with a sneer, of United States District Attorney Charles Ingersoll whether “the offices of the executive were to become slave catchers for the Spanish government.”
²⁰
Thompson acknowledged that “the feelings of the community are deeply involved” in the case, but he denied the habeas writ for the little girls. He and Andrew Judson of the U.S. District Court dropped the charges of piracy and murder, whereupon the claims of property became the key issue. They responded to questions about the jurisdiction of the courts by ordering an investigation of precisely where the
Amistad
had been captured by the
Washington
. They ruled that the case resume in Hartford on November 19, 1839. The
Amistad
Africans remained in the Hartford jail, which continued to teem with visitors, until September 28, when they were returned to New Haven. What they made of the intense engagement with their cause, in the courtroom and in the jail, is unknown.
²¹

Warrior Moves

When the
Amistad
Africans returned to the New Haven jail, their daily regimen changed. First and perhaps most importantly, because the judges had ruled that they had not broken any laws of the United States, the rationale for keeping Cinqué separate from his comrades
was no longer legally valid. He was therefore moved out of the stronghold and into the rooms where the rest of the
Amistad
Africans were kept. The collective was happily reunited. Second, all of the prisoners were now freer to talk about what had happened in the rebellion, deepening the drama of their story and expanding the public interest in it. Third, the prisoners were now allowed to go outside, under supervision, to New Haven Green for fresh air and exercise.
²²

When the
Amistad
Africans went to the green, they contributed—perhaps wittingly, perhaps not—to the circus atmosphere surrounding their case. They performed acrobatics, gymnastics, and tumbling before the buzzing crowds that assembled to see them. The Reverend Alonzo Lewis, who saw the
Amistad
Africans through the wonder-filled eyes of a seven-year-old boy, recalled:

The group as a whole was graceful and talented, but two stood (or leapt) out for their extraordinary skills. Cinqué, who was “muscular, athletic, and extremely active,” performed “astonishing feats of agility.” Grabeau, short, burly, and strong, executed moves one observer had “never before seen attempted.” In Hartford he had balanced “himself on his hands,” then “tumbled wheelbarrow fashion, without touching his feet” the entire fifty-yard length of the jail.
²⁴

Given the excitement, debate, and publicity that surrounded the case, these performances became public spectacles. The massive crowds that filed through the jail assembled to watch the bodies fly through the air across the green, then followed them back to their cells for another look. At the moment when flamboyant popular commercial entertainments were on the rise in America—circuses being a
prime example—the
Amistad
Africans made a curious and unexpected discovery: their acrobatic skills could earn them money. This made many people, on both sides of the
Amistad
debate, profoundly uneasy. Writers for the proslavery
New York Morning Herald
complained about how the “spectators shell out the sixpences freely” to the performers when watching the tumbling “exhibition.” The abolitionist
Emancipator
expressed disdain for the displays of “astonishing bodily activity” by saying, “The Marshal who has them in charge, will, we think, do a service to them and to good morals, by forbidding any more exhibitions of the kind.” As it happened, the Marshal made money as the performers dazzled the multitude of visitors, so the show went on.
²⁵

What the good folk on New Haven Green saw as circus-like had a very different genesis and meaning in Africa. The
Amistad
Africans had learned these “wonderful feats of strength and agility” not in a commercial marketplace of entertainment and leisure activity, but rather as part of their initiation into the Poro Society back in West Africa, where athleticism was linked to the rituals and communal traditions of the warrior. As anthropologist Kenneth Little wrote of the young Mende men engaged in Poro rites of passage, “They practice somersaults and acrobatics, and altogether their experiences produce a strong sense of comradeship.” The higher the level of initiation into the Poro, the higher the level of gymnastic skill one might possess. This is a main reason why the two Africans repeatedly described as the most astonishing acrobats and tumblers—Cinqué and Grabeau—were also the two primary leaders of the rebellion, and the group as a whole, while they were in jail. Probably none of the American spectators who watched them had any idea that they were actually demonstrating their own lofty standing in the Poro Society, the basis of their authority within Mende culture. Probably none of the expropriated warriors who left jail and gathered on New Haven Green to tumble, leap, turn, and somersault understood how they would appear as “showmen” and “circus athletes,” nor how their Poro training would help them to capture the American imagination and make their freedom struggle more popular.
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