The Amistad Rebellion (24 page)

At various points in the hearing Judson had trouble controlling the crowd, which pulsed with sympathy for the Africans and vocally expressed pleasure on points in their favor. Lewis Tappan observed that the assembled actually cheered Baldwin as he vigorously demanded that his clients go free. Baldwin got another rise when he turned to—and turned on—United States District Attorney W. S. Holabird: “By what right does the U.S. Attorney appear here at all?” Whenever the eloquent lawyer or one of his associates (Theodore Sedgwick and Seth Staples) spoke, the crowd “hung upon their lips spell bound.”
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After five long days of hearings, Judson issued several rulings. The district court did have jurisdiction because the
Amistad
had been found on the “high seas.” Lieutenant Thomas Gedney and his fellow officers were entitled to salvage, on the vessel but not on the Africans, who under Connecticut law could not be considered property. The Long Island hunters Green and Fordham were not entitled to salvage. The court would send the cabin boy Antonio back to the heirs of the deceased Captain Ferrer in Cuba.
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In the ruling that everyone had been waiting for, Judson declared
that the Africans were in fact “each of them Natives of Africa and were born free and ever since have been and still of right are free and not slaves.” It was a stunning vindication of the African and abolitionist argument; indeed, Judson repeated verbatim what Baldwin and Staples had submitted to the court in their opening plea. Moreover, the words had been spoken by a member of the American Colonization Society, whose attitudes and legal record on race had caused many to expect a contrary ruling. The
Amistad
Africans would therefore be turned over to President Martin Van Buren for repatriation to their native land.
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Tappan concluded that “the Judge felt the pressure of public sentiment.” Judson lived in New Haven, ground zero in the struggle, and witnessed the widespread support for the Africans. He visited the prisoners in jail on two occasions, which meant that the issues before him were concrete and human. Some pressure he felt came directly from the Africans themselves, for when he visited them, they made it a point to tell him how much they wanted to go home.
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When the Reverend Day arrived with James Covey at the jail and relayed the news of Judson’s ruling to the Africans who had not been in the courtroom, their “hearts overflow[ed] with gratitude.” “Words cannot express the joy they felt,” Day wrote. All but one understood the Mende translation of the news. The one who did not (the Temne man Pie) “sat still, not knowing what was meant” until one who spoke both Mende and his language “communicated the decision to him.” He began to clap his hands for gladness of heart, and expressed his thanks to Day. The Congregational minister seized the moment to pray with the Africans, to direct “their thoughts to the Lord Jesus Christ as their Deliverer. They knelt, and followed the interpreter audibly, and with apparent devoutness.” Day also noted that “They long to go back to their Father-land.”

Other Plans

So unsure were the Africans about the outcome of the legal hearing, and so convinced were the abolitionists that President Van Buren
wanted to resolve the issue by returning the
Amistad
Africans to deadly Havana, the anti-slavery coalition strategized about what to do in case the verdict should go against them. Prior to the early hearings it was by no means certain that the judges would rule in favor of the rebels. In fact, it seemed more likely that they would not.

The USS
Grampus
, a schooner like the
Amistad
, sailed into New Haven harbor under mysterious circumstances on Friday, January 8, the very day on which Cinqué, Grabeau, and Fuli testified before the district court about their enslavement, Middle Passage, and rebellion. The vessel was to many a “strange and sudden apparition,” as John Quincy Adams later described it. Why would sailors be dispatched from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to a New England port in the dead of winter? When a local pilot asked an officer of the
Grampus
about the vessel’s destination, the man said he did not know: “She had sealed orders.” Well supplied “with provision, &c. for twenty months,” that is, a long voyage, the
Grampus
provoked heated speculation. One rumor had it that the vessel was meant to join the small American squadron fighting the slave trade in West Africa, and that the
Amistad
Africans might be picked up in New Haven and taken to their native lands. Yet most abolitionists were convinced that the purpose of the vessel was the opposite: Van Buren and Secretary of State John Forsyth, a Georgia slaveholder, had sent the
Grampus
to New Haven to seize the
Amistad
Africans as soon as the court ruled that they were indeed “merchandize.” In fact, the sealed orders instructed Captain John S. Paine to take them to Cuba immediately, before an appeal could be made, and to restore them to their so-called owners, Ruiz and Montes, thereby honoring the demands of Spain. Abolitionists howled that the United States government was now acting as slave catcher and trader: the goal intended for the
Amistad
Africans was to “hurry them to death or to a bondage that shall end only with death!”
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The activists did not stand idly by. Fearing a negative verdict, they began to organize their own vessel that would carry the
Amistad
Africans, not to a living hell or actual death in Cuba, but rather in the other direction—to freedom in Canada. The work likely involved African American sailors based in Connecticut ports, from which David
Ruggles had emerged. The plot remained a closely guarded secret for many years, although Lewis Tappan alluded to it in a letter he published in the
Emancipator
soon after the
Grampus
arrived in port: if Captain Paine and his crew expected to secure the Africans and deliver them to the Spanish authorities, they would be in for a surprise. He wrote, “as the quaker lady said to the agent of a fugitive slave, ‘thy prey hath escaped thee.’”
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Evidence appeared years later to confirm that the rebels and the abolitionists had planned a jailbreak if the legal ruling had gone against them. The obituary of Nathaniel Jocelyn (brother of Simeon, member of the Amistad Committee) disclosed in 1881 that the artist was part of a group of abolitionists who plotted, in service of “higher law,” to break the Africans “out of jail by force” and put them aboard a vessel “in which they were to sail away.” Simeon Eben Baldwin, the son of Roger S. Baldwin, also noted, in 1886, that the Amistad Committee, “had another vessel here [New Haven] ready to receive the Africans in case of an adverse decision, and run them off to some more friendly shore.” The Reverend Alonzo Lewis likewise confirmed the existence of a direct-action plot, in a reminiscence of the
Amistad
case published in 1907. He wrote, “It will do no harm, at this late day, to reveal a secret which has been carefully guarded, viz., that there was a plot to rescue the captives if the case went against them.” Lewis learned of the intended action from the Reverend Day, who was deeply involved in the struggle. Lewis himself was only seven years old in 1840, so he must have learned of the plot years later. The abolitionists may have hoped that the provocative act would cause a war with Spain that might lead to the “liberation of Cuba” and the ending of slavery in one of its strongholds.
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Many abolitionists had long since concluded that the
Amistad
Africans had not committed any crime and therefore should not be held as “criminals in loathsome dungeons.” As early as October 1839 a writer using the pen name “Common Sense” appealed to the memory of both the American and French revolutions in asking, ominously, “Is a Connecticut jail to be converted into a Bastille, and shall its doors not fly open?” Many involved in the case, from Jocelyn to
African-American abolitionist Robert Purvis, had worked on the Underground Railroad; experienced direct-actionists, inspired by the rebellion, gravitated to the case. Determined not to let the
Amistad
Africans be hanged as pirates, murderers, or slave rebels, nor even to see them slave in Cuba, making sugar with blood, antislavery activists exhibited their antinomian disdain for unjust laws. One direct action aboard a small vessel in the Caribbean had helped to inspire another, made ready on the New Haven waterfront. Such militance pointed toward the future.
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T
he victory in Connecticut was quickly negated, or at least stalemated, by a national politics in which slaveholders held great influence. They were not known to abolitionists as the “Slave Power” for nothing. Martin Van Buren supported the Spanish crown, and at bottom, both Cuban and southern masters, by appealing the rulings Judson and Thompson had made on January 23. The verdict declaring the
Amistad
Africans free was cruelly reversed when the federal government appealed it to the Supreme Court. The Africans would remain incarcerated as the case ran its long, slow course through the American legal system.

The news of the appeal was crushing and incomprehensible to the rebels. “[T]hey seemed much grieved,” noted someone who conveyed the news to them and tried to explain it. “Their hopes had been raised; their hearts were set upon Africa; and it is a sore disappointment to them to have their hopes deferred, with the possibility of their never being realized.” The visitor tried to console them, saying that the delay would give them more time to study, which would ultimately be to their benefit. They replied that the gallows still looming over their heads discouraged their efforts: “They say it will be of no use for them to try to learn, if in a few months they are to be hanged.”
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Abolitionists were outraged by the appeal, quick to see and denounce “executive interference” in the judicial process. The
Emancipator
wondered of the president: “Why should this democratic functionary
be so aggrieved at a decision in favor of liberty?” The
Oberlin Evangelist
stated, “The Africans cannot to this day understand the justice of his proceedings, nor do we think white men can understand it as just.” It was time for opponents of slavery to “buckle their armor again in the defence of righteousness.” Would the public continue to support the cause, was the question.
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Slowly the Africans pulled out of their despair, resetting their sights on their long-term goal of going home. They were able to use their undiminished popularity to strengthen their alliance with the abolitionists and to participate in activities that would keep their case before the public eye. The doors of the jail continued to revolve as people from all walks of life paid their shilling to visit, some to propose projects of their own that would connect the prisoners to the American people in one way or another. Artists such as John Warner Barber, Sidney Moulthrop, and Amasa Hewins went into the jail to create images of the rebels through engraving, wax-casting, and painting. Over the long term of incarceration, the most faithful and purposeful visitors to the jail were the abolitionists, who came to teach and proselytize. The Africans and the American antislavery reformers in particular would develop a complex, sometimes vexed relationship—what might be called a working misunderstanding. It would allow both sides to navigate a broad cultural divide, work together, build trust, and maintain independence of perspective and objective. During the next year in jail, the Africans would emerge as a new cultural and political entity: the “Mendi People.”
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Teaching and Learning

The agendas of the rebels and their allies converged on the issue of education. At the heart of the jailhouse encounter lay a reciprocal, mutually influential process: Africans and Americans, neither of whom knew much about their counterparts, learned from and about each other—about America, Africa, politics, culture, and a host of other subjects. Both sought the practical knowledge of how to understand and work with the other in the common project of abolishing
slavery. The “book palaver” was central to the jail experience for both groups.

The reciprocity had its limits. The abolitionists and the
Amistad
Africans approached education in jail with different assumptions and goals. The former saw it as a civilizing process, a means to turn pagan savages into sober, orderly, disciplined, virtuous Christians. In January 1840 Lewis Tappan reported with pleasure, “most of their savage habits have been relinquished, and habits of civilized life acquired.” A writer for the newspaper
Farmer’s Cabinet
agreed: “They are also acquiring ideas of order and moral duty, and gradually conforming to the habits of civilized life; readily assembling at stated hours, when summoned by a bell; recognizing the Sabbath, and giving regular attendance upon their religious exercises, &c.”
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The Africans took a less imperial view. They were uninterested in reforming—or being reformed. They did not try to make their abolitionist visitors into new people, nor could they have done so, in any case. They were more or less content to try to understand them and work with them toward common goals of survival and freedom, but bafflement sometimes prevailed. Translator James Covey related a story about the reception of time-discipline among the Africans. In the New Haven jail on a Sunday morning, he and Cinqué heard a church bell ring. The leader asked (no doubt in Mende, which Covey later translated into pidgin English), “What for bell ring?” Covey explained, “When ’Meriky people go pray to God, they ring bell.” Cinqué was perplexed. He said, “These people be fool. When want to pray to God, what for ring bell?” It was a real question for someone unaccustomed to social life organized by the clock. Missionary George Thompson noted that the Mende in Africa were both fascinated and puzzled by his watch, which they called “the living man,” probably because it seemed to give instructions to the one who wore it. Cinqué and his comrades would have to come to terms with “the living man” and much else, no matter how strange it all may have seemed.
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