The Amistad Rebellion (26 page)

Barber stressed his impartiality in presenting a “correct statement of the facts of this extraordinary case,” but he himself opposed slavery. Yet the pamphlet was not an abolitionist tract. Although Barber made use of the work of Josiah Gibbs, George Day, and Benjamin Griswold, who worked closely with the captives and the Amistad Committee, there is no evidence that the leaders of the defense campaign (Tappan, Joshua Leavitt, and Simeon Jocelyn) played any role in making the pamphlet. Indeed, they would not have approved of the central image,
The Death of Capt. Ferrer
, which depicted the insurrection. Nonetheless it became the most famous representation of the rebellion. The engraving circulated widely with the pamphlet and as a broadside, some copies of which were hand-colored, presumably by Barber himself.
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Barber’s image featured nine of the
Amistad
Africans, five of them armed with cane knives; Captain Ferrer, who is cut, bleeding, and dying; a worried Ruiz; and Antonio, watching as he climbs up the shrouds. The corpse of Celestino lies on the deck in the background. Because Barber drew the portraits of the
Amistad
Africans “from life” in jail and sought to represent them accurately, it is possible to identify specific individuals in the image. With a cane knife at left is Cinqué, preparing to strike the killing blow, as he and three others surround the captain. The other three are probably meant to be Moru, Kimbo, and Faquorna, who were known to have carried out the attack with Cinqué—although Warner would not have known what Faquorna looked like, as he had died before the engraver entered the jail. At the far right is Burna, who is not armed and was known in the story of the uprising for his merciful defense of the Spaniards. He raises his hand
as if to try to stop the violence of the armed Konoma, who rushes toward the Spaniards and is identifiable by his so-called tusk-like teeth.

“Death of Capt. Ferrer, the Captain of the
Amistad”

Barber may have had antislavery sympathies, but he used racialized tropes of savagery in representing the
Amistad
Africans. In composition and title, he seems to have drawn upon
The Murder of Jane McCrea
, a painting and print widely circulated at the time. In this set piece of frontier hostility two cruel, demonic Native American warriors armed with tomahawks slay a young white woman. Like McCrea, Captain Ferrer is the central figure, commanding the sympathetic attention of the viewer. In a diary entry for April 27, 1840, Barber described the image using clipped, racially charged language: “Drawing Massacre Amistad.” A gang of black men slaughter a single defenseless white man. In the hand-colored versions of the image, blood pours from the wounds on Ferrer’s head.
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Despite the graphic violence, Barber’s engraving projects an oddly peaceful, almost tranquil mood. The Africans are not possessed by rage as were the Native Americans as they killed Jane McCrea. Barber softened the faces of the rebels, making them reflect not fury, but calm determination. They stand in contrast to the gruesome image of the only other slave rebels to be graphically represented in the United States before the Civil War, in the
Horrid Massacre in Virginia
, which depicted Nat Turner’s uprising in Virginia in 1831. Barber’s image of the rebellion reflected necessity—what the
Amistad
rebels had to do “in order to gain their freedom,” as the artist described their purpose in the engraving’s caption.
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Cinqué and three fellow warriors surround Captain Ramón Ferrer (above), as Konoma joins, and Burna tries to limit, the attack (right).

Slavery Waxed

“The thrilling and unprecedented events connected with the capture of the Amistad, which have excited so much public attention, not only in this country, but throughout the civilized countries of Europe, furnishes a subject of uncommon interest.” So began an advertisement by Peale’s Museum and Portrait Gallery, located opposite city hall on Broadway in New York, inviting the public to see “the accurate likeness of 29 of the Africans” in life-size wax figures. Artist Sidney Moulthrop repeated the rationale of John Warner Barber as he explained the public value of his art. Like Warner, he cast and arranged the
figures at the peak moment of rebellion, when Cinqué and others surrounded and killed Captain Ferrer. He too thought this was what the people wanted to see.
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Moulthrop thought right. Beginning June 16, 1840, the exhibition was originally slated to run for a week, but the crowd that flocked to see it, and “the urgent desire for its continuance by several who have not yet had an opportunity,” caused the manager to hold it over. Newspaper advertisements appeared in the column “Amusements,” and the wax figures shared gallery space with live performers: the magician Signor Antonio Blitz, the pianist S. W. Bassford, and the fancy glassmaker Mr. Owens. The show would circulate to Armory Hall in Boston, Town Hall in Norwich, Connecticut, and finally, several years later, to Phineas T. Barnum’s American Museum. Barnum, himself known as an abolitionist, included the wax figures in a show with a live orangutan and a performance by black men in blackface, the “Ethiopian Serenaders,” whom Frederick Douglass thought “may yet be instrumental in removing the prejudice against our race.” The price of admission to see the rebellion in wax was usually twenty-five cents.
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Like Barber, Moulthrop lived in New Haven and visited the
Amistad
Africans in jail. He somehow managed to convince them to allow him to take molds of their faces and even to give him some of their hair, which he used to enhance the realism of his sculptures. Perhaps he paid them, or perhaps the Africans were simply interested in his project and freely supported it. The museum announced, “By means of this process, a perfect exhibition of the form of each face, embracing every wrinkle, &c., is given.” Each wax figure was constructed to “exact height and form.” The display also featured painted portraits of all of the “surviving Africans, drawn from life, to each of which is attached their history.” The “history” was in all likelihood based on the biographical sketches collected in Barber’s
A History of the Amistad Captives
, copies of which were on sale at the exhibition. Indeed, Barber and Moulthrop had worked together in making their images of rebellion. Barber had drawn his profiles using a pantograph, a mechanical copying machine, on the busts made by the wax artist.
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Moulthrop’s centerpiece was “a sinking representation of the death of Captain Ramón Ferrer, the Spanish Captain of the Amistad.” Cinqué and several others, armed with knives, rush up on the captain, “who is seen falling mortally wounded.” Again, the corpse of Celestino, the slave sailor, lies in the background. “A correct likeness of the boy Antonio, the slave of Captain Ferrer, is given,” as Burna appears “saving the lives of Ruiz and Montez.” Moulthrop added a wax figure of James Covey, the sailor-translator, who had not been aboard the
Amistad
but was playing a large part in the contemporary drama, and hence was of interest to the public. Covey had probably translated for Moulthrop as he had done for Barber.
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A correspondent for the African American newspaper the
Colored American
, who had not been able to visit the jail in New Haven to see “the great originals” of the
Amistad
drama, had been told that the “counterfeits, done in wax” are “perfect likenesses: every muscle, every lineament of countenance is portrayed with all the appearance of life.” He urged readers to go to Peale’s Museum to witness the wax figures that “possess a fidelity to nature which is truly astonishing.” The
Workingman’s Friend
also gave the exhibit a warm reception, encouraging its readers, “Go and see them and take a friend or two with you.” A writer for the
Norwich Aurora
thought, “No pen can do justice to this exhibition. Nothing of the kind has ever come near it.” It appears that even the
Amistad
Africans got to see the life-size reproductions of themselves, because, as one correspondent noted, “When the real and the representative figures have been placed together, persons could not distinguish the one from the other.” What the real figures made of the wax ones is not known. It must have seemed to them that
ta-mo ko-lin-go
(the white man) was clever but strange.
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Rebellion Magnificently Painted

Boston artist Amasa Hewins created the most monumental work of art inspired by the
Amistad
Rebellion—a 135-foot panorama, more than twice as long as the
Amistad
itself. He took a crooked path to the jail. Born in Sharon, Massachusetts, in 1795, he tried his hand at West
Indian commerce, failed, then turned to painting portraits in the 1820s. In 1830 he toured Europe during dramatic times: he was in Italy and France during the revolutions of that year, and he kept a journal of his travels. Hewins was a committed republican, hence his sympathies were with the people in struggle against the aristocracy and the church, although the “rabble” in various towns in Italy seem to have made him nervous. In 1839–1840 he had no studio and apparently made a living as an itinerant artist, working in Boston, in various towns in Connecticut, and as far south as Baltimore and Washington, DC, no doubt painting portraits. He modestly entitled his grandest work
The Magnificent Painting of the Massacre on board the schooner Amistad!!
It circulated to various venues, including Denslowe Hall in Hartford and the Phoenix Building in New Haven, where the artist installed the gigantic canvas and charged admission to those eager to see the uprising on a human scale.
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Alas, the painting has been lost. Simeon Eben Baldwin, son of
Amistad
attorney Roger S. Baldwin, noted in an article published in 1886 that it was at that time in the possession of the New Haven Colony Historical Society. How something so huge could have been lost is an interesting question to ponder. In any case, efforts in recent years to find it have failed, but fortunately numerous written descriptions of the painting, some by the artist himself, survive and permit its reconstruction as both image and interpretation of the rebellion.
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Because Hewins had visited the jail and painted individual portraits of the
Amistad
Africans, he could claim that the larger work, “strikes the beholder as real life.” Some reviewers of the work had also been in the jail and agreed: “The likenesses of many of the blacks will be readily recognized.” A writer for the
New Haven Herald
noted that the painting offered “a view of the vessel and every person on board, many of which are portraits, particularly those of Cinquez, and Grabeau.” Hewins apparently showed the painting to the
Amistad
Africans themselves at some point, for he used their approval in a broadside he prepared and distributed far and wide in order to publicize the display of his painting: “Its faithfulness to the original [event] has been attested by those who participated in the awful tragedy.”
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