The Amistad Rebellion (3 page)

The meaning of the rebellion and trials was shaped not only by American political realities but by broader Atlantic ones, for the
Amistad
had sailed into a huge and historic wave of slave resistance. David Walker’s
Appeal…to the Coloured Citizens of the World
(1829) had
emphasized the continuing relevance to freedom struggles of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution. Sailors black and white spread the revolutionary word by smuggling the pamphlet into slave societies. Nat Turner had led a bloody uprising in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, and Sam Sharpe had followed with his “Baptist War” in Jamaica in 1831–32. Other revolts, for example, in Brazil and Cuba, erupted against the backdrop of a growing abolitionist movement and indeed helped to make it possible. William Lloyd Garrison founded the
Liberator
in 1831 and Great Britain abolished slavery in its West Indian colonies in two stages, in 1834 and 1838.
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Wherever contemporaries debated the meaning of the
Amistad
rebellion, the ghosts of Walker, Toussaint Louverture, and Turner hovered above their heads.
Noticioso de Ambos Mundos
, a Spanish-language newspaper published in New York, posed a “delicate question” amid the debate about whether the
Amistad
rebels should go free: “Let us then see if the [American] Government establishes the principle that it is lawful for a slave to kill his master, because then they can with impunity rise up in Washington, and slay all masters and all members of the Government that allowed slavery.” The broad Atlantic struggle against slavery generated the larger meaning of the
Amistad
controversy.
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The meeting of African insurrectionists and American reformers in the New Haven jail was an unprecedented and historic moment. The rebels had made a revolution in miniature aboard the ship, which inspired sympathetic coverage in the press, especially the
New York Sun
, and in turn generated intense fascination among the public. Tappan and other abolitionists responded, struggling to control and direct the enormous popular interest toward their own purposes, building in the process a determined, energetic, interracial defense campaign. Many who supported the
Amistad
struggle were not, strictly speaking, abolitionists; moreover, they celebrated the heroic insurrection in ways that made moderate abolitionists uneasy. The Africans themselves, through their actions on the vessel and their noble bearing in jail, continued to inspire an unprecedented interest in the fearsome subject of slave revolt. To many, especially African Americans
enslaved and free, the
Amistad
rebels rekindled the radical egalitarian hope of the American Revolution.
⁶

The insurrectionists and reformers who met in Connecticut jails represented the two main wings of a global movement against slavery. Black rebels had long played an important role in America’s antislavery movement, especially by their audacious escapes from slavery, which inspired and mobilized abolitionists throughout the northern states. The
Amistad
case publicized a more controversial form of resistance—outright rebellion—and gave enslaved rebels and their resistance a more important place in an expanded, radicalized movement against slavery. This movement would help to establish the right of unfree people to seize freedom through armed self-defense and to claim their place as equals in society.
⁷

Even though slave resistance was ubiquitous throughout the turbulent 1830s, revolts were infrequent, even rare, occurrences, especially in the United States. Slaveholders always enforced the consequences of a failed revolt with hangings, maimings, and violent repression of all kinds. Most slaves, like most other people, were reluctant to risk everything in a gamble few before them had won. But an example of success changed everything. This, of course, was part of the importance of the Haitian Revolution. The black men and women of Saint Domingue had demonstrated the bottom rail could be placed on top. Until 1839, slaves in mainland North America could find no similar example of success. Slave rebels had failed in New York in 1712 and 1741; in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800; in Louisiana in 1811; and in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822. That record of failure changed in 1839, and with it changed the worlds of American slavery and abolition.

A history of the
Amistad
rebellion from below is supported by a collection of sources unique in the annals of New World slavery. Because the makers of the maritime insurrection spent twenty-seven months in Connecticut (nineteen of them in jail) and because their cause was both controversial and well publicized, they met thousands of people from all walks of life, both within the walls of the jails and without.
Journalists and ordinary citizens visited them, conversed with them through translators such as the Mende sailor James Covey, and transcribed their life stories, noting their work and nationality (hunter, Temne), where they lived in Africa (“two moons march to the coast”), and how they were enslaved (captured in war, kidnapped). Other visitors drew their portraits and silhouettes. Phrenologists measured the size of their skulls. Yale professors such as Josiah Gibbs compiled and published vocabularies of their languages. Many of these visitors published their findings in business newspapers such as the
New York Journal of Commerce
, in penny-press papers such as the
New York Sun
and
New York Morning Herald
, and in abolitionist periodicals such as the
Emancipator
and the
Pennsylvania Freeman
. As many as 2,500 articles were published altogether, many of them written by correspondents who had visited the African rebels in jail. No other makers of a modern slave revolt generated such a vast and deep body of evidence, which in turn makes it possible to know more about the
Amistad
Africans than perhaps any other group of once-enslaved rebels on record, and to get to know them, individually and collectively, in intimate, multidimensional ways, from their personalities and sense of humor to their specifically West African ways of thinking and acting during their ordeal.
⁸

Throughout their odyssey the
Amistad
rebels struggled—sometimes alongside the American abolitionists, sometimes against them—for a voice of their own. As abolitionist Joshua Leavitt noted soon after they were brought ashore, “these unfortunate persons, who have been committed to prison and bound over to be tried for their lives” could not “say a word for themselves.” Of course the rebels could and did say many words for themselves, but for weeks no one could understand them. Here enter a group of African sailors, most notably James Ferry, Charles Pratt, and James Covey, whose cosmopolitan knowledge of multiple languages finally allowed the rebels to tell their stories of origins, enslavement, and insurrection. Ferry had been liberated from slavery in Colombia at age twelve by Simón Bolivar, Pratt and Covey by the British naval anti-slave-trade patrols. They were
experienced in the struggle against slavery and they would be denounced by proslavery critics as “half-civilized, totally ignorant” sailors, who, like other men of color and low standing, were not to be trusted or believed. The motley crews of ship and waterfront played a critical role in the
Amistad
case.
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Leavitt’s observation lingers. The
Amistad
rebels’ struggle for voice led them to learn English, to study American political culture and to use it for their own ends, to tell both individual and collective stories about what had happened to them and why. Even so, it was no easy matter for them to be heard, in their own times, above or even alongside the voices of evangelical Christians; lawyers, politicians, and diplomats; middle-class antislavery reformers; and proslavery ideologues. And it has proved no easy matter to hear them today. This is a history of the
Amistad
rebellion from below. That, literally, is how and where the
Amistad
case began, with the eruption of armed rebels from the hold on to the main deck of the vessel. By viewing the courtroom drama in relation to the shipboard revolt, or, put another way, the actions taken from above in relation to those taken from below, the entire event, from causes to consequences, appears in a new light. This history puts the
Amistad
rebels back at the center of their own story and the larger history they helped to make. Theirs was an epic quest for freedom.
¹⁰

O
n a May evening in 1841, an overflow crowd at the Presbyterian Church on Coates Street in Philadelphia listened as a Mende man named Fuli spoke about “man-stealing” in his native southern Sierra Leone: “If Spanish man want to steal man, he no steal him himself, but hire black man; he pay him I don’t know how much.” Fuli referred to the urbane, cigar-smoking Spanish slave trader Pedro Blanco and his ally, the African King Siaka, who dressed in gold lace garments, drank from silver bowls, and mobilized soldiers and kidnappers in the interior of the Gallinas Coast. “The man catchers live in villages,” continued Fuli, “and honest people live in cities. If they come to the cities, the magistrate say you bad man, you go away.” Some “honest people” took more direct action: they shot the man-stealers as they would other beasts of prey, “lions and tigers.” Fuli and others sought to protect themselves against the slave traders, but they did not always succeed, as his own presence in Philadelphia attested. Fuli then demonstrated his knowledge of the Bible to the audience, interpreting his own experience and that of his comrades on the
Amistad
: “The man stealer, he walk crooked, he no walk straight, he get out of the high road. He walk by night, too, he no walk in the day time.” He referred, in a single answer, to the books of Deuteronomy (24:7), Psalms (82:5), and Isaiah (59:8). He himself had been stolen around two and half years earlier by those who walked—and enslaved—in darkness.
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Until that fateful moment, Fuli, whose name meant “sun,” had lived
in Mano with his parents and five brothers, humble people who farmed rice and manufactured cloth. A portrait drawn by a young American artist, William H. Townsend, depicted him with a mustache, a broad face, prominent cheekbones, a full forehead with a slightly receding hairline, and distinctive, almond-shaped eyes. He was five feet three inches tall, apparently unmarried, and said to be “in middle life,” which probably meant his late twenties. According to one who knew him, Fuli was a “noble-spirited” man and decidedly not someone who could be enslaved without resistance.
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