The Amistad Rebellion (37 page)

Another sign of the growth of the antislavery movement was the number and variety of people who supported the
Amistad
campaign while insisting that they were not abolitionists. The effects of the images in popular culture can be seen in a note accompanying a contribution to the Amistad Committee in early September 1839: “A friend of ‘human rights,’ but no Abolitionist, desires your acceptance of the enclosed
Five Dollars
, for the benefit of ‘
Joseph Cinquez
’ and his African comrades, who nobly and righteously liberated themselves from illegal and involuntary bondage.” The editor of the
New London Gazette
likewise announced, “We are no abolitionist, though we are an enemy to slavery in all its shapes.” Soon thereafter a writer named “Humanitas,” a “true friend” to the Africans, worried that abolitionists would “prejudice the public mind against them” and in the end get them all hanged. The movement in support of the
Amistad
Africans and the abolitionist movement were never identical.
¹⁸

In an article of 1842 entitled “What the Mechanics of the Country
Think,” Samuel Thompson of Poughkeepsie, New York, reported to Joshua Leavitt, editor of the
Emancipator
, that the
Amistad
and
Creole
rebellions had gained “general approval” among his fellow workers. He noted that “one gentleman of influence” expressed his hope at a public meeting that “every time they attempted to ship slaves to the south they would kill every individual concerned in the deed.” The speaker then swore to God that “he was no abolitionist.” The room full of mechanics “all endorsed his sentiment.” As they made their resolution, merchants in Virginia worried that the murder of their employees was growing, and disrupting the domestic slave trade.
¹⁹

Abolitionism itself evolved in the wake of the
Amistad
rebellion. As the mechanics suggested, the combination of the
Amistad
and
Creole
rebellions strengthened “abolitionism from below,” especially its most militant parts. As historian Stanley Harrold has written, “The slave revolts aboard the
Amistad
in 1839 and the
Creole
in 1841 were central to the sense of crisis among abolitionists,” to the growth of a more militant and confrontational approach, especially among African American activists, and to abolitionist “Addresses to the Slaves,” which now acknowledged the agency of the enslaved and the great significance of resistance from below. The advance of this tendency from the time of the
Amistad
to the Civil War can be followed through the growing power and popularity of a phrase that originated with Lord Byron in
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
(canto II, stanza 76) in 1818:

In the stirring climax of a speech to the National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo, New York, on August 16, 1843, the once-enslaved black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet remembered “the immortal Joseph Cinque, the hero of the Amistad” and Madison Washington, “that bright star of freedom.” They were “Noble men!” Their very names, “surrounded by a halo of glory,” were an inspiration as Garnet proclaimed a coming jubilee that could be brought about only by resistance from below. “No oppressed people have ever secured
their liberty without resistance,” he thundered. Garnet repeated Cinqué’s claim that it was better to “die freemen than live to be slaves.” His message was clear: “Brethren, the time has come when you must act for yourselves. It is an old and true saying that, ‘if hereditary bondmen would be free, they must themselves strike the blow.’”
²⁰

The phrase was popular among the most radical abolitionists. The street fighter David Ruggles had urged striking the first blow in 1841 in an open letter announcing a black antislavery convention, which itself had been partially inspired by the
Amistad
rebellion, and the militant Martin R. Delany would place it on the masthead of his journal
The Mystery
, which began publication in Pittsburgh in 1843. The phrase would achieve its classic expressions when John Brown and his fellow insurrectionists “struck the first blow” at Harper’s Ferry in 1859, to inspire slave revolts throughout the South, and when Frederick Douglass’s broadside
Men of Color, to Arms
used the phrase to encourage enlistment in the Union army in 1863. Advocated primarily by African American abolitionists in the aftermath of the
Amistad
and
Creole
rebellions, collective armed struggle against slavery had become the order of the day.
²¹

The militant effects of the
Amistad
rebels were not simply a matter of rhetoric. In January 1840, in defiance of the law, abolitionists planned a jailbreak and escape for the Africans had the court ruling gone against them and the Van Buren administration tried to load the prisoners onto the
Grampus
for a quick return to Cuba before an appeal could be made. More significantly still, abolitionist John Treadwell Norton wrote to Lewis Tappan in February 1841 that “many here,” around Farmington, were “ready forcibly to interfere” on behalf of these “brethren” should the Supreme Court rule against them. He added, “If such a step could ever be justified it would be in this case, where injustice is apparent at every step”—and where there existed broad popular support for the cause. As tensions rose, so did local militancy, wrote Norton two weeks later: “Many of the good friends here are very desirous to get the Africans out of the hands of the oppressors at once; and some are willing to go so far as to shoulder a Musket, or to turn
Mohawks
for this purpose.” One armed struggle
inspired another: rank-and-file abolitionists now wanted to free the very people who themselves had risen under arms to escape their oppressors. Norton and his “good friends” invoked the memory of the Boston Tea Party, in which people took the law into their own hands as “Mohawks” and tomahawked casks of tea, and thereby wrapped the
Amistad
struggle in the glorious mantle of the American Revolution.
²²

In an effort to restore the
Amistad
Africans to their rightful place in their own story, this history has returned to Henry Highland Garnet’s observation about the relationship between white abolitionists and his own people of color, enslaved and free, in the nineteenth century: “They are our allies—Ours is the battle.” But what extraordinary allies they were! Lewis Tappan may have been a condescending Christian paternalist, but his devotion to the Africans was exceptional, his commitment of time, energy, and money to the cause exemplary. Roger S. Baldwin and John Quincy Adams made singular contributions to the struggle, winning a tense and dramatic battle against the United States government before the Supreme Court. The role played by rank-and-file abolitionists such as Dwight Janes and the unnamed militants in Farmington who were prepared to pick up the gun must also be acknowledged. The alliance of the African insurrectionists and the American abolitionists was essential to the victory.

The reverberations of the
Amistad
rebellion in American popular culture made a difference to the outcome. The peculiarities of the case made it easier for Americans of all walks of life to embrace: the rebels of the
Amistad
were African, not African American, and the slaveholders were Cuban, not American. Yet here was a group of black men who had killed a white figure of authority during a fearful time of widespread slave revolt, and Americans showed a level of interest and support that was extraordinary by the standards of the day. The newspaper coverage, the play, the prints, the engravings, the paintings, the wax figures, the pamphlets, the long lines leading to the doors of the jail and the courtroom—all created a charged atmosphere in which district, circuit, and Supreme Court judges made what were, at the time and in retrospect, surprising decisions favorable to the
Amistad
Africans and their claims of freedom. District court judge Andrew Judson was known to be hostile to people of color; one abolitionist called him “Andrew Sharka Judson” after the Vai king who ruled a slave-trading empire. A majority of the Supreme Court justices had southern backgrounds. All of the judges who issued written rulings on the case acknowledged the extraordinary degree of popular interest in the case.
²³

An unnamed abolitionist rightly gave credit for the
Amistad
victory to the antislavery movement, with “no thanks to the Supreme Court” and “No thanks to American law.” Without the resolute efforts of the rebels, and without the translators, legal assistance, publicity, and fundraising provided by the abolitionists, the Supreme Court surely would have done the bidding of President Martin Van Buren and American slaveholders, delivering “these people up to the anacondas whose throats were stretched for them.” The author concluded, “Thanks to God only, and to the anti-slavery movement, His instrumentality.” Many regarded the
Amistad
victory as the movement’s greatest achievement, as the
Anti-Slavery Standard
and the
Emancipator
announced: “Let those who ask what we have done, look at the generous excitement, the universal public sentiment, in behalf of the Amistad captives.” Never had an American antislavery campaign been so popular—or so victorious. Winning, first on the deck of the
Amistad
, then in the chambers of the Supreme Court, changed everything.
²⁴

The victory in the
Amistad
case contributed to a broad set of changes in the complex and evolving struggle against slavery. It strengthened the “political” abolitionists, led by Arthur and Lewis Tappan, as well as African American and other increasingly militant activists, led by the likes of Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. John Brown noted that he was inspired by the “personal bravery” of “Cinques, of ever lasting memory.” The victory also helped to broaden and integrate the movement, which became increasingly interracial after 1840. It answered the call for a “Black Warrior” or a “Black Spartacus” who could wage war against slavery and win, thereby expanding the pantheon of liberators, adding Cinqué and, by his example, Madison Washington, to the names of David
Walker, Toussaint Louverture, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner. It helped to establish and popularize the theme of legitimate armed self-defense by those seeking freedom. Although it would take years for these changes, and others, to create a revolutionary overthrow of the entire slave system, it may be said that in their own day and after, the
Amistad
rebels contributed to a shift in thinking about what might be possible in the war against slavery.
²⁵

A small band of multiethnic Africans aboard the
Amistad
succeeded against all odds. Enslaved in their homelands and shipped to Cuba, they planned and executed a revolt, worked their way to a “free country,” cooperated and allied themselves with a small, much-despised group of antislavery activists, then overcame the opposition of two powerful governments, Spain and the United States, to gain their freedom and go home, accomplishing precisely what they had always wanted to do. They carried out the entire epic cycle of loss, quest, and recovery. From beginning to end, their odyssey was unprecedented in the annals of New World slavery.

Cinqué’s revolution in miniature aboard the
Amistad
reverberated around the Atlantic. Abolitionist Henry C. Wright noted in April 1841 that “his name and his deeds have been heralded in every paper in this nation and in England—have stirred every heart and been the theme of every tongue.” Even when confined in a prison for nineteen months, he and his comrades commanded debate and discussion in the United States, Spain, England, and France. Cinqué’s name “will be the watchword of freedom to Africa and her enslaved sons throughout the world.” Through a long, heroic struggle in which insurrectionists and reformers cooperated to create an interracial movement of great power, he had come to symbolize a revolutionary future, that “bright and glorious day” on which slavery would be overthrown.
²⁶