The Amistad Rebellion (39 page)

Introduction: Voices

1
. This work owes much to Levi Raymond Pettler, “Education and
The Amistad
: Black Agency, the American Left, and Spielberg’s
Amistad
,” unpublished paper; and Jesse Lemisch, “Black Agency in the
Amistad
Uprising, or, You’ve Taken Our Cinque and Gone,” in
Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
1 (1999): 57–70. I have chosen to use the name “Cinqué,” which grew from the freedom struggle in America, rather than the Mende name Sengbe. My decision was based on the fact that Cinqué himself embraced the name and used it in daily life, signing his letters that way, for example, no doubt because the name, the person, and the cause had become famous in the course of the struggle.

2
. Julie Roy Jeffrey, “
Amistad
(1997): Steven Spielberg’s ‘True Story,’”
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
21 (2001): 77–96; Marouf Hasian Jr. and A. Cheree Carlson, “Revisionism and Collective Memory: The Struggle for Meaning in the
Amistad
Affair,”
Communications Monographs
67 (2000): 42–62. Novels include Barbara Chase-Riboud,
Echo of Lions
(New York: William Morrow & Co., 1989); Alexs D. Pate,
Amistad
(New York: Signet, 1997); and David Pesci,
Amistad
(Marlowe and Co., 1997). A poetic reflection on the history and meaning of the case is Kevin Young,
Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).

3
. The
Amistad
Rebellion has attracted many fine writers and scholars over the years. The first major work was a historical novel, based on extensive research and therefore sometimes mistaken for history: William A. Owens,
Black Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner Amistad
(New York: John Day Co., 1953). Mary Cable’s
Black Odyssey: The Case of the Slave Ship “Amistad”
(New York: Viking Press, 1971) is a brief, lucid account of the mutiny and its aftermath. Two studies by literary scholars are Maggie Montesinos Sale,
The Slumbering
Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997) and Iyunolu Folayan Osagie,
The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). The latter stresses the meanings of the
Amistad
case in American popular culture and in recent West African history, especially in the author’s own war-torn Sierra Leone during the 1990s. The pinnacle of scholarship, to which I am much indebted, is Howard Jones’s
Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Jones used extensive research to offer a thorough and insightful exploration of the legal, diplomatic, and political aspects of the case. Other important scholarship includes James A. Miller, ed., “The Amistad Incident: Four Perspectives,”
Occasional Papers of the Connecticut Humanities Council
10 (1992); Arthur Abraham,
The Amistad Revolt: An Historical Legacy of Sierra Leone and the United States
(Washington, DC : U.S. Department of State International Information Programs, 1998); and David Brion Davis, “The Amistad Test of Law and Justice,” in his
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006),
chap. 1
.

4
. Henry Highland Garnet’s
An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America
was delivered before the National Convention of Colored Citizens, Buffalo, New York, August 16, 1843, then published in Henry Highland Garnet,
Walker’s Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life, and also Garnet’s Address to the Slaves of the United States of America
(New York: J. H. Tobitt, 1848); Peter Hinks,
To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance
(College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); C.L.R. James,
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
(New York: Vintage Books, 1989; orig. publ. 1938); Kenneth S. Greenberg,
Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Michael Craton,
Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Joaô José Reis,
Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Robert L. Paquette,
Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict Between Empires over Slavery in Cuba
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988); James Brewer Stewart,
Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1996).

5
. “Motín en alta mar, piratería, y asesinatos,”
Noticioso de Ambos Mundos,
August 31, 1839.

6
. The best, and most poetic, account of the struggle against slavery and its long aftermath remains Vincent Harding,
There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America
(New York: Vintage Books, 1981).

7
. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker,
The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), chap. 9. Other scholars whose work has been especially valuable in including enslaved rebels in the abolitionist movement include Merton L. Dillon,
Slavery Attacked: Southern Slaves and Their Allies, 1619–1865
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Stanley Harrold,
American Abolitionists
(Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001); and Douglas R. Egerton, “The Scenes Which are Enacted in St. Domingo: The Legacy of Revolutionary Violence in Early National Virginia,” in Jack R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold,
Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 41–64.

8
. I would also like to acknowledge the recent and forthcoming work of five talented scholars on one or another dimension of the
Amistad
rebellion: Orlando García Martínez, Benjamin N. Lawrance, Robert S. Wolff, Joseph L. Yannielli, and Michael Zeuske.

9
. Quoted in Jones,
Mutiny on the Amistad
, 210. On the radicalism of the waterfront, see Linebaugh and Rediker,
The Many-Headed Hydra
, chaps. 7 and 8.

10
. “Incarcerated Captives,”
NYCA
, September 6, 1839.

Chapter One: Origins

1
. “The Amistad Africans,”
Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier
, May 29, 1841; Forbes, 75–76.

2
. “Fuli,” William H. Townsend (1822–1851), Sketches of the Amistad captives, [ca.
1839–1840], box 1, folder 4, GEN MSS 335, Beneicke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Yale University; “Captives of the Amistad,”
Emancipator
, December 19, 1839.

3
. Barber, 11.

4
. Barber, 15; “Marqu,” Townsend Sketches, box 1, folder 7. See Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, “Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundation of the Calabar Slave Trade,”
American Historical Review
104 (1999): 332–55, and “The Business of Slaving: Pawnship in Western Africa,”
Journal of African History
42 (2001): 67–89. On the experience of Margru and the other children aboard the
Amistad
, see Benjamin N. Lawrance, “‘All We Want Is Make Us Free’: The Voyage of
La Amistad’s
Children Through the Worlds of the Illegal Slave Trade,” in Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds.,
Child Slaves in the Modern World
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 13–36.

5
. Barber, 12; “Malhue,” Townsend Sketches, box 2, folder 18. Moru played a leading role in the rebellion, suggesting that he was an experienced warrior. Thanks to Konrad Tuchscherer for the identification of the Margona family name, which is often given as Magona.

6
.
No Rum!—No Sugar! Or, The Voice of Blood, being Half an Hour’s Conversation between a Negro and an English Gentleman, shewing the Horrible Nature of the Slave-Trade, and Pointing Out an Easy and Effective Method of Terminating It, by an Act of the People
(London, 1792). In case readers were disinclined to believe Cushoo, the author of the pamphlet provided footnotes, with eyewitness accounts of Africa, the slave trade, and New World slavery itself to support the argument.

7
. Robert Paquette,
Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict Between Empires over Slavery in Cuba
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).

8
. The articulation of slavery and industrialism has been called the “second slavery.” See Dale Tomich, “The Wealth of Empire: Francisco Arrangoy Parreno, Political Economy, and the Second Slavery in Cuba,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History
45 (2003): 4–28.

9
. Raphael Samuel, “Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in Mid-Victorian Britain,”
History Workshop
3 (1977): 6–72; Christopher Lloyd,
The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century
(London: Routledge, 1968).

10
. Alexander Jones,
Cuba in 1851; Containing Authentic Statistics of the Population, Agriculture, and Commerce of the Island
…(New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1851); Dale Tomich, “Sugar and Slavery in an Age of Global Transformation,” in his
Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830–1848
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 14–32.

11
. Daniel Walker Howe,
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), chap. 20.

12
. Bronislaw Novak, “The Slave Rebellion in Sierra Leone, 1785–1796,”
Hemispheres
3 (1986): 151–69; Ismail Rashid, “‘A Devotion to the Idea of Liberty at any Price’: Rebellion and Antislavery in the Upper Guinea Coast in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Sylviane A. Diouf, ed.,
Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 132–51; Ismail Rashid, “Escape, Revolt, and Marronage in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Sierra Leone Hinterland,”
Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines
34 (2000): 656–83.

13
. Much valuable biographical evidence was gathered by Connecticut engraver John Warner Barber, who visited the
Amistad
Africans in the New Haven jail numerous times in early 1840, and through Mende sailor and interpreter James Covey talked with them at length about their lives in Africa.

14
. “The Captive Africans,”
Emancipator
, October 17, 1839. Teacher Sherman Booth noted in August 1841 that four were Temne, four were Kono, one was Gola, and that four were “from the Bullom country,” although three of the final group, Kinna, Fuli, and Kwong, were Mende who had lived in Bullom country. The Mende, by Booth’s calculation, would have been approximately twenty-six in number. See “The Liberated Mendians,”
PF
, August 18, 1841. Since there were two
Amistad
Africans by the name of Burna, subsequent references to the elder will be simply “Burna,” the other as “Burna the younger.”

15
.
The Palm Land
, 429. See also the astute remarks on the Mende and other peoples of Sierra Leone in Michael A. Gomez,
Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998),
chap. 5
.

16
. Jones, 177; Barber, 8. Two abolitionists who later worked closely with the
Amistad
Africans agreed that the “Mohammedan influence” among them had not been great. See A. F. Williams to Lewis Tappan, Farmington, March 25, 1841, and Notes by Professor [Josiah] Gibbs, July 1841, ARC.

17
. “The Mendi People,”
Emancipator
, September 23, 1841; Governor William Fergusson to Lewis Tappan, 1842, published in
North American and Daily Advertiser
, June 15, 1842. Adam Jones remarks that information about Mende country before 1870 is “very limited”; Jones, 18, 85. The Temne were known because the British had bought land from one of their kings for the settlement at Freetown. The Bullom were closer to the coast and hence had more contact with European and American traders. Little was known of the Gbandi, Kono, Loma, and Gola peoples. Richard Robert Madden included “Menda Country” on the map that accompanied his “Report on Sierra Leone, 1841,” Colonial Office (CO) 267/172, NA. Based on his conversations, Barber added “Mendi” to the map he engraved for
A History of the Amistad Captives
(1840). Philip Misevich has found a reference to the “Cursa” (Kossa) dating from 1713 (personal communication to the author, Janary 12, 2012).

18
.
The Palm Land
, 415; A. Menzies, “Exploratory Expedition to the Mende Country,”
Church Missionary Intelligencer: A Monthly Journal of Missionary Information
(London: Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday, 1864), vol. XV, 115; “The Liberated Mendians,”
PF
, August 18, 1841.

19
.
Thompson in Africa
, 414–15; Robert Clarke,
Sierra Leone: A Description of the Manners and Customs of the Liberated Africans; with Observations upon the Natural History of the Colony, and a Notice of the Native Tribes
(London: James Ridgway, 1843), 163.

20
. Forbes, 62–63;
The Palm Land
, 246; Clarke,
Sierra Leone
, 44; “Liberated Mendians,”
PF
, August 18, 1841. According to Jones, a “king” was a regional overlord, a “chief” was the political head of a town or larger unit, and a “big man” was one who possessed prestige, wealth, allies, and relatives/dependents, often on the village level. See Jones, 13.