The Amistad Rebellion (43 page)

73
. “The Long, Low Black Schooner,”
NYS
, August 31, 1839.

Chapter Three: Movement

1
.
NLG
, August 28, 1839; “The Spanish Piratical Schooner Amistad,”
NYMH
, August 30, 1839.

2
.
NLG
, August 28, 1839.

3
. On the life and legal career of Judson, see Douglas L. Stein, “The
Amistad
Judge: The Life and Trials of Andrew T. Judson, 1784–1853,”
Log of Mystic Seaport
49 (1998): 98–106.

4
. “The Long, Low Black Schooner,”
NYS
, August 31, 1839. It is impossible to know what was inside Cinqué’s greegree bag, but it is possible to know what
kinds of things
might have been there, because missionary George Thompson, who was in many ways the first ethnographer among the Mende peoples of southern Sierra Leone, inspected and wrote about such containers and their contents. When a “benighted heathen” converted to Christianity, he or she sometimes surrendered a “greegree bag” to Thompson. That of an “old conjurer” included an “old, dirty, greasy cloth, containing live bug-a-bugs (white ants), and some of their dirt from the large hillocks; also one piece of iron, and one very small antelope’s horn.” A “big-war medicine” contained “some old dirt, an iron rod about one foot long, a nail and two screws.” A third was “a goat’s horn, containing three or four pieces of leopard skin, and a piece of paper written on both sides with Arabic writing.” The inclusion of what appear to have been Quranic inscriptions, offered by “Muslim strangers” in times of war, illustrates the advance of Islam in Cinqué’s region. Thompson wrote that small bags “were tied to a string and worn about the neck!” To the missionary, these were “the delusions of Satan.” See
Thompson in Africa
, 152, 194, and
The Palm Land,
178–79, 390. See also Jones, 77, 184; M. C. Jedrej, “Medicine, Fetish, and Secret Society in a West African Culture,”
Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute
46 (1976): 247–57; and Mariane Ferme,
The Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and the Everyday in Sierra Leone
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 3, 4, 5, 67.

5
. For more on the legal history of the case, see R. Earl McClendon, “The
Amistad
Claims: Inconsistencies of Policy,”
Political Science Quarterly
48 (1933): 386–412; Bruce A. Ragsdale, “‘Incited by the Love of Liberty’: The
Amistad
Captives and the Federal Courts,”
Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration
35 (2003): 12–24.

6
. “Joseph Cinquez, Leader of the Piratical Gang of Negroes, who killed Captain Ramon Ferris and the Cook, on board the Spanish Schooner Amistad, taken by Lieut. Gedney, commanding the U.S. Brig Washington at Culloden Point, Long Island, 24th Aug
^t
1839, Drawn from Life by J. Sketchley, Aug. 30, 1839,” lithograph by John Childs, NHCHS. The speech: “My brothers, I am once more among you, having deceived the enemy of our race by saying I had doubloons. I came to tell you that you have only one chance for death, and none for Liberty. I am sure you prefer death, as I do. You can by killing the white man now on board, and I will help you, make the people here kill you. It is better for you to do this, and then you will not only avert bondage yourselves, but prevent the entailment of unnumbered wrongs on your children. Come—come with me then–.” The same quotation appears in “The Long, Low Black Schooner,”
NYS
, August 31, 1839. See also Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, in
Portraits of the People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 130.

7
. “Joseph Cinquez, Leader of the Gang of Negroes,…Captured by Lieutenant Gedney of the U.S. Brig Washington at Culloden Point, Long Island, August 24th 1839,” hand-colored lithograph, Stanley Whitman House, Farmington, Connecticut. Shaw dates the lithograph October 1, 1839, but the basis for this is not clear; see
Portraits of the People
, 130–31.

8
. “Joseph Cinquez, The brave Congolese Chief, who prefers death to Slavery, and who now lies in Jail at New Haven Conn. awaiting his trial for daring for freedom,” LC.
A second, smaller version of the image—perhaps a handbill—is in the Frances Manwaring Caulkins Scrapbook, reference 029.3 Scr 15, Misc. American, 1830–1850, New London County Historical Society, New London, Connecticut. Below the caption was the “Speech to his Comrade Slaves after Murdering the Captain &c and Getting Possession of the Vessel and Cargo”: “Brothers we have done that which we purposed, our hands are now clean as we have Striven to regain the precious heritage we received from our fathers. We have only to persevere. Where the sun rises, there is our home, our brethren, our fathers. Do not seek to defeat my orders, if so I shall sacrifice any one who would endanger the rest. When at home we will kill the old Man, the young one shall be saved. He is kind and gave you bread. We must not kill those who give us water. Brothers, I am resolved that it is better to die than be a white man’s slave, and I will not complain if by dying I save you. Let us be careful what we eat that we may not be sick. The deed is done and I need say no more.” The
New York Sun
of August 31, 1839, identified “James Sheffield of New London” as the artist, but it appears the main maritime artist of New London in this period was Isaac Sheffield (1798–1845). See H. W. French,
Art and Artists in Connecticut
(Boston, 1879), 60.

9
. “Joseph Cinquez Addressing his Compatriots on board the Spanish Schooner AMISTAD 26th Augt 1839,” lithograph by John Childs, Chicago Historical Society (ICHi 22004).

10
. This broadside was, like the others, apparently commissioned by the
New York Sun
. The text, though not the image, was republished in the newspaper on August 31, 1839: “Friends and brothers—We would have returned but the sun was against us. I would not see you serve the white man, so I induced you to help me kill the Captain. I thought I should be killed—I expected it. It would have been better. You had better be killed than live many moons in misery. I shall be hanged, I think, every day. But this does not pain me. I could die happy, if by dying I could save so many of my brothers from the bondage of the white man.” The speech was republished in the
NYJC
on September 2, 1839, and in the
Charleston Courier
on September 5, 1839. The speech was said to have been translated by Antonio. The print and speech provide a good example of the “print-performance culture” described by Peter Reed,
Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 4.

11
. “Portrait of Cinquez” from the Monday, September 2, 1839 edition, reprinted in the
NYS
, September 7, 1839, Country Edition, Weekly—no. 147. The reach of the
New York Sun
extended all the way to Havana, where Richard Robert Madden read the paper and learned of the
Amistad
case. He later went to New Haven to visit the captives and subsequently gave crucial testimony. See Gera Burton, “Liberty’s Call: Richard Robert Madden’s Voice in the Anti-Slavery Movement,”
Irish Migration Studies in Latin America
5 (2007): 202–03. On the rise of the penny press see James L. Crouthamel,
Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989) and Dan Schiller’s classic account,
Objectivity and the News: The Public and the Rise of Commercial Journalism
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981).

12
. Interest in the case was also great in Boston, where 4,000 copies of a September 1 “Extra” of the
NYMH
sold out by noon; “Boston,”
NYMH
, September 4, 1839.

13
. “The Long, Low Black Schooner,”
NYS
, August 31, 1839. The correspondent even threw in a glowing phrenological analysis of Cinqué’s head, suggesting among other things that he possessed “unshaken courage, and intense love of home and kindred.”

14
. Dwight P. Janes to Rev. Joshua Leavitt, New London, August 30, 1839; Dwight P. Janes to R. S. Baldwin, New London, August 31, 1839; Dwight P. Janes to R. S. Baldwin, New London, September 2, 1839; Dwight P. Janes to Joshua Leavitt, New London, September 2, 1839, ARC. See also two articles by Maria Hileman, “The Amistad’s Unsung Hero” and “Dwight Janes: Conscience of the Amistad,” both published in
The Day
, October 5, 1997.

15
. For biographies of Tappan and Leavitt see Bertram Wyatt-Brown,
Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery
(Cleveland: Case Western University Press, 1969, reprinted Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997) and Hugh Davis,
Joshua Leavitt, Evangelical Abolitionist
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).

16
. “The Captured Slaves,”
NYMH
, September 2, 1839.

17
. South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun had declared slavery to be a “positive good” in 1837. See Jones,
Mutiny on the Amistad
, 10.

18
. Stanley Harrold,
American Abolitionists
(Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001), 34; James
Brewer Stewart, “From Moral Suasion to Political Confrontation: American Abolitionists and the Problem of Resistance, 1831–1861,” in his
Abolitionist Politics and the Coming of the Civil War
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 3–31.

19
. For the background to the abolitionist movement, see Richard S. Newman,
The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

20
. James Pennington,
The Fugitive Blacksmith; or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington, Pastor of a Presbyterian Church, New York, Formerly a Slave in the State of Maryland, United States
(London: Charles Gilpin, 1849); Margaret Washington,
Sojourner Truth’s America
(Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 138.

21
. “Incendiaries,”
New Orleans Bee
, October 11, 1839; “Mobile,”
Richmond Enquirer
, November 1, 1839; “Another Exciting Rumor,”
NYS
, September 3, 1840; “A Negro Revolt in Louisiana,”
NYS
, September 12, 1840; “A Negro Plot,”
NYS
, November 10, 1840; “A Revolt,”
PF
, September 22, 1840; “Slave Insurrection,”
PF
, September 24, 1840; “An Attempted Slave Insurrection in South Carolina,”
PF
, October 20, 1841;
NYS
, August 31, 1839; Kenneth W. Porter,
The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996).

22
. Fergus Bordewich,
Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America
(New York: Amistad, 2005).

23
. Philip M. Hamel, “Great Britain, the United States, and the Negro Seamen Acts, 1822–1848,”
Journal of Southern History
1 (1935): 3–28; Peter Hinks,
To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance
(State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996).

24
. “Incarcerated Captives,”
NYCA
, September 6, 1839; “Conditions for Amistad Captives,”
NYCA
, September 9, 1839; “Case of the Captured Africans,”
NYMH
, September 22, 1839; “Visit to Hartford, Connecticut,”
NYMH
, September 24, 1839; and “Removal of the Africans to Hartford—Crim. Con. among the Savages—Exposure of the Abolition Falsehood, &c.,”
NYMH
, November 19, 1839;
NYS
, September 20, 1839; “Calvin Edson, The Living Skeleton,”
Daily Chronicle
, January 18, 1832.

25
. “To the Committee on Behalf of the African Prisoners,”
NYJC
, September 10, 1839; “Removal of the Africans,”
NYMH
, November 19, 1839; “Incarcerated Captives,”
NYCA
, September 6, 1839; “The Captives of the Amistad,”
Emancipator
, October 3, 1839.

26
. “The Captives of the Amistad,”
Emancipator
, October 3, 1839.

27
. Anonymous, “Treatment of the Captured Africans,” November 1, 1839, ARC. This appears to have been an unpublished article written for the
Emancipator
.

28
. Ibid. See also
Emancipator
, September 9, 1839.

29
. “The Captured Africans of the Amistad,”
NYMH
, October 4, 1839. This comment referred to the Hartford jail; see below, 129–32.

30
. “Private Examination of Cinquez,”
NYCA
, September 13, 1839; “The Negroes of the Amistad,”
New Hampshire Sentinel
, October 2, 1839.

31
. “Captured Africans,”
NYMH
, October 4, 1839; “The Negroes Lately Captured,”
NYMH
, September 5, 1839; “The Africans,”
Patriot and Democrat
, September 21, 1839; “The Africans,”
NYMH
, October 5, 1839. Abolitionist A. F. Williams wrote that “1,000 $ was recd in Hartford & more than 1,000 $ (as I am informed) in N. Haven at 12
¹
⁄
₂
cts admission” from visitors to the jails. The figure for Hartford, where the
Amistad
Africans spent only two weeks in September 1839 and a few days in November, is credible, but the figure for New Haven is far too low. See A. F. Williams to Lewis Tappan, Farmington, March 13, 1841, ARC.

32
. “Captured Africans,”
NYMH
, October 4, 1839; “The Africans,”
NYMH
, September 13, 1839.

33
. “Captured Africans,”
NYMH
, October 4, 1839;
NYS
, September 20, 1839.