The vessel itself was in eerie disrepair: “Long grass was growing upon her bottom, and her sails were much torn, as if she had been driving about at the mercy of the gale, with her sails set and no one at the helm.” Here, declared the Morning Herald, was the “Flying Dutchman,” the ghost ship that wandered the seas endlessly as a portent of doom. Indeed, doom seemed already to have struck the vessel, which once upon a time had been a slave ship: “It was supposed that the prisoners had risen upon the captain and his assistants and captured her.” Having murdered the master and crew, those aboard could not navigate the vessel. They “are now drifting about bound for no particular port.”
Over the next few days, other newspapers offered new accounts of the vessel, many of them short on reliable information and long on overheated speculation. One reported that this “black, rakish, suspicious sail” was full of “black piratical wretches” who had “undoubtedly robbed several vessels, and perhaps committed murder.” Another had no doubt: the crew “had murdered all the white men.” They were, moreover, rife with riches: “there is money and jewels on board of the value of $40,000.” Another wrote, “Some accounts say, that there are two hundred thousand dollars in coin stowed away in her hold.” Yet another claimed they had “three tons of money on board.”2
Thus began the story of the Amistad in America’s penny press, with lurid tales of gore and gold. These articles made “the long, low, black schooner” a popular sensation. The nation’s two leading penny newspapers, the Morning Herald and the New York Sun, known for their interest in crime stories, especially murder, and for their ability to convey the news cheaply to the “great masses of the community,” took an avid interest in the case of the “black pirates.” So did the older commercial newspapers, the New York Commercial Advertiser and the New York Journal of Commerce. Southern newspapers such as the Richmond Enquirer, the Charleston Courier, and the New Orleans Bee, republished articles from the Northern press, sometimes editing out inconvenient information about the slave rebellion and adding fearful rhetoric of their own, demanding the gallows for murderous “African pirates.”3
A mere six days after the Amistad had been towed ashore in New London, Connecticut, a drama troupe performed a play about its story of mutiny and piracy at New York’s Bowery Theatre. Commercial artists drew images of the leader of the rebellion, a man called Cinqué, reproduced them quickly and cheaply, and had them hawked by boys about the streets of eastern cities. Artist Amasa Hewins painted a 135-foot panorama depicting the Amistad Africans as they surrounded and killed Captain Ramón Ferrer and seized their freedom by force of arms. Another artist, Sidney Moulthrop, created twenty-nine life-size wax figures of the Africans and the Amistad crew, which he cast and arranged to dramatize the shipboard insurrection. Both artists would tour with their creations, charging admission to see a visual reenactment of the uprising. The wax figures appeared in Peale’s Museum and Portrait Gallery in New York, Armory Hall in Boston, and finally in Phineas T. Barnum’s American Museum. Meantime, thousands of people lined up daily to pay admission and walk through the jails of New Haven and Hartford to get a glimpse of the Amistad prisoners. When legal proceedings began, citizens jammed the courtrooms to capacity and beyond, refusing to leave their seats during breaks for fear of losing them. Popular fascination with the case was unprecedented. Slave resistance became a commercial entertainment, a commodity to be consumed in the ever-growing American marketplace.4
Within the excellent scholarship on the Amistad rebellion, most notably by Arthur Abraham, Howard Jones, and Iyunolu Folayan Osagie,5 remains a puzzle: how did this bloody slave revolt—in which forty-nine African men, armed with cane knives, rose up, killed the white captain of the vessel and another member of the crew, and seized their freedom by force6—manage to become a popular cause in a slave society, where, in 1839, two and a half million people were held in bondage? The last time anything like this had happened in the United States was 1831, when Nat Turner’s Rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, convulsed the nation. Slave revolts had long caused panic throughout white American society, not least among white middle-class abolitionists, many of whom were frankly terrified of them. Why would the Amistad rebellion prove different? To make matters more curious, the Amistad rebels would achieve popularity while cooperating with abolitionists, themselves despised as extremists by many. Another odd twist is that abolitionists committed to non-violent principles flocked to the campaign as something heaven sent to advance their cause.7
The outpouring of interest, most of it sympathetic, depended on the peculiar facts of the case. The Amistad affair centered on the slave trade, against which abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic had already won major victories, establishing a limited but real popular consensus about its horrors. Moreover, it mattered that the slave owners, the villains of the story, were Spaniards, not Americans, and the self-emancipated heroes were Africans, who had never been American slaves. The Amistad rebellion did not, therefore, directly challenge American slavery as Nat Turner’s insurrection had done. The tactics, strategy, strength, and will of the abolitionist movement also helped to generate interest in, and favorable coverage of, the case. Indeed, victory in the Amistad case would be one of the movement’s greatest and most popular achievements.
Yet these facts cannot fully unravel the knot of contradiction: Nat Turner had become infamous, the very nightmare of many white people north and south, but Cinqué became a celebrity in the modern sense of the word. Indeed he was the first person of African descent to claim such status in the history of the United States. How can we explain this extraordinary difference in the popular images of the two best-known leaders of slave revolts in American history?8
An unexplored part of the answer lies in how the Amistad rebellion originally appeared to the American public as a pirate story. Tales of “black pirates,” told in various ways in and through an increasingly commercialized mass culture, excited intense interest everywhere, rapidly making what happened on the Amistad a national issue of concern “among all classes of the community,” including, crucially, urban workers. Less than a week after the first report, the clamor had grown so loud that the Amistad was now called the “famous piratical vessel.”
Four case studies in the early representation of the revolt follow: the play performed at the Bowery Theatre; the images of Cinqué produced for mass circulation; a recently discovered pamphlet of 1839: A True History of the African Chief Jingua and His Comrades; and the legal and popular debate about piracy and its specific application to the case. Drama, art, journalism, and law shaped the popular perception of the Amistad rebels and ultimately the outcome of the case.9
Militant collective action taken by a small group of West African warriors on the deck of a small vessel off the north coast of Cuba would reverberate around the world, mobilizing an army of playwrights, actors, theater-goers, artists, correspondents, writers, readers, lawyers, judges, politicians, activists, and citizens, who would produce and consume images of the rebels and their actions. By representing the Amistad Africans as “black pirates,” the creators of popular culture shaped the popular perception of the case. The history of slavery and the history of piracy thus intersected in complex and ambiguous ways, with profound results, for the Amistad case and the struggle against Atlantic slavery. The international movement against bondage would take an unexpected popular form, which would in turn help to expand, strengthen, and radicalize the anti-slavery movement and its accompanying public.10
The History of Piracy
The early nineteenth century witnessed the rise of sea literature in America, within which lay a special fascination with the pirate. James Fenimore Cooper wrote The Pilot (1823) and Red Rover (1828). The two greatest American writers about things maritime themselves went to sea at this time: Richard Henry Dana (from 1834 to 1836) and Herman Melville (from 1839 to 1844). Beginning with Lord Byron’s influential epic poem The Corsair (1814) and continuing with Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Pirate (1821
) and Frederick Marryat’s novel of the same title in 1836, sea robbers strengthened their grip on the literary and popular imagination. In 1837 an enthusiastic seventeen-year-old named Friedrich Engels wrote a short story called “The Pirate.” By 1839, articles, stories, poems, and books about the lore and legends of piracy poured from the presses of newspapers and publishers, including, for example, the “Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read,” the women pirates (1833), and Blackbeard, a novel (1835). The worldwide Romantic movement expanded popular interest in things maritime in the United States and around the Atlantic, establishing a broad predisposition to view the Amistad rebellion as a sea story and the rebels themselves as pirates.11
Newspaper writers and their readers also had specific historical reasons to see the Amistad rebels as “black pirates.” Because the North Atlantic had long been an important theater in the history of robbery by sea, pirates themselves were deeply embedded in popular consciousness and memory, as both “enemies of all mankind” and folk heroes. During the “Golden Age of Piracy,” 1650–1730, pirate crews captained by Blackbeard, Samuel Bellamy, and many others had haunted the colonial coast, producing fear, excitement, and robust popular writing on pirates, especially when a gang of them was captured, taken ashore, tried, and hanged, as happened on numerous occasions. Cotton Mather, who delivered thunderous sermons at several pirate hangings, wondered in exasperation why so many regarded these criminals as heroes.12
The motley pirate crews that plagued the North American coast included many Africans and African Americans, beginning in the seventeenth century, when buccaneers marauded on the Spanish Main and people of color ran away from Caribbean plantations to join them, and continuing through the 1710s and 1720s, when, for example, Blackbeard’s crew of one hundred had sixty black members, Oliver La Bouche’s men were “half French, half negro,” and William Lewis had “40 able negro sailors.” In 1723 the Boston News-Letter reported that an all-mulatto crew of pirates were taking ships in the Caribbean and eating the hearts of white captives. Such fantasies were rekindled in the images of the rebels aboard the Amistad more than a century later.13
There was, moreover, a recent history of piracy that would have been on the minds of many Americans in 1839. The pirates of the North African Barbary Coast had long attacked European and American shipping in the Mediterranean, prompting Britain, France, and even the fledgling navy of the United States to take measures to subdue them, which they managed finally to do with the French occupation of Algiers in 1830. The US involvement in the Tripolitan War (1801–1805) and the Algerine War (1815) had high public visibility and long-lasting consequences. At roughly the same time the Spanish American Wars of Independence (1808–1829) had produced a new explosion of piracy closer to home. Multiethnic crews, including many of African descent, attacked merchant ships around the Caribbean. The infamous privateers of Cartagena led the way.14
The hanging of the pirates of the ship Panda on June 11, 1835, in Boston vividly framed the Amistad case. These were the last executions of pirates ever to take place in the United States. Colombian captain Pedro Gilbert and crew had marauded in the northern Caribbean, plundering the American-owned brig Mexican in 1832 of $20,000 in silver off the coast of Florida before locking the crew inside the vessel, setting it afire, and sailing away. The sailors of the Mexican managed to break out, douse the flames, and eventually return to their home port of Salem, Massachusetts. The Panda was finally captured by a British cruiser off the coast of West Africa, and Gilbert and his crew were then extradited to the United States for trial. The resulting legal drama generated wide newspaper coverage, as well as several pamphlets and books.15
In the late 1830s, “Mitchell the Pirate,” a privateer-turned-pirate who operated out of New Orleans in the Gulf of Mexico, became “notorious” for his robberies by sea. The Connecticut Courant announced that he and his “long, low, black schooner” had “frightened the whole country.” Mitchell was captured in Mobile, Alabama, in 1838, after taking part in a port-city riot. He broke out of jail, was retaken, bound, and sent back toward confinement but “managed to loose himself” and escaped again, only to be shot by one of the guards. He soon died of the wound. He went on to become a legendary figure after his death as rumors swirled about treasure he had buried on Cat Island in the Bahamas. When the US revenue cutter Jefferson was retired from service, it was proudly noted that she had “brought up the ‘long, low, black schooner,’ Mitchell the pirate.” The story of Mitchell entered the realm of fiction in January 1839, in a pirate yarn called “The Chase” written by “Ben Bobstay.”16
Enterprising writers used the publicity surrounding pirates to launch new books. The Lives and Bloody Exploits of the Most Noted Pirates, their Trials and Executions, including correct accounts of the Late Piracies, committed in the West Indies, and the Expedition of Commodore Porter; also those committed on the Brig Mexican, who were Executed at Boston, in 1835 was published in 1836 by Ezra Strong in Hartford, Connecticut, where the hearings on the Amistad rebels would take place three years later. The following year Charles Ellms, based in Boston, published The Pirates’ Own Book; or, Authentic Narratives of the Lives, Exploits, and Executions of the Most Celebrated Sea Robbers, with Historical Sketches of the Joassamee, Spanish, Ladrone, West India, Malay, and Algerine Pirates, which would prove popular among sailors and indeed help to inspire future acts of resistance.17
The connection between the history of piracy and the Amistad rebellion was made explicit in a third volume of the era, Henry K. Brooke’s Book of Pirates, containing Narratives of the Most Remarkable Piracies and Murders, committed on the High Sea: Together with an Account of the Capture of the Amistad, which was published in Philadelphia and New York in 1841. In both subtitle and text, Brooke played up the story of the “black pirates,” placing their seafaring adventure alongside those of Blackbeard, Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and the most successful freebooter of them all, Bartholomew Roberts. In his preface, Brooke mentioned Scott’s The Pirate and quoted Byron’s The Corsair at length. After the Supreme Court ruled that the rebels were “free men,” they entered the popular pirate canon as social bandits: “Pirates, robbers, and murderers, from the days of Robin Hood (1160) to the present time, have been heroes in the imaginations of old and young, rich and poor, the learned and the illiterate.”18
These books placed the recent piracies of the Panda, the Barbary Coast, and the Amistad alongside the pirate narratives of the “Golden Age,” reprinting large parts of the classic account by Captain Charles Johnson, A General History of the Pyrates, originally published in two volumes, in 1724 and 1728. The books featured fantastic stories of money and mayhem that would dominate the popular image of pirates ever after—tales of buried treasure, walking the plank, and hand-to-hand combat on deck. Another theme in all three books, repeated from Johnson, was that piracy represented a “life of liberty,” an escape from the slavish conditions common sailors faced aboard the vessels under the arbitrary and dictatorial power of their captains. The success of the books was reflected in their publishing history: taken together, the three were republished twenty times before 1860. In the first sentence of his preface Charles Ellms wrote that “there are few subjects that interest and excite the curiosity of mankind” more than pirates.19
The “black pirates” of the Amistad proved the point. When reports of their activities appeared in the popular press between August 24 and September 4, 1839, readers up and down the coast and all around the country had a framework in place for viewing the case. The dramatic seizure of a ship at sea and the organization of a new social order, based on liberty, were already widely familiar and deeply popular themes.
The Long, Low, Black Schooner
On September 2, 1839, New York’s Bowery Theatre began its run of The Black Schooner, or the Pirate Slaver Armistead—or The Long, Low, Black Schooner, as it was more commonly called. An advertisement announced “an entire new and deeply interesting Nautical Melo-Drama, in 2 acts, written expressly for this The
atre, by a popular author,” almost certainly Jonas B. Phillips, who was the “house playwright” during the 1830s.20 Based on “the late extraordinary Piracy! Mutiny! & Murder!” aboard the Amistad and the sensational newspaper reports of “black pirates,” the play demonstrated how quickly the news of the rebellion spread, and with what cultural resonance. The title of the play drew on the title of the New York Sun article about the Amistad rebellion published on August 31, 1839, which in turn had drawn on the recent descriptions of Mitchell’s pirate ship. The line from piracy to slave revolt was direct.21
In 1839 the Bowery Theatre was notorious for its rowdy, raucous working-class audiences: youthful “Bowery b’hoys and g’hals” and dandies, as well as sailors, soldiers, journeymen, laborers, apprentices, street urchins, and gang members. Prostitutes plied their trade in the theater’s third tier. The audience cheered, hissed, drank, fought, cracked peanuts, threw eggs, and squirted tobacco juice everywhere. During an especially popular performance, the overflow crowd might sit on the stage amid the actors and props, or they might simply invade it and become part of the performance. The owner and manager of the theater, Thomas Hamblin, employed a pack of constables to prevent riots, which on several occasions exploded anyway. That the Bowery Theatre was associated with a big, violent anti-abolitionist riot in 1834 makes its staging of The Long, Low, Black Schooner all the more remarkable.22
Outlaws of the Atlantic Page 17
