The Amistad Rebellion

by Marcus Rediker

  The United States was a fledgling power, an increasingly massive continental empire in its own right, and one deeply riven by conflicts over the institution of slavery. With a highly productive agricultural hinterland based on family farms and free labor in the north and on plantations and slave labor in the south, and a growing class of industrial workers located primarily in the northeast, the United States was pursuing continental expansion—its “manifest destiny”—and Native American groups, one after another, suffered bloody expropriation. As slavery expanded westward, the abolitionist movement grew amid a logic of polarization between north and south. The arrival of the Amistad rebels off the coast of Long Island in August 1839 was seen in some antislavery quarters as positively providential. It would rile the nation.11

  When the Amistad Africans departed Lomboko in April 1839, they sailed head-on into a huge and historic wave of slave resistance that had been rippling around the Atlantic for a decade. From Toussaint Louverture to David Walker and Nat Turner, rebels throughout the Americas had struggled against a common plight. Resistance to slavery also convulsed the home region of the Amistad rebels in this period, as people captured by King Siaka and settled in “slave towns” rose up and waged a long, bitter, and partially successful struggle for freedom, the Zawo War, between 1825 and 1842. The Amistad rebellion may be seen as an oceanic extension of this struggle in West Africa and a linchpin that connected it to Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, and Virginia—an Atlantic geography of resistance. Taken together with the revolt led by former Virginia slave Madison Washington aboard the American slave ship Creole in November 1841, it capped a formative, decadelong wave of rebellion.12

  Origins of the Amistad Africans

  The slave trade tried to create a faceless, anonymous mass of laborers for the plantations, but the Amistad Africans can be known as individuals—who they were, where they were from, what nations and ethnic groups they were part of, what sorts of work they had done, what kinds of families they had lived in, how old and how tall they were, and finally, how they were enslaved and how they got to Fort Lomboko on the Gallinas Coast. Much can be known about the thirty-six men and children who were still alive in early 1840, considerably less about eight others who can be identified by name, bringing the total to forty-four of the fifty-three Africans who were aboard the schooner during the uprising. Little evidence has survived about the other nine. Everything the rebels did, from the moment of enslavement to the moment of repatriation and afterward, was based to a large extent on their experiences in Africa before capture.13

  The Amistad Africans were multiethnic, or motley: the original fifty-three consisted of people from at least nine different groups. The dominant group were the Mende. Of the thirty-seven for whom a cultural identity can be recovered, at least twenty-five, and as many as twenty-eight, including Fuli and Margru, called themselves Mende. Four—Moru, Burna (the elder), Sessi, and Weluwa—were Gbandi. Bagna, Konoma, and Sa were Kono. Pugnwani was from the Kono chiefdom of Sando. Pie and his son Fuliwulu were Temne, while Gnakwoi was Loma, Beri was Gola, and Tua was Bullom. Burna suggested that among the ten men who died at sea after the rebellion were one Kissi and one from the multiethnic Kondo confederation. This represents most of the major culture groups of southern and eastern Sierra Leone in the first half of the nineteenth century. All except the Bullom were located in the interior, fifty to two hundred fifty miles inland.14

  These groups had different histories and cosmologies, but they shared common cultural characteristics, practices, and beliefs, especially about kinship, family, ancestral spirits, and the afterlife. Most people lived in villages, towns, or cities that consisted of small conical houses, built of mud wattled around posts and sticks, with thatched roofs and compressed earth floors. Many settlements, especially among the Mende, were palisaded against the chronic threat of war. Town walls were twelve to fifteen feet high, three feet thick at the bottom, eighteen inches thick at the top, with sharpened sticks at the apex. Depending on the size of the population, the compound would have had four to six well-guarded gates and might encompass five to forty acres of land.15

  Islam was spreading slowly through the region, largely among members of the upper classes, who converted, usually in superficial ways, grafting a thin layer of the new religion onto a long-held core of traditional spiritual beliefs. Muslim holy men, variously called maribouts, mori-men, or book-men, were growing in number on the Gallinas Coast and in its hinterlands, often as advisers to chiefs and kings such as Siaka. They also played a role in warfare by helping to create charms or amulets, locally called greegree, believed to have protective supernatural power for those going into battle. Arabic writing on a small bit of parchment was a common part of the charm or “medicine.” Cinqué’s second in command on the Amistad, Grabeau, had seen people in his hometown write “from right to left.” The Irish abolitionist Richard Robert Madden noted that one unnamed Amistad African knew how to recite prayers in Arabic.16

  The Amistad Africans came from a region about which people of European descent in 1839 knew almost nothing. Even though Europeans had traded in Sierra Leone since the sixteenth century, and mapped its coastline, few had gone inland and they were therefore especially ignorant of the Mende, whose name first appeared in print only in 1795. “Mende” did not appear on maps of West Africa prior to the arrival of the Amistad in Connecticut. By the 1830s, the people the name referred to—largely “Liberated Africans” taken by the British off captured slave ships and settled mostly around Freetown—had become known by another name: Kossa, or the variations Kosso or Kussoh. This added confusion to ignorance. When an American abolitionist explained that “we had a book in which their country is described as Kossa, they [the Amistad Africans] say, that is not its true name, but it is a term of reproach, a name that has been applied to the Mendi people by the English, and by those who dislike them! This accounts for their never having mentioned the word Kossa to their teachers and friends.” Kossa was indeed a term of contempt, used by the acculturated settlers and recently freed slaves of African descent brought to Sierra Leone by the British. The Amistad Africans initially identified themselves by town and leader, not language group.17

  Those who traveled into or near Mende country in the mid-nineteenth century imagined it to be a vast land, teeming with people. American missionary and abolitionist George Thompson, who lived among the Mende and spoke to both African and European travelers, thought that the land of his hosts “stretches eastward hundreds of miles—for weeks’ journey. This we know, for we have often seen persons from the interior from such distances. Doubtless many millions of people speak the Mendi language, for we do not find it in its purity till we get some 200 miles back from the sea.” A British missionary named A. Menzies later noted that Mende was spoken in twelve districts, only three of which had he been able to visit over an eighty-mile expanse. He too was sure that Mende country was immense. The Amistad Africans themselves told their teacher that Mende was “a very great great country.” It was, in fact, less a country than a large agglomeration of localized societies loosely connected by a common, though regionally variable, language.18

  Where had this numerous and expansive people come from? Some “old Mendians” told missionary John Brooks that “their forefathers came from the east,” making war against western tribes, capturing large towns, settling and building farms along the way, intermarrying and forming alliances “with the people around them.” The elders succinctly described what historians now call the “Mane Invasions,” in which Mende warriors pushed south and west beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century, conquering and settling as they went, and permanently altering the political and cultural geography of southern Sierra Leone. Over the ensuing two centuries, the Mende shared a common language and culture over a wide geographic expanse, but they formed no large political state, had no sense of unity, and shared little sense of common identity. Victorious warriors gathered their families, friends, and soldiers to form farms and village
s on newly conquered lands.19

  Leadership among the Mende was, for the most part, earned rather than inherited. Kings, chiefs, and “big men” tended to be those who combined military and economic acumen and resources in what were predominantly small, decentralized societies. These leaders, usually in concert with a council of elders, ruled patrilocal and patrilineal societies, meaning that young families lived with or near the family of the husband and that the male line defined identity and property transmission. The Mende were also polygynous: a man could take two or more wives at the same time, if he had the necessary wealth. “Polygamy is common among the wealthier classes,” ex-plained the Amistad Africans. “Big men” in the region had “a plurality of wives, and if a king hundreds.” Siaka’s son, King Mana of the Vai, for example, was said to have five hundred wives. The accumulation of wives at the top often created a shortage of women for the poorer males, who found it difficult “to get even one.” Bride-wealth costs could be prohibitive—four, five, or six bullocks and other goods. Wealth in Mende society was reckoned by the number of wives, children, slaves, and cattle a man had. Only thirteen of the Amistad Africans indicated that they had wives, which was a comment on their relative youth and class.20

  Almost all of those held captive aboard the Amistad were commoners, people who worked the land or plied their craft. And the commons of Mende country was rich—decidedly not a place for the “starving savage” of imperial imagination. Wild bush yams and coco in particular made it easy to live with little work. “Blessings are scattered with a lavish hand,” admitted the exasperated Thompson, who sought to discipline his Mende congregants to a Protestant work ethic. The lavishness included nuts, grapes, pineapple, orange trees, and fig trees. Learning to survive in the bush was an essential skill. The Amistad Africans explained to their teacher, “Their soil is very productive, and they are obliged to labor but a small part of the time to procure the comforts of life.”21

  Only four of the Amistad Africans claimed any kind of elite status. Gbatu explained that his father “is a gentleman and does no work.” Fakinna’s father, Bawnge, was a “chief or king” at Dzhopoahu, in Mende country. It was said that Cinqué’s father was a “big man” in his own society. Several others, on the other hand, had been slaves. Yaboi had been captured when his village was surrounded by soldiers in an act of grand pillage and thereafter served a Mende master as a slave for ten years before he was sold to “Luiz, the Spaniard.” Pugnwawni, a Sando man, was enslaved and forced to work for two years cultivating rice before he too was sold to the Spanish traders on the coast. Kimbo’s experience encompassed both ends of the class structure: his father was a gentleman, he said, but after his death, Kinna was enslaved by his king (probably because his father was in debt) and given to a son who resided in Bullom country. He was then sold to another Bullom man, who sold him to a Spaniard at Lomboko.22

  The Mende, like the Temne and many others from the Gallinas area, were traditionally rice farmers. Working the rice fields was a primary experience among the Amistad Africans. Cinqué, Grabeau, Ba, and Bagna described themselves as “planters of rice,” while several others also mentioned the staple crop of the “Grain Coast.” Rice lands were communally owned and labor was cooperative. Men and women tilled the plentiful rice fields as the young and the old fended off the small yellow ricebirds that could destroy a crop. In an upland system of rice production that depended on rainfall, they worked a given piece of land for two or three years, then let it lie fallow for five or six years before returning it to cultivation. Women had especially important roles in threshing rice, in ways that seemed to anthropologist Kenneth Little to have shaped their forms of dance: “There is a very close and striking similarity between the rhythm and movements of the Mende dancer and the rhythm and movements of a woman treading and threshing rice.” They grew rice to eat and to sell, especially as the slave trade expanded and bondsmen had to be fed in the barracoons and on the ships. Some of the Amistad Africans may have been feeding the monster that would eventually devour them.23

  Their communities were economically sophisticated, and several men engaged in more than one occupation. Burna the younger “was a blacksmith in his native village, and made hoes, axes, and knives; he also planted rice.” Sessi, a Gbandi man, was also a blacksmith, a trade he had learned from his brother and one that carried prestige and spiritual power. Grabeau planted rice and worked as a merchant, traveling widely (and learning four regional languages) to sell ivory and camwood. Pie, on the other hand, was a hunter. He had killed five leopards in Temne country, “3 on the land, and 2 in the water,” for which he may have earned royal distinction. One leopard skin he “hung up on his hut, to show that he was a hunter.” His weapon of choice seems to have been the European musket. His hands had been “whitened by wounds received from the bursting of a gun barrel, which he had overloaded when showing his dexterity.”24

  The division of labor was sufficiently developed in Mende and other societies to make iron and cotton manufacture significant parts of their political economy. Iron ore was of especially high quality in the region, and metalworking artisans like Burna the younger and Sessi were many. The tools they made of “true country iron” were valued above European imports. Cotton had been grown throughout the Gallinas region, especially in Mende country, since at least the seventeenth century. One of the Amistad Africans told his teacher, “Cotton make the hills white.” George Thompson, who traveled extensively in Mende country, noted, “Everywhere I went, I observed many of the women spinning, and men weaving their country cloths.” Weavers spun cotton and dyed it red (using camwood), yellow (“Bassel tree”), blue (“a green bush, called the Serang”), and green (camwood and “Bassel tree” together), then wove it into six-inch strips, which were sewn together, primarily to make clothing for personal use and for exchange. “Country cloth,” as it was called, had a ready market, and a broad one. Several of the Amistad Africans were skilled weavers who practiced their craft while they were in jail to produce napkins in the “fringed African style,” which, as skilled artisans, they proudly demonstrated at public meetings after their liberation from jail.25

  The Amistad Africans were, by and large, urban people. Foone had lived in the “large town” of Bumbe, while Gnakwoi hailed from Tuma, “the largest town in the Balu country.” Their home cities, they insisted, were roughly equal in size to New Haven, which in 1840 had a population of roughly twelve thousand, suggesting significant urbanization in Mende country. The urban past of many was illustrated by Fuli’s comment about how man-stealers preyed on city dwellers, and perhaps even more dramatically by the way in which fully a dozen of the Amistad Africans were captured and enslaved while they were “on the road” traveling from one place to another, most often to “buy clothes.” The leaders of the rebellion, Cinqué and Grabeau, were both caught while “traveling in the road.” Burna was captured while “going to the next town,” Kinna while on his way to Kongoli.26

  They were living, clearly, within a vibrant system of regional trade. According to their teacher Sherman Booth, they “traffic principally in rice, clothes, and cattle, and these are the only currency of the country.” There was also a ready trade in domestic items such as salt and fish, both from the coast, along with European goods of various kinds, especially the rum about which Cushoo spoke, as well as guns, gunpowder, textiles, and tools. Over time the main commodity exchanged for the European items was slaves, but there was “by-play” (secondary trade), as one merchant explained, in ivory and camwood, in addition to rice required by the slave trade.27

  The Amistad Africans presented themselves as part of extended, usually multigenerational kin groups that lived under the same roof, as was common among the Mende and their neighbors. Sessi lived with his three brothers, two sisters, wife, and three children. Fabanna was the only person to mention that he had more than one wife; he had two, and one child. It was later discovered by missionaries that Burna, who, in detailing his kin mentioned no wife, actually had seve
n. Fuli lived with his mother, father, five brothers, and, for a time, with his grandmother. Family trumped everything else, in his worldview. When asked if he might wish to stay in the United States after gaining his freedom, he replied, “If America people would give him his hat full of gold, and plenty of houses and lands, to stay in this country, he would not, for gold was not like his father, nor his mother, nor his sister, nor his brother.” Throughout their ordeal the Amistad Africans steadfastly insisted that they wanted to return to “their homes, their birth-place, the land of their fathers.”28

  It is difficult to know precisely how old the Amistad Africans were because they did not reckon age according to the European calendar. A visitor to the jail grouped them into four basic categories, probably based on appearance and whatever information he had been able to gain through interviews. The youngest group was the four children, each of whom (including Margru) was probably around nine years old in 1839. Then came five youths, very likely in their early to mid-teens. Another eleven were said to be “in middle age,” which probably meant late twenties and early thirties. That left the largest group, sixteen, in early adulthood, late teens to mid-twenties. These numbers are consistent with the long-standing preferences of slave traders and American plantation owners, who always wanted to buy men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five for plantation labor such as awaited the captives in Cuba. There was also a tendency, as the slave trade evolved and traders found fewer men in the prime of life, to buy younger men. Because age and experience were highly valued among the Mende and others of the Gallinas Coast, the eleven men of “middle age” exercised considerable authority within the group.29

  The Amistad Africans were modest in size, although fit and athletic. In March 1841, John Pitkin Norton noted in his diary that they were “small men” but proud, unbowed by the experience of slavery. Ndzhagnwawni was the tallest adult at five feet nine inches, while Grabeau, an excellent acrobat, was the shortest at four feet eleven inches. The four children were all roughly four feet three inches tall. The average height of the Amistad men was a shade above five feet four inches at a time when the typical African American man was about the same size, and the American male of European descent was about two inches taller.30