The Abolitionist Movement in 1839
Another person who came aboard the Washington and the Amistad on August 27, 1839, was not a journalist, a lawyer, or a law enforcer, but a rank-and-file political activist, Dwight Janes. He was a grocer who knew the docks and the coming and going of ships. He went aboard the vessels, where he saw Ruiz, Montes, and the sickly Africans. He quickly gathered the essential facts: the name of the ship and its slaveholders; the variety and value of the cargo; and what had happened in the rebellion. He talked to Ruiz and Antonio, from whom he garnered important evidence. He learned that the Africans had not been in Havana long enough to become subjects of Spain and that “none of them can speak any thing but their native language.” He understood that finding Africans in America who could communicate with those of the Amistad would be crucial to the case. He realized that the ship’s papers had been fabricated. Perhaps most importantly, he knew that Spain’s slave trade was now illegal and argued, presciently, that “the blacks had a perfect right to get their liberty by killing the crew and taking possession of the vessel.” This was a natural opportunity for a national campaign. Humanity and justice, thought Janes, would move many to defend these “Citizens of Africa.”14
Janes wrote a flurry of urgent letters in which he conveyed both critical information and strategic perspective to leading abolitionists, soliciting their involvement in a case he immediately recognized as extremely important. He wrote to Joshua Leavitt, a minister and editor of the Emancipator, Lewis Tappan, a wealthy silk merchant and New York businessman, and Roger S. Baldwin, a distinguished Connecticut attorney. In a short time, when time was of the essence, Janes anticipated the entire abolitionist strategy for the case and quickly activated the movement. He embodied and expressed the strength of abolitionism from below.15
Janes and his antislavery comrades flew into action, along the waterfront and up and down the eastern seaboard, causing a correspondent for the New York Morning Herald to write of the Amistad captives on September 2, “the Abolitionists are moving heaven and earth to effect their release; several members of the society have left town for Connecticut to see them, to employ the most able counsel in their behalf, and to contest every point inch by inch; and, judging from appearances, we should say that there are general preparations making in all quarters for a grand explosion in this matter of slavery and the slave trade.” The powder would be mixed in jail.16
Janes was part of a movement that was growing dramatically in the 1830s, around the world and in the United States, in opposition to a dynamic American and Atlantic slave system. The global movement was strongest in Great Britain, where it already boasted two major victories: the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the abolition of slavery in all British colonies in two stages, in 1834 and 1838. At the same time, a national polarization on the issue of slavery was taking shape in the United States, pitting firebrands in the South, who increasingly saw slavery as a “positive good,” against abolitionists who saw it as pure evil. Janes saw the main chance presented by the Amistad rebellion and he seized it.17
The two primary antislavery organizations of the day were the New England Anti-Slavery Society, formed in 1831, and the larger national group, the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833. Inspired by the moral perfectionism of the Second Great Awakening and based largely in northern churches, both were to some extent interracial and committed to nonviolent “moral suasion”—seeking to convince the nation that slavery was a sin and that it must, for moral reasons, be abolished. In 1837 the American Anti-Slavery Society had 145 local societies in Massachusetts, 274 in New York, and 213 in Ohio. In 1838 it had 1,350 affiliates and a membership of 250,000. In a nation of seventeen million people, the abolitionists were modest in number, but they were committed, outspoken, and growing.18
By 1839 abolitionist societies had created a strong, durable network of communication and material support. They had their own newspapers and journals such as the Emancipator (New York), the Liberator (Boston), and the Pennsylvania Freeman (Philadelphia), which they published, along with other antislavery pamphlets and books, using their own printing presses. In 1835 they had organized a postal campaign in which they mailed a huge volume of antislavery literature to a hostile, defensive South. They organized massive petition campaigns, delivering hundreds of thousands of signatures opposing slavery to Congress and prompting southern politicians to effect a “gag rule” in 1836 to evade them. The abolitionists had their own lecture circuits, their own means of publicity and fund-raising, their own lawyers to employ on behalf of the Amistad prisoners.19
The abolitionist movement crossed lines of race and class, and its full variety was reflected by those who gravitated to the Amistad case. They were black and white, male and female, middle-class and working-class, enslaved and free. They included businessmen such as Tappan, whose home had been trashed by an anti-abolition mob in 1834. They included ministers such as Simeon Jocelyn, who preached to an interracial congregation in New Haven; “enlightened” figures such as Professor Josiah Gibbs, a scholar of oriental languages at Yale University; artisan-artists such as John Warner Barber and Nathaniel Jocelyn; black sailors such as James Covey; Lydia Maria Child, an eminent writer and feminist; and former slaves such as James Pennington, the runaway “fugitive blacksmith” who became a leading black minister in Hartford, and Isabella Baumfree, who would become known as Sojourner Truth, a leading figure in the women’s movement who asked, “Ain’t I a Woman?”20
Slave rebels themselves played a crucial part in the abolitionist movement, on the Amistad and elsewhere. Their actions throughout the Western Hemisphere shaped the battle against slavery on plantations, in cities, and even in rural areas where no slavery existed. The Amistad struggle took its place alongside contemporaneous slave conspiracies, revolts, and mass escapes in Mobile, Alabama; Lafayette and St. Martinsdale, Louisiana; Anne Arundel and Charles County, Maryland; and Purrysburg, South Carolina. Slave incendiaries were said to be active in Charleston, New Orleans, Mobile, and Natchez, Mississippi. Many of the uprisings took place in sugar-producing regions in the United States, Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil. Meanwhile, the fires of resistance raged in Florida, where many self-emancipated slaves fought in the Second Seminole War.21
Running away from slavery was an ever-brighter flashpoint in the struggle. Indeed, the year 1839 was the very moment when the reality and the name of the Underground Railroad came into existence. Most people of African descent who escaped slavery, it should be noted, did so on their own, without the assistance of organized middle-class abolitionists. A large portion of them got away by sea, as stowaways on ships, with the assistance of proletarian dockworkers and sailors. The Underground Railroad for the movement of former bondspeople remained important, as sources of hope among the enslaved and as provocations to southern slaveholders, who railed fiercely against it. Three main routes had begun to evolve by 1839: from Missouri to Illinois; from Kentucky to Cincinnati and Oberlin College in Ohio; and from Virginia and points south to Washington, DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. All three went on to Canada by various routes.22
Crucial to the early formation of the Underground Railroad was another antislavery organization called the Vigilance Committee, formed in New York in 1835, Philadelphia in 1837, Boston in 1841, and in numerous other places thereafter. Given to direct action, and made up to a large extent of African American men such as former sailor David Ruggles, leader of the New York group, the committees worked, often along the waterfront, to assist free people of color who had been kidnapped or “blackbirded” into slavery as well as runaways trying to escape it. Vigilance Committees tended to attract militant abolitionists, sometimes called “ultras,” who believed that uncompromising direct action would bring slavery to an end. This group was small but growing in importance in 1839.
The waterfront had long been an important and dangerous zone of conspiracy and subversion. Throughout the age of revolution, sailors, slaves, and freedpeople played key r
oles in uprisings in America, Haiti, and on ships of the Atlantic where mutiny exploded on a massive scale in the 1790s. Lawmakers continued to fear the circulation of subversion on the waterfront in the 1820s, passing the infamous Negro Seamen Acts beginning in 1822, following former sailor Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy in Charleston, South Carolina. All black seamen coming into South Carolina ports would be taken off their vessels and held in prison, at the captain’s expense, until departure. This was a policy of revolutionary quarantine: those “whose organization of mind, habits, and associations, render them peculiarly calculated to disturb the peace and tranquility of the State,” would be treated “in the same manner as…those afflicted with infectious diseases.” Over the next twenty years Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana would follow South Carolina’s lead. In 1829, waterfront slopseller and political thinker David Walker gave slaveholders more to worry about when he published his famous Appeal…to the Coloured Citizens of the World and then sewed it into the clothing of sailors, black and white, who in turn smuggled the incendiary document into Southern ports. Walker appealed to the minds, habits, and associations of enslaved and oppressed people all around the Atlantic. It was no accident that abolitionist Dwight Janes met the insurrectionists of the Amistad aboard ships anchored on the waterfront of New London, making a connection that would grow into a powerful alliance.23
The New Haven Jail
On the orders of Judge Judson, Marshal Wilcox arranged for transportation of the Amistad Africans from New London to New Haven and its jail of six large rooms. Because several arrived in poor physical health, suffering from the “white flux” (dysentery) and prolonged dehydration, Wilcox and his assistant, local jailer Stanton Pendleton, set up one room as a hospital under the supervision of Dr. Edward Hooker. A visitor noted that several of the Africans were almost as thin as Calvin Edson, the curious “living skeleton” who had made a circus-like tour some years earlier. Several of the Amistad veterans would not recover: Faquorna, Fa, Tua, Weluwa, Kapeli, Yammoni, Kaba, and one or two others whose names are unknown, died between late August and mid-December 1839. Several of them were buried in New Haven’s Grove Street Cemetery, located at the corner of Grove and Prospect streets.24
Special arrangements were also made for the four children—Kale, Margru, Kagne, and Teme—and for Cinqué. The four youths were given a room to themselves, until Pendleton removed the three girls and essentially made them domestic servants in his own household. Fear of Cinqué’s militant influence caused the jailer to isolate him from his comrades: he was placed in a special secure cell, the “strong hold,” with “several savage looking fellows, black and white, who are in jail on various charges.” The jailer worried that these desperate prisoners would try to escape, so the door to that part of the jail was rarely opened and visitors were not permitted inside. Those who wanted to speak with Cinqué had to do so through the “aperture of the door.” The remaining Amistad Africans, a majority, were confined together in three rooms, in “gangs.” During the day, they had access “to a very large airy front chamber,” where they could sit by an open window. One of their first priorities would be to engage the jailer in a struggle for the “open air.”25
Even though the Amistad Africans had much experience of incarceration by the time they arrived in the New Haven jail, they must have found the place disorienting and nervewracking. No one understood their languages and they still had no clear idea of where they were, nor of what the future held. The threat of execution hung heavily over their heads. Cinqué “drew his hand across his throat, as his room mates said he had done frequently before, and asked whether the people here intended to kill him.” Decapitation was a common fate for a captured warrior in his native society.26
To make matters worse, the jail shared features of the slave ship beyond the brute fact of incarceration. Not the least of these was the pungent smell of bondage. A visitor wrote that “the rooms occupied by the Africans are infected with the odor peculiar to jails that are badly ventilated, or not ventilated at all.” The stench was “almost insupportable.” A main reason why were the “necessary tubs,” which were public and located “in the eating and sleeping rooms.” The four children were jammed into a single bed, the men slept on straw, amid vermin, and the food was poor in quality.27
Among the curiosities of their new life in the New Haven jail were the clothes the Amistad Africans were expected to wear. Accustomed to dressing in a single, light piece of cotton “country made” African cloth, which they wrapped around the body and hung over the shoulder, they were now presented with something different, though not entirely unfamiliar, for they had found, and some, like Cinqué, had worn, European-style clothing on board the Amistad. Still, when the jailer brought striped cotton shirts and trousers called “hard times” (prison “fatigues”), woolen stockings, and caps, they had to laugh at the preposterous clothing of white people. According to Lewis Tappan, “The prisoners eyed the clothes some time, and laughed a good deal among themselves before they put them on.” Cinqué in particular did not like them; he thought them too tight and confining. Meanwhile Margru, Kagne, and Teme turned some of their clothing to a purpose all their own: they “made the little shawls that were given them into turbans.” The thing the entire group may have appreciated more than anything else about their attire in the New Haven jail was that it did not include manacles, shackles, or neck-rings.28
During the confinement of the Amistad Africans, the New Haven jail became an extraordinary meetinghouse for all kinds of people, ranging from African slaves of many nationalities to rowdy young boys, to sailors from the waterfront, to respectable middle-class abolitionists, to the rich and high-born. Many came because of the publicity that surrounded the case and to see the insurrectionists who had, with high drama, made a successful revolution, turning the wooden world of the Amistad upside down. Others came to indulge their curiosity about Africa and Africans. Some appeared at the jail because they supported the abolitionist movement, others because they opposed it. The jail—a much more open institution in 1839 than it would be later—was “filled with men, women, and children of all ages, colors, and sizes.”29
No matter why they came in the first place, most of the visitors, claimed Lewis Tappan, who had spent much time in the jail and was therefore in a position to know, “express much sympathy with these much abused strangers, and utter sentiments of strong indignation against those who have torn them from their native land, or meditated their enslavement.” Many of those who filed through the jail brought gifts. Some came with food, such as confections and “dainty cakes”; some brought the always welcome “baccar” (tobacco); and others gave “coppers,” money, or “trinkets” to the prisoners.30
In early September 1839 the Amistad case was the talk of the town, if not the entire nation. It was “the only topic touched upon in conversation, in the streets, the bar room, the ball room, the boudoir, the bed room, the kitchen, the parlor, and the pulpit.” People came in huge numbers, jamming the New Haven jail to capacity and beyond. On August 31, the first full day the Amistad Africans spent in the New Haven jail, two thousand people paid their “York shilling” (twelve and a half cents) to visit. In their first four days, jailer Pendleton took in $500 ($12,000 in 2012 dollars), paid by some four thousand visitors who had come from “New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, and all parts of Connecticut.” The prisoners, reported one newspaper, represented “a golden harvest to the Jailor.” Meantime, another two thousand people were visiting the Amistad in New London. Some came out of carnival curiosity, others out of a commitment to antislavery ideals.31
The correspondents of the proslavery New York Morning Herald beheld the crowded, tumultuous, enthusiastic scenes in jail and they were appalled. One of them wrote:
These blacks have created a greater excitement in Connecticut than any event that has occurred there since the close of the last century. Every kind of engine is set in motion to create a feeling of sympathy and an exc
itement in their favor; the parsons preach about them, the men talk about them, the ladies give tea parties and discuss their chivalry, heroism, sufferings, thews and sinews, over their souchong; pious young women get up in prayer meetings and pray for them; scouts are sent round the country to hunt up all the negroes that can speak any kind of African dialect; interpreters by dozens arrive daily at Hartford; grammars and spelling books and primers without number, in all sorts of unknown tongues, are sought for and secured.
The jail had become, in their view, a circus, a world turned upside down, a place the Amistad Africans truly enjoyed: “The ingress and egress of visitors furnish abundance of opportunities for them to escape, but so far from wishing to do so, it would be difficult to drive them out of jail.” The place of confinement had become “a sort of fool’s paradise, filled with gaping curiosity, silly men, infatuated women, and happy negroes.”32
What did the Amistad Africans make of all this? They must have experienced no small amount of sheer bewilderment, as suggested by the New York Morning Herald: “The poor blacks themselves are utterly astonished at the prodigious sensation they have created.” Beneath it all lay a deep, nagging fear, as suggested when several of the prisoners, “under much apprehension,” asked a sympathetic visitor “if they were to have their throats cut, passing their hands across their necks when they made the inquiry.” Getting a negative answer, one of the Africans then asked, “If they don’t mean to kill us…why are so many people here to see us?”33
The Amistad Rebellion Page 12
