CHAPTER FOUR
Jail
The Amistad Africans arrived at the New Haven jail on August 30, 1839, the latest link in a transatlantic chain of incarceration. The first link was the slave factory at Lomboko; the second, the lower deck of the Teçora; the third, the barracoons of Havana; the fourth, the hold of the Amistad. Following their successful rebellion, freedom voyage, and capture by the United States Navy, they were forced belowdecks again on the vessel they had seized, and now they had arrived at another place of confinement. The material reality of unfreedom in the Amistad case was Atlantic: a slave factory in Africa, a ship on the Atlantic, a slave pen in Cuba, a schooner in the Caribbean, and a jail on the shores of North America.
The Amistad Africans had exercised their political will in the rebellion and in sailing their vessel from the “slave country” of Cuba to the “free country” of New York and Connecticut, capturing the popular imagination and mobilizing abolitionists along the way. Now that they were incarcerated again, their agency would be circumscribed, its setting reduced from the wide Atlantic to several small rooms in a jail. They were, in essence, political prisoners before the term had been invented. (It would be coined a few years later, in 1860, by Charles Dickens in a short story called “The Italian Prisoner.”) From the moment the sailors of the U.S. brig Washington captured the Amistad rebels off Culloden Point, Cinqué and his comrades expected death. Now, charged by the federal government with piracy and murder, both punishable by execution, they had good reason. The closest African parallel to the latest captivity would have been “prisoner of war,” a pervasive reality in their conflict-riven homelands. Enclosed in a small space and shadowed by death, they would search for new ways to shape their destiny.1
How the African insurrectionists would relate to American abolitionists amid a burst of popular interest would be a key to achieving their ultimate goal of free return to their native lands. The two groups that met in the New Haven jail represented the main wings of the antislavery movement in the United States and around the world. The parties would discover how to communicate, learn from and influence each other, and cooperate toward common ends, legal and political. Trust would develop slowly, as would an antislavery alliance. What happened in jail would shape what happened in the courtroom and the case more broadly. If the abolitionists wanted to make “political capital” of the Amistad case, the Africans would be the labor to make it possible.2
The meeting of slave rebels and abolitionists in jail had a history, and indeed had already produced an idea central to the movement. “Immediatism,” a personal commitment to end slavery immediately, not gradually, and with no compensation to slaveholders, had emerged from an experience of incarceration earlier in the decade. In 1830, William Lloyd Garrison, a fiery young abolitionist born of a Boston sailor, attacked merchant Francis Todd in print for a connection to the illegal slave trade. Todd in turn filed a libel suit and got Garrison locked up in the Baltimore jail. There the budding activist had his first close encounter with slavery: he met captured runaways as well as enslaved Africans awaiting sale. He talked with them. They made the horrors of slavery real to him and deepened his opposition to the “peculiar institution.” Arthur Tappan (brother of Lewis) read the young editor’s defiant account of his jailing and immediately bailed him out. Garrison then toured New England to spread the gospel of immediatism, which he now, thanks to the jail experience, linked to the issue of black equality. The same political issues would be raised anew in the New Haven jail.3
The African Story
On the morning of Tuesday, September 10, Lewis Tappan and a host of associates arrived at the home of Marshal Norris Wilcox for an important meeting. The most crucial member of Tappan’s entourage was James Ferry, the recently discovered Kissi man who spoke Vai and was therefore able to communicate with the Amistad Africans through Bau. Five other men arrived with Tappan and Ferry: two professors from Yale University, Josiah Gibbs, a linguist, and Denison Olmsted, a physicist and astronomer; two Congregationalist ministers, Leonard Bacon of New Haven and Henry G. Ludlow of New York; and Roger S. Baldwin, an eminent attorney from a powerful New Haven political family. All were committed abolitionists. Indeed, the homes of two of them, Tappan and Ludlow, had been trashed by anti-abolition mobs.4
The purpose of the meeting was a formal interview with Cinqué and Bau, who would now, with Ferry’s assistance, begin the all-important process of telling the African story of the Amistad rebellion. Up to this moment, public accounts of the uprising had been based primarily on the testimony of the white Cuban slaveholders José Ruiz and Pedro Montes. Ruiz’s ability to speak English (he had been educated in Connecticut) and Lt. Richard W. Meade’s ability to speak Spanish, coupled with the inability of anyone to understand the many languages of the Africans (until the discovery of Ferry), had assured that only one side of the tale of rebellion was being told at a time when everyone was fascinated by the case and determined to know what had happened.5
When Wilcox brought Cinqué and Bau into the room, probably in manacles and shackles, the prisoners were filled with uncertainty, for they still expected to be executed. They had met Tappan, Gibbs, and Baldwin the previous Sunday evening in the New Haven jail, but they did not know the others, nor did they know why they had been summoned to a strange place for a meeting. Cinqué was “under some apprehension,” but still he moved with confidence and dignity, filling the room with his magnetic presence.6
Speaking through Ferry, Tappan tried to put the men at ease: “We endeavored to impress upon their minds, in the first place, that we were their friends, and that they must speak the truth.” The latter concern produced what may have been the first “God palaver,” or religious discussion, between the Amistad Africans and the American abolitionists. Tappan noted that “both of them appeared to have some idea of a good Spirit, and also of an evil Spirit.” Through Ferry they explained that “if they told lies, the evil Spirit would take them somewhere, they did not know where.” Tappan asked Cinqué if he knew that God would punish him if he did not speak the truth. The Amistad leader answered yes, and “added in his own language—‘me tell no lie; me tell the truth.’” Asked where God lived, “he pointed upward,” no doubt to nods of approval from the onlooking Christians. This would be a “private examination,” but Tappan clearly wanted it to have public credibility and perhaps legal force, hence his emphasis on truthfulness.
Cinqué and Bau then began to unfold their personal histories to the gentlemen through John Ferry. A master storyteller in the Mende tradition, Cinqué warmed to the occasion and relished the opportunity. Sensing that the persons in the room were “friendly to him,” he began to tell “his story” in an animated manner. He relayed the details of his life and the calamity that had brought him to New Haven. Occasionally he “would shake hands with the interpreter, and laugh very heartily,” building into his narrative human connection and humor.7
Cinqué and Bau began with the free lives they led in southern Sierra Leone, establishing their identities first and foremost through their families, which was the traditional way in their homelands. Cinqué “left his father, mother, wife and three children” in Mani, where his father was “a leading man.” Two of his children were “a little larger than the African girls who are prisoners, and the other about as large,” which would have put him in his early thirties. He was kidnapped and marched to Genduma, the capital of King Siaka’s slaving empire, about fifteen miles from the coast. Siaka in turn sold him to “a great man” named Fulekower, who sold him to the Spaniards at Lomboko.8
Bau—“sober, intelligent looking, and rather slightly built”—left a wife and three children in the Mende country. Four men captured him as he was on his way to the rice fields, tied his left hand to his neck, and marched him for ten long days to Lomboko, where he probably met Cinqué and many others who would be his shipmates. Both men had the skills of warriors: “They had been in battles, in their own country, using muskets.”9
From t
heir arrival at Lomboko, Cinqué and Bau shared a common history of incarceration, shipment, and resistance. Brought to the coast, they “were chained when put on board the slaver, which was a brig. It was crowded with slaves—200 men, 300 women, and ‘plenty of children.’” At this point Cinqué “sat down on the floor, walked about on his knees, and bent his head beneath the imaginary deck above, all to dramatize the cramped conditions he and his comrades experienced on the lower deck.” Their sufferings on the eight-week Middle Passage were great; many of their shipmates died.
Cinqué and Bau were put ashore in Havana “in the night.” They were “ironed hand and foot” and “chained together at the waist and by the neck.” Ten days later they boarded the Amistad in the evening and sailed around midnight. Once at sea, their irons were taken off, although the two seamen kept watch with muskets. Some of the Africans slept below, the rest on deck. Captain Ferrer, they emphasized, was “very cruel,” beating them routinely and keeping them “almost starved.” They decided that they “would not take it, to use their own expression, and therefore turned to and fought for it.” Once they had captured the vessel, they told the Spaniards to take them to Sierra Leone, but, according to Cinqué, “They made fools of us.” Because Cinqué officially faced execution for murder, he and Bau discreetly stated that “they were down in the hold, and did not see the fight.” So much for the spirits and their punishments.
Despite Ferry’s translation, confusion remained. Tappan and his colleagues continued to think that Cinqué and most of the others were Mandingo, from Senegambia, rather than Mende, and that a few were Congo rather than Kono. Tappan understood that the quality of communication left something to be desired and therefore, at the end of his published account of the interviews, he made an appeal to “native Africans in this city, or elsewhere in this country, who were born near the sources of the river Niger, or in Mandingo, or who can converse readily in the Susoo, Kissi, Mandingo, or Gallinas dialects” to call on the Amistad Committee at 143 Nassau Street in New York. He also made a request for books and pamphlets that might illuminate the history and cultures of that part of Africa from which the prisoners came.
The African story of the rebellion thus emerged, through John Ferry, in an interaction that featured abolitionist questions and prisoner answers, shaped by native traditions of storytelling. The narrative of the uprising began with freedom in Africa, where families were torn asunder, the storytellers violently enslaved and forced into a gruesome Middle Passage, incarcerated in the barracoons of Havana, and mistreated on the Amistad, where they finally launched a rebellion in order to achieve their ultimate objective: to go home to the freedom where their tale began. The Africans offered a narrative of freedom to slavery to freedom—a coherent, compelling story that would captivate people throughout the United States and beyond.
Romance Denied
As the Amistad Africans spent their second week in jail, and as they began to tell their story to the abolitionists who would represent them in court, the public uproar over the case and their presence in New Haven, continued unabated. Those who visited the prisoners included a cross-section of mid-Atlantic and New England society. In addition to Tappan, Gibbs, Olmsted, Bacon, Ludlow, and Baldwin, other visiting luminaries in coming months would include the Reverend George E. Day (divinity) and Benjamin Silliman (chemistry and natural history), both from Yale. Day and several others—Robert C. Learned and Benjamin Griswold of the Theological Seminary, S. W. Magill, and, of special importance, Sherman Booth, a senior at Yale University—instructed the captives in jail. The Irish abolitionist/British diplomat Richard Robert Madden came all the way from Havana, speaking to several of the Amistad Africans in Arabic and estimating the ages of several others. Former president, current member of Congress, and future attorney for the Amistad Africans John Quincy Adams made what he described as a pleasurable visit, remarking afterwards that the “clothing, bedding &c of the Africans are not what they ought to be.” Even United States District Court judge Andrew Judson visited the Amistad Africans in jail, twice. Phrenologists such as L. N. Fowler were busy studying and measuring the heads of the Africans, to deduce their temperaments and characters. Artists entered the place of confinement with pencils and brushes to sketch and paint portraits. Among the throngs in jail a newspaper correspondent saw “the finest looking women there that ever God made.” Some of these women were determined abolitionists.10
As the New York Sun and other newspapers reported favorably, even romantically, on the Amistad Africans and their struggles, James Gordon Bennett and his colleagues at the proslavery New York Morning Herald took a dissenting view. They howled in protest against the sympathetic depictions of Cinqué and his mates and declared the Sun to be “the New York penny nigger paper.” During a time of polarization on the issue of slavery, the correspondents for the Morning Herald angrily sought “to destroy the romance which has been thrown around [Cinqué’s] character.” They roundly denied that he had the dignified, graceful bearing of Othello. Rather, he was a “blubber-lipped, sullen looking negro, not half as intelligent or striking in appearance as every third black you meet on the docks of New York.” The entire lot of the Amistad Africans represented nothing so much as “hopeless stupidity and beastly degradation”—they were likened to baboons. Back in Africa, they had been “slothful and thievish,” and were “sunk in a state of ignorance, debasement and barbarism, of which no adequate conception can be formed.” They were in no way equal to whites. They were “a distinct and totally different race, and the God of nature never intended that they should live together in any other relation than that of master and slave.”11
The writers for the Morning Herald considered the depictions of the Africans in the New York Sun to be not only dead wrong, but dangerously egalitarian and subversive. In response they spewed racist invective against the Amistad Africans and viciously lampooned those who visited and supported them while they were in jail: “Parsons go to preach to them, philosophers to experiment on them, professors to pick up a knowledge of their language, phrenologists to feel their heads, and young ladies to look and laugh at them.” These depictions, more extreme than anything that appeared in Southern newspapers, were the textual equivalent of the demeaning “bobalition” prints of the day.12
To Hartford
When Wilcox the marshal and Pendleton the jailer arrived at the New Haven jail Saturday morning, September 14, to take the Amistad Africans to Hartford for their second legal hearing, the little girls, Kagne, Teme, and Margru, began to weep bitterly. They did not want go. Neither did the men, one of whom hid in a remote room and could not be discovered for some time. Others tried to escape the jail altogether. Cinqué listened to the upheaval from his isolated cell, for the plan was to take this dangerous prisoner separately, two days later. Burna cocked an ear from the sick room, with Weluwa, who lay near death. They were too ill to travel. None of the others seemed to know where they were going, nor why. Having been in New Haven barely two weeks and assuming that a change could only be for the worse, perhaps their own execution, they were “filled with awful forebodings.”13
The authorities eventually got everyone into a canal boat, bound for Farmington, an “abolition town,” where farmer Roderick Stanley saw them, as he noted in his journal: “38 Afrecans passed here on their way to Hartford to be tryed on an Indightment for Piracy and Murder, they were lately from Afreca—3 small girls, the rest males.” Word had already begun to circulate in abolitionist circles that they were “lately from Afreca” and hence had been illegally enslaved, a positive sign, but unknown to the anxious travelers. In Farmington they shifted to wagons for the final ten miles to Connecticut’s capital city, their mood brightening along the way.14
They found in Hartford the same tumultuous, agitated scene they had come to know in New Haven: the city was suddenly “crowded with strangers,” convinced advocates of abolition, equally determined opponents, and those who had no opinion on the great debate of the times. All had heard of t
he dramatic rebellion and wanted to get a look at the prisoners. Into the jail strode “many distinguished members of the bar” who had come from all over Connecticut and as far away as New York and Boston. The U.S. Hotel and various other public houses were “full to overflowing” with “politicians, lawyers, judges, sheriffs, reporters, editors, &c., all visiting Hartford to be present at this trial.” Indeed, the most commonly heard question around town at the time was, “Which way is the jail?” Correspondents both hostile and sympathetic to the Amistad Africans agreed: the “rush to prison has been immense”; “not less than four thousand have visited them so far this week.”15
The appalled editors of the New York Morning Herald not only sent a correspondent to Hartford, they commissioned artist Peter Quaint to depict what was going on inside Hartford jail. The correspondent described what the engraving illustrated:
On the left hand is Lewis Tappan, with his white hat, attended by another abolitionist, looking at Cinguez kissing a pretty young girl, who was handed up to him by her sympathetic mother. Near the mother is the celebrated phrenologist, Mr. Pierce, who has been forming a vocabulary of their language, hereunto annexed. In the centre of the prison group is Garrah, turning a somerset before the Africans and white company—and below, in the foreground, are two negroes scratching themselves, for it is well known that many of them have the itch. Away to the right is the fashionable, pious, learned, and gay people of Connecticut, precisely as they appeared during these amusing scenes in Hartford prison, receiving lectures and instructions in African philosophy and civilization.16
The interest of women in the case (and in the abolitionist movement more broadly) was especially disturbing to the writers of the Morning Herald: theirs was “a species of hallucination.” The Amistad affair had taken on “all the romance of an eastern fairy tale, and they [women] consider the black fellows as worthy of as much honor as the colored Moorish Knights of old.” The staunchest and most vocal opponents of the Amistad Africans and their abolitionist allies fanned the flaming fears of amalgamation, but their anger and agitation suggested that the heroic images were winning the day.17
The Amistad Rebellion Page 14
