The Amistad Rebellion

by Marcus Rediker

  “The Captured Africans of the Amistad: Teaching Philosophy to Lewis Tappen & Co.”

  The legal hearing was supposed to begin on Tuesday, September 17, but was delayed for two days until federal circuit court judge Smith Thompson arrived to join district court judge Andrew Judson. Once he did, the courtroom filled every day, “crowded to suffocation.” On the final day of the hearing, Monday, September 23, the court was “thronged to overflowing” by eight a.m. Even a correspondent for the proslavery Richmond Enquirer was moved to observe, “A more interested audience—judging from the earnest attention of those present, were never assembled together.”18

  The judges had a complex welter of issues to adjudicate, first and foremost whether the Africans were to be tried as pirates and murderers. Then came salvage claims by Lt. Gedney and other naval officers; salvage claims by the Long Island hunters Henry Green and Peletiah Fordham; claims by Ruiz and Montes for their slave property; claims by the Spanish consul on behalf of the family of Ferrer for the schooner and enslaved cabin boy Antonio; and a request by the federal government that all property, both vessel and slaves, be returned to Spain. On a related issue, abolitionist attorney Theodore Sedgwick argued a habeas corpus brief for the three little girls, to remove them from the case altogether, because they were clearly too young to have been in Cuba long enough to predate the treaty that made the slave trade illegal in 1820.19

  Over four days many gave testimony: Ruiz, Montes, and Meade about the Amistad’s voyage, rebellion, and recapture. Ferry translated as Bau (called “Bahoo” by the court) testified about the three little girls. Roger S. Baldwin spoke for two and half hours on behalf of the Amistad Africans, making what one of his abolitionist colleagues called a “forcible and ingenious argument” in which he ridiculed the salvage claim of Gedney and asked, with a sneer, of United States District Attorney Charles Ingersoll whether “the offices of the executive were to become slave catchers for the Spanish government.”20 Thompson acknowledged that “the feelings of the community are deeply involved” in the case, but he denied the habeas writ for the little girls. He and Andrew Judson of the U.S. District Court dropped the charges of piracy and murder, whereupon the claims of property became the key issue. They responded to questions about the jurisdiction of the courts by ordering an investigation of precisely where the Amistad had been captured by the Washington. They ruled that the case resume in Hartford on November 19, 1839. The Amistad Africans remained in the Hartford jail, which continued to teem with visitors, until September 28, when they were returned to New Haven. What they made of the intense engagement with their cause, in the courtroom and in the jail, is unknown.21

  Warrior Moves

  When the Amistad Africans returned to the New Haven jail, their daily regimen changed. First and perhaps most importantly, because the judges had ruled that they had not broken any laws of the United States, the rationale for keeping Cinqué separate from his comrades was no longer legally valid. He was therefore moved out of the stronghold and into the rooms where the rest of the Amistad Africans were kept. The collective was happily reunited. Second, all of the prisoners were now freer to talk about what had happened in the rebellion, deepening the drama of their story and expanding the public interest in it. Third, the prisoners were now allowed to go outside, under supervision, to New Haven Green for fresh air and exercise.22

  When the Amistad Africans went to the green, they contributed—perhaps wittingly, perhaps not—to the circus atmosphere surrounding their case. They performed acrobatics, gymnastics, and tumbling before the buzzing crowds that assembled to see them. The Reverend Alonzo Lewis, who saw the Amistad Africans through the wonder-filled eyes of a seven-year-old boy, recalled:

  The negroes were splendid specimens of manly strength and vigor. No circus athlete could excel them in “ground and lofty tumbling.” They would stand still, leap into the air, and turn a double (or treble) somersault before reaching the ground. They would extend their arms and leap and revolve along the ground like a wagon-wheel without its tire. There was nothing in the acrobatic line they could not do.23

  The group as a whole was graceful and talented, but two stood (or leapt) out for their extraordinary skills. Cinqué, who was “muscular, athletic, and extremely active,” performed “astonishing feats of agility.” Grabeau, short, burly, and strong, executed moves one observer had “never before seen attempted.” In Hartford he had balanced “himself on his hands,” then “tumbled wheelbarrow fashion, without touching his feet” the entire fifty-yard length of the jail.24

  Given the excitement, debate, and publicity that surrounded the case, these performances became public spectacles. The massive crowds that filed through the jail assembled to watch the bodies fly through the air across the green, then followed them back to their cells for another look. At the moment when flamboyant popular commercial entertainments were on the rise in America—circuses being a prime example—the Amistad Africans made a curious and unexpected discovery: their acrobatic skills could earn them money. This made many people, on both sides of the Amistad debate, profoundly uneasy. Writers for the proslavery New York Morning Herald complained about how the “spectators shell out the sixpences freely” to the performers when watching the tumbling “exhibition.” The abolitionist Emancipator expressed disdain for the displays of “astonishing bodily activity” by saying, “The Marshal who has them in charge, will, we think, do a service to them and to good morals, by forbidding any more exhibitions of the kind.” As it happened, the Marshal made money as the performers dazzled the multitude of visitors, so the show went on.25

  What the good folk on New Haven Green saw as circus-like had a very different genesis and meaning in Africa. The Amistad Africans had learned these “wonderful feats of strength and agility” not in a commercial marketplace of entertainment and leisure activity, but rather as part of their initiation into the Poro Society back in West Africa, where athleticism was linked to the rituals and communal traditions of the warrior. As anthropologist Kenneth Little wrote of the young Mende men engaged in Poro rites of passage, “They practice somersaults and acrobatics, and altogether their experiences produce a strong sense of comradeship.” The higher the level of initiation into the Poro, the higher the level of gymnastic skill one might possess. This is a main reason why the two Africans repeatedly described as the most astonishing acrobats and tumblers—Cinqué and Grabeau—were also the two primary leaders of the rebellion, and the group as a whole, while they were in jail. Probably none of the American spectators who watched them had any idea that they were actually demonstrating their own lofty standing in the Poro Society, the basis of their authority within Mende culture. Probably none of the expropriated warriors who left jail and gathered on New Haven Green to tumble, leap, turn, and somersault understood how they would appear as “showmen” and “circus athletes,” nor how their Poro training would help them to capture the American imagination and make their freedom struggle more popular.26

  People Will Talk

  Even though the first steps had been taken to get the African story of the rebellion into the courts and the public sphere, the search for better means of communication continued. Next to try his hand, or rather hands, in late September 1839, was the pioneer in education for the deaf, the Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. He had heard of the difficulties of communication and wanted to apply his own theories and methods. He spent hours each day for several days in the Hartford jail “conversing with the Africans by signs, and endeavoring to make up a vocabulary of their own language.” Like many other Christian visitors, Gallaudet was deeply interested in the religious ideas of the Amistad Africans, so he tried to discover “whether they had any distinct idea of a Supreme Being.” He asked, by signs, “whether they knew of anything higher than the sun, moon, stars &c.; and several of them answered in succession that they did—that Gooly [their name for God] was above all these things.” He wanted to know if they believed that Gooly would punish people for wrongdoing, such as mu
rder, the idea of which he conveyed by the motion of cutting the throat. As soon as the Amistad Africans read the sign language, “they cast down their eyes and were silent,” refusing to carry on the conversation. Gallaudet soon realized that he had signed his way into their fear of execution in the aftermath of the rebellion. Fortunately, James Ferry came into the jail at that very moment and was able to clear up the misunderstanding.27

  Professor Josiah Gibbs took an avid interest in the case and worked “day and night” to facilitate mutual understanding. He talked with the Amistad Africans in jail, noting the meanings of their words, constructing vocabularies, and trying to understand the nature of their languages. Among the many things he learned was how to count from one to ten in Mende, “1, eta; 2, fili; 3, kiau-wa; 4, naeni.” How did he learn it and from whom?28

  A clue may lie in an encounter that took place in jail on September 6, 1839. A correspondent to the New York Commercial Advertiser observed that “several young gentlemen” visiting the jail were “under the tuition of the little girls, studying the Mandingoe tongue.” Margru, Kagne, and Teme, he noted, were “familiar with mathematics” and were able to “count ten—and to give the name of each numeral.” They taught the gentlemen how to count, not in Mandingo but Mende. They also taught them other words, “the names in their language of such things as they are acquainted with, such as ear [gu-li], mouth [nda], &c.” The correspondent was sure that the agency of the little girls would be long lasting and that the jail would remain a place of learning: “Should these people stay here long some of the Yankees will become adept scholars in the Mandingoe tongue, I have no doubt.”29

  What the little girls taught, Gibbs took to the waterfront of New York. He walked up and down amid the hustle and bustle of the docks, counting loudly from one to ten in Mende until two curious sailors, Charles Pratt and James Covey, approached him and spoke to him in the language he was hoping to hear. One or both may have said, “gna gi-hi-ya Men-di” (I come from Mende). The professor probably did not understand what they said, but since they both also spoke English, he knew immediately that he had found his interpreters. The mostly Mende-speaking Amistad Africans would now be able to deliver a full, detailed version of what happened aboard the “long, low black schooner.”

  Gibbs used the methods of the little girls to link the struggle against slavery inside the New Haven jail to the struggle against slavery on the Atlantic waterfront. Pratt and Covey were both working sailors aboard the British brig of war Buzzard, a vessel in the West African antislavery patrol. Pratt, who was about twenty-five years old and illiterate, was the cook for Captain James Fitzgerald. Born in Sierra Leone, he knew both the Mende and Gbandi languages, having traveled as a child with his father, a merchant, to both lands. He testified that “he knew at Lonboko [sic] on the coast of Africa a man called Petro Blanco who was a Spanish slave trader.” He did not say whether he knew him because his father traded with him or because he, like the Amistad Africans, had passed through the factory as a slave on the way to the New World.30

  James Covey was even better equipped to play a central role in the case. Born of a Kono father and Kissi mother, the twenty-year-old young man grew up in Mende country and could therefore speak several languages. Covey explained, “I was stolen by a black man who stole 10 of us.” He was twelve years old at the time. He was sold, first, to a Bullom merchant, for whom he worked as a slave for three years cultivating rice, then to Pedro Blanco at Gallinas, who placed him on board a Portuguese slave ship bound for Havana, which was soon captured by the British anti-slave-trade patrol. Covey and his shipmates were taken to Freetown, where he was educated by representatives of the Church Missionary Society. He could therefore speak and write English. He had enlisted aboard the Buzzard in November 1838. Captain Fitzgerald apparently held strong antislavery beliefs himself and was happy to lend the young sailor to the abolitionist cause when asked to do so by Lewis Tappan. Covey thus possessed not only a personal background of Kono and Mende language and culture, he had experienced enslavement, Lomboko, the slave ship, and liberation, and he had practical antislavery experience aboard the Buzzard, which was in New York in October 1839 because it had captured a slaver and brought it to the American port for adjudication.31

  The moment Pratt and Covey walked into the jail and began to address the Amistad Africans in Mende, everyone knew that a breakthrough had been made. A gentleman who was present at the time described the entry of Covey during breakfast, which caused Marshal Wilcox to object. One of the prisoners, “finding a countryman who could talk in their own language, took hold of him, and literally dragged him in. Such a scene ensued as you may better conceive than I describe. Breakfast was forgotten; all crowded around the two men, and all talking as fast as possible. The children hugged one another with transport.” Another eyewitness added, “As soon as one of the new comers addressed them in their native tongue, there was an instant explosion of feeling—they leaped and shouted and clapped their hands, and their joy seemed absolutely uncontrollable.” At last the words they would say for themselves could be understood by all.32

  The Story Continued

  The Mende-speaking sailors Pratt and Covey were the strategic link between the African insurrectionists and the American abolitionists. Their translations made possible an immediate escalation of the struggle on two fronts. First, the full, detailed life-and-death histories of the Amistad rebellion and of those who made it could now be told fully. Tappan and his colleagues immediately interviewed all of the Africans, highlighting and publishing the vivid first-person accounts of Grabeau and Kimbo, two dynamic leaders of the group. With each life story collected and published, the Amistad case grew in human stature. The New York Journal of Commerce announced the arrival of the “Narrative of the Africans” on October 10, 1839.33

  A second escalation was more confrontational. Lewis Tappan and attorney Theodore Sedgwick used the translations of Pratt and Covey to bring lawsuits, on behalf of Cinqué and Fuli, then Foone and Kimbo, against José Ruiz and Pedro Montes for “assault and battery, and false imprisonment” during their time aboard the Amistad. On October 17, Tappan accompanied a police officer to 65 Fulton Street in New York to have Ruiz and Montes arrested. The outraged New York Morning Herald reported that Tappan, wearing a “half-benevolent, half-malignant smile,” asked, “How do you do, Mr. Ruiz?” He then turned to the officer and said, “This is your man—take him.” The officer took both men before Judge Inglis of the Court of Common Pleas and Judge Samuel Jones of the Superior Court. The plaintiffs sought damages of $2,000 (almost $50,000 in 2012 dollars) for “the brutal scourging, &c., they received on board the Amistad, by order of Ruiz.”34

  Judge Inglis imposed a hefty bail of $1,000 each on Ruiz and Montes. The wealthy Ruiz claimed that he could not pay it and went to jail—in a bid for public sympathy, the abolitionists thought. Inglis eventually ruled that Montes was not liable in the suit and released him. Rattled by the aggressive tactics of the Africans and the abolitionists, Montes immediately left the city, taking passage on the brig Texas to Neuvitas, Cuba. Inglis eventually reduced Ruiz’s bail to $250, which the young gentleman paid, and left the jail.35

  In affidavits dated October 7, 1839, each of the Africans told a similar story, like those Cinqué and Bau had told Tappan and others in the first interviews a month earlier. The narrative began at home, in freedom in Africa, then progressed through enslavement, the Middle Passage on the Teçora, the barracoons of Havana, and violent mistreatment aboard the Amistad. They all emphasized the grim realities of the slave ship: the use of irons, the short allowance of food and water, the beatings and floggings. Foone and Kimbo alleged that they had been tortured: “powder salt and rum were applied to the wounds” left by the whip and “the marks are still visible.”36

  The lawsuits against Ruiz and Montes provoked a howl of protest from the Richmond Enquirer and the Southern Patriot, published in Charleston, South Carolina. The former condemned this “worse than savage conduct towards
the unfortunate strangers who were brought upon our shores by the mischances of the sea.” The latter decried the fact that Ruiz was cruelly imprisoned in “Egyptian catacombs.” Both expressed the worry of every southern master who traveled northward: “Before long, a citizen from the South will be arrested here and thrown into prison, on the oath of his servant, procured by the abolitionist.” Might his case then be “sent before a prejudiced and fanatical Jury? Is this the point to which these Abolitionists are aiming?” Indeed it was. Tappan wrote of the provocative arrest, “I doubt not it will exasperate the tyrants & their abettors throughout the country.” The abolitionist newspaper, the Pennsylvania Freeman, crowed: the arrest and imprisonment of slaveholders represented a “Great Point Gained.” Tappan had wanted “to test the civil rights of the free born and illegally enslaved Africans in this free community” and to bring more of the African story before the public. He succeeded, but at the cost of great personal vilification. He was accustomed to it, and in any case was sure that God would protect him.37

  Education and Self-Defense

  Pratt and Covey also made possible a new approach to teaching and learning, which was announced in the New York Journal of Commerce on October 9, 1839. Because the interpreters “can communicate very freely with all of them and have acquitted themselves to perfect satisfaction,” giving their labors to the cause “with great cheerfulness,” the abolitionists developed “Plans to Educate the Amistad Africans in English.” Professor George Day, a theologian at Yale, stepped forward to take charge. He planned to use a blackboard and slates, “Gallaudet’s Elementary work for Deaf and Dumb, which seem well adapted to the first lessons,” and several Yale students to assist him. Cinqué assured Day and the other abolitionists that he and his comrades were eager to learn and would apply themselves. They were ready for the book palaver with the white men.38