The Amistad Rebellion

by Marcus Rediker

  Other Plans

  So unsure were the Africans about the outcome of the legal hearing, and so convinced were the abolitionists that President Van Buren wanted to resolve the issue by returning the Amistad Africans to deadly Havana, the anti-slavery coalition strategized about what to do in case the verdict should go against them. Prior to the early hearings it was by no means certain that the judges would rule in favor of the rebels. In fact, it seemed more likely that they would not.

  The USS Grampus, a schooner like the Amistad, sailed into New Haven harbor under mysterious circumstances on Friday, January 8, the very day on which Cinqué, Grabeau, and Fuli testified before the district court about their enslavement, Middle Passage, and rebellion. The vessel was to many a “strange and sudden apparition,” as John Quincy Adams later described it. Why would sailors be dispatched from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to a New England port in the dead of winter? When a local pilot asked an officer of the Grampus about the vessel’s destination, the man said he did not know: “She had sealed orders.” Well supplied “with provision, &c. for twenty months,” that is, a long voyage, the Grampus provoked heated speculation. One rumor had it that the vessel was meant to join the small American squadron fighting the slave trade in West Africa, and that the Amistad Africans might be picked up in New Haven and taken to their native lands. Yet most abolitionists were convinced that the purpose of the vessel was the opposite: Van Buren and Secretary of State John Forsyth, a Georgia slaveholder, had sent the Grampus to New Haven to seize the Amistad Africans as soon as the court ruled that they were indeed “merchandize.” In fact, the sealed orders instructed Captain John S. Paine to take them to Cuba immediately, before an appeal could be made, and to restore them to their so-called owners, Ruiz and Montes, thereby honoring the demands of Spain. Abolitionists howled that the United States government was now acting as slave catcher and trader: the goal intended for the Amistad Africans was to “hurry them to death or to a bondage that shall end only with death!”62

  The activists did not stand idly by. Fearing a negative verdict, they began to organize their own vessel that would carry the Amistad Africans, not to a living hell or actual death in Cuba, but rather in the other direction—to freedom in Canada. The work likely involved African American sailors based in Connecticut ports, from which David Ruggles had emerged. The plot remained a closely guarded secret for many years, although Lewis Tappan alluded to it in a letter he published in the Emancipator soon after the Grampus arrived in port: if Captain Paine and his crew expected to secure the Africans and deliver them to the Spanish authorities, they would be in for a surprise. He wrote, “as the quaker lady said to the agent of a fugitive slave, ‘thy prey hath escaped thee.’”63

  Evidence appeared years later to confirm that the rebels and the abolitionists had planned a jailbreak if the legal ruling had gone against them. The obituary of Nathaniel Jocelyn (brother of Simeon, member of the Amistad Committee) disclosed in 1881 that the artist was part of a group of abolitionists who plotted, in service of “higher law,” to break the Africans “out of jail by force” and put them aboard a vessel “in which they were to sail away.” Simeon Eben Baldwin, the son of Roger S. Baldwin, also noted, in 1886, that the Amistad Committee, “had another vessel here [New Haven] ready to receive the Africans in case of an adverse decision, and run them off to some more friendly shore.” The Reverend Alonzo Lewis likewise confirmed the existence of a direct-action plot, in a reminiscence of the Amistad case published in 1907. He wrote, “It will do no harm, at this late day, to reveal a secret which has been carefully guarded, viz., that there was a plot to rescue the captives if the case went against them.” Lewis learned of the intended action from the Reverend Day, who was deeply involved in the struggle. Lewis himself was only seven years old in 1840, so he must have learned of the plot years later. The abolitionists may have hoped that the provocative act would cause a war with Spain that might lead to the “liberation of Cuba” and the ending of slavery in one of its strongholds.64

  Many abolitionists had long since concluded that the Amistad Africans had not committed any crime and therefore should not be held as “criminals in loathsome dungeons.” As early as October 1839 a writer using the pen name “Common Sense” appealed to the memory of both the American and French revolutions in asking, ominously, “Is a Connecticut jail to be converted into a Bastille, and shall its doors not fly open?” Many involved in the case, from Jocelyn to African-American abolitionist Robert Purvis, had worked on the Underground Railroad; experienced direct-actionists, inspired by the rebellion, gravitated to the case. Determined not to let the Amistad Africans be hanged as pirates, murderers, or slave rebels, nor even to see them slave in Cuba, making sugar with blood, antislavery activists exhibited their antinomian disdain for unjust laws. One direct action aboard a small vessel in the Caribbean had helped to inspire another, made ready on the New Haven waterfront. Such militance pointed toward the future.65

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Mendi”

  The victory in Connecticut was quickly negated, or at least stalemated, by a national politics in which slaveholders held great influence. They were not known to abolitionists as the “Slave Power” for nothing. Martin Van Buren supported the Spanish crown, and at bottom, both Cuban and southern masters, by appealing the rulings Judson and Thompson had made on January 23. The verdict declaring the Amistad Africans free was cruelly reversed when the federal government appealed it to the Supreme Court. The Africans would remain incarcerated as the case ran its long, slow course through the American legal system.

  The news of the appeal was crushing and incomprehensible to the rebels. “[T]hey seemed much grieved,” noted someone who conveyed the news to them and tried to explain it. “Their hopes had been raised; their hearts were set upon Africa; and it is a sore disappointment to them to have their hopes deferred, with the possibility of their never being realized.” The visitor tried to console them, saying that the delay would give them more time to study, which would ultimately be to their benefit. They replied that the gallows still looming over their heads discouraged their efforts: “They say it will be of no use for them to try to learn, if in a few months they are to be hanged.”1

  Abolitionists were outraged by the appeal, quick to see and denounce “executive interference” in the judicial process. The Emancipator wondered of the president: “Why should this democratic functionary be so aggrieved at a decision in favor of liberty?” The Oberlin Evangelist stated, “The Africans cannot to this day understand the justice of his proceedings, nor do we think white men can understand it as just.” It was time for opponents of slavery to “buckle their armor again in the defence of righteousness.” Would the public continue to support the cause, was the question.2

  Slowly the Africans pulled out of their despair, resetting their sights on their long-term goal of going home. They were able to use their undiminished popularity to strengthen their alliance with the abolitionists and to participate in activities that would keep their case before the public eye. The doors of the jail continued to revolve as people from all walks of life paid their shilling to visit, some to propose projects of their own that would connect the prisoners to the American people in one way or another. Artists such as John Warner Barber, Sidney Moulthrop, and Amasa Hewins went into the jail to create images of the rebels through engraving, wax-casting, and painting. Over the long term of incarceration, the most faithful and purposeful visitors to the jail were the abolitionists, who came to teach and proselytize. The Africans and the American antislavery reformers in particular would develop a complex, sometimes vexed relationship—what might be called a working misunderstanding. It would allow both sides to navigate a broad cultural divide, work together, build trust, and maintain independence of perspective and objective. During the next year in jail, the Africans would emerge as a new cultural and political entity: the “Mendi People.”3

  Teaching and Learning

  The agendas of the rebels and their allies
converged on the issue of education. At the heart of the jailhouse encounter lay a reciprocal, mutually influential process: Africans and Americans, neither of whom knew much about their counterparts, learned from and about each other—about America, Africa, politics, culture, and a host of other subjects. Both sought the practical knowledge of how to understand and work with the other in the common project of abolishing slavery. The “book palaver” was central to the jail experience for both groups.

  The reciprocity had its limits. The abolitionists and the Amistad Africans approached education in jail with different assumptions and goals. The former saw it as a civilizing process, a means to turn pagan savages into sober, orderly, disciplined, virtuous Christians. In January 1840 Lewis Tappan reported with pleasure, “most of their savage habits have been relinquished, and habits of civilized life acquired.” A writer for the newspaper Farmer’s Cabinet agreed: “They are also acquiring ideas of order and moral duty, and gradually conforming to the habits of civilized life; readily assembling at stated hours, when summoned by a bell; recognizing the Sabbath, and giving regular attendance upon their religious exercises, &c.”4

  The Africans took a less imperial view. They were uninterested in reforming—or being reformed. They did not try to make their abolitionist visitors into new people, nor could they have done so, in any case. They were more or less content to try to understand them and work with them toward common goals of survival and freedom, but bafflement sometimes prevailed. Translator James Covey related a story about the reception of time-discipline among the Africans. In the New Haven jail on a Sunday morning, he and Cinqué heard a church bell ring. The leader asked (no doubt in Mende, which Covey later translated into pidgin English), “What for bell ring?” Covey explained, “When ’Meriky people go pray to God, they ring bell.” Cinqué was perplexed. He said, “These people be fool. When want to pray to God, what for ring bell?” It was a real question for someone unaccustomed to social life organized by the clock. Missionary George Thompson noted that the Mende in Africa were both fascinated and puzzled by his watch, which they called “the living man,” probably because it seemed to give instructions to the one who wore it. Cinqué and his comrades would have to come to terms with “the living man” and much else, no matter how strange it all may have seemed.5

  The brute geographic and political facts of being incarcerated and subjected to an alien legal process demanded certain responses from the Africans. With simple eloquence Cinqué took his abolitionist teachers to the heart of the matter, stressing the equality and the political necessity of the jailhouse encounter: “If you were in my country and could not talk with any body, you would want to learn our language; I want to learn yours.” He assured the abolitionists that his comrades “will apply themselves to learning.” From beginning to end, education in jail entailed a struggle to communicate. Even after translators had been found, teacher Benjamin Griswold had “great difficulties in making them [the Amistad Africans] understand his instructions.”6

  Everyone agreed that the captives approached their studies with abiding enthusiasm and commitment. As Covey put it in a letter to Lewis Tappan, “Our African friends love to read.” They had a special interest in geography, as expropriated and displaced people might. They expressed curiosity about the “countries beside Mendi and America,” even as these two no doubt loomed in equal importance above all others. Other interests included almanacs, grammar, and the Bible. Covey requested a “big dictionary” for himself and his fellow Africans, in order to “look out hard words.” Visitors to the jail saw many men “intently engaged with books and slates.” Their teacher summarized their attitude to learning: “Their whole souls are absorbed in their studies, to which they give their undivided attention. They are the most attentive pupils I have ever saw and never get tired of learning. They are very inquisitive, and manifest great joy when they gain a new idea.—They are affectionate, grateful, and warm in their attachment.”7

  The commitment of the Amistad Africans to education was more than a matter of good attitude. Studying became something they could do among and for themselves, for the purpose of emancipation. They realized early on that learning, and demonstrating what they had learned, would be a key to cementing the alliance with the abolitionists, who had organized the jailhouse as a school. The Africans then made the project their own, as they made clear by their actions on numerous occasions. They used their own money, given as gifts by visitors to the jail or earned through acrobatics, to buy Bibles and other books. One stormy morning when their teacher did not show up for class, Cinqué gathered the group for self-instruction and study. Commitment to education eventually enabled the Amistad Africans to contribute to the legal strategy of their case and to express in English their own political ideas.8

  Informal teaching and learning in the jail began immediately. The first steps were the teaching and learning of primary numbers, one through ten, and the use of body parts to create vocabulary—eyes, nose, ears, mouth—as the little girls taught the “gentlemen” soon after they arrived in the New Haven jail. The presence of Yale professors added a systematic component to the process of learning. Josiah Gibbs took down Kissi, Vai, and Mende words to create vocabularies he published in leading scientific journals. George Day brought images to teach vocabulary, so that the Amistad Africans might “pronounce the name upon seeing either the picture or the printed word.” Some of the pictures reflected the abolitionist imagination of exotic Africa—wild beasts such as lions, tigers, and elephants, which the rebels sometimes recognized as creatures of their native lands. Other images included tools and implements. By these means they were “acquiring a good stock of English words.” The learning proceeded so quickly that Professor Day soon ran out of pictures.9

  Initial instruction in reading and writing began in October 1839, and became more intensive and systematic after the January 1840 court hearings. Teacher Sherman Booth eventually organized his students into three groups of ten to twelve each, based on what he perceived as ability. The top class (which included Cinqué, Kinna, and Fuli) read the Gospels, concentrating on the Book of Luke; studied a spelling book; and did exercises in arithmetic. The youthful Kale was the star pupil of this group, which was, by late 1840, “using pen and paper, and expressing their own thoughts, in our language, quite intelligibly.” At the same time a second class studied spelling and had covered seventy pages of Lowell’s “first class book.” A third class, still working on the alphabet and the discipline of writing letters and words, were showing “some weariness” in their studies. Abolitionist teachers were especially pleased when books and slates replaced “native games,” as they apparently did after a few months of study.10

  Because most abolitionists were religious, and some, like Lewis Tappan, were evangelical, devotional services were a significant part of jailhouse education. Ministers as well as laymen preached and commented on a huge array of Biblical passages and subjects. Tappan wrote a fellow abolitionist: “Every Sabbath divine service has been held at the prison, and the Africans had the prayers and instructions interpreted to them by Covey. They behaved quite orderly and apparently took much intent at the services.” Professor Gibbs gave an example of Covey’s translation of a prayer:

  O Ge-waw wa, bi-a-bi yan-din-go; bi-a-bi ha-ni gbe-le ba-te-ni; bi-a-bi fu-li ba-te-ni; bi-a-bi nga-li ba-te-ni; bi-a-bi tûm-bi-le-gai ba-te-ni; bi-a-bi ngi-yi ba-te-ni; ke ndzha wa; bi-a-bi dzha-te ba-te-ni, ke ngu-li, ke gnwaw-ni, ke nwu-a, ke nûn-ga wu-lo-a.

  One of the abolitionists wrote, “We have preaching, or a palaver, tomorrow, with the Africans, on the subject of the religion of the white men.” It was one of many.11

  Eventually the Amistad Africans learned to speak the language of Christianity, which is evident in each and every surviving letter they wrote. In writing a letter to Miss Juliana Chamberlain, who had contributed $5 to the Amistad Committee fund, Kale managed, in a single paragraph, to rehearse his entire recent study of Christianity. He mentioned the love of “Great God,
” who “sent his beloved son into the world to save sinners who were lost” and “sent the Bible into the world to save us from going down to hell.” He noted that Jesus had “made the sick well he made the lame walk he made the dumb speak and deaf hear.” He expressed the hope that God would help and bless the benevolent Miss Chamberlain, give her a “new Soul,” and “take her up to Heaven when she dies.” He concluded, “All Mendi people thank you for your kindness and hope to meet you in heaven,” but he was quick to add to his godliness a political demand: “I want you to pray to the Great God make us free and go our home and see our friends in African Country.”12

  It is difficult to know what the Amistad Africans heard, found significant, and remembered from the “God palavers,” but one passage of the Bible seems to have had a special resonance: Psalm 124:7, which the rebels themselves used to explain their ordeal of enslavement and emancipation. Cinqué, Kale, and Kinna wrote, “We read in this Holy Book, ‘If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when men rose up against us, then they had swallowed us up quick, when their wrath was kindled up against us. Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us a prey to their teeth. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowler; the snare is broken and we are escaped. Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made Heaven and Earth.’” As people whose skill at catching birds on New Haven Green amazed onlookers, they drew a metaphor directly from their own experience. The “men who rose up against us” were the slave catchers and traders. Slavery itself was likened to being eaten alive, preserving memory of the threat of cannibalism through a Biblical parable.13