7. Robert Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict Between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).
8. The articulation of slavery and industrialism has been called the “second slavery.” See Dale Tomich, “The Wealth of Empire: Francisco Arrangoy Parreno, Political Economy, and the Second Slavery in Cuba,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003): 4–28.
9. Raphael Samuel, “Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in Mid-Victorian Britain,” History Workshop 3 (1977): 6–72; Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1968).
10. Alexander Jones, Cuba in 1851; Containing Authentic Statistics of the Population, Agriculture, and Commerce of the Island…(New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1851); Dale Tomich, “Sugar and Slavery in an Age of Global Transformation,” in his Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830–1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 14–32.
11. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), chap. 20.
12. Bronislaw Novak, “The Slave Rebellion in Sierra Leone, 1785–1796,” Hemispheres 3 (1986): 151–69; Ismail Rashid, “‘A Devotion to the Idea of Liberty at any Price’: Rebellion and Antislavery in the Upper Guinea Coast in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Sylviane A. Diouf, ed., Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 132–51; Ismail Rashid, “Escape, Revolt, and Marronage in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Sierra Leone Hinterland,” Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 34 (2000): 656–83.
13. Much valuable biographical evidence was gathered by Connecticut engraver John Warner Barber, who visited the Amistad Africans in the New Haven jail numerous times in early 1840, and through Mende sailor and interpreter James Covey talked with them at length about their lives in Africa.
14. “The Captive Africans,” Emancipator, October 17, 1839. Teacher Sherman Booth noted in August 1841 that four were Temne, four were Kono, one was Gola, and that four were “from the Bullom country,” although three of the final group, Kinna, Fuli, and Kwong, were Mende who had lived in Bullom country. The Mende, by Booth’s calculation, would have been approximately twenty-six in number. See “The Liberated Mendians,” PF, August 18, 1841. Since there were two Amistad Africans by the name of Burna, subsequent references to the elder will be simply “Burna,” the other as “Burna the younger.”
15. The Palm Land, 429. See also the astute remarks on the Mende and other peoples of Sierra Leone in Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), chap. 5.
16. Jones, 177; Barber, 8. Two abolitionists who later worked closely with the Amistad Africans agreed that the “Mohammedan influence” among them had not been great. See A. F. Williams to Lewis Tappan, Farmington, March 25, 1841, and Notes by Professor [Josiah] Gibbs, July 1841, ARC.
17. “The Mendi People,” Emancipator, September 23, 1841; Governor William Fergusson to Lewis Tappan, 1842, published in North American and Daily Advertiser, June 15, 1842. Adam Jones remarks that information about Mende country before 1870 is “very limited”; Jones, 18, 85. The Temne were known because the British had bought land from one of their kings for the settlement at Freetown. The Bullom were closer to the coast and hence had more contact with European and American traders. Little was known of the Gbandi, Kono, Loma, and Gola peoples. Richard Robert Madden included “Menda Country” on the map that accompanied his “Report on Sierra Leone, 1841,” Colonial Office (CO) 267/172, NA. Based on his conversations, Barber added “Mendi” to the map he engraved for A History of the Amistad Captives (1840). Philip Misevich has found a reference to the “Cursa” (Kossa) dating from 1713 (personal communication to the author, Janary 12, 2012).
18. The Palm Land, 415; A. Menzies, “Exploratory Expedition to the Mende Country,” Church Missionary Intelligencer: A Monthly Journal of Missionary Information (London: Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday, 1864), vol. XV, 115; “The Liberated Mendians,” PF, August 18, 1841.
19. Thompson in Africa, 414–15; Robert Clarke, Sierra Leone: A Description of the Manners and Customs of the Liberated Africans; with Observations upon the Natural History of the Colony, and a Notice of the Native Tribes (London: James Ridgway, 1843), 163.
20. Forbes, 62–63; The Palm Land, 246; Clarke, Sierra Leone, 44; “Liberated Mendians,” PF, August 18, 1841. According to Jones, a “king” was a regional overlord, a “chief” was the political head of a town or larger unit, and a “big man” was one who possessed prestige, wealth, allies, and relatives/dependents, often on the village level. See Jones, 13.
21. The Palm Land, 202–14; “Liberated Mendians,” PF, August 18, 1841.
22. Barber, 8–14.
23. Anthony J. Gittins, Mende Religion: Aspects of Belief and Thought in Sierra Leone (Nettetal: Steyler Verlag, 1987), 166; Thompson in Africa, 300; The Palm Land, 197; Kenneth Little, The Mende of Sierra Leone: A West African People in Transition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951, rev. ed. 1967), 70–80; Jones, 62. The relationship between the slave trade and rice production is explored well by James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
24. Rankin, vol. II, 241–43.
25. The Palm Land, 129; Thompson in Africa, 212; Forbes, 58; Laing, 201–04.
26. The information about urban origins was provided in May 1841 by Sherman Booth, who had worked for many months as the primary teacher of the Amistad Africans and who had therefore spent more time in conversation with them than anyone: “They lived in cities, most of which were of about the size of New Haven; adjacent to their cities, they cultivated farms, grew cotton, manufactured cloth, &c.” See the Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier, May 29, 1841. The size of many Mende towns and cities is unknown because of the lack of surviving evidence, but travelers frequently mention concentrations of several thousand people. George Thompson was convinced, based on local conversations, that much larger cities, with tens of thousands of people, existed further east, distant from the reach of the slave trade, which had depopulated coastal areas (The Palm Land, 428–29). Yet the cities were probably not as large as suggested here. This may have been because the Amistad Africans did not realize how large New Haven was, or they may have exaggerated the size of their own cities. It should also be noted that abolitionists wanted to present the Amistad Africans as denizens of advanced, “civilized” societies in Africa.
27. Testimony of Francis Bacon, New Haven Palladium, n.d. (January 1840), copy in the Baldwin Family Papers. See also “The Liberated Mendians,” PF, August 18, 1841.
28. Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier, May 29, 1841; ARCJ, June 1, 1841.
29. Richard Robert Madden estimated the ages of eight of the Amistad Africans, but seems to have suggested that they were younger than they actually were. For comparative ages of a sample of Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone, see P.E.H. Hair, “The Enslavement of Koelle’s Informants,” Journal of African History 6 (1965): 194–95. Kale was described as being eleven years old in 1841, after he had learned to speak English well, hence the estimate of nine in 1839.
30. Norton Papers, Diaries, vol. III: entry for Thursday, March 18, 1841, box no. 3, folder 18, MS 367.
31. The Palm Land, 282; Emancipator, September 23, 1841. On the connections among the Mende, Loma, and Gbandi languages within the “South-Western Mande” language group, see Valentin Vydrine, “Note on Current Use of Manding and Mande Ethnonyms and Linguonyms,” available at http://mandelang.kunstkamera.ru/. On the localized nature of political power in the region surrounding Freetown, see Philip Misevich, “The Sierra Leone Hint
erland and the Provisioning of Early Freetown, 1792–1803,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 9 (2008).
32. Kenneth L. Little, “The Role of the Secret Society in Cultural Specialization,” American Anthropologist, n.s., 51 (1949): 202; F.W.H. Migeod, “The Poro Society: The Building of the Poro House and Making of the Image,” Man 16 (1916): 102. An important study of how secret societies moved from the Cross River region of present-day Nigeria to Cuba is Ivor L. Miller, Voice of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009).
33. Jones, 19; Little, The Mende of Sierra Leone, 8–9, 97–99, Forbes, 60; Barber, 13; Hannah Moore to William Harned, October 12, 1852, ARC. On the relationship between the degree of scarification and Poro standing, see Kenneth. L. Little, “The Political Function of the Poro, part I,” Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute 35 (1965): 359, 360.
34. Jones, 179; Laing, 99. For a valuable exploration of the Atlantic migration of cultures, including spiritual beliefs, see Walter Hawthorne, From Africa to Brazil: Culture, Identity, and an Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–1830 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
35. W. T. Harris and Harry Sawyerr, The Springs of Mende Belief: A Discussion of the Influence of the Belief in the Supernatural Among the Mende (Freetown: University of Sierra Leone Press, 1968), 111; Little, The Mende of Sierra Leone, 184.
36. The Palm Land, 418; Laing, 93–95; Jones, 48, 187. It should be noted that some Poro Societies were also known to have been involved in slave trading.
37. Jones, 179; Forbes, 61; Thompson in Africa, 418–19.
38. Forbes, 60; Rankin, vol. II, 82; Arthur Abraham, Mende Government and Politics under Colonial Rule: A Historical Study of Political Change in Sierra Leone, 1890–1937 (Freetown: Sierra Leone University Press, 1978), 159–60.
39. Rankin, vol. I, 259–60; Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle, African Native Literature (Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck–U. Verlagsantalt, 1968. First published 1854 by Church Missionary Society, London), vii; The Palm Land, 38; Laing, 206–7.
40. Little, The Mende of Sierra Leone, 197; Donald Cosentino, Defiant Maids and Stubborn Farmers: Tradition and Invention in Mende Story Performance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Marion Kilson, Royal Antelope and Spider: West African Mende Tales (Cambridge, MA: Press of the Langdon Associates, 1976).
41. Thompson in Africa, 61; Koelle, African Native Literature, xiii.
42. Thompson in Africa, 169, 194, 244; The Palm Land, 237; Forbes, 66; Barber, 8.
43. Abraham, Mende Government and Politics, 15–16; Thompson in Africa, 127.
44. Thompson in Africa, 105, 108.
45. Clarke, Sierra Leone, 163; Thompson in Africa, 225–26, 237; Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1962), 246.
46. Abraham, Mende Government and Politics, 7; S. W. Koelle, Outlines of a Grammar of the Vei Language, Together with a Vei–English Vocabulary and an Account of the Discovery and Nature of the Vei Mode of Syllabic Writing (Westmead, UK: Gregg International Publishers, 1968. First published 1854 by Church Missionary House, London), iii; The Palm Land, 293; Adam Jones, “Who Were the Vai?” Journal of African History 22 (1981): 159.
47. Abraham, Mende Government and Politics, 3; Jones, 65; Little, The Mende of Sierra Leone, 84, 176.
48. “The Mendians,” Vermont Chronicle, June 8, 1842; Barber, 10. See also “Goterah, African Warrior,” ARCJ 15 (1839): 290–94. On the geopolitical context of Goterah’s mercenary war making, see Svend Holsoe, “A Study of Relations Between Settlers and Indigenous Peoples in Western Liberia, 1821–1847,” African Historical Studies 4 (1971): 331–62.
49. ARCJ, 18 (1842): 300; Thompson in Africa, 308. Harris and Sawyerr wrote: “Ambuscades were naturally only successful in dark nights, as moonlight would always expose attackers to the view of the defenders” (The Springs of Mende Belief, 119), while Forbes added, Africans “never fight in the day time, and seldom in the night unless the opposite party is asleep in a town” (102). See also Rankin, vol. II, 237. On the traditions of warfare in the region, including fighting at night, see A. P. Kup, A History of Sierra Leone, 1400–1787 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 167–70, and John Thornton, Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, 2000), chap. 2.
50. Abraham, Mende Government and Politics, 20; Jones, 19; Rankin, vol. II, 76; Barber, 10.
51. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1972), 141–43; Rankin, vol. II, 74, 224; Laing, 217. For subsequent history, see John J. Grace, “Slavery and Emancipation Among the Mende in Sierra Leone, 1896–1928,” in Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 415–31.
52. The world market sprouted other local roots when Susu traders, armed with bows and arrows poisoned with snake venom, manned their fearsome war canoes in the 1850s to capture slaves along the Boom and Kittam rivers. They carried them north to work on their own plantations, where they grew peanuts for export to England, France, and the United States; The Palm Land, 186, 187. The presence of tobacco in the region may have predated the slave trade.
53. Jones, 89–91. See also Laing, 127, and the articles by Rashid in note 12 above. On the early history of the slave trade see Toby Green, The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
54. Jones, 21, 24–25, 37, 43–44; Testimony of Bacon, New Haven Palladium; Rankin, vol. II, 74; Adam Jones, “White Roots: Written and Oral Testimony on the ‘First’ Mr. Rogers,” History in Africa 10 (1983): 151–62. Other important slave-trading families in the region included the Caulkers, Clevelands, Coles, and Tuckers. It is difficult to square the figures available through the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database about slave shipments from Sierra Leone during the 1830s with the evidence provided by people who visited the region at the time, including the British naval officers whose job it was to gauge the nefarious commerce. The former suggests exports of about 2,000 slaves per year, while the latter almost all agreed that the number was closer to 10,000. Sierra Leone’s governor, Sir John Jeremie, reported that the slave traders on the Gallinas Coast had shipped “upwards of thirteen thousand” during the year 1840 (“Destruction of African Slave Factories,” Bury and Norwich Post, April 14, 1841). Much of the discrepancy can no doubt be accounted for by the illegal nature of the trade: the slavers, such as the Teçora, made it their business to create no records, hence there is no documentation about many of them to include in the database.
55. Madden, Report on Sierra Leone, 25; Forbes, v–vi; Theophilus Conneau, A Slaver’s Logbook, or 20 Years’ Residence in Africa, ed. Mabel M. Smythe (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1976), chap. 15. On Conneau, see Svend E. Holsoe, “Theodore Canot at Cape Mount, 1841–1847,” Liberian Studies Journal 4 (1972): 163–81; Bruce L. Mouser, “Théophilus Conneau: The Saga of a Tale,” History in Africa 6 (1979): 97–107; and Adam Jones, “Théophile Conneau at Galinhas and New Sestos, 1836–1841: A Comparison of the Sources,” History in Africa 8 (1981): 89–105. On the anti-slave-trade squadron, see Marika Sherwood, After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade After 1807 (London: I. B. Taurus, 2007), 114–20 and Allen M. Howard, “Nineteenth-century Coastal Slave Trading and the British Campaign in Sierra Leone,” Slavery and Abolition 27 (2006): 23–49.
56. Rankin, vol. II, 78, 80; The Palm Land, 245; Barber, 12–15; Moore to Harned, October 12, 1852, ARC. The experiences of enslavement among the Amistad Africans were in many ways similar to those of 179 Africans interviewed by linguist Sigismund Koelle in Sierra Leone around 1850, 34 percent of whom had been captured in war, 30 percent kidnapped, and the remaining 36 percent enslaved for crime, debt, or other reasons. See Hair, “The Enslavement of Koelle’s Informants,” 193–203.
57. A. F. Williams to Lewis Tappan, Farmington, September 23, 18
41, and S. W. Booth to Lewis Tappan, Farmington, October 4, 1841, ARC.
58. Barber, 10.
59. Cinqué “had never seen a white man until he was sold a slave into their hands.” See Amos Townsend Jr. to Lewis Tappan, New Haven, November 13, 1839, ARC.
60. Jones, 1, 5–6; Rankin, vol. II, 206; Clarke, Sierra Leone, 7–8, 18, 20; The Palm Land, 122, 188–89, 266; Forbes, 124–25; Laing, 78; “Sketches of the Colony of Sierra Leone and Its Inhabitants, by Robert Clarke, Surgeon, late of Her Majesty’s Colonial Service; formerly Member of the Executive and Legislative Councils of the Gold Coast; Acting Judicial Assessor; Corresponding Member of the Ethnological Society, etc. With pictorial Illustrations, from original drawings by Mrs. Clarke,” Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London 2 (1863): 322–23.
61. Forbes, 13–15; Clarke, “Sketches of the Colony of Sierra Leone,” 329; Madden, Report on Sierra Leone, 4, 8. Important work on the Liberated Africans includes Rosanne Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa”: Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007); Philip R. Misevich, “On the Frontier of ‘Freedom’: Abolition and the Transformation of Atlantic Commerce in Southern Sierra Leone, 1790s to 1860s,” Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 2009; Sharla M. Fett, “Middle Passages and Forced Migrations: Liberated Africans in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Camps and Ships,” Slavery and Abolition 31 (2010): 75–98; and Robert Burroughs, “Eyes on the Prize: Journeys in Slave Ships Taken as Prizes by the Royal Navy,” Slavery and Abolition 31 (2010): 99–115.
62. Conneau described the examination process as he learned it from John Ormond, alias “Mongo John,” at Bangalang, in 1826. See Conneau, A Slaver’s Logbook, 71–72.
63. Moore to Harned, October 12, 1852, ARC.
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