32. “Captured Africans,” NYMH, October 4, 1839; “The Africans,” NYMH, September 13, 1839.
33. “Captured Africans,” NYMH, October 4, 1839; NYS, September 20, 1839.
34. William H. Townsend, Sketches of the Amistad captives, [ca. 1839–1840]. GEN MSS 335, Beneicke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Yale University.
35. Family tradition had it that Townsend produced his pencil sketches around the time of one of the several trials of the Amistad captives: September 1839, November 1839, January 1840, or March 1841. The sketch of Faquorna suggests an earlier date. See Charles Allen Dinsmore, “Interesting Sketches of the Amistad Captives,” Yale University Library Gazette 9 (1935): 51–55.
36. David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 149; Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 159. Phillips was apparently employed by the Bowery Theatre in May 1838, when he wrote a statement to be read to “an overflowing house” when the theatre reopened after a fire. Another suggestive fact is that Inez, the only female character in the play, was played by a “Mrs. Phillips.”
37. The playbill is in the Harvard Theatre Collection. See also “Bowery Theatre,” NYCA, September 4, 1839; “The Long, Low Black Schooner,” NYS, August 31, 1839. I am especially indebted in this section to Bruce A. McConachie, “‘The Theatre of the Mob’: Apocalyptic Melodrama and Preindustrial Riots in Antebellum New York,” in McConachie and Daniel Friedman, eds., Theatre for Working-class Audiences in the United States, 1830–1980 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 17–46; the same author’s Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992); and Reed, Rogue Performances. See also Shane White, Stories of Freedom in Black New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
38. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986), 89, 90, 93–95; McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 122; Reed, Rogue Performances, 9, 11, 15; Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 84; Peter George Buckley, “To the Opera House: Society and Culture in New York City, 1820–1860,” Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984, 181–82.
39. Philadelphia Inquirer, September, 2, 1839. The New York Mirror (“The Theatre,” September 14, 1839) listed the play as one of the successes of the season. The Bowery Theatre was known for pioneering longer runs. See McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 120. The estimated revenue comes from a well-researched but unfootnoted article by Perry Walton, “The Mysterious Case of the Long, Low Black Schooner,” New England Quarterly 6 (1933): 360. Walton also notes that the play was performed at the Park Theatre, the National Theatre, and Niblo’s Garden as well as the Bowery. I have not been able to confirm the revenue or the other venues in primary sources. The last newspaper mention of the play was in the New Orleans Bee, September 17, 1839.
40. “Bowery Theatre,” NYCA, September 4, 1839; “Theatricals—The Seven Ages,” NYMH, February 28, 1840; Bank, Theatre Culture, 72.
41. The name Zemba apparently came from a story, “Tales of the Niger: Zemba and Zorayde,” published in The Court Magazine, containing Original papers by Distinguished Writers (London: Bull and Churton, 1833) 3 (July–December 1833): 71–74, republished in the Philadelphia Inquirer on January 2, 1838. Zemba is Muslim guide to a British traveler, who kindly saves him from a despotic African king, allowing him to marry his beloved Zorayde.
42. The use of the hold of the schooner as a setting made the play unusual. Heather Nathans has noted that the Middle Passage “virtually disappeared” from the American stage at midcentury as the slave trade was rethought as something internal to the nation’s borders. See her Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 129–30.
43. Peter Reed writes that a staged execution was not likely and that a more common plot outcome at the time would have been a reprieve for the hero. Personal communication to the author, December 14, 2010.
44. Rosemarie K. Bank notes that The Gladiator was “considered too rebellious for black ears,” hence free people of color were banned from the audience, but the ban may not have been enforced. See her Theatre Culture, 96. Three-fingered Jack was called a “daring freebooter” in the Supplement to the Royal Gazette, January 27–Feb 3, 1781, 79, cited in Diana Paton, “The Afterlives of Three-Fingered Jack,” in Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson, eds., Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the Abolition Act of 1807 (London: Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), 44. See also McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 70–71, 142, 143, and Reed, Rogue Performances, 21, 37, 100, 122, 159–160. For the pirate plays of the era, see George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1928), vol. IV (1834–1843), 30, 144, 149, 151, 163, 313, 315, 373, 390, 481, 488. Other plays included Pirates of the Panda, or the Plunder of the Mexican (1834–1835, based on current events); The Pirate Boy (1837); Pirates of the Hurlgate (1839); and The Pirates Signal, or the Bridge of Death (1840).
45. Reed, Rogue Performances, 5, 13 (quotation), 43; McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 97–100.
46. “Private Examination,” NYCA, September 13, 1839; “The Long, Low Black Schooner,” NYS, August 31, 1839.
47. Reed, Rogue Performances, 10, 175–85; Jonas B. Phillips, Jack Sheppard, or the Life of a Robber! Melodrama in Three Acts founded on Ainsworth’s Novel (written and performed in 1839). On Sheppard, see Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1991), chap. 1.
48. “Incarcerated Captives,” NYCA, September 6, 1839.
49. Dwight P. Janes to Rev. Joshua Leavitt, New London, August 30, 1839, ARC; “Incarcerated Captives,” NYCA, September 6, 1839. For other efforts to find interpreters, see Seth Staples to Roger Baldwin, September 4, 1839, and Ellis Gray Loring to Roger Baldwin, September 19, 1839, Baldwin Family Papers.
50. “To the Committee” NYJC, September 10, 1839; “Captured Africans,” NYMH, October 4, 1839.
51. “To the Committee,” NYJC, September 10, 1839. A controversy surrounded the issue of whether Antonio could translate for the Amistad Africans, although in practical terms the question was moot as he was segregated from them after September 10, 1839. Around this time, Ruiz insisted that “the cabin boy knows nothing of the language” of the Africans and could not translate. Yet there is abundant evidence to contradict that claim, some of it provided by Ruiz himself. In an earlier account of the rebellion he had explained that the Africans would have killed Antonio, but for the fact that “he acted as interpreter between us, as he understood both languages.” The pro-Ruiz Morning Herald also reported that “no one but Antonio can understand” the Amistad Africans. During his court testimony in November 1839, Burna looked to Antonio every time he did not understand a question. The New Bedford Mercury also reported that “Antonio is the only one able to communicate with them,” although “very imperfectly.” On top of all this is the practical evidence of his abilities to translate provided by Ruiz and Montes in their account of the Amistad’s voyage after the rebellion. See “The Case of the Captured Negroes,” NYMH, September 9, 1839; “Important from Washington—The Captured Africans,” NYMH, September 10, 1839: and “Herald on Amistad Trial,” NYMH, November 21, 1839; “The Long, Low Black Schooner,” NYS, August 31, 1839; “The African Captives,” New Bedford Mercury, September 13, 1839; NLG, October 16, 1839.
52. “Funds Appeal,” NYCA, September 5, 1839.
Chapter Four: Jail
1. “The Long, Low Black Schooner,” NYS, August 31, 1839; Charles Dickens, “The Italian Prisoner,” no. XVII in The Uncommercial Traveller from All the Year Round (October 13, 1860): 13–17. The definition of “political prisoner” used here is someone incarcerated for a technically illegal act that a substantial part of the populati
on considered ethically justified.
2. “Education of the Africans—Doubtful whether they are Negroes Personal History—Sketch of their Country, &c.,” NYMH, November 12, 1839. This chapter builds on the work of James L. Huston, “The Experiential Basis of the Northern Antislavery Impulse,” Journal of Southern History 56 (1990): 609–40. See also the excellent essay by Susan Eva O’Donovan, “Universities of Social and Political Change: Slaves in Jail in Antebellum America,” in Michele Lise Tartar and Richard Bell, eds., Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America (Athens, GA : University of Georgia Press , 2012), 124–46.
3. Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), chap. 5.
4. Tappan had written the day before that attorney Seth Staples was to attend the September 10 interview along with Baldwin and the others, but he was not listed among those who did. See Tappan’s letter, “To the Committee on Behalf of the African Prisoners,” NYJC, September 10, 1839. Bau (or Bahoo) was incorrectly identified as “Bowle” in the first accounts of the interview, according to a correspondent of the NYS. See “The Amistad Case,” NYS, September 23, 1839.
5. “The Captured Africans of the Amistad,” NYMH, October 4, 1839. Antonio also gave testimony in the hearing conducted by Judge Andrew Judson aboard the U.S. brig Washington. His remarks were published in “The Long, Low Black Schooner,” NYS, August 31, 1839.
6. “Private Examination of Cinquez,” NYCA, September 13, 1839. This paragraph and the seven following are based on this article and another, published as “To the Committee,” in the NYJC, September 10, 1839, both by Lewis Tappan. Shorter summaries of the interviews also appeared in the NLG, September 11, 1839, and the NYS, September 12, 1839.
7. Arthur Abraham, “Sengbe Pieh: A Neglected Hero?” Journal of the Historical Society of Sierra Leone 2 (1978): 22–30.
8. “To the Committee,” NYJC, September 10, 1839; “The Slaves,” NLG, September 11, 1839; “Private Examination,” NYCA, September 13, 1839.
9. John Warner Barber later recorded that Bau had lived “near a large river named Wo-wa,” probably the Moa. See Barber, 11. Based on evidence gathered from Liberated Africans by linguist Sigismund Koelle in Freetown, Sierra Leone, around 1850, P.E.H. Hair suggests that the peoples of the region began to form families around the age of 25. See “The Enslavement of Koelle’s Informants,” Journal of African History 6 (1965): 193–203. Cinqué’s age would have increased his authority within the relatively young group.
10. “To the Committee,” NYJC, September 10, 1839; Lewis Tappan to Roger Baldwin, November 21, 1840, Baldwin Family Papers; Deposition of Dr. Richard R. Madden, November 20, 1839, U.S. District Court, Connecticut, NAB; “Adams Letter on Amistad Africans,” NYJC, December 25, 1839; “Plans to Educate the Amistad Africans in English,” NYJC, October 9, 1839; “Amistad Trial—Termination,” Emancipator, January 16, 1840; L. N. Fowler, “Phrenological Developments of Joseph Cinquez, Alias Ginqua,” American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany 2 (1840): 136–38; New England Weekly Record, May 23, 1840; “Peale’s Museum and Portrait Gallery,” NYCA, June 16, 1840; “Visit to Hartford, Connecticut,” NYMH, September 24, 1839.
11. “The Captured Africans,” NYMH, September 17, 1839; “The Amistad Africans in Prison,” NYMH, October 9, 1839.
12. Phillip Lapsansky, “Graphic Discord: Abolitionists and Antiabolitionist Images,” in Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 218–21; Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000), 172–76; Richard Powell, “Cinqué: Antislavery Portraiture and Patronage in Jacksonian America,” American Art 11 (1997): 56–57.
13. Haverhill Gazette, September 27, 1839; “Removal of the African Prisoners,” NYCA, September 16, 1839.
14. Roderick Stanley, “Journal of Farmington Farmer,” 1837–1843. (Ms 74260), CHS; Emancipator, September 19, 1839.
15. “The Amistad,” NYCA, September 19, 1839; “Amistad,” NYCA September 20, 1839; “Visit to Hartford, Connecticut,” NYMH, September 24, 1839.
16. “Teaching Philosophy to Lewis Tappen & Co. in the Prison at Hartford,” NYMH, October 4, 1839.
17. Ibid.; Lapsansky, “Graphic Discord,” 222–30. On “amalgamation,” see James Brewer Stewart, “The Emergence of Racial Modernity and the Rise of the White North, 1790–1840” and Leslie M. Harris, “From Abolitionist Amalgamators to ‘Rulers of the Five Points’: The Discourse of Interracial Sex and Reform in Antebellum New York City,” both in Patrick Rael, African-American Activism Before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 220–49 and 250–71.
18. “Case of the Captured Africans,” NYMH, September 22, 1839; “The Amistad,” Richmond Enquirer, September 27, 1839.
19. “Details of the Slow Hartford Trial,” NYCA, September 21, 1839. See Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad, chap. 4.
20. “Case of the Captured Africans,” NYMH, September 22, 1839; [Lewis Tappan], “The Amistad Circuit Court Trial,” NYCA, September 23, 1839.
21. “The Amistad,” NYCA, September 24, 1839.
22. “The Captured Africans,” NYCA, October 4, 1839.
23. Reverend Alonzo N. Lewis, M.A., “Recollections of the Amistad Slave Case: First Revelation of a Plot to Force the Slavery Question to an Issue more than twenty Years before its Final Outbreak in the Civil War—Several Hitherto Unknown Aspects of the Case Told,” Connecticut Magazine 11 (1907): 127.
24. “Important from Washington—The Captured Africans,” NYMH, September 10, 1839; “Captured Africans,” NYCA, October 8, 1839; “Teaching Philosophy to Lewis Tappen [sic],” NYMH, October 4, 1839; “The Africans,” NYMH, September 26, 1839.
25. “The Africans,” NYMH, October 5, 1839; “The Captives of the Amistad,” Emancipator, October 3, 1839. For a broader history of warrior moves, see T. J. Desch Obi, Fighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Art Traditions in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008).
26. “The Negroes of the Amistad,” New Hampshire Sentinel, October 2, 1839. On Poro training in acrobatics, see F.W.H. Migeod, “The Poro Society: The Building of the Poro House and Making of the Image,” Man 16 (1916): 102; Kenneth L. Little, “The Role of the Secret Society in Cultural Specialization,” American Anthropologist, n.s., 51 (1949): 202; Little, The Mende of Sierra Leone: A West African People in Transition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951, rev. ed. 1967), 121.
27. “An Incident,” NYCA, September 26, 1839.
28. “Plans to Educate,” NYJC, October 9, 1839; Barber, 9; Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1942), 16–46.
29. “Conditions for Amistad Captives,” NYCA, September 9, 1839. Gibbs would later testify that he acquired his knowledge of the Mende language from James Covey, but here too the dependence on the African sailor would become clear: when Covey grew sick in November 1839 and could not attend the legal hearing in Hartford, Gibbs tried to replace him as interpreter and failed. See Testimony of Professor Josiah W. Gibbs, January 8, 1840, Records of the U.S. District and Circuit Courts for the District of Connecticut, NAB; “Trial,” NYMH, November 22, 1839.
30. Deposition of Charles Pratt, October 1839, Records of the U.S. District and Circuit Courts for the District of Connecticut, NAB. For an account of the anti-slave-trade activity of the Buzzard, including the capture of the Emprendedor with 470 enslaved people aboard, see “Cruise of the H.B.M. Brig Buzzard,” Emancipator, November 21, 1839.
31. Deposition of James Covey, January 7, 1840, Records of the U.S. District and Circuit Courts for the District of Connecticut, NAB.
32. “The Captured Africans,” NYCA, October 4, 1839; “The Africans,” NYCA, October 8, 1839. See also “The Captured Blacks,” NYS, October 7, 1839.
33. “Narrative of the Africans,” NYJC, October 10, 1839.
34. Entry for October 17, 1839, Second Journal/Notebook, August 31, 1838–June 10, 1840, Journals and Notebooks, 1814–1869 Lewis Tappan Papers; “Extraordinary Arrest,” NYMH, October 18, 1839; “Case of the Spaniards,” NYCA, October 24, 1839; “From the New York Evening Star,” PF, February 13, 1840.
35. “Case of Montez and Ruiz,” NYCA, October 23, 1839; “Don Montez Absconded,” PF, November 14, 1839. For the full text of the first ruling by Inglis, see “Case of Montez and Ruiz,” PF, November 14, 1839.
36. “Ruiz and Montez,” NYCA, October 18, 1839; “Another Abolition Arrest,” Richmond Enquirer, November 5, 1839; Testimony of Founi and Testimony of Kimbo, State of Connecticut, County of New Haven, New Haven, Oct. 7, 1839, Miscellany: “Amistad Case,” Lewis Tappan Papers.
37. “The Abolitionists,” Richmond Enquirer, November 5, 1839; “Signor Ruiz,” Southern Patriot, February 14, 1840; Lewis Tappan to Joseph Sturge, October 19, 1839, in Annie Heloise Abel and Frank J. Klingberg, eds., A Side-Light on Anglo-American Relations, 1839–1858, Furnished by the Correspondence of Lewis Tappan and Others with the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (Lancaster, PA: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1927), 60; “Great Point Gained,” PF, November 14, 1839. The first two articles were originally published in the New York Express and the New York Star, demonstrating proslavery attitudes in the North. See Tappan’s account of his actions in the PF, February 13, 1840.
38. “Plans to Educate,” NYJC, October 9, 1839. On the parallel enthusiasm among Liberated Africans for schooling in Sierra Leone in the same time period, see David Northrup, “Becoming African: Identity Formation Among Liberated Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Sierra Leone,” Slavery and Abolition 27 (2006): 7–8.
The Amistad Rebellion Page 31
