The Amistad Rebellion (31 page)

What role had the Africans played in their own legal defense? They had met with both Baldwin and Adams, and Kale had written a long
letter to Adams on behalf of the entire group to explain what he should say to the “Great Court.” Through interpreters John Ferry, Charles Pratt, and especially James Covey, and through their own advancing facility in the English language, the “Mendi People” had told their individual and collective stories and made claims for freedom that were honestly reflected in the attorneys’ remarks. Of course Baldwin and Adams brought their own perspective, skills, and stature to bear on the case, but they did say, by and large, what the “Mendi People” had wanted them to say: they were free natives of Africa; they had suffered greatly in their enslavement and shipment; they had won their own freedom in battle; they had brought themselves to a “free country.” Ruiz and Montes had lied about their history. With this critical information at hand, Baldwin and Adams did their essential part in the freedom palaver. They had “accompanied” the Africans in a successful struggle.
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New Conflicts

The Supreme Court ruling raised an important question about the younger people involved in the case: what would be done with the three little girls, Kagne, Teme, and Margru, and the Afro-Cuban teenager Antonio? Soon after the ruling, Lewis Tappan and Amos Townsend Jr. brought a lawsuit on behalf of the “Mendi People” to remove the girls from the household of Stanton Pendleton. The jailer had employed them as servants in his kitchen and had provided neither domestic training nor education. Mrs. Pendleton had said it would be pointless to teach them to sew “as they were so soon to go back to Africa where they went naked.” Because the girls had fallen so far behind their male counterpart, Kale, in speaking and reading English, the abolitionists lobbied Pendleton to allow the girls to study at the “Sabbath School of the Colored Church” in New Haven. This mistreatment was compounded by the rising tensions between Pendleton and the rest of the
Amistad
Africans.
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While the court was in session deciding the fate of the little girls, Pendleton returned to the Westville jail with his wife, his brother
William, a ship captain, and Thomas Mook (“not good man” according to Kinna) who worked for him and proceeded to inflame tensions further. The group threatened the
Amistad
Africans with reenslavement and death, promising again, as Fuli explained, to send a “hundred men to kill Mendi people.” He continued to vilify Tappan, who would buy the entire lot of them, whip them “plenty,” then sell them again. Pendleton had told the same things to the little girls: “a white man told them that Mr. Tappan wanted to sell them as slaves.” The
Amistad
Africans had apparently encountered Pendleton’s brother earlier in the New Haven jail, when he had said, “This is great business—teaching these
niggers
—might as well teach monkeys—I suppose they will establish a college, when they get back to Africa.” Now the men sought out Cinqué, cursing and threatening him with deportation to Cuba, as Kinna reported: “They want fight and Cinque did not like fight.” The men then tried to confine all of the
Amistad
Africans in a small room and take away their food and water. When Tappan and other abolitionists found out about the threats, they immediately went to Westville to lend support. They found the prisoners “in a great state of alarm, expecting to be sold again, and supposing they had been deceived as formerly.”
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The conflict with Pendleton concluded in court, when a judge ruled to remove the girls from the jailer’s household and to make abolitionist Townsend their legal guardian. The judgment was reached after Cinqué had been allowed to address the girls in Mende in a New Haven courtroom: “His eyes blazed and his voice was elevated in its tone—and his action passionate.” In “one of the
finest
specimens of Mendee eloquence,” he explained that the Pendletons were not to be trusted. They would do as they had many times threatened to do: they would “send them away and sell them.” Tensions boiled over again as the sheriff removed William Pendleton from the courtroom, “by order of the Judge, for striking one of the Africans in court.” The struggle to keep the collective together had been won. Kinna wrote Tappan to say how “very glad” and “joyful” the “Mendi People” were now that the little girls had been freed from the clutches of the wicked Pendleton.
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The Supreme Court upheld the lower-court ruling that Antonio should be returned to Cuba and the heirs of the deceased Captain Ferrer. The boy himself had requested as much, to the delight of proslavery journalists, soon after the
Amistad
came ashore. Marshal Wilcox assigned Antonio to the care of Pendleton, who received $2.50 per week from the government for his room and board and who nonetheless forced the teenager to work “without wages,” all the while forbidding him to be educated with his shipmates. By the time the district court ordered his delivery to Ferrer’s widow as her rightful property in late March 1841, Antonio had begun to think differently about his future.
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A writer for the
Colored American
noted that when the Supreme Court ruled that the
Amistad
Africans were free, Antonio “thought it better to be free also.” As “a species of property which thinks, reasons, and wills,” he decided to “
walk off
” from the marshal and the jailer. In New Haven he stole aboard a steamboat appropriately named the
Bunker Hill
and made his way to New York, where he stayed at the home of an African American friend of Lewis Tappan. The New York Vigilance Committee then “took charge of Antonio & have conveyed him away.” It was noted that he “rejoiced to be at liberty, and is desirous of laboring for wages.”
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Antonio traveled by night “to Canada, by the usual route” of safe houses on the Underground Railroad. One of the stops was Enosburgh, Vermont, about fifteen miles from the Canadian border, where Elias S. Sherman housed the “jolly and good natured” young man, who gratefully helped his host family with the cooking. Antonio told Sherman’s seven-year-old son the dramatic stories of the “capture of the Amistad, and his escape through the kindness of friends.” A night or two later, Antonio disappeared as mysteriously as he had appeared. He soon arrived in Montreal, where, a local abolitionist announced proudly, he is “now beyond the reach of all the slaveholders in the world.” Captain Ferrer had branded Antonio’s shoulder with a hot iron so that he might be known as his slave, but he was a slave no more. Thy prey, abolitionists told the slaveholders, “hath escaped thee.”
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The “Mendian Exhibitions”

Without resources of their own, and hoping to capitalize on their fame, the
Amistad
Africans went on what might be called a “victory tour” in May 1841, to raise funds for their lodging and education. In November they went on a second tour to raise money for their repatriation. The Amistad Committee organized all events and drew heavily on abolitionist networks of cooperation and publicity. The “Mendi People” performed eight times on the first tour, in New York and Philadelphia, and at least sixteen times on the second, primarily in New England, with five meetings in Boston and usually single meetings in smaller towns such as Andover, Hampton, Haverhill, Northampton, Lowell, and Springfield, Massachusetts, and Nashua, New Hampshire. They also held farewell meetings in Hartford and Farmington, Connecticut, and two final meetings in New York just before they boarded the
Gentleman
to return to Sierra Leone on November 27, 1841. Dozens of newspapers around the nation covered one or more of these events.
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The venues varied from the Broadway Tabernacle, a hive of antislavery activity located at the corner of Houston and Thompson streets in New York, where four of the meetings were held to overflow crowds of as many as twenty-five hundred people, with many turned away, to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on Church Street in New York and the large Melodeon Concert Hall in Boston, which hosted two meetings each. Organizers scheduled most of the events in churches. Turnout was extraordinary everywhere. Observers described the buzzing scenes as “crowded,” “overflowing,” and “immensely large.” The crowds were made up of “blacks and whites, and every intermediate hue and color,” by provocative design. In the disapproving words of the
New York Morning Herald
, “On one seat was a negro fellow, as black as the ace of spades, with a mulatto wife, and a couple of children, a shade whiter than the mother, and next to them, well dressed white ladies and gentlemen, all mingling together, regardless of the oder [
sic
] exhaled by their neighbours, and happy to receive their colored brethren and sisters on terms of perfect equality.” Ticket
prices were usually twenty-five cents. The funds raised would have amounted to roughly $4,000—a little more than $100,000 in 2012 dollars.
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A large part of the draw was the sheer celebrity of the people who had been in the news and in the larger circuits of American popular culture since late August 1839 and who had recently won their case before the highest tribunal in the land. Gallons of ink and paint and wax had been spent on the African freedom fighters. Not surprisingly, people wanted to see them in the flesh. When the
Amistad
Africans entered the Broadway Tabernacle on the very first exhibition, an excited tumult ensued: “So eager were the audience to see them, that they rose in great numbers, and many rushed towards the desk to get a nearer look of the blacks.” Those people blocked the view of everyone else, who cried out, “Sit down there in front…we can’t see through you.”
²⁷

Cinqué in particular, the “hero of the
revolution
” as he was called by the
New Hampshire Sentinel
, was a special attraction. At the Marlboro Chapel in Boston, a youthful audience greeted him with “a tremendous shout of applause.” When Lewis Tappan tried to translate what the hero had said in the Mende language, the young people “made so much noise that he could not succeed.” At the Broadway Tabernacle, every time Cinqué rose to address the crowd, “great bursts of applause resounded from all parts of the house.” The
Colored American
urged all to turn out to shake hands with the great man; “hundreds on hundreds” seized the opportunity.
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Early events, such as the first one at the Broadway Tabernacle, featured sixteen of the
Amistad
Africans, but the number slowly dropped over time, to twelve, then ten in later performances. Cinqué led the group into the hall, each person clutching an octavo Bible given them by the American Bible Society. They appeared happy and healthy, well dressed in American clothing, and they had a physical presence: they were “finely built, and possess great physical strength.” A reporter for the abolitionist
Pennsylvania Freeman
noted that they had “intelligent countenances and dignified and manly bearing—showing that they never had their spirits broken by the yoke.” They
had survived their many incarcerations with their self-respect and political will intact.
²⁹

All events followed a basic pattern. A local minister led the assembled in prayer, then a member of the Amistad Committee, usually Lewis Tappan, provided a brief introduction, with a statement about the three main purposes of the event: “to show to the public the improvement which the Africans had made;—to excite an interest in a religious mission to Mendi, their country;—to raise money to defray the expense of supporting and educating them here, and of returning them to their country.” The meetings lasted about two hours.
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Tappan introduced Sherman Booth, the main teacher of the
Amistad
Africans in jail and during their residence in Farmington following their liberation. Booth served as a sort of master of ceremonies for the event, providing “interesting facts relative to the improvement and conduct of his pupils” and making observations about Mende culture. He assisted as several of the
Amistad
Africans recounted their own personal histories—where they were from and how they were forced into Atlantic circuits of slavery. Booth then gave his charges Bible verses to recite as well as words and sentences to spell, in order to demonstrate their knowledge, and invited the audience to ask questions of Kale, Kinna, and Fuli, the best English-speakers. The queries usually concerned their understanding of Christianity and how they would use it when they returned to Africa. The Africans then sang a Christian hymn and a couple of “native songs.” Kinna recounted for the audience, in English, their recent history as a prelude to the grand finale: Cinqué told, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say,
acted out
the story of the
Amistad
rebellion. He always spoke
in Mende
. The meeting concluded with another hymn, the audience joining the
Amistad
Africans in song.
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The heart of the program had emerged from an antislavery meeting in Bloomfield, Connecticut, attended by Kinna and Cinqué, in April 1841. They listened to the speakers with great interest, and at the end of the meeting were asked if they would like to address the group. Kinna “arose in a very dignified manner” and told their story. Abolitionist A. F. Williams noted that “before he sat down I saw many
around me in tears.” Cinqué then spoke for fifteen minutes in Mende, Kinna translating. The audience was dazzled by a talk that was “truly grand and sublime.” After this meeting Sherman Booth advised Lewis Tappan that Kinna and Cinqué should speak in precisely these ways during the exhibitions. The rest of the program was likely the result of negotiation between the abolitionist organizers and the “Mendi People,” some of whom did not originally embrace the idea of performing their “progress” before large audiences. Cinqué in particular could be a tough negotiator. Abolitionist George Day recalled him as a “turbulent fellow, hard to manage.” Eventually the leader and his comrades agreed to do the tour, in large part because it was presented to them as a requirement for going home—they had to help raise the money for their return voyage. They said they would do it gladly.
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