The Amistad Rebellion (36 page)

The reverberations of the
Amistad
rebellion were beginning to be felt in the wider world of Atlantic slavery, as predicted by abolitionist Henry C. Wright, an associate of William Lloyd Garrison. He foresaw that Purvis’s painting, properly displayed, would confront slaveholders and their apologists with a powerful message about successful rebellion against bondage. To have it in a gallery would lead to discussions about slavery and the “inalienable” rights of man, and convert every set of visitors into an antislavery meeting.

Wright did not imagine a meeting of only two people, one of them a rebellious fugitive, nor could he have known that the painting would inspire radical action on another slave ship, which would result in both a collective self-emancipation and an international diplomatic row between the United States and Great Britain. The combination of the
Amistad
and
Creole
rebellions had a major impact on the antislavery struggle, pushing activists toward more militant rhetoric and practices. As Purvis concluded many years later, “And all this grew out of the inspiration caused by Madison Washington’s sight of this little picture.”
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To Africa

Three weeks after the
Creole
emancipation, the
Amistad
Africans made their way to Freetown and other parts of West Africa, including Vai, Temne, and Mende country. They carried a potent history with them, as revealed when William Raymond, James Steele, and several of the rebels met with local kings, chiefs, and big men, hoping to secure land for the Mende Mission and support for the spread of Christianity. The missionaries apparently had not considered that the makers of a successful revolt against slavery would not be welcomed by African rulers who owned and traded slaves. “Who are the friends of these men!” Steele asked of the repatriated African rebels. He answered, not the rulers of West African societies with whom they were meeting, but
“principally the poor, the oppressed, and the slaves.” They and their like were commoners, always in danger of being enslaved in war-torn Sierra Leone. Steele then used a telling comparison to explain his dilemma in using the
Amistad
Africans in his ministry: “Let me ask what reception the mutineers of the Creole would meet with if they should return with missionaries to Virginia?” It was a good question. The veterans of armed struggle against slavery on one side of the Atlantic did not advance his cause among slaveholders and slave-traders on the other. He would have been better off without them, he explained.
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The original action of the Africans aboard the
Amistad
and their hard work of cooperation with abolitionists while in jail in New Haven propelled the American antislavery struggle back to Africa, where it took its place alongside indigenous struggles—the escapes, marronage, and revolts, including the Zawo War, in which enslaved people fought King Siaka and, after him, his son Crown Prince Mana, over many years beginning in the late 1820s. The Mende Mission, according to historian Joseph L. Yannielli, became “a transatlantic extension of the Underground Railroad,” a new place of cooperation between (missionary) abolitionists and those seeking to escape or overthrow slavery. William Raymond and, later, George Thompson turned the mission into something of a “liberated zone,” to which those fearing or escaping enslavement might flee.

Raymond himself liberated war captives, buying them from slave traders and settling them at the mission. Those who studied there gained protection as “no slave-trader will buy a man who speaks the English language.” Thompson wrote that “the Mission was a ‘City of Refuge’ to the surrounding inhabitants, when fleeing from their burning towns and deadly pursuers.” As the news of the Mende Mission spread up and down the coast of Sierra Leone, and as far as two hundred miles inland through the travels of Cinqué and others, along with it spread the dramatic news of successful rebellion against slavery in America. The
Amistad
Africans had become transoceanic symbols of insurrection against bondage.
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In America

The
Amistad
rebellion also reverberated powerfully throughout the United States, primarily along two tracks: the first was American popular culture; the second was the American abolitionist movement. The result was to expand and radicalize the movement against slavery, to strengthen what we might call “abolitionism from below,” involving the enslaved, the African American community more broadly, and those who wanted to take militant action to bring bondage to an end.

One of the remarkable features of the images of the
Amistad
rebellion in American popular culture was their anti-slavery message.
The Long, Low Black Schooner
made Cinqué its hero, recounting his personal history early in the drama in order to create sympathy in the audience. The play also highlighted the horrific Middle Passage, already made infamous by the abolitionist movement, by going belowdecks to the hidden space where the “wretched slaves” lay jumbled together and where they would begin their conspiracy. The title page of the pamphlet,
A True History of the African Chief Jingua and his Comrades
, explained that

The author referred to the “unfortunate victims” of the slave trade, offered a sympathetic (if largely invented) biography of Cinqué, and chronicled the horrors of his enslavement, march to the coast, and Middle Passage. The popular
Book of Pirates
did likewise, using the testimony of Grabeau and Bau and other abolitionist sources, arguments, and sentiments to render a compassionate portrait of the
Amistad
Africans.
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The images of Cinqué produced by the
New York Sun
likewise played up the drama of the rebellion, gave voice to its leader, conveyed strong antislavery messages, and actively sought to enlist public sympathy for the rebels and their cause. The text that accompanied the images of Cinqué repeatedly expressed his insistence on “Death or
Liberty,” echoing the revolutionary cry of Patrick Henry. Here was a bold, romantic, even swashbuckling hero who “dared for freedom” and justice. Significantly, the antislavery images and text produced by the
Sun
appeared, like
The Long, Low Black Schooner
, within a week of the arrival of the
Amistad
Africans in New London,
before
Lewis Tappan, Roger S. Baldwin, and other abolitionists had worked out the legal strategy to represent them as freedom fighters. Perhaps the elite abolitionists learned from the penny press, which in turn had learned from the rebels themselves.
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John Warner Barber, Sidney Moulthrop, and Amasa Hewins lent their artistic hands to the cause, dramatizing the insurrection as a struggle for freedom. Hewins likened Cinqué to George Washington. These artists moved beyond the individual portraits of Cinqué produced by the commercial artists of the
New York Sun
to depict, by popular engraving, wax figures, and monumental painting, images of collective armed struggle. Nathaniel Jocelyn returned to the individual hero in his serene, noble portrait. “This little picture” produced radical results in the
Creole
rebellion.

The popular images of the
Amistad
rebellion stood in sharp contrast not only to the racist antiabolitionist images of the day, but to long-standing paternalist depictions by abolitionists that suggested either grateful deference among supplicant slaves—“Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”—or their status as sentimentalized victims of atrocity. Sarah Grimké wrote that such images expressed the “speechless agony of the fettered slave.” By contrast, the rebels of the
Amistad
appeared as powerful, independent actors, not as individuals acted upon by others. They inspired admiration, not condescension, benevolence, or pity. They certainly were not “helpless victims,” as attorney Baldwin described them in court.
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Institutions of a rapidly commercializing popular culture transformed resistance into a commodity, to be consumed in playhouses, pamphlets, newspapers, galleries, and museums. The images humanized the rebels and evoked popular sympathy. Literary and visual evidence—Zemba Cinques the mutineer, Cinquez the leader of a “Piratical Gang of Negroes,” Jingua the Barbary corsair, Cinqué as freedom
fighter and revolutionary—whether on stage, in print, in wax, or in paint demonstrate the process at work. It did not go unnoticed, or uncriticized, at the time. Nathaniel Rogers, leader of the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society, noted in the
Herald of Freedom
the aggressive entry of the market into the
Amistad
case and remarked, “Our shameless people have made merchandise of the likeness of Cinque” and his comrades. Rogers resented the “wood-cut representation of the royal fellow,” even though he thought it a good likeness. He considered it “effrontery” that artists had studied the “lion-like” face of the “African hero” to draw the image that was now for sale. He detested the intrusion of money and profits into the realm of high principle, but he may have underestimated how much “making merchandise” of resistance helped his cause.
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The popular images, and the celebrity that resulted from them, may help to account for a curious feature of the
Amistad
case. In a decade notorious for urban riots against African Americans and abolitionists—one of which, in 1834, resulted in an attack that moved from the Bowery Theatre to the home of Lewis Tappan—there was a signal lack of violence, or even the threat thereof, directed against the rebels or their supporters. Certainly the opportunities for such violence were many, whether in jail as the thousands filed through, or on New Haven Green, where the
Amistad
Africans routinely went for fresh air and acrobatics. Even more likely moments were May and November 1841, when the Africans went on their fund-raising tours, especially to New York and Philadelphia, where antiabolitionist mobs had been most violent. It is hard to be sure why something
did not happen
, but it may be that the positive images and the larger publicity surrounding the case protected the
Amistad
rebels and their supporters against the racist violence frequently used in this period by rampaging white mobs. A New York woman commented on the change: “some years ago,” she explained to the British abolitionist Joseph Sturge, large public meetings like those featuring the
Amistad
Africans “would have excited the malignant passions of the multitude, and probably caused a popular outbreak.” Now the gatherings caused “a display of benevolent interest among all classes.”
¹³

The antislavery movement in 1839 consisted of a rebellious and sometimes insurrectionary wing of enslaved people, a reform wing of various, quarreling, mostly white middle-class abolitionists, and a growing antislavery public that crossed many social and economic lines. The popular representations of the
Amistad
rebellion helped to connect the first two and to expand the third by circulating antislavery images and ideas into new social domains—into the streets, where boys hawked the images and newspapers to urban workers, and where the stories of the revolt would circulate to free and enslaved laborers alike; on the waterfront, where Vigilance Committees in New York and Philadelphia were already undertaking direct action in the struggle against slavery; into factories, where workers contributed to the defense campaign; and into African American churches, where interest in the case ran high. The
Amistad
rebellion helped to change the social composition of the antislavery movement.
¹⁴

The popular nature of the movement to free the
Amistad
Africans is revealed by its funding. It has long been assumed that the wealthy Lewis Tappan bankrolled the entire operation, but his own punctilious accounts as treasurer of the Amistad Committee tell a different story. The committee itself made several public appeals for funds. A broad-based response from people of all classes sustained the long and uncertain struggle, and in the end made possible the free return to Africa.
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The
Amistad
Africans played the single largest role in raising money for their own education, lodging, and repatriation, earning $4,000 or more through the “Mendian Exhibitions” described in
chapter 6
. Antislavery groups, civic organizations, and churches made a range of smaller, still significant contributions. The Montpelier, Vermont, Female Anti-Slavery Society, for example, gave $10, while the “Color’d Citizens of Cincinnati” sent $90 to the Amistad Committee. Members of the Congregational Church of Farmington, Connecticut, where the Africans lived from the time of the Supreme Court ruling in March 1841 until their departure in late November, pledged an extraordinary $1,337.21 (more than $32,000 in 2012 dollars).
¹⁶

A huge portion of the money came from thousands of private
citizens, most of them from the Northeast, who made modest contributions. Many of the donations were of twenty-five and fifty cents, sometimes combined into gifts of a dollar or two. Mary Ann Parker, “a mute,” gave twenty-five cents. Former seaman and African American abolitionist J. B. Vashon of Pittsburgh sent $1. A nine-year-old boy in Oswego County, N.Y., gathered $2 from his Sunday School classmates and sent it in support of the cause. An anonymous “Anti-Abolitionist” gave $5. Henry Post and thirteen others who worked at an iron foundry on Elm Street in New York added $9.87. When the mother of missionary William Raymond heard the story of the
Amistad
Africans, she “out of a full heart exclaimed, ‘I have no money to give, but I will give my son.’” In the same spirit Raymond himself added, “I go,—I have not money to give, but I give
myself
.” To be sure, Tappan gave generously of his own fortune and time, but so did many others of limited means. After the federal government appealed the favorable ruling of January 1840 and extended the long jail sentence of the
Amistad
Africans, the
Emancipator
wondered, “Will the public sustain the defense?” Many voices, including those of the
Amistad
Africans themselves, answered with a determined yes.
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