The Amistad Rebellion (48 page)

53
. “Public Meeting in New York,”
CA
, May 22, 1841; “The Amistad Africans, Farewell Meetings and Embarkation,”
Connecticut Courant
, December 25, 1841; “Letters from New York,”
PF
, December 29, 1841.

54
. “Public Meeting in New York,”
CA
, May 22, 1841; “Letters from New York,”
PF
, December 29, 1841. Important work on the Mende Mission includes Clifton Herman Johnson, “The American Missionary Association, 1846–1861: A Study of Christian Abolitionism,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1958; Clara Merritt DeBoer,
Be Jubilant My Feet: African American Abolitionists and the American Missionary Association
(New York and London: Garland, 1994); and the forthcoming dissertation by Joseph L. Yannielli, “Dark Continents: Africa and the American Abolition of Slavery,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, forthcoming 2013.

55
. “Captives of the Amistad,”
Emancipator
, December 19, 1839. The letter from “Beta” was written on November 24, 1839, and reprinted from the
New Haven Record
.

56
. Lewis Tappan to John Scoble, January 20, 1840, New York, Correspondence, 1809–1872, Tappan Papers; Benjamin Griswold to Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, January 13, 1840, Baldwin Family Papers.

57
. John Hooker,
Some Reminiscences of a Long Life, With a Few Articles on Moral And Social Subjects of Present Interest
(Hartford, CT: Belknap and Warfield, 1899), 25; Christopher Webber,
American to the Backbone: The Life of James W. C. Pennington, the Fugitive Slave Who Became One of the First Black Abolitionists
(New York: Pegasus Books, 2011).

58
. Lewis Tappan,
History of the American Missionary Association
(New York, 1855); “Meeting of the Mendians,”
CA
, May 15, 1841.

59
. “Call for a Missionary Convention,”
CA
, July 3, 1841.

60
. This and the following four paragraphs are constructed from these sources: John Treadwell Norton to Lewis Tappan, Farmington, August 9, 1841, and A. F. Williams to Lewis Tappan, Farmington, August 18, 1841, ARC; Austin F. Williams Account Book, 1845–1881, CHS, 12. Williams also thought the
Amistad
Africans were concerned that their primary teacher, Sherman Booth, “care no more for Mendi People” and that he was contemplating leaving them, as indeed he was.

61
. “The Mendian Negroes,”
ARCJ
, December 1, 1841. For the practice and meaning of suicide among people of the African diaspora in America, see Walter C. Rucker,
The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 52–55.

62
. “Missionary Convention,”
CA
, September 4, 1841.

63
. “Return of the Mendians,”
Emancipator
, August 26, 1841; “Appeal on Behalf of the Amistad Africans,”
Emancipator
, September 30, 1841.

64
. William Raymond to Lewis Tappan, October 11, 1841, ARC.

65
. “Amistad Trial—Termination,”
Emancipator
, January 16, 1840; “The Mendi People,”
Emancipator
, September 23, 1841; Joshua Coffin,
An Account of some of the Principal Slave Insurrections, and others, which have occurred, or been attempted, in the United States and elsewhere, during the last two centuries, With Various Remarks
(New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860), 33–34.

66
. “Africans of the Amistad,”
Emancipator
, November 4, 1841; “The Mendians—Amistad Freemen,”
Oberlin Evangelist
, December 8, 1841; Helen Pratt, “My Grandfather’s Story,” mss HM 58067, fo. 18a, Huntington Library.

67
. Voyage contract between P. J. Farnham & Co. and Lewis Tappan, New York, November 1, 1841, ARC; “The Amistad Africans,”
Connecticut Courant
, December 25, 1841; Tappan to Sturge, November 15, 1841, reprinted in Sturge,
Visit
, Appendix E, xlvi.

68
. “The Mendians—Amistad Freemen,”
Oberlin Evangelist
, December 8, 1841; “The Amistad Africans,”
Connecticut Courant
, December 25, 1841; “Farewell Meeting of the Mendians at Farmington,” November 30, 1841, ARC.

69
. Mary Cable,
Black Odyssey: The Case of the Slave Ship “Amistad”
(New York: Viking Penguin, 1971), 138–39; Iyunolu Folayan Osagie,
The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone
(Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2000), 59; Letter from Captain Morris dated February 13, 1842, published in the
Daily Atlas
, March 10, 1842.

70
. “The Mendian Negroes,”
ARCJ
, 23 (1841); “Letters from New York,”
PF
, December 29, 1841.

71
. James Steele to Lewis Tappan, Freetown, February 1, 1842, ARC.

72
. “The Mendians,”
Vermont Chronicle
, June 8, 1842. The Mende in Freetown tended to live in a multiethnic town called Gloucester or in “Kosso Town” (where Cinqué’s brother Kindi lived). See Samuel W. Booth to Lewis Tappan, October 4, 1841, ARC; Lamin Sanneh,
Abolitionists Abroad: American Blacks and the Making of Modern West Africa
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 122–23.

73
. Steele letter quoted in the
Vermont Chronicle
, June 8, 1842; “The Amistad Africans,”
ARCJ
28 (1842).

74
. James Steele to Simeon Jocelyn, Freetown, April 19, 1842, published in the
AFASR
, June 20, 1842.

75
.
Emancipator
, April 28, 1842.

76
. C.L.F. Harnsel to Lewis Tappan, Quebec, November 22, 1841, ARC; Dr. Madden’s Report on Sierra Leone, 1841, Colonial Office (CO) 267/172, 22-24, NA.

77
. “Late Intelligence from the Mendians,”
New-York Spectator
, October 5, 1842. This is not the place to rehearse the subsequent history of the Mende Mission. It has been explored well by Osagie in
The Amistad Revolt
,
chap. 3
. Joseph L. Yannielli’s “Dark Continents” will take scholarship on the subject to a new level. A preview of his work appeared in an award-winning article, “George Thompson among the Africans: Empathy, Authority, and Insanity in the Age of Abolition,”
Journal of American History
96 (2010): 979–1,000, and in
Cinqué the Slave Trader: New Evidence on an Old Controversy
(New Haven: The Amistad Committee, 2010). See also De Boers,
Be Jubilant My Feet
.

78
. “The Mendi Mission,”
Cleveland Daily Herald
, July 11, 1842; William Raymond to Lewis Tappan, York, Sierra Leone, February 19, 1844, published in the
Union Missionary
, May 1844. See also
North American and Daily Advertiser
, June 15, 1842, and Marlene D. Merrill,
Sarah Margru Kinson: The Two Worlds of an Amistad Captive
(Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin Historical and Improvement Organization, 2003).

79
. Fuli to Lewis Tappan, April 15, 1842, reproduced in Helen Pratt, “My Grandfather’s Story,” mss HM 58067, Huntington Library. The ten who remained loyal longest were Fuli (George Brown), Kinna (Lewis Johnson), Beri (Thomas Johnson), Ndamma (John Smith), Kali (George Lewis), Tsukama (Henry Cowles), Fabana (Alexander Posey), Sa (James Pratt), Ba (David Brown), and Moru (John Williams). The three little girls were Margru (Sarah Kinson), Teme (Maria Brown), and Kagne (Charlotte, last name unknown). See DeBoer,
Be Jubilant My Feet
, 106.

80
. “The Mendians,”
Vermont Chronicle
, June 8, 1842; Osagie,
The Amistad Revolt
, 64; Barber, 15.

81
. “Letters from New York,”
PF
, December 29, 1841. After his enslavement Burna spent six weeks in transit to Lomboko, “three and a half moons” (months) at the fortress itself, eight weeks in the Middle Passage, two weeks in Cuba, and eight weeks at sea in the
Amistad
before he came ashore in New London on August 27, 1839. He met his mother in February 1842 after a period of roughly three years, three months. The encounter is described in letters written by missionary James Steele, published in the
Ohio Observer
, August 4, 1842, and the
Liberator
, August 5, 1842, from which the quotations are taken. I assume that “Banna” here was Burna the elder, who was frequently called on by that name, while Burna the Younger was called “Little Banna” or “Banna wulu.” The mother of Burna the younger was deceased. See Barber, 9.

82
.
Thompson in Africa
, 201.

Conclusion: Reverberations

1
. Purvis gave this account to a journalist in 1889, a half century after the
Amistad
rebellion. See “A Priceless Picture,”
Philadelphia Inquirer
, December 26, 1889. Frederick Douglass mentioned the meeting of Purvis and Washington in “Great Anti-Colonization Mass Meeting of the Colored Citizens of New York,”
National Anti-Slavery Standard
, May 3, 1849. Later Douglass wrote a novella about Washington and the
Creole
rebellion entitled
The
Heroic Slave, a Thrilling Narrative of the Adventures of Madison Washington, in Pursuit of Liberty
(Boston: John P. Jewitt & Co, 1852).

2
. “The ‘Hanging Committee’ of the ‘Artists’ Fund Society’ Doing Homage to Slavery,”
PF
, April 21, 1841. See also the excellent article by Richard J. Powell, “Cinqué: Antislavery Portraiture and Patronage in Jacksonian America,”
American Art
11 (1997): 49–73.

3
. “A Priceless Picture,”
Philadelphia Inquirer
.

4
. Stanley Harrold, “Romanticizing Slave Revolt: Madison Washington, the
Creole
Mutiny, and Abolitionist Celebration of Violent Means,” in John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold, eds.,
Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 89–107; Howard Jones, “The Peculiar Institution and National Honor: The Case of the
Creole
Slave Revolt,”
Civil War History
21 (1975): 28–50; Walter Johnson, “White Lies: Human Property and Domestic Slavery Aboard the Slave Ship
Creole
,”
Atlantic Studies
5 (2008): 237–63.

5
. George Hendrick and Willene Hendrick,
The Creole Mutiny: A Tale of Revolt Aboard a Slave Ship
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003).

6
. “The ‘Hanging Committee,’”
PF
, April 21, 1841. Wright spoke of the controversy that surrounded the refusal of the Artists’ Fund Society to include the portrait of Cinqué in an exhibition, out of their fear of violence from an antiabolition mob. Their fears may have been unfounded, as discussed below. See also Roy E. Finkenbine, “The Symbolism of Slave Mutiny: Black Abolitionist Responses to the
Amistad
and
Creole
Incidents,” in Jane Hathaway, ed.,
Rebellion, Repression, Reinvention: Mutiny in Comparative Perspective
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 233–52.

7
. Steele letter quoted in “The Amistad Africans,”
Ohio Observer
, August 4, 1842.

8
. Joseph L. Yannielli, “Dark Continents: Africa and the American Abolition of Slavery,” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, forthcoming, 2013,
chap. 1
, 14; “The Mendi Mission,”
ARCJ
, May, 1843;
Thompson in Africa
, 335; William Raymond to Lewis Tappan, Woburn, Mass., June 15, 1843, ARC. After it became clear that the missionaries had their own agenda and that he would not be the leader he expected to be, Cinqué left the mission and struck out on his own. He soon remarried and became a merchant, trading locally in and around Freetown. He did not abandon the mission entirely, although his relationship with the missionaries remained vexed for years. He nonetheless kept up intermittent contact, and indeed he played a crucial role in acquiring land at Kaw Mende, to which the mission would relocate in 1844. George Thompson noted that Cinqué traveled for a time to Jamaica in 1844 or 1845, perhaps as part of a British initiative to transport Liberated Africans to the colony as workers. He disappears from the historical record for years at a stretch, but finally returned to the Mende Mission when he was near death in 1879. He died there and was buried in the mission graveyard. Like Howard Jones and Joseph L. Yannielli, I have found no evidence to suggest that Cinqué became a slave trader upon return to Sierra Leone, as has long been alleged. See Jones, “Cinqué of the
Amistad
a Slave Trader? Perpetuating a Myth,”
Journal of American History
87 (2000): 923–39, and Joseph L. Yannielli,
Cinqué the Slave Trader: Some New Evidence on an Old Controversy
(New Haven, CT: The Amistad Committee, 2010). The proslavery
NYMH
had reported on September 13, 1839, that Cinqué had been a slave trader before he himself was enslaved. This claim was often repeated in the proslavery press, but is unsubstantiated.

9
. Peter Reed,
Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Theatre Culture
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 11; Bruce A. McConachie,
Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 97–100.
The Long, Low Black Schooner
was one of five plays found by Melinda Lawson to represent slave insurrection on the American stage in the early national and antebellum eras. See her “Imagining Slavery: Representations of the Peculiar Institution on the Northern Stage, 1776–1860,”
Journal of the Civil War Era
1 (2011): 34. It was the only one to deal with a current event. The couplet would later appear in the
Chartist Circular
, published in Glasgow, May 1, 1841, in a poem entitled “Liberty! Universal Liberty!” by “Argus.” See
The True History of the African Prince Jingua and his Comrades
, frontispiece.