The Amistad Rebellion Read online

  The insurrectionists and reformers who met in Connecticut jails represented the two main wings of a global movement against slavery. Black rebels had long played an important role in America’s antislavery movement, especially by their audacious escapes from slavery, which inspired and mobilized abolitionists throughout the northern states. The Amistad case publicized a more controversial form of resistance—outright rebellion—and gave enslaved rebels and their resistance a more important place in an expanded, radicalized movement against slavery. This movement would help to establish the right of unfree people to seize freedom through armed self-defense and to claim their place as equals in society.7

  Even though slave resistance was ubiquitous throughout the turbulent 1830s, revolts were infrequent, even rare, occurrences, especially in the United States. Slaveholders always enforced the consequences of a failed revolt with hangings, maimings, and violent repression of all kinds. Most slaves, like most other people, were reluctant to risk everything in a gamble few before them had won. But an example of success changed everything. This, of course, was part of the importance of the Haitian Revolution. The black men and women of Saint Domingue had demonstrated the bottom rail could be placed on top. Until 1839, slaves in mainland North America could find no similar example of success. Slave rebels had failed in New York in 1712 and 1741; in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800; in Louisiana in 1811; and in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822. That record of failure changed in 1839, and with it changed the worlds of American slavery and abolition.

  A history of the Amistad rebellion from below is supported by a collection of sources unique in the annals of New World slavery. Because the makers of the maritime insurrection spent twenty-seven months in Connecticut (nineteen of them in jail) and because their cause was both controversial and well publicized, they met thousands of people from all walks of life, both within the walls of the jails and without. Journalists and ordinary citizens visited them, conversed with them through translators such as the Mende sailor James Covey, and transcribed their life stories, noting their work and nationality (hunter, Temne), where they lived in Africa (“two moons march to the coast”), and how they were enslaved (captured in war, kidnapped). Other visitors drew their portraits and silhouettes. Phrenologists measured the size of their skulls. Yale professors such as Josiah Gibbs compiled and published vocabularies of their languages. Many of these visitors published their findings in business newspapers such as the New York Journal of Commerce, in penny-press papers such as the New York Sun and New York Morning Herald, and in abolitionist periodicals such as the Emancipator and the Pennsylvania Freeman. As many as 2,500 articles were published altogether, many of them written by correspondents who had visited the African rebels in jail. No other makers of a modern slave revolt generated such a vast and deep body of evidence, which in turn makes it possible to know more about the Amistad Africans than perhaps any other group of once-enslaved rebels on record, and to get to know them, individually and collectively, in intimate, multidimensional ways, from their personalities and sense of humor to their specifically West African ways of thinking and acting during their ordeal.8

  Throughout their odyssey the Amistad rebels struggled—sometimes alongside the American abolitionists, sometimes against them—for a voice of their own. As abolitionist Joshua Leavitt noted soon after they were brought ashore, “these unfortunate persons, who have been committed to prison and bound over to be tried for their lives” could not “say a word for themselves.” Of course the rebels could and did say many words for themselves, but for weeks no one could understand them. Here enter a group of African sailors, most notably James Ferry, Charles Pratt, and James Covey, whose cosmopolitan knowledge of multiple languages finally allowed the rebels to tell their stories of origins, enslavement, and insurrection. Ferry had been liberated from slavery in Colombia at age twelve by Simón Bolivar, Pratt and Covey by the British naval anti-slave-trade patrols. They were experienced in the struggle against slavery and they would be denounced by proslavery critics as “half-civilized, totally ignorant” sailors, who, like other men of color and low standing, were not to be trusted or believed. The motley crews of ship and waterfront played a critical role in the Amistad case.9

  Leavitt’s observation lingers. The Amistad rebels’ struggle for voice led them to learn English, to study American political culture and to use it for their own ends, to tell both individual and collective stories about what had happened to them and why. Even so, it was no easy matter for them to be heard, in their own times, above or even alongside the voices of evangelical Christians; lawyers, politicians, and diplomats; middle-class antislavery reformers; and proslavery ideologues. And it has proved no easy matter to hear them today. This is a history of the Amistad rebellion from below. That, literally, is how and where the Amistad case began, with the eruption of armed rebels from the hold on to the main deck of the vessel. By viewing the courtroom drama in relation to the shipboard revolt, or, put another way, the actions taken from above in relation to those taken from below, the entire event, from causes to consequences, appears in a new light. This history puts the Amistad rebels back at the center of their own story and the larger history they helped to make. Theirs was an epic quest for freedom.10

  CHAPTER ONE

  Origins

  On a May evening in 1841, an overflow crowd at the Presbyterian Church on Coates Street in Philadelphia listened as a Mende man named Fuli spoke about “man-stealing” in his native southern Sierra Leone: “If Spanish man want to steal man, he no steal him himself, but hire black man; he pay him I don’t know how much.” Fuli referred to the urbane, cigar-smoking Spanish slave trader Pedro Blanco and his ally, the African King Siaka, who dressed in gold lace garments, drank from silver bowls, and mobilized soldiers and kidnappers in the interior of the Gallinas Coast. “The man catchers live in villages,” continued Fuli, “and honest people live in cities. If they come to the cities, the magistrate say you bad man, you go away.” Some “honest people” took more direct action: they shot the man-stealers as they would other beasts of prey, “lions and tigers.” Fuli and others sought to protect themselves against the slave traders, but they did not always succeed, as his own presence in Philadelphia attested. Fuli then demonstrated his knowledge of the Bible to the audience, interpreting his own experience and that of his comrades on the Amistad: “The man stealer, he walk crooked, he no walk straight, he get out of the high road. He walk by night, too, he no walk in the day time.” He referred, in a single answer, to the books of Deuteronomy (24:7), Psalms (82:5), and Isaiah (59:8). He himself had been stolen around two and half years earlier by those who walked—and enslaved—in darkness.1

  Until that fateful moment, Fuli, whose name meant “sun,” had lived in Mano with his parents and five brothers, humble people who farmed rice and manufactured cloth. A portrait drawn by a young American artist, William H. Townsend, depicted him with a mustache, a broad face, prominent cheekbones, a full forehead with a slightly receding hairline, and distinctive, almond-shaped eyes. He was five feet three inches tall, apparently unmarried, and said to be “in middle life,” which probably meant his late twenties. According to one who knew him, Fuli was a “noble-spirited” man and decidedly not someone who could be enslaved without resistance.2

  Fuli

  One night, in darkness, a group of King Siaka’s soldiers surrounded Mano and set it aflame. Fuli said that “some were killed, and he with the rest were taken prisoners.” Apparently separated from his family (their fate is unknown), he began a monthlong march through Vai country and ended up at Fort Lomboko on the coast, where he was purchased by the notorious Pedro Blanco. He was a victim of “grand pillage,” a brutal, plundering kind of warfare that had long helped to fill Atlantic slave ships with bodies.3

  Margru, one of four children aboard the Amistad, took a different route to the slave ship. Born in Mendeland, she was about nine years old, a mere four feet three inches tall. Her name reflected parental love and affection. Tow
nsend sketched her with a large, high forehead, curly hair platted above each ear, and a slight smile at the corners of her mouth. Her manner was pleasant, quiet, reserved, and rather shy. She lived with her parents, four sisters, and two brothers. Her father was a trader, whose practices of credit and debt entangled him in some way with the slave trade. He pawned Margru, meaning that he left her in the possession of another trader for an agreed-upon period of time as a surety against commodities he had been advanced on credit—a practice common to many parts of West Africa. When he did not return in time to pay off his creditor—literally to redeem Margru—she was enslaved to satisfy the debt.4

  Margru

  Moru was a Gbandi man, born in Sanka. His life took a hard turn when, as a child, both of his parents died. Surviving evidence does not suggest how he grew up, or with whom, but it appears that at some point he became a warrior, and eventually a slave; perhaps he was captured in battle. His master, Margona, a member of what would become the ruling house of Barri Chiefdom in the Pujehun District of Gola, was a man of wealth with “ten wives and many houses.” At some point, for reasons unknown, Margona sold Moru to a slave trader, who marched him twenty days (probably a couple of hundred miles) to Lomboko, where he was sold to Belewa, or “Great Whiskers,” a Spaniard. Moru was described as “middle age, 5 ft. 8 1⁄2 in. with full negro features,” and drawn by Townsend to have small eyes, full lips, high cheekbones, and a somewhat suspicious look.5

  Moru

  The webs of Atlantic slavery were broad and intricate, and many of the people who guided and shaped the destinies of Fuli, Margru, and Moru, as well as Siaka and his warriors and Blanco and his overseers, lived far from the societies where man-stealing took place. Decisions taken by kings and queens and presidents, imperial planners, merchants, and plantation owners profoundly influenced what happened to the two men and little girl who found themselves at Lomboko and eventually aboard a slave ship under sail to Havana. Intercontinental and transoceanic forces linked England and Spain to the Gallinas Coast, and, across the Atlantic, to the slave societies of the Americas, especially Cuba, Brazil, and the United States. The process and the logic that governed from afar the lives of captives at Lomboko, and indeed millions of others, were clearly explained a generation earlier in an unusual tract published in London.

  The Voice of Blood

  In 1792, at the peak of a broad popular agitation against the slave trade in Great Britain, an abolitionist published an anonymous pamphlet, in which Cushoo, an African who had been enslaved in Jamaica, engaged an English gentleman, aptly named Mr. English, in conversation. Cushoo had been owned by a friend of Mr. English. He begins by saying, “Ah! Massa Buckra, pity poor Negroman.” Mr. English responds, “Why, Cushoo, what’s the matter?” The matter, in short, was capitalism and slavery—more specifically, how a violent, exploitative global system hid its true nature in the benign form of commodities, especially slave labor–produced sugar and rum, the likes of which Mr. English and others around the world consumed, without understanding how they were produced and at what human cost.6

  Mr. English does not understand, but the ever-patient and outwardly deferential Cushoo answers his questions and, in so doing, challenges the rationalizations that lie behind them. He explains in simple, vivid terms how the slave trade and slavery actually work. He shows that the pleasure Mr. English takes in eating sugar depends on the misery of the many. Those who produce his sugar are violently exploited in Jamaica and yet invisible in England. The material chains of slavery and the global chain of commodities are linked.

  As the conversation unfolds, Cushoo gives the English gentleman what amounts to a lesson in the political economy of global capitalism. The message is that everything turns on commodities. The “poor Negro was bought and sold like cattle.” The slave trade is fueled by “brandy, rum, guns, and gunpowder,” which create wars throughout West Africa and in so doing help to manufacture the ultimate Atlantic commodity: the slave. By consuming the commodities rum and sugar, Mr. English supports the slave trade and the extreme violence on which it depends.

  “In what manner?” asks the agitated gentleman.

  “You pay for kidnap and murder of poor Negro,” comes the quick retort.

  E. How? I don’t understand you.

  C. O me soon make you understand, Massa—You pay de grocer—

  E. Yes, or he wou’d not thank me for my custom.

  C. Den de grocer pay de Merchant—de merchant de Sugar Planter—him pay de Slave Captain—de Slave Captain pay de Panyarer [kidnapper], de Cabosheer [village chief], or de Black King.

  E. By this round-a-bout way you make us all thieves and murderers.

  C. No round-about Massa, it come home straight line—only—

  Cushoo thus invites Mr. English to follow the money involved in creating the commodity, from England, to Jamaica, to Africa, and back again. He wants Mr. English to join the abolitionist boycott of sugar that was then gaining strength throughout England. Cushoo had learned from previous struggles what might now be possible. His friend “Yalko say dat good while ago dey drink no tea in ’Merica—de Bostonian trow all in de sea. Ha! Ha! Dey made tea wid salt water.” An Atlantic cycle of rebellion meant no tea then, hence the Boston Tea Party, and no sugar now. In the end, Cushoo’s combination of historical knowledge, worldly experience, and pidgin eloquence persuades Mr. English to join the sugar boycott.

  The pamphlet articulated what would eventually become one of the slogans of the antislavery movement: “sugar is made with blood.” The point was announced in the title of the pamphlet: No Rum! No Sugar! or, The Voice of Blood. Cushoo would be the “voice of blood” in order to illustrate two passages from the Bible:

  “What hast thou done? The Voice of thy Brother’s Blood Crieth unto me from the ground.” (Genesis 4: 10)

  “My God forbid it!—shall I drink the blood of these men?” (I Chronicles 11: 19).

  For perhaps the first time in history a member of a mass movement for fundamental social change had made a simultaneous popular critique of the exploitation of labor, the commodity form, and the capitalist world market. In this scenario, consumers were unconscious vampires.

  Fuli, Margru, Moru, and indeed all of the Amistad Africans exemplified Cushoo’s argument. The man-stealer may have walked crooked, as Fuli said, but the straight line of the Middle Passage, from expropriation in Africa to exploitation in the Americas, was an axis of modern capitalism. The profits to be made in a far-reaching system of sugar production shaped the enslavement of Mende, Gbandi, Temne, Kono, and others inland from the Gallinas Coast of West Africa, their transportation across the Atlantic aboard the Portuguese or Brazilian slave ship Teçora, their landing in Havana, Cuba, and their reshipment aboard the Amistad for Puerto Príncipe and its hinterland booming with the production of sugar. Cubans shared the early nineteenth-century aphorism: “Con sangre se hace azúcar”—Sugar is made with blood.7

  The Atlantic in 1839

  The Atlantic coordinates of the Amistad rebellion were London and Seville in Europe, the seats of the British and Spanish empires, whose monarchs, Queen Victoria and Queen Isabella, took an interest in the case; Cuba and the northern Caribbean, where the rebels were meant to work and where the revolt exploded; Connecticut and Washington, DC, where the trials took place and high-ranking American politicians, including presidents and ex-presidents, as well as middle-class reformers, got involved; and the Gallinas Coast of West Africa and its hinterlands, where Pedro Blanco, King Siaka, Fuli, Margru, and Moru lived. The growing capitalist economy linked these people, disparate of class and region, within a larger Atlantic economic transformation that combined bondage and industrialism.8

  In 1839 Great Britain was the “workshop of the world.” It was the first industrial nation and the preeminent imperial power, not least because of its Royal Navy. Manufacturing and maritime power went hand in hand. Merchant ships linked the markets of the world and naval ships protected Britain’s interests therein. The island nation’s
role in the Amistad affair was indirect but important. Because the social movement that produced The Voice of Blood had successfully abolished the slave trade in 1807, and had pushed the state to conclude treaties with Spain and Portugal to end their slave trades, the British navy was deployed on the coast of West Africa to intercept illegal slave ships, waging a kind of war by sea against the trade. The Gallinas Coast was a major theater of battle, especially after the same movement abolished slavery throughout the British Empire in 1838. Pedro Blanco and his slave factories would be targets of special importance for the anti-slave-trade patrols.9

  Spain had long dominated the Atlantic world, but was in decline in 1839, much of its vast empire destroyed by the Spanish–American wars of independence that took place between 1808 and 1829. Standing out amid the ruins, however, was the dynamic colony of Cuba, whose rise as a sugar-producing power owed everything to a successful revolution a generation earlier in neighboring St. Domingue, where 500,000 enslaved Africans had altered the course of world history. Until 1791 they had produced almost a third of the world’s sugar, made with blood under the most horrific conditions. Their revolution, coupled with the decline of sugar production in British colonies after abolition, opened the global market for sugar planters in Cuba and Brazil, who became the world’s hungriest consumers of transatlantic slave labor in the early nineteenth century. In 1839, enslaved people of African descent made up about 45 percent of Cuba’s one million people. The illegal slave trade boomed and sugar production soared. In the half century between the beginning of the Haitian Revolution and the Amistad rebellion, Cuba’s sugar production increased ninefold, making the Spanish colony the world’s new leading source of the sweet commodity. The voice of blood was calling with full-throated urgency.10