Cinqué and his companions could not have known, but the timing of their arrival in the United States was fortunate: the nation was experiencing a widespread reform movement that, on the surface at least, exalted the common man and emphasized equality of opportunity. Although Andrew Jackson was no longer in the White House, his presidency had left an imprint on the nation that carried into the administration of his successor, Martin Van Buren. Questions have arisen over democratic myth and reality in the Jacksonian period, but numerous Americans claimed that they were serious about ending undemocratic practices and redeeming the grand promises contained in the Declaration of Independence.
The greatest evil of the age, according to the small but vocal group of antislavery activists called abolitionists, was the enslavement of human beings. Slavery, they argued, was symbolic of all that was wrong in the United States and living proof of the hypocrisy of a people who could proclaim the unalienable rights of mankind while practicing slavery and racial discrimination. The abolitionists decided that the time had come to rid the nation of slavery. As Cinqué and the other captives of the Amistad were victims of the situation in Cuba, so might they become beneficiaries of a reformist mood that was not confined to the United States but permeated England as well.
Less than a week after the Amistad’s arrival in New London, American abolitionists decided to use the mutiny in their campaign against slavery. Antislavery sentiment was part of the reform age of the 1830s, but it had not yet raised its head above other causes. Abolitionists were few in number and differed among themselves over methods and over the issue of the black’s position in society but were united in believing that all men had a right to freedom.1 Abolitionists were more radical than the larger number of Americans who merely opposed slavery. Whereas many Northerners were moderately antislavery and were satisfied to confine the institution to its current borders and force it into slow decline, the abolitionists demanded immediate emancipation without compensation to the owners.2 Perhaps many of the “immediatists” privately conceded that implementation of such a plan was not feasible and that what they wanted was an immediate commitment to emancipation through agitation, but their basic belief was that slavery violated the most sacred principles of a Christian civilization by inflicting the worst kind of injustice on human beings.3 The seeking of advantages at the expense of the weak and unfortunate had destroyed the nation’s ideals and caused some people to question whether America itself could survive.4 The Amistad case might bring these great issues into focus.
Abolitionists recognized that the Amistad affair had the potential for causing an emotional debate over slavery in the United States. A young Connecticut lawyer, E. W. Chester, summarized the issue in a letter to the Emancipator, the official organ of the American Antislavery Society. In the Amistad case, he insisted, “color cannot alter the rights or liabilities of the accused.” Africans had to stand before the courts in the same way Europeans or Americans would stand. These people could be regarded “only as persons, as moral agents, owing allegiance to this law of nature when on the high seas, and liable to be dealt with for its violation by any jurisdiction within which they may afterwards be found.”5 If the abolitionists demonstrated that color was not a legitimate obstacle to a person’s natural right to freedom, they would lay the basis for a major assault on slavery that might vindicate their larger aims.
Many abolitionists were convinced that the end to slavery depended upon a prior end to racism in the United States.6 Abolition would succeed, the evangelist Theodore Dwight Weld declared, only in proportion to a decline in racial prejudice.7 A black abolitionist, the Reverend Joshua Easton, had warned in 1837 that after slavery died the abolitionists would have to fight the spirit of prejudice that made color “a mark of degradation.”8 Gradual emancipation would not work. Racial feelings were too deeply embedded in Americans to be rooted out with time and patience. Nor was sending black people to Africa the answer, abolitionists believed, for they dismissed the American Colonization Society as a tool of racist Americans who wanted to safeguard slavery by ridding the nation of free blacks. The only remedy was an appeal to morality based on Christian principles and to individual liberties grounded in natural law.9
Many of the abolitionists had been trained for the ministry, and to those guided by religious evangelism the antislavery cause assumed both spiritual and temporal meanings.10 The evangelicals’ main goal was to convert everyone to Christianity and return the United States to God’s grace.11 To preserve the Christian basis of America, they had to expose the most flagrant evidence of this sickness—the hatred and violence stemming from slavery. Abolitionists asked searching questions. How could liberty and equality coexist with slavery and racial prejudice? Was it necessary to stand society on its head to awaken a national consciousness that would drive out slavery and racism? How could one establish a Christian world unencumbered by the enslavement of human beings?12 These questions had personal and immediate implications as well as visionary and international ones. As the abolitionist Wendell Phillips declared in 1851, “My friends, if we never free a slave, we have at least freed ourselves in the effort to emancipate our brother man.”13
The abolitionists’ growing belief in immediatism by the 1830s stemmed from evangelical Christianity, and for that reason their movement against slavery rested on emotions that had potential social, political, and economic consequences. The “Christian abolitionists,” as some writers have called them, believed that they had to convert people from within, by appealing to their sense of morality.14 In trying to destroy social evils, they argued that sin was a rebellion against God and therefore required repentance. Only through the soul’s regeneration could a Christian launch an inner drive for perfection that would manifest itself in attempts to reform society.15 Abolition became a religious act grounded in the revivalist feeling of the times. For nearly two thousand years Christians had considered sin a form of slavery; now they were arguing that slavery itself was a sin.16 One could not abolish slavery gradually, any more than one could abolish sin gradually. To compensate slaveowners for losses would be to compromise with evil. As the evangelicals argued, conversion itself was compensation, for it meant a bestowing of God’s favor.17 Nonabolitionists warned that any attempt to end slavery with a sudden sweep would cause nationwide upheaval.18
Abolitionists during the 1830s aimed primarily at converting Northerners to their cause. The main objective of the movement, according to the National Anti-Slavery Standard of New York, was to “reform the white man, so that the colored man may be safe by his side.” Conversion of Southern slaveholders seemed hopeless, leading most abolitionists to believe that to succeed they had to widen their narrow base of followers to include antislavery moderates in the North who regarded slavery as injurious to economic expansion and to democratic ideals.19 But these moderates lacked fervor, and abolitionists bitterly attacked those who refused to make a total commitment to the cause.20
Opposition to slavery, whether intense or mild, was not necessarily devoid of racism. Many Northerners who were antislavery in feeling nonetheless feared that immediate abolition would lead to racial troubles. Antislavery groups disagreed over the methods and time required to reach the goal, and over the types of social adjustment necessary during the postslavery period. Anti-abolitionists were concerned that abolition would force a choice between racial war and racial amalgamation.21 The South, they feared, could not survive the social and economic upheaval caused by abolition. Furthermore, such a revolution would have serious ramifications in their own section of the country. Another wave of violence stemming from the slavery issue—similar to that which had occurred in the early 1830s—could permanently divide the country.22
Probably because of widespread racial feelings, no antislavery group, including the abolitionists, had formulated a plan for social, political, and economic adjustment after slavery came to an end.23 Most Americans seemed to agree that sentiment against slavery did not automatically lead to a push for equality between the races. Abolitionists themselves differed over how far the reform movement should go beyond ending slavery. Whereas some proclaimed it poor strategy to argue about details when great principles were at stake, others were not willing to advocate a racially integrated society. More than a few had not given thought to the matter.24
Abolitionists believed that the essential weakness in the antislavery cause was that Northerners had stubbornly failed to take a stand against the greatest wrong of the day.25 The reason for this reluctance, they thought, was that few Northerners had confronted slavery on its own terms. Instead of accepting the slaveholders’ arguments about the ameliorative qualities of the institution, Northerners should examine the central depravity fostered by slavery: the degradation of both master and slave resulting from one man’s ownership and exploitation of another man as property.26 Abolitionists believed that a dramatic event was required to awaken their countrymen to the sordid nature of slavery. The mutiny on the Amistad provided one.
Shortly after Judge Judson’s hearing on the USS Washington, Dwight P. Janes, an abolitionist from New London, informed friends in the cause that none of the black captives on board the Amistad was legally a slave belonging to José Ruiz or Pedro Montes. Janes had been on board the Washington during the inquiry, and Ruiz had made this admission to him in the cabin. Furthermore, Janes had secured confirmation of this information from Marshal Willcox. A slaver had violated Spanish laws against the African slave trade by transporting the blacks from Africa to Cuba, where Ruiz and Montes, with full knowledge of the situation, had purchased them at the public slave market.27
Janes wrote to two allies in the abolitionist cause, the Reverend Joshua Leavitt of New York, a Yale graduate, lawyer, and editor of the Emancipator, and Roger S. Baldwin, a lawyer from New Haven who had already become known as a defender of justice for the less fortunate. After recounting the details of the mutiny to both men, Janes argued that the Amistaďs blacks could be neither slaves nor Spanish subjects. They had not been in Havana long enough to be domiciled. They could not speak Spanish. Their languages were unknown in origin but clearly African. Spanish law labeled the African slave trade an act of piracy, punishable by death. For these reasons, the captives on the Amistad had a legal right to liberty at any cost. Janes asked Leavitt to investigate the vessel’s papers in New York, with the intention of establishing that the Spaniards had no legal title to the blacks as slaves. He also suggested that Leavitt attempt to find someone in New York who could speak the Africans’ languages and go to New Haven to determine their side of the story. Finally, he urged Leavitt to persuade Baldwin to take the case. “Perhaps I over-rate the importance of this affair,” Janes wrote, but “all the abolitionists here feel as I do.”28
Janes explained the abolitionists’ strategy. He first asked that Baldwin act in behalf of the Amistaďs blacks in filing a claim for the vessel and the cargo as their legal property. The objective was to charge the two Spaniards with piracy and then to gather evidence by locating native Africans who could speak the languages of the blacks of the Amistad. The case had aroused great interest in New London. Most Americans, he believed, did not think the blacks guilty of murder and opposed returning them to Spanish officials to stand trial. The best solution was to set them free or return them to Africa. Janes added that the latter option appeared to be the responsibility of the American Colonization Society, which would be, he sarcastically remarked, “the only legitimate work which has yet been offered them.” If Baldwin could establish that the blacks were not legally slaves, the inherent right of self- defense would justify their seizure of the Amistad.29
Janes insisted that the abolitionists sought only “humanity and justice” for the blacks. Baldwin should refer to them as “citizens of Africa,” for the burden of proof would then rest on the prize master and the two Spaniards to show that slavers had taken the blacks to Havana before the slave trade became an act of piracy. Failure to provide such proof might establish that the schooner was engaged in an illegal activity that had begun in Africa, and that the blacks had a right to liberty. Besides Ruiz’s admission, there was the statement to Janes by the young cabin boy, Antonio, that the blacks on the Amistad had arrived in Cuba only recently. The passports secured by the Spaniards in Havana proved the local government’s involvement in a “bad business.” The papers could not legalize the voyage to Puerto Príncipe unless the Spaniards first established that the blacks’ entrance into Havana was legal.30
Janes advised prompt action out of concern that the Spanish government might secure a quiet arrangement with the Van Buren administration in Washington that would provide for the return of vessel, cargo, and blacks to Spanish authorities. Although the Spanish consul in Boston had said he did not believe that his government would demand their return, Janes feared that the consul’s policy was to play down the issue while negotiating a settlement with Secretary of State John Forsyth. Janes was aware of Forsyth’s strong proslavery feelings (the secretary was a slaveholder from Georgia), and he knew that the Van Buren administration would not want the Amistad matter to erupt on the political scene—especially with a presidential election coming soon. Janes recommended that Baldwin pursue whatever legal means were necessary to require the United States marshal in New Haven to hold the vessel, its cargo, and the blacks until a full investigation could take place. Indeed, Ruiz and Montes themselves had enough money to settle the salvage matter with Lieutenant Gedney; this would eliminate the only obstacle to a delivery of the prize to Spanish officials. Could not Baldwin start a legal action against Gedney based on “unlawful detention” of the blacks?31
Baldwin was no novice in the field of constitutional liberties. He was born in New Haven in 1793, into a family tracing its lineage from Puritan emigrants and having a long history of participation in public affairs. His mother was the daughter of Roger Sherman, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, a later delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and, ironically, a key figure in the protecting of slavery in the Constitution, At the age of eighteen, Baldwin graduated with honors from Yale College, and after studying law he was admitted to the bar in 1814. Soon afterward he won a fugitive slave’s freedom by securing a writ of habeas corpus and successfully arguing the case before the superior court. Before becoming governor and later United States senator from Connecticut during the 1840s, Baldwin was interested in the cause of abolition. With Simeon Jocelyn, a Congregational minister in New Haven, he had in 1831 confronted an angry mob resisting their attempts to build a black training school near Yale College.32
Now Jocelyn asked Amos Townsend, Jr., a prominent banker in New Haven, to persuade Baldwin to take the case. Jocelyn was the minister of New Haven’s first church for blacks, a founder of the city’s antislavery society, and a conductor of runaways in the underground railroad. Recognizing that the case would require more than one counsel, he secured help from Seth Staples, who, because of the importance of the issue, agreed to accept an indemnity only for his time. In the meantime Townsend accompanied another abolitionist from Connecticut, John F. Norton, to talk with Baldwin about handling the case. After a two-hour discussion in Baldwin’s office, he agreed to do so. Baldwin was reluctant to discuss terms because he was not sure he would charge anything for defending the “injured fellow beings.” At this time he advised Townsend that a writ of habeas corpus would not be necessary, because even the president of the United States lacked authority to turn the blacks over to Spanish authorities without allowing them their day in court.33
By early September abolitionists in Connecticut had established contact with friends in New York City, who made an important move in securing the aid of Lewis and Arthur Tappan. The two brothers, descendants of Benjamin Franklin, were successful merchants who had experienced firsthand the resistance to the abolitionism that pervaded much of the North. Lewis had left Boston to join Arthur in New York in 1826, and the following year Arthur established the Journal of Commerce to exert moral influence against slavery. Arthur had earlier been instrumental in founding the American Antislavery Society. Public reaction to the Tappans’ antislavery activities had been swift. In 1834 a mob disrupted a meeting of the society in New York and went on to break into Lewis’s house, throwing furniture into the street and burning it. The mob then threatened to do the same to the store of Arthur Tappan and Company, but iron shutters protected the windows, and thirty clerks armed with muskets frightened off the mob. The following year an unnamed person offered $100,000 for the bodies of the Tappans, payable upon delivery into any slave state. They heard stories of gangs waiting for them; they were burned in effigy and attacked in the press; insurance companies declined to insure family property; and they received mail containing threatening letters, pieces of rope suggesting the gallows, and, at one point, a slave’s ear. These and other events had subjected the Tappan brothers to trial by fire. When friends of Arthur’s urged him to resign as president of the American Antislavery Society, he declared, "I will be hung first." Lewis meanwhile armed himself with his only weapon—a copy of the New Testament in his breast pocket.34
And yet, Arthur Tappan showed an ambivalence toward color that was probably characteristic of many Americans. He was not racially prejudiced but was undecided about free blacks’ place in American society. After an incident of 1834, in which church members were incensed over his appearance with a fair-skinned black minister, he refused to associate publicly with blacks except for business purposes. Years afterward he made a distinction between emancipation and mixture of the races. Although Christians had to disregard color, he wrote to a friend, he saw the need for “great prudence” in seeking changes in the public’s attitude on race. Tappan insisted that his own feelings did not preclude public association with a “well educated and refined colored person, male or female,” but he added, “I felt that their best good would be promoted by refraining from doing so till the public mind and conscience were more enlightened on the subject.”35 Whether this was a rationalization is impossible to say; but Tappan’s longtime public support for the cause suggests that he was confronting the same dilemma that faced many. Serious social, political, and economic consequences awaited people who morally condemned slavery and the racism that was its underpinning.
Lewis Tappan’s feelings toward slavery were indicative of the strong evangelical strain running through the abolition movement. He was a puritan who constantly faced the problem of wanting to change the world while having to live in it. An admitted Christian abolitionist, he would not compromise with either slavery or racial prejudice. Firmly believing slavery a moral wrong, he condemned both those who participated in the act and those who permitted the practice by ignoring it. Unlike his brother, he openly opposed racial discrimination. Even in marriage, he insisted, religious unity was more important than race. Amalgamation did not concern him. By the “present system of bleaching,” he wrote a friend, both blacks and whites would in a thousand years be “copper colored, the original color of this climate.”36 And he was an uncompromising moralist: all sins, in his view, involved rebellion against God, and slavery was evidence of a whole range of sins. Slavery, he wrote his brother Benjamin, a senator from Ohio, was “the worm at the root of the tree of Liberty. Unless killed the tree will die.”37
Tappan did not want balance. His stereotypes, which idealized blacks and condemned the South, were necessary tools for uprooting the deeply entrenched institutions that were morally irreparable. The black became a noble savage, victimized by morally corrupt Southerners and by morally calloused Northerners. Tappan saw slavery solely in moral terms, and for that reason he could not compromise with social, political, or economic realities. Such concessions would be tantamount to making amends with evil.38
In early September, New York abolitionists appointed Lewis Tap- pan, Joshua Leavitt, and Simeon Jocelyn as the “Amistad Committee,” which was assigned the task of raising money for the blacks’ legal counsel and for their needs while in the New Haven jail.39 This was not the first time the three men had served the cause together. In 1831 they were on a committee in New York that tried—but failed—to establish a national antislavery society.40 Leavitt differed with Tappan over the place of political action in the abolitionist movement but for the time being joined forces with him and other evangelicals.41 Indeed, the Amistad affair perhaps suggested that the sentiment against slavery was widening because later events united many opponents of the institution who were not always abolitionists and who often disagreed with one another. The committee ran advertisements in the newspapers, asking “Friends of Liberty” to make donations. According to the committee, the president of the United States would choose to surrender the blacks to Spanish authorities in an effort to take “the victims out of sight with the least observation.” Since black Africans had killed a white Spaniard, no one would see the need for further inquiries. The committee declared that the Africans’ right to freedom derived from the law of nature, international laws against the slave trade, and “the voice of humanity and liberty.” Almost immediately, contributions began to arrive.42
Meanwhile, the blacks’ legal team continued to grow. The abolitionists had attempted to secure the services of Rufus Choate of Boston, but the prominent attorney declined. Though citing previous commitments, Choate was a Whig who believed that abolitionists were radicals whose agitations could disrupt the Union. The abolitionists did succeed in persuading one other attorney to join Baldwin and Staples in defending the Amistad captives: Theodore Sedgwick, an antislavery Democrat whose office was located in the same building in New York City as Staples’s and who, according to Lewis Tappan, was “an active & talented young lawyer.” Baldwin was assigned the responsibilities of preparing the case and giving the opening argument in court.43
Townsend was worried that the Amistad matter was coming under too much visible control of the abolitionists. He feared that the widespread favorable impression of the blacks could disappear because of the animosity toward Tappan and other abolitionists. The wisest course, Townsend thought, was to call a meeting of “gentlemen” to appoint a committee to handle the case. They should keep their work distinct from Tappan’s fund so that the effort in behalf of the blacks would not “smell too strong of Abolition.” If managed correctly, the case could change the public’s attitude toward slavery and the slave trade. But if abolitionists appeared to claim the “virtue of exclusive sympathy,” many Americans would turn away in disgust. The New York Daily Express, Townsend pointed out, had already denounced Tappan’s advertisement as an effort by abolitionists to cause trouble. It would be wise to enlist the help of those who were not “professed abolitionists” and who could exert a favorable influence on the case.44
Before Townsend could carry out his recommendation, Tappan assumed a leading public role in the case by locating three native Africans in New York and immediately taking them to New Haven to talk with the Amistad captives. One of them, John Ferry, was a native of the Kissi tribe in the continental interior who had been kidnapped at the age of about twelve and liberated in Colombia by Simon Bolívar. Ferry could speak Mandingo but was more fluent in Gallinao, which some of the prisoners could speak. After Tappan delivered an impromptu sermon to the blacks (which they could not comprehend), Ferry engaged in limited conversation with a few of the blacks. He concluded that the four children were Africans by birth, one of them being Congolese, the other three Mandingoes. Though most of the story remained untold because of difficulties in communication, Ferry claimed that at least the youths had been kidnapped in Africa and illegally sold into Cuban slavery.45 This was enough to confirm the abolitionists’ position.
Realizing that the blacks’ greatest asset was public sympathy, the Amistad Committee did everything possible to keep attention focused on their plight. Leavitt and Tappan visited the blacks in New Haven on at least three occasions, returning to write long public letters for the newspapers that further aroused the feeling of readers. The press printed every detail, no matter how seemingly obscure and unimportant. The blacks were not “man-eaters,” Tap- pan declared in trying to dispel stories in some of the newspapers. One of the blacks, Konoma, was a Congolese with teeth that protruded markedly. However, he was not a cannibal. Rather, as the abolitionists later reported, Konoma had used this disfiguration to attract women. Tappan repeatedly insisted that the blacks were human beings, possessing the same wants and needs as whites. These details were of enormous interest to people in Connecticut and elsewhere, many of whom visited the jail to view the blacks firsthand.46
According to the accounts by Leavitt and Tappan, all of the prisoners except Cinqué lived quite comfortably in four apartments—the men in three different rooms and the four children in a room by themselves—under the care of United States Marshal Norris Willcox and the jailer, Colonel Stanton Pendleton. Cinqué was in a room with others charged with various crimes, “savage looking fellows, black and white.” Problems existed in all of the dwellings. Fresh air and exercise were lacking, and a physician had found evidence of disease and malnutrition. Tappan reported that though the blacks were generally in good health, one had died a few days earlier and two or three were seriously ill. The Mandingoes among them, Tappan declared, were “robust” and at times “full of hilarity,” but all were generally “quiet, kind and orderly.” Leavitt agreed that most of the blacks appeared to be of “quiet minds” and “mild and cheerful temper” with “no contentions” among them.47 The marshal had secured decent food and clothing for the prisoners, despite some of the newspapers’ charges that they had nothing to wear on their arrival in New Haven. Leavitt explained that the basis for these accusations probably lay in the blacks’ decision to remove most of their clothing because of the heat of the hold on board the Amistad. Tappan noted that the men were dressed in dark striped cotton trousers and striped cotton shirts, whereas the girls were in calico frocks and had shawls that they made into turbans.48
Most public interest was focused on Cinqué, who had become a romanticized figure. He greatly resembled the prints already on sale around the streets, Leavitt declared. Cinqué was “like another Othello,” Tappan wrote, of “fine proportions,” who carried himself with a “noble air” and a “good degree of gracefulness and native dignity.” Asked whether he believed in God, Cinqué had, according to Tappan, expressed “some idea” of a “good Spirit” and of an “evil Spirit.” If men lied, Cinqué asserted through Ferry, the evil spirit would “take them somewhere, they knew not where.” He declared, “God is good,” and insisted, “Me tell no lies—me tell the truth.” Asked where God was, Cinqué pointed upward. Tappan hired divinity students from Yale College to work with Ferry in giving the blacks religious instruction. Tappan soon realized that the captives from the Amistad regarded Cinqué as their chief. When receiving permission to visit Cinqué, they called him “massa” and gave him money received from visitors. But Cinqué turned over the money to his brother, one of the prisoners, before reentering his cell—probably because he worried that one of his fellow inmates would take it from him, Tappan thought.49
Even the shape of Cinqué’s head drew the attention of those pseudoscientists of the nineteenth century who claimed that they could determine his character from it. A phrenologist, L. N. Fowler, examined Cinqué and reported his conclusions in a journal article that revealed strong racial overtones even though the thrust of the argument was favorable to his subject. The base of Cinqué’s brain, Fowler declared, was smaller than the other parts, meaning that “lower animal propensities” did not dominate his character. In temperament Cinqué liked mental and physical exercises and was nervous and restless. He was blessed with a “strong constitution” and “great powers of endurance” and had a “love of liberty, independence, determination, ambition, regard for his country, and for what he thinks is sacred and right.” Shrewd, tactful, a good manager, and a man of moral courage, pride, and self-esteem, Cinqué possessed strong leadership qualities and could handle power and command respect. He did not seem to be “naturally cruel, malicious, or even selfish,” but his disposition changed if his liberty and rights were in jeopardy. He refused to be subject to others, and although at times “tyrannical and dictatorial,” he could show “humanity, kindness, and sympathy for the happiness of others.” His “cerebral organization,” Fowler remarked, seemed “superior to the majority of negroes” in the United States. Indeed, Cinqué ’s intellect was “generally well-balanced, and better developed than most persons belonging to his race.”50
After some discussion the jailer allowed a professor of linguistics at Yale College, Josiah W. Gibbs, to accompany Tappan, Baldwin, and Ferry in talking with Cinqué. Gibbs had visited the blacks a few days earlier, and after learning some of the numbers in their languages, he searched the waterfronts of New York and New Haven, hoping to find a native African who might recognize the languages. He finally came across two Africans employed on the British warship Buzzard, then in New York: James Covey, a former slave from Sierra Leone, and Charles Pratt, a native of Mende who had been seized by a Spanish slaver about seven years earlier. Gibbs took them to New Haven on September 9.51
Cinqué was at first reluctant to talk with his visitors, but he finally consented. He confirmed what the other blacks had told Ferry—that most of them were from Mandingo. Gaining confidence as he spoke, Cinqué declared with great feeling that he was born in Africa about sixty miles inland, the son of one of the “principal men” of his country, but not of a king or a chief. During his business dealings, he had bought some goods but was unable to pay the entire amount. Seized by his own tribesmen as payment for the debt, he had been sold to King Sharks, who reigned in the Gallinas area about fifteen miles from the Atlantic. After a while Spaniards, he thought, bought him and took him to Havana, forcing him to leave behind his parents, wife, and three children. Asked whether he had ever helped enslave his countrymen, he staunchly replied, “I would never take advantage of any one, but would always defend myself.” He asserted that during the voyage of the Amistad the captain was “very cruel and beat them severely.” After the revolt, the Spaniards, he bitterly remarked, “made fools of us and did not go to Sierra Leone.” Cinqué did not realize that the vessel was in America until Captain Green told him. Although Cinqué was willing to give up everything, Green refused to take the blacks to Sierra Leone. When asked whether the Amistad had carried gold, Cinqué claimed that the two trunks taken ashore and shown to Green had rattled and clanked with doubloons. But after Lieutenant Gedney had seized the vessel and cargo, Tappan wrote, the gold was never found. At one point, Cinqué drew his hand across his throat, asking whether his captives planned to kill him. Reassured that he was among friends and would soon go home, he showed noticeable relief.52
Cinqué had not told all the truth, probably because he did not trust white people. Most of the blacks, Cinqué included, were from Mende, not Mandingo, and Cinqué later admitted in court that the Amistad carried only a few doubloons, not as many as he wanted Tappan and the others to believe. Perhaps he feared additional assaults from slave traders on his people still in Mende. On the gold question, he perhaps hoped to divide the whites or thought that by alleging knowledge of the wealth, he would assure his fellow captives’ lives. The reasons Cinqué may have had for these fabrications remain a matter for conjecture. Almost two years later, however, the Amistad blacks admitted to having agreed among themselves not to reveal their homeland, because they trusted no one.53
The Amistad Committee wanted the court to release the prisoners unless officials brought formal charges, and it urged Baldwin to seek a writ of habeas corpus before the Van Buren administration intervened and delivered them to the Spanish government under the terms of Pinckney’s Treaty of 1795. Tappan recommended that Baldwin take “every precautionary measure,” including, the committee noted, seeking the writ “in case of necessity.” As Tappan pointed out, the Spanish minister in Washington had referred to Pinckney’s Treaty in demanding the blacks’ return to Cuba, and the White House would undoubtedly comply. He recommended that Baldwin talk with Governor William W. Ellsworth about the steps the Connecticut state government might take in case the federal government tried to “interfere unlawfully.” Some “trusty man” should watch the marshal and give immediate warning if anyone tried to remove the blacks from jail. Henry B. Stanton, a well-known lawyer and abolitionist from Boston, agreed with Tappan that the American government would return the Africans to the Spanish upon demand. Ellis Gray Loring, another abolitionist from Boston, who was an avid follower of William Lloyd Garrison and who served as the Tappans’ attorney, also urged Baldwin to use a writ of habeas corpus to prevent such an event. As Jocelyn scribbled on the outside of a letter from Leavitt to Baldwin, a writ of habeas corpus seemed advisable because “it may save the Africans and us [the abolitionists] great respect.” “Who will trust the present administration in regard to law,” he asked, “when none but the lives of foreign blacks are concerned?”54
One careful observer of the proceedings was John Quincy Adams, member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts and former president. Though not an abolitionist, he hated slavery for what it had done to the American fabric of freedom. The blacks, he wrote to William Jay—an evangelical abolitionist, a legal and constitutional expert, and the son of John Jay—had “vindicated their own right of liberty” by “executing the justice of Heaven” upon a “pirate murderer, their tyrant and oppressor.” Adams refused to believe that if the Spanish government demanded the blacks, the United States would comply. Such a move would turn them over to “slavetrading justice and mercy.” No executive officer of the United States would be “daring enough” to return them to the “mockery of a tribunal of slave- smugglers.”55
To discourage any effort to surrender the blacks to Spain, the abolitionists appealed to the president to allow the courts to handle the matter. In a letter to Van Buren, Staples and Sedgwick urged him to refrain from an exercise of “executive discretion” and permit the judiciary to determine the facts in the case. The treaty of 1795 did not authorize the submission of conflicting property rights to “mere official discretion”; that decision belonged to the tribunals always relied upon to guarantee civil rights. Nothing in the treaty authorized their delivery to Spain. Moreover, international law did not require the president to give in to demands. The Spanish had no legal title to the blacks as slaves. The government in Madrid had forbidden the African slave trade by agreeing to a treaty with England in 1817 and by issuing a royal decree under the queen’s name in November 1838. Ruiz and Montes could not have acquired legal ownership over blacks illegally imported into Cuba. The inherent right of self-defense had allowed the captives to free themselves from “illegal restraint.” Staples and Sedgwick asked that the president refuse to have the matter decided “in the recesses of the cabinet,” where these “unfriended men” could present no evidence in their behalf.56
The abolitionists intended to push the Amistad issue into the public arena. To do this, they had to wrest it from the president’s private negotiations with Spain and to take the case into the courts, where, they hoped, it would become part of the larger game of national politics.