The sun beat down heavily in the late afternoon, sending across his glass a sharp glint of light that made it difficult to see. Lieutenant Richard W. Meade adjusted his sights again, trying to bring form to the moving objects on the beach, over a mile away. From the prow of an American revenue cutter, the USS Washington, he had about an hour earlier seen a black schooner with sails torn and tattered, lying low in the water off Culloden Point and less than a mile from Long Island. What was its business in this secluded spot? Meade had scanned the beaches, fighting the glare of the sun as he peered through the glass. At last he saw what appeared to be a dozen men, rushing back and forth across the sand, carrying two trunks from a small boat toward some wagons a few yards up the shore. As Meade finally brought the shoreline into focus, he could see that over half the men were black. Were they smugglers? The evidence seemed clear: wagons for transporting goods; a small boat; two large trunks carried ashore; a ship nearby; hurried activity. But what kind of operation would involve blacks and whites in collusion? Why was there no flag identifying the nationality of the vessel? Somehow, he surmised, the men had commandeered the ship and were now delivering the stolen goods. Clearly they were guilty of piracy, a crime punishable by death under international law.1
Meade alerted the commander of the Washington, Lieutenant Thomas R. Gedney, who probably welcomed a respite from the tedious duty of surveying the coastal waters. Like Meade, Gedney observed the activity through his glass and immediately suspected those ashore of smuggling. He ordered Midshipman D. D. Porter to take a boat of six armed men and investigate the schooner and the people ashore. Meade volunteered to go with them, and within moments the sailors were under way, rowing as fast as possible under the warm August sun of 1839.
With pistols and muskets ready, the men reached the ship, where Porter quickly led them up the main rigging and, surprisingly, encountered no resistance as he took control amid great excitement and confusion. Meade was shocked by an eerie sight: the sides of the vessel, once colorful with a white streak separating green bottom from black top, now weather-beaten and covered with barnacles; seaweed stringing from the cable and along the water line; topsail yard gone and sails shredded and waving lifelessly in the breeze; the deck strewn with stale remains of food, ripped-open boxes, empty medicine containers, tattered silks, cotton, and other materials. But a worse sight than this was the occupants of the vessel, at first count perhaps fifty of them, all black. One was armed with pistol and cutlass, some had long-bladed knives, many were half-clothed or even naked, and all were clearly desperate from hunger and thirst. Four of the blacks were children—three of them girls, standing around the windlass, and, like the boy, all probably under twelve years of age.
Meade stripped the blacks of their weapons and demanded the ship’s papers. Finding that one of the blacks could speak English, but then realizing that this amounted only to a nonsensical string of unconnected words, he ordered all of them below. Meade sent two of his men to search the hold. The ship was a slaver: built for speed, its hatchway wide, five sweeps on each side. Below the large gilt eagle head on its bow, Meade could read Amistad, a word he knew meant friendship in Spanish. What calamity had brought this slave ship to New York? More important, where was its captain?
At this point, Meade’s men appeared from the hold, accompanied by two haggard white men, severely scarred on their heads and arms from recent injuries. Before Meade could speak, the two men, one in his twenties and the other in his fifties, fell on their knees, crying and exclaiming in Spanish, “Bless the Holy Virgin, you are our preservers.” Begging protection from the blacks, the older of the two men became so emotional that he lunged forward and threw his arms around Meade, causing Meade to draw his pistol to the Spaniard’s face and threaten to shoot if he failed to let go. Once order returned, someone produced a torn Spanish ensign, which Meade had placed in the main rigging to signal Gedney to send more men because of the possibility of trouble. Meade guessed what had probably happened. Stories had been circulating for weeks of a mysterious black-hulled schooner, manned by black pirates, suspiciously inching its way along the North American coast and stalking defenseless merchant vessels. More than one American sea captain had met resistance upon attempting to investigate the strange intruder and to tow it into harbor. The two white men, perhaps, had at one time been in command of the vessel.
Realizing that the blacks could speak only native African tongues, Meade doubtless wondered if the truth could ever become known. But he could speak Spanish, and one side of the story was better than none. Besides, he found that one of the two Spaniards, José
Ruiz, spoke English. Ruiz and his companion, Pedro Montes, claimed to be owners of fifty-three slaves aboard the Spanish vessel. About two months earlier, Ruiz nervously explained, the schooner had departed Havana for the 300-mile coastal voyage to Guanaja, port of entry for Puerto Príncipe in Cuba, where he was to deliver his forty-nine adult male slaves and Montes his four youths. Nothing was illegal about their activities, Ruiz emphasized; he and Montes had purchased the blacks on the public slave market in Havana. Just three days out, during the night of July 1, the slaves, led by Joseph Cinqué, had armed themselves with cane knives and risen in revolt, seizing control of the vessel after killing its captain and owner, Ramón Ferrer, and the cook, Celestino. During the scuffle, Ruiz and Montes put up resistance but were greatly outnumbered and had no chance. Ruiz surrendered, while Montes, who was severely wounded, tried to hide below. Montes was found and returned to the deck. The two crew members disappeared, the two Spaniards declared, presumably murdered and thrown overboard with the other two victims. One black was killed in the melee. By now, in addition to Antonio, the captain’s slave and cabin boy, only thirty-nine slaves of the original fifty-three remained alive.
Ruiz explained that he and Montes were alive only because they had navigational skills. Cinqué and his companions had wanted to return to Africa. But, Ruiz explained to Meade, he and Montes tricked Cinqué into believing that the vessel was sailing in the right direction, when in reality the Spaniards were steering it back and forth through the waters, hoping to stay within range of British cruisers patrolling the Caribbean. Though beaten and starved by their black captors, Ruiz proudly proclaimed, he and Montes kept the Amistad headed in a general northerly direction toward the United States. The Amistad had zigzagged for two months within sight of the American coast, where now, in late August, Lieutenant Meade had just seized the vessel.
Seemingly satisfied with this story, Meade ordered two sailors to remain with him on the hatches while Porter and the rest of his men went after the others onshore. But five of the blacks who were on the beach at the time saw the approaching boat, jumped into their own craft, and tried to return to the schooner. Before they could paddle halfway across the water, Porter’s men were upon them. Panic-stricken, the blacks turned their boat back to shore, whereupon Porter fired a warning shot over their heads and motioned them to the schooner. They made it to the sand, however, followed directly by the sailors with cutlasses drawn. After the white men still onshore explained that their only intention had been to capture the blacks, Porter and his men moved into the brush, where in a few moments they found nine blacks, including the five from the beach, and ordered them to surrender. Facing pistols cocked and aimed, the blacks had no choice. Soon the two small boats were en route to the schooner, one with Porter and his men, the other half-filled with water and beginning to sink, but carrying the black captives, the two trunks Meade had seen from afar, and various other goods.
As the two boats neared the Amistad, Ruiz and Montes excitedly declared that one of the captives was Cinqué. An uneasy moment followed as the tall, lightly bronzed, and athletically built young man identified as leader of the revolt climbed aboard with the others and exchanged hard glances with his former prisoners. Meade ordered the blacks to join their companions below. Porter’s men threw the contents of the boats on deck: a bottle of gin, sacks of potatoes, the trunks—locked but quickly opened to reveal nothing of value. Meade’s men had meanwhile found only a few Spanish doubloons aboard, confirming his belief that Ruiz and Montes had told the truth. The Amistad was not a pirate ship but a Spanish slaver, overtaken by black mutineers whom the Spaniards deceived into sailing northward into American waters.
During these lengthy proceedings, Cinqué had become suspicious that the new white captors would ally with the Spaniards and kill him and the rest of his companions. Were not he and his people black and the others white? Who would sympathize with alleged slaves who had taken white lives during a mutiny? Cinqué suddenly leaped up the hatchway past Meade and the others and jumped overboard. Meade ordered a detachment of men after him in a boat. But every time the men approached Cinqué in the water, he dived below, only to surface again a few yards away. After several minutes of this, Cinqué finally became exhausted, and he was captured and returned to the schooner.
Yet the excitement was not over. Meade ordered Cinqué taken by himself to the Washington; but once there he showed such a strong desire to return to the Amistad that Gedney allowed him to do so. In the hold of the schooner again, his black comrades surrounded him, rejoicing at his safe return. Cinqué began speaking his native language in an animated fashion, apparently intending to stir his fellow blacks into a frenzy and another revolt. This time Meade had Cinqué manacled and returned to the Washington. On the next day, Cinqué signified by motions that if his captors would return him to the schooner, he would show them a handkerchief of doubloons he had hidden below. Permitted again to board the Amistad, Cinqué went below to receive a welcome even stronger than the one he got the day before. Instead of producing the doubloons, he delivered another impassioned address that alarmed Meade—especially when Cinqué repeatedly turned toward the whites and caused the blacks to yell and jump as if possessed by “some talismanic power.”2 For a third time, Meade had Cinqué returned to the Washington. En route to the American vessel, Cinqué stood quietly, his eyes fixed on the Amistad. Once aboard the brig again, he resumed staring at the schooner until taken below.
At last in control of the Amistad and its occupants, Lieutenant Gedney put his prize into tow, bound for New London, Connecticut, where after an investigation by the authorities he would file a claim in admiralty court for salvage.
Had it not been for abolitionists in the United States, the excitement over the Amistad might have ended quietly in a prize court in Connecticut. But their involvement in the case turned it into a cause célèbre for the abolition movement. New York’s Lewis Tappan joined Roger S. Baldwin, Simeon Jocelyn, Joshua Leavitt, and other abolitionists in using the Amistad affair as a means of publicizing the evils of the African slave trade and of slavery itself. Doubts arose as to whether the Amistaďs blacks were legally slaves. Those versed in international law would point out that in 1817 England and Spain had formally agreed to halt the African slave trade and that the four children on the schooner, who could speak only an African language, were too young to have been brought into Cuba before the treaty went into effect in 1820. If the four youths were not slaves, the legitimacy of the slavehood of the other slaves came into question. The abolitionists, aware of these doubts, would argue in court that all the blacks on the Amistad had been kidnapped from Africa and enslaved illegally in Cuba. Personal liberty was at stake in the case, regardless of the color of the persons involved. Should the abolitionists establish the principle that all individuals, white and black, have an inherent right to freedom, it might help erase the color line, inflicting a mortal blow on American slavery by undermining the racial basis of its existence. Indeed, a recent writer insists that before the Dred Scott decision of 1857, no case involving slavery attracted as much nationwide attention as did the Amistad.3
Abolitionism was part of a broader struggle for equal justice based on natural rights. Looking back over years of abolitionist activity, William Lloyd Garrison, the fiery editor of the Boston Liberator, declared in 1852 that the antislavery movement had begun out of concern for blacks but grew into a crusade for the fundamental liberties of all people. Abolitionists saw slavery as unjust not only because it threatened an entire people with bondage but also because it encouraged the development of a class of aristocratic landowners who had conspired to win power by spreading slavery throughout the Southern states. Furthermore, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips warned, the “slaveocracy” would unite with Northern industrial capitalists to form “the Lords of the Lash and the Lords of the Loom.”4 Garrison called for the immediate emancipation of slaves with no compensation to owners.5 If the state, church, and American Union could not survive the antislavery movement’s call for humanity and freedom, he once exclaimed, they deserved to collapse. “If the Republic must be blotted out from the roll of nations, by proclaiming liberty to the captives, then let the Republic sink beneath the waves of oblivion.”6
Lewis Tappan was a Christian abolitionist who professed a hope to establish a virtuous nation based upon the principles of Christian morality. He and others, such as Leavitt and Jocelyn, used evangelical arguments to support their stand against slavery. Tappan realized that the abolitionists were a small minority in the United States and knew that they faced a monumental task in attempting to change a national system that did not permit equal justice to all peoples and relegated some of them to the status of property. Tappan therefore sought to politicize slavery by making it a moral issue and pushing it into the mainstream of American thought. The American courts, however, tried to avert arguments over slavery by searching for a consensus that would quiet the issue and preserve the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian political system of compromise. What seemed clear to Tappan and friends did not seem clear to most other Americans, including those in the North who claimed to oppose slavery. To mobilize an effective movement against the institution, Tappan realized, he and other abolitionists would first have to gain the support of moderates. Such a coalition might expose the repugnance of slavery and make an appeal to higher law. The Amistad mutiny provided that opportunity.
The Amistad affair is a case study of how the abolitionists temporarily overcame their differences to unite against slavery. Diversity characterized not only the antislavery movement but also the abolitionists. Some trusted solely in “moral suasion,” believing that graphic illustrations of the immorality of slavery would turn good people against the institution. Others accepted this approach but added a religious emphasis that made slavery a sin and the slaveholder a sinner; repentance was necessary to end the inhumane, immoral, and unchristian practice. Only á government built on the principles of God, not man, could restore God’s sovereignty over man in a proper relationship not subverted by institutions of human bondage. A third group of abolitionists turned to political action, either through the Whig party in particular or by establishing a special party seeking to abolish slavery. Still other abolitionists tried to combine some of the above, or simply moved from one approach to another, hoping that a dramatic incident would awaken the American people to the injustice of slavery.7 On many occasions the abolitionists bitterly disagreed over their approaches to the problem; in the Amistad case they agreed that if they could undercut barriers based on color and racial prejudices, the South would lose its major bases for slavery.
Perhaps the chief reason for the abolitionists’ harmony in the Amistad case was that there was room for all three approaches. Those emphasizing moral suasion found widespread sympathy for the black captives—even among Americans who had no strong feeling against slavery and who certainly did not advocate racial equality. A paternalistic attitude clearly guided these Americans’ thinking once it was established that the helpless victims on the Amistad posed no threat to the white community. After the antiabolitionist violence in the North of the early 1830s, it was difficult to convince Americans that justice for the Amistad blacks did not automatically endanger the welfare of everyone around them. Abolitionists recognized that they might develop a universal argument for fair treatment of all people, regardless of color, if they could demonstrate that black people had human feelings and emotions. The task would not be easy. Proslavery theorists argued for black inferiority on the basis of an alleged absence of civilized life in Africa. Savagery, cannibalism, nongodly worship, the shape of the head—all were indicative of physical and mental inferiority that only enslavement could ameliorate.8 South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun declared in the Senate in 1837 that slavery was “a positive good.”9 To counter racial prejudice, evangelical abolitionists equated slavery with sin, whereas the more practical members of the abolitionist movement, those who by the late 1830s were placing more emphasis on political realities, sought to build political coalitions that would press for a change in the Constitution’s sanction of slavery in the states.10
The abolitionists’ use of the Amistad affair paralleled transitions that occurred in the abolitionist movement as a whole. They first had to expose the evils of slavery before they could stir substantive opposition to it. All abolitionists recognized the importance of revealing the immoral nature of slavery, but not all of them understood that the movement against slavery had to go beyond mere criticism. To achieve permanent changes in the constitutional framework of the nation, the abolitionists had to construct bases of political power. The Amistad case illustrates these adjustments to changing realities. Once the abolitionists had demonstrated the humanity of the blacks and had publicized the atrocities of the slave trade and slavery, this stage of the battle was over. For remedial action, political and legal steps were necessary.
Tappan and other evangelical abolitionists believed that the Constitution itself was the most serious obstacle to their success in the Amistad affair and other issues involving slavery. The great document condoned slavery by making it a matter for state constitutions and laws. An amendment for the abolition of slavery was impossible to obtain because of the need for ratification by three-fourths of the states. To repeal laws safeguarding slavery, therefore, one would have to work inside the slave states, which was out of the question. The only conceivable national powers regarding slavery were those regulating the interstate movement of slaves and prohibiting it in territories. The day before the Amistad case began before the Supreme Court, that same Court dealt with a case involving the first of these—Groves v. Slaughter—and ducked the issue. The territorial question would arise again and again, but not until the 1840s, when controversy developed over the Wilmot Proviso, first introduced during the Mexican War. These two approaches to the problem of slavery would ultimately become the abolitionists’ most effective weapons; but for Tappan and others during the 1830s, moral suasion was the chief instrument in exposing the injustices contained in the laws of the United States and in combating the evil of slavery.
One wonders what the outcome might have been had the abolitionists searched the Constitution for remedies, rather than criticizing it as a weapon of slaveholders and as being in total violation of the law of nature. Article I, Section 8, Clause 10, empowered Congress to “define and punish . . . Offences against the Law of Nations.” Since natural law was the foundation of the law of nations, it would have been an interesting situation had the abolitionists taken advantage of the broad definition of international law and raised this point during their struggle against slavery. Believing that there was no legal recourse, they appealed to a higher law—natural law—as had been done (in the abolitionists’ view) in 1776. That is what they sought to do in the Amistad case.
The following account of the mutiny on the Amistad shows that the law of nature went on trial in the United States. The essential issue throughout the affair was a conflict between human rights and property rights—whether natural law as the abolitionists defined it was to take precedence over what they regarded as positive, man-made law. Abolitionists asked whether American law was a guarantor of the nation’s ideals. Or did the federal system of government permit a framework for racism that approved the oppression of blacks on the one hand and supported the civil rights of whites on the other? What was the status of free blacks in American society? Did the law of nature permit an attack on slavery, despite the Constitution’s tacit approval of it?
More than once, Lewis Tappan alluded to natural law when he spoke of “universal liberty” and called for the “largest liberty for the poor man—for the oppressed.” There should be no artificial distinctions in society based on race or color; everyone should have the opportunity to achieve all he was capable of achieving. The only way to reach this goal, Tappan believed, was to establish a government based on the principles of God. Slavery was the most serious of wrongs—indeed, a sin—because it interfered with man’s free moral agency and violated God’s absolute authority by giving it to man. Tappan sought to go beyond immediate issues in appealing to universal principles of righteousness, thus confronting slaveholders and their Northern supporters with their own racism and the inhumanity of the system of slavery it promoted. He and other evangelicals repeatedly stressed the supremacy of natural rights over man-made law; they called for a Christian, moral government admitting to the priority of liberty over property. One of the Amistad captives’ lawyers, Seth Staples, borrowed from the English philosopher John Locke, in emphasizing the “inherent property of liberty.”11
Tappan and other abolitionists derived many lessons from their attempt to win social justice. In confronting America’s racial inequities, they used the courts as a forum in which to condemn social injustice and to call for equality. Furthermore, they learned what political and legal paths were open for future battles. Some abolitionists came to realize that despite their appeals to higher law, they ultimately had to resort to positive law. In that regard, they would attempt to fight slavery by turning to congressional powers over interstate commerce and over territories. Americans would not resolve these moral-legal matters during the 1830s; indeed, their failure to do so helped bring on the Civil War. And the questions of moral injustice remain today, continuing to divide Americans.
The Amistad mutiny made an indelible mark on history. Besides being pure drama, the event raised questions about the relevance, if any, of race and slavery to the nineteenth-century definition of liberty. The affair helped to establish ties between American and British antislavery groups, while further distinguishing the abolitionists from other reformers in the United States. It also led to a level of political maneuvering by the White House that approached impropriety if not conspiracy or sheer illegality. In two major instances, President Martin Van Buren authorized actions that interfered with the judicial process and exceeded the powers of the executive office—both out of concern about his reelection in 1840. The case strained relations between the United States and Spain until the outbreak of the American Civil War, often becoming entangled with other issues, including America’s growing interest in Cuba. In addition, the diplomatic imbroglio threatened to involve the British. If the Spanish were guilty of violating treaties with England against the slave trade, the government in London would have a pretext for intervening in Cuba and thereby endangering America’s interest in the island. Finally, the mutiny became the subject of a trial before the United States Supreme Court that pitted former President John Quincy Adams against the federal government and that may have affected Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s later decision in the famous Dred Scott case. In the Amistad verdict of 1841 Associate Justice Joseph Story wrote a decision that helped calm the waters, only to have them become turbulent again when, in the Dred Scott case of 1857, Taney handed down a decree that inadvertently thrust previously avoided issues over slavery into the public arena.
The questions highlighted by the Amistad controversy are part of America’s national heritage, as provocative to Americans of today as they were to those of the nineteenth century.