By February 1841, the Amistad Africans had appeared in American court five times. The first was on the deck of the U.S. brig Washington at the docks of New London, Connecticut, where Judge Andrew Judson of the United States District Court held a hearing on August 29, 1839, soon after they came ashore, to consider charges of piracy and murder. A second set of hearings was held in Hartford between September 19 and 23, presided over by Judson and Smith Thompson of the U.S. Circuit Court. In October Lewis Tappan brought charges of violent assault and false imprisonment against José Ruiz and Pedro Montes on behalf of four of the Amistad Africans, which resulted in a new set of hearings before judges Inglis and Jones in New York. The original case resumed in Hartford November 19, but James Covey’s sickness required postponement to January 7–13, 1840, in New Haven. When the United States Supreme Court convened in Washington on February 22, 1841, to make a definitive ruling about whether the Amistad Africans would be returned to their “owners” under the provisions of the Pinckney Treaty of 1795, the Africans were not present in the courtroom. They awaited the verdict in jail in Westville, Connecticut.
Anxiety about the big palaver had settled over the Africans about two months earlier, reported their teacher Sherman Booth. The case was originally scheduled for January. Cinqué was losing weight because of “mental disquiet.” By the time the court began its deliberations, nerves were on edge in the jailhouse. Every day the leader of the Africans came to Booth to ask, “What the Grand Court say? Tell me.” The “Mendi People” knew that this would be the final judgment. Their fates, and their necks, hung in the balance of pro-and antislavery forces that met in Washington, DC.1
By this time the adult Amistad Africans had enough experience with the law to be wary. Indeed, four of them were in Connecticut because they had fallen afoul of it in their homelands and were sold into slavery for “criminal conduct.” All were accustomed to palavers held in the bari, the communal meeting house where disputes about law and custom were argued and settled, often with eloquent speeches given by parties on both sides of the dispute to a king, chief, or head man, a group of elders, and the interested part of the community in attendance. The local leader usually consulted with the elders in reaching a judgment, which all parties would be obliged to accept. Occasionally a verdict might be appealed to the jurisdiction of a more powerful regional leader, but issues of justice were usually decided locally. Behind the palavers stood the Poro Society, which to a large extent determined the rules and practices that would be followed in the legal procedure. This would have been the framework in which the Amistad Africans interpreted their legal experience in the United States. They knew courtroom argument and drama, but not the larger American system of law, especially its federal jurisdictional structure and lengthy process of appeal. Amos Townsend Jr. noted that the Africans were accustomed to a “summary process” of trial “in their own country,” and that the delay caused by appeal was hard for them to understand and endure.2
In Washington, interest in the case quickened as the court date approached. Visitors surged into the capital from out of town, including abolitionists such as Joshua Leavitt, a member of the Amistad Committee, from New York, to report on the hearings. As excitement mounted, abolitionists circulated for sale John Sartain’s mezzotint portrait of Cinqué. The Spanish-language newspaper Noticioso de Ambos Mundos, published in New York, asked, provocatively, whether the United States government would consider “uprising, mutiny, and murder the best recommendation in order not to comply with the provisions of a treaty.” Once again the court chambers would fill with spectators, including recent presidential candidate Henry Clay and Senator John J. Crittenden, both of Kentucky, among others. Everyone understood that the court would decide issues of national and international significance.3
Another interested party was the British government, which, at the urging of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, mobilized its diplomatic corps to apply pressure to Spain and the United States. Statesman G. S. Jerningham wrote to Spanish minister Don Evaristo Pérez de Castro in Madrid at the end of December 1840, reminding him of the treaty that made it illegal “to import negroes from Africa into the Spanish dominions” after 1820. He recommended that the Amistad Africans “be put in possession of the liberty of which they were deprived.” Britain had, after all, paid Spain £400,000 (almost $37 million in 2012 dollars) to agree to eliminate the evil trade. On January 20, 1841, Ambassador Henry Stephen Fox wrote Secretary of State John Forsyth that “a powerful and humane interest” in the case existed in the United States and Britain, reminding him of the treaty with Spain and the Treaty of Ghent (1814), negotiated by John Quincy Adams, in which Great Britain and the United States mutually pledged “to use their best endeavors for the entire abolition of the African slave trade.” Fox urged that the president of the United States act to secure the liberty to which the Amistad Africans were clearly entitled. Above these suggestions to Spain and the United States loomed Britain’s military capacity to seize the island of Cuba if it so desired.4
Attorney General Henry D. Gilpin explained in his opening statement why the Supreme Court should overturn the ruling of the lower court. He sought the straightforward restoration of private property based on the Pinckney Treaty of 1795, in which the United States and Spain agreed to mutual assistance for ships in distress. Article 8 stipulated that if a ship “be forced through stress of weather, pursuit of pirates or enemies, or any other urgent necessity” to seek shelter, it “shall be received and treated with all humanity” and properly assisted. Article 9 added: all ships “rescued out of the hands of any pirates or robbers on the high seas, shall be brought into some port” and returned to those who originally owned them. The Spanish slaveholders Ruiz and Montes made claims based on these articles of the treaty, as had the government of Spain through their ambassadors, Angel Calderón de la Barca and Pedro Alcántara de Argaiz. The vessel, cargo, and slaves, argued Gilpin, should be “restored to the Spanish owners.” These black pirates—“enemies of all mankind”—had committed a crime against property by seizing themselves. They should be returned to Cuba.5
Roger S. Baldwin, who had worked with the Amistad Committee throughout the ordeal, spoke on behalf of the thirty-six Africans, contending “for freedom and for life, with two powerful governments arrayed against them.” Baldwin cleverly turned the tables on Gilpin. Drawing on an American federal law of 1820 that any citizen of the United States who engaged in the slave trade “shall be adjudged a pirate” and if convicted “shall suffer death,” he asked, who are the pirates here? Not the Amistad rebels but rather Ruiz, Montes, and by implication the deceased Captain Ramón Ferrer, all of whom were, in this rhetorical flourish (if not in law, for they were not American citizens), illegal slave-trading pirates. Baldwin insisted that the Amistad rebels were not pirates, were not slaves, and that the United States government must not turn them over to Ruiz, Montes, Cuba, Spain, or anyone else. They should go free. Baldwin stated that his clients “were not pirates, nor in any sense hostes humani generis” (enemies of all mankind). They had no goal of enrichment in seizing the vessel and they attacked no other ships. Their sole objective was to free themselves from unlawful bondage. They were in fact the “victims of piracy.”6
Twelve times in his fluent address Baldwin acknowledged the Amistad rebels as the agents of their own emancipation. By their own “successful revolt,” they had “achieved their deliverance from slavery, on the high seas.” They had arrived “in a condition of freedom within the territorial limits of a FREE AND SOVEREIGN STATE”—that is, what the Africans called “a free country.” This was an important legal point because it meant a return to Cuba or Spain would require the United States government to “re-enslave them, for the benefit of Spanish negro-dealers,” which was clearly unconstitutional. Baldwin railed against the “executive interference” that sought to place them back in bondage. He also noted the “intense interest [in the case] throughout the country;—I may almost say throughout the civilized world.” An observer noted that Baldwin’s speech was “one of the most complete, finished, conclusive legal arguments ever made before that court.”7
When John Quincy Adams rose to address the court, he noted that his “learned friend and colleague” had defended the Amistad Africans “in so able and complete a manner as leaves me scarcely anything to say.” His address would therefore last a mere seven and a half hours, over two court sessions. In the first, the wily master of rhetoric had some fun with the contradictions of the argument about piracy. Both the American and Spanish governments had insisted on treating the Amistad Africans as both “merchandise”—as passive property, that is to say, as slaves—and at the same time as “pirates and robbers,” who were active, aggressive human agents. Referring to the treaty of 1795, Adams remarked, “My clients are claimed under the treaty as merchandise, rescued from pirates and robbers.” But who were the merchandise and who were the robbers? “According to the construction of the Spanish minister, the merchandise were the robbers, and the robbers were the merchandise. The merchandise was rescued out of its own hands, and the robbers were rescued out of the hands of the robbers.” Adams then turned to the justices and asked, no doubt with a glint of mischief in his eyes, “Is this the meaning of the treaty?” Adams also assailed Lt. Thomas Gedney and the other officers of the navy, who had no legal right to attack the rebels, drive them belowdecks, seize them, or forcibly carry them to New London. Their “sympathy” for the white slaveholders was all too apparent. Adams expanded upon Baldwin’s argument that the Africans arrived in the United States in full, rightful possession of both the vessel and their freedom.8
After the court adjourned for the day, its proceedings were “interrupted by the solemn voice of death.” Justice Philip Barbour of Virginia was found dead in his bed the following morning, causing a postponement of the case until March 1. Other dramatic news came soon after, from Liberia, by way of an American shipmaster: the British antislavery patrol, led by Captain Joseph Denman, had destroyed the slave-trading factories of Pedro Blanco on the Gallinas Coast, the very place from which the Amistad Africans had been shipped to Cuba aboard the Teçora in April 1839. Eleven boats with one hundred twenty armed sailors had pushed off from the Wanderer, the Saracen, and the Rolla on the evening of November 19, 1840, arrived undetected, and forced the overseers to grab their papers and fly into the bush in fright and consternation. The sailors liberated more than eight hundred enslaved Africans and torched the barracoons, destroying property worth an estimated £200,000 ($9 million in 2012 dollars). Lord Palmerston, British secretary of state for foreign affairs, commended the action: “Taking a wasp’s nest…is more effective than catching the wasps one by one.” At roughly the same time, Captain H. F. Seagram had negotiated the surrender of Blanco’s former partner, Theophilus Conneau, now the second biggest slave trader on the coast. Suddenly a “mammoth market for human flesh” had been destroyed and “a thousand miles of coastline cleared” of the horrid trade.9
Back in Connecticut, abolitionists were once again debating what to do in the event of a verdict against the Amistad Africans. The discussion was complicated this time because Wilcox the marshal and Pendleton the jailer expected a jailbreak. Abolitionists therefore worried that they might take preemptive action to move the Africans to another location. Amos Townsend Jr. met with Cinqué to alert him to the possibility, telling him to keep everyone together and to “make all the resistance in their power & not suffer themselves to be carried off by stealth.” Cinqué and his fellow warriors had demonstrated “all the resistance in their power” aboard the Amistad, but he understood that a different, lesser kind of resistance was called for on this occasion. He promised that “if they come we will all halloo loud & make plenty noise” to alert sympathetic neighbors. In any case, many local abolitionists remained “ready forcibly to interfere,” if necessary. Wilcox and Pendleton added guards and extra locks to the prison doors.10
When Adams resumed on Monday, March 1, in a “well filled Court room” as a snowstorm raged outside, he waged a blistering attack on Martin Van Buren for “executive interference” in the case. He pointed repeatedly to the courtroom copy of the Declaration of Independence, emphasizing the principle of equality as crucial to the case. As he concluded, he was gripped by emotion, his voice almost failing, his face lined with tears. A correspondent, profoundly moved, wrote, “The closing part of his speech was the most touching and affecting of anything of the kind to which I ever listened.” “Old Man Eloquent,” as Adams was called, had given his all to the defense.11
Acknowledging the public engagement in this “interesting and important controversy,” the eight sitting justices reviewed all of the evidence, arguments, and previous rulings of the Amistad case and decided, 7–1, that “these negroes never were the lawful slaves of Ruiz or Montes or of any other Spanish subjects.” Writing for the majority, Justice Joseph Story affirmed the narrative the Africans had given in September and repeated endlessly ever since: “They are natives of Africa, and were kidnapped there, and were unlawfully transported to Cuba, in violation of the law and treaties of Spain, and the most solemn edict and declarations of that Government.” The Court lamented the “dreadful acts” by which they “asserted their liberty” during the rebellion, but implicitly acknowledged them as legitimate. The Africans were not “robbers or pirates” and the treaty of 1795 therefore “cannot be obligatory upon them.” The court, however, rejected Adams’s argument that the ship and cargo lawfully belonged to the Africans, ruling that they were the property of Spanish subjects and that Gedney and the other officers were entitled to salvage, as the lower court had ruled. The court also ruled that the United States government bore no obligation of repatriation.12
As the decision was being rendered in Washington, the Amistad Africans were nervously calling out the windows of the Westville jail to passersby, asking if they had heard any news. Everyone was waiting on the arrival of the New York newspapers. Soon Wilcox and Pendleton showed up at the jail to deliver the verdict. They gathered into one room all of the captives, who, on Cinqué’s signal, sat down to receive the fateful news. Their faces expressed “the deepest anxiety.” Marshal Wilcox then said, “The big Court has come to a decision—they say that you—one and all—are free.” He then showed them the newspaper and said, “Read it.” Cinqué turned to Kale, the best reader in the group, and told him to read it aloud for all. The leader remained skeptical, adding, “Paper lie sometimes.” Soon abolitionists Henry G. Ludlow and Amos Townsend Jr. arrived at the jail to give the Africans the news from more trustworthy sources. The Africans demonstrated “great joy,” although not “the tumultuous outbreak of feeling which the first decision of the lower court produced.” They were wary and subdued in their response as they remembered their previous disappointment more than a year earlier, when they thought they had won their freedom, only to have the United States district attorney appeal the case and extend their incarceration.13
The visitors wanted to know what the Africans would do now that they were truly free. Would they return to Africa or would they remain in America? Townsend thought many of them might prefer to stay, especially when they said, “America country good country—America people good people—set we free.” Cinqué then answered the question directly, saying “We talk together and think—then I tell.” They would hold a communal meeting to make a decision, “one and all.” Kinna added that he would follow Cinqué’s advice: “He great man—he get us all free—he President.” “Yes,” added Grabeau with his impish sense of humor, “he President of the poor.”14
As the word of the verdict spread, so did the ecstasy of the abolitionist community. Many, including John Quincy Adams, used the Bible to interpret the joyful moment, turning to Isaiah 61:1 and the biblical Jubilee: God had sent his people “to proclaim liberty to the captives” and to open “the prison to them that are bound.” As soon as he heard the verdict Adams wrote to the Amistad Committee, “The Captives are free!” Townsend commanded, with Old Testament gravity, “Bless the Lord, for his right hand hath gotten him the victory. The oppressor is confounded, and the oppressed delivered.” The Youth’s Cabinet praised the faith that had brought “deliverance to the captive,” and “the opening of the prison doors to them that were bound.” The abolitionist movement in Philadelphia announced a “public Thanksgiving” involving the ministers of six congregations to celebrate “liberty to the captive,” while the New York Anti-Slavery Society suggested that “thanks be given in all the churches of the land, in view of the decision.” The Colored American joyously announced that “our long-imprisoned brethren…ARE FREE on this soil, without condition or restraint.” The “people of color” of Columbus, Ohio, “deeply touched with the result of the trial of the Amistad captives,” wrote expressions of gratitude to Baldwin and Adams.15
Knowing that the public would, after the verdict, once again hunger for reading material about the Africans, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter brought out a special edition “extra” on March 15, 1841, featuring several of John Warner Barber’s engravings (although not the one of the rebellion), news of the destruction of Pedro Blanco’s slave factories, and excerpts of the speeches by Baldwin and Adams before the Supreme Court. The Amistad Committee advertised the availability of Sartain’s portrait of Cinque, Chief of the Amistad Captives for purchase. The image was now a symbol of victory: “It is hoped that every friend of human rights throughout the country will secure one of these engravings, and preserve it in memory of Cinque not only, but of the righteous triumph of justice and humanity over cruelty and oppression in the decision that has set the arrested captives free.”16
Knowing too that the Amistad Africans would be in ever greater demand by the admiring public, the abolitionists moved them immediately out of the New Haven region, twenty-eight miles away, to Farmington, under the watchful eyes of an “abolition town” in general, and gentleman farmer John Treadwell Norton, who had founded the local Anti-Slavery Society in 1836, in particular. When his son, John Pitkin Norton, found out on March 16, 1841, that the Africans were “coming here en masse to morrow to stay for a time & continue their education,” he explained why: “The circus & menagerie proprietors & managers of theatres are gathering around them in New Haven like so many sharks & it is on that & other accounts thought best to remove them hither.”17
What role had the Africans played in their own legal defense? They had met with both Baldwin and Adams, and Kale had written a long letter to Adams on behalf of the entire group to explain what he should say to the “Great Court.” Through interpreters John Ferry, Charles Pratt, and especially James Covey, and through their own advancing facility in the English language, the “Mendi People” had told their individual and collective stories and made claims for freedom that were honestly reflected in the attorneys’ remarks. Of course Baldwin and Adams brought their own perspective, skills, and stature to bear on the case, but they did say, by and large, what the “Mendi People” had wanted them to say: they were free natives of Africa; they had suffered greatly in their enslavement and shipment; they had won their own freedom in battle; they had brought themselves to a “free country.” Ruiz and Montes had lied about their history. With this critical information at hand, Baldwin and Adams did their essential part in the freedom palaver. They had “accompanied” the Africans in a successful struggle.18
New Conflicts
The Supreme Court ruling raised an important question about the younger people involved in the case: what would be done with the three little girls, Kagne, Teme, and Margru, and the Afro-Cuban teenager Antonio? Soon after the ruling, Lewis Tappan and Amos Townsend Jr. brought a lawsuit on behalf of the “Mendi People” to remove the girls from the household of Stanton Pendleton. The jailer had employed them as servants in his kitchen and had provided neither domestic training nor education. Mrs. Pendleton had said it would be pointless to teach them to sew “as they were so soon to go back to Africa where they went naked.” Because the girls had fallen so far behind their male counterpart, Kale, in speaking and reading English, the abolitionists lobbied Pendleton to allow the girls to study at the “Sabbath School of the Colored Church” in New Haven. This mistreatment was compounded by the rising tensions between Pendleton and the rest of the Amistad Africans.19
While the court was in session deciding the fate of the little girls, Pendleton returned to the Westville jail with his wife, his brother William, a ship captain, and Thomas Mook (“not good man” according to Kinna) who worked for him and proceeded to inflame tensions further. The group threatened the Amistad Africans with reenslavement and death, promising again, as Fuli explained, to send a “hundred men to kill Mendi people.” He continued to vilify Tappan, who would buy the entire lot of them, whip them “plenty,” then sell them again. Pendleton had told the same things to the little girls: “a white man told them that Mr. Tappan wanted to sell them as slaves.” The Amistad Africans had apparently encountered Pendleton’s brother earlier in the New Haven jail, when he had said, “This is great business—teaching these niggers—might as well teach monkeys—I suppose they will establish a college, when they get back to Africa.” Now the men sought out Cinqué, cursing and threatening him with deportation to Cuba, as Kinna reported: “They want fight and Cinque did not like fight.” The men then tried to confine all of the Amistad Africans in a small room and take away their food and water. When Tappan and other abolitionists found out about the threats, they immediately went to Westville to lend support. They found the prisoners “in a great state of alarm, expecting to be sold again, and supposing they had been deceived as formerly.”20
The conflict with Pendleton concluded in court, when a judge ruled to remove the girls from the jailer’s household and to make abolitionist Townsend their legal guardian. The judgment was reached after Cinqué had been allowed to address the girls in Mende in a New Haven courtroom: “His eyes blazed and his voice was elevated in its tone—and his action passionate.” In “one of the finest specimens of Mendee eloquence,” he explained that the Pendletons were not to be trusted. They would do as they had many times threatened to do: they would “send them away and sell them.” Tensions boiled over again as the sheriff removed William Pendleton from the courtroom, “by order of the Judge, for striking one of the Africans in court.” The struggle to keep the collective together had been won. Kinna wrote Tappan to say how “very glad” and “joyful” the “Mendi People” were now that the little girls had been freed from the clutches of the wicked Pendleton.21
The Supreme Court upheld the lower-court ruling that Antonio should be returned to Cuba and the heirs of the deceased Captain Ferrer. The boy himself had requested as much, to the delight of proslavery journalists, soon after the Amistad came ashore. Marshal Wilcox assigned Antonio to the care of Pendleton, who received $2.50 per week from the government for his room and board and who nonetheless forced the teenager to work “without wages,” all the while forbidding him to be educated with his shipmates. By the time the district court ordered his delivery to Ferrer’s widow as her rightful property in late March 1841, Antonio had begun to think differently about his future.22
A writer for the Colored American noted that when the Supreme Court ruled that the Amistad Africans were free, Antonio “thought it better to be free also.” As “a species of property which thinks, reasons, and wills,” he decided to “walk off” from the marshal and the jailer. In New Haven he stole aboard a steamboat appropriately named the Bunker Hill and made his way to New York, where he stayed at the home of an African American friend of Lewis Tappan. The New York Vigilance Committee then “took charge of Antonio & have conveyed him away.” It was noted that he “rejoiced to be at liberty, and is desirous of laboring for wages.”23
Antonio traveled by night “to Canada, by the usual route” of safe houses on the Underground Railroad. One of the stops was Enosburgh, Vermont, about fifteen miles from the Canadian border, where Elias S. Sherman housed the “jolly and good natured” young man, who gratefully helped his host family with the cooking. Antonio told Sherman’s seven-year-old son the dramatic stories of the “capture of the Amistad, and his escape through the kindness of friends.” A night or two later, Antonio disappeared as mysteriously as he had appeared. He soon arrived in Montreal, where, a local abolitionist announced proudly, he is “now beyond the reach of all the slaveholders in the world.” Captain Ferrer had branded Antonio’s shoulder with a hot iron so that he might be known as his slave, but he was a slave no more. Thy prey, abolitionists told the slaveholders, “hath escaped thee.”24
Without resources of their own, and hoping to capitalize on their fame, the Amistad Africans went on what might be called a “victory tour” in May 1841, to raise funds for their lodging and education. In November they went on a second tour to raise money for their repatriation. The Amistad Committee organized all events and drew heavily on abolitionist networks of cooperation and publicity. The “Mendi People” performed eight times on the first tour, in New York and Philadelphia, and at least sixteen times on the second, primarily in New England, with five meetings in Boston and usually single meetings in smaller towns such as Andover, Hampton, Haverhill, Northampton, Lowell, and Springfield, Massachusetts, and Nashua, New Hampshire. They also held farewell meetings in Hartford and Farmington, Connecticut, and two final meetings in New York just before they boarded the Gentleman to return to Sierra Leone on November 27, 1841. Dozens of newspapers around the nation covered one or more of these events.25
The venues varied from the Broadway Tabernacle, a hive of antislavery activity located at the corner of Houston and Thompson streets in New York, where four of the meetings were held to overflow crowds of as many as twenty-five hundred people, with many turned away, to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on Church Street in New York and the large Melodeon Concert Hall in Boston, which hosted two meetings each. Organizers scheduled most of the events in churches. Turnout was extraordinary everywhere. Observers described the buzzing scenes as “crowded,” “overflowing,” and “immensely large.” The crowds were made up of “blacks and whites, and every intermediate hue and color,” by provocative design. In the disapproving words of the New York Morning Herald, “On one seat was a negro fellow, as black as the ace of spades, with a mulatto wife, and a couple of children, a shade whiter than the mother, and next to them, well dressed white ladies and gentlemen, all mingling together, regardless of the oder [sic] exhaled by their neighbours, and happy to receive their colored brethren and sisters on terms of perfect equality.” Ticket prices were usually twenty-five cents. The funds raised would have amounted to roughly $4,000—a little more than $100,000 in 2012 dollars.26
A large part of the draw was the sheer celebrity of the people who had been in the news and in the larger circuits of American popular culture since late August 1839 and who had recently won their case before the highest tribunal in the land. Gallons of ink and paint and wax had been spent on the African freedom fighters. Not surprisingly, people wanted to see them in the flesh. When the Amistad Africans entered the Broadway Tabernacle on the very first exhibition, an excited tumult ensued: “So eager were the audience to see them, that they rose in great numbers, and many rushed towards the desk to get a nearer look of the blacks.” Those people blocked the view of everyone else, who cried out, “Sit down there in front…we can’t see through you.”27
Cinqué in particular, the “hero of the revolution” as he was called by the New Hampshire Sentinel, was a special attraction. At the Marlboro Chapel in Boston, a youthful audience greeted him with “a tremendous shout of applause.” When Lewis Tappan tried to translate what the hero had said in the Mende language, the young people “made so much noise that he could not succeed.” At the Broadway Tabernacle, every time Cinqué rose to address the crowd, “great bursts of applause resounded from all parts of the house.” The Colored American urged all to turn out to shake hands with the great man; “hundreds on hundreds” seized the opportunity.28
Early events, such as the first one at the Broadway Tabernacle, featured sixteen of the Amistad Africans, but the number slowly dropped over time, to twelve, then ten in later performances. Cinqué led the group into the hall, each person clutching an octavo Bible given them by the American Bible Society. They appeared happy and healthy, well dressed in American clothing, and they had a physical presence: they were “finely built, and possess great physical strength.” A reporter for the abolitionist Pennsylvania Freeman noted that they had “intelligent countenances and dignified and manly bearing—showing that they never had their spirits broken by the yoke.” They had survived their many incarcerations with their self-respect and political will intact.29
All events followed a basic pattern. A local minister led the assembled in prayer, then a member of the Amistad Committee, usually Lewis Tappan, provided a brief introduction, with a statement about the three main purposes of the event: “to show to the public the improvement which the Africans had made;—to excite an interest in a religious mission to Mendi, their country;—to raise money to defray the expense of supporting and educating them here, and of returning them to their country.” The meetings lasted about two hours.30
Tappan introduced Sherman Booth, the main teacher of the Amistad Africans in jail and during their residence in Farmington following their liberation. Booth served as a sort of master of ceremonies for the event, providing “interesting facts relative to the improvement and conduct of his pupils” and making observations about Mende culture. He assisted as several of the Amistad Africans recounted their own personal histories—where they were from and how they were forced into Atlantic circuits of slavery. Booth then gave his charges Bible verses to recite as well as words and sentences to spell, in order to demonstrate their knowledge, and invited the audience to ask questions of Kale, Kinna, and Fuli, the best English-speakers. The queries usually concerned their understanding of Christianity and how they would use it when they returned to Africa. The Africans then sang a Christian hymn and a couple of “native songs.” Kinna recounted for the audience, in English, their recent history as a prelude to the grand finale: Cinqué told, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, acted out the story of the Amistad rebellion. He always spoke in Mende. The meeting concluded with another hymn, the audience joining the Amistad Africans in song.31
The heart of the program had emerged from an antislavery meeting in Bloomfield, Connecticut, attended by Kinna and Cinqué, in April 1841. They listened to the speakers with great interest, and at the end of the meeting were asked if they would like to address the group. Kinna “arose in a very dignified manner” and told their story. Abolitionist A. F. Williams noted that “before he sat down I saw many around me in tears.” Cinqué then spoke for fifteen minutes in Mende, Kinna translating. The audience was dazzled by a talk that was “truly grand and sublime.” After this meeting Sherman Booth advised Lewis Tappan that Kinna and Cinqué should speak in precisely these ways during the exhibitions. The rest of the program was likely the result of negotiation between the abolitionist organizers and the “Mendi People,” some of whom did not originally embrace the idea of performing their “progress” before large audiences. Cinqué in particular could be a tough negotiator. Abolitionist George Day recalled him as a “turbulent fellow, hard to manage.” Eventually the leader and his comrades agreed to do the tour, in large part because it was presented to them as a requirement for going home—they had to help raise the money for their return voyage. They said they would do it gladly.32
The content of the program on the tour reflected the nature of the alliance between the Africans and the American reformers as it had developed in jail prior to the Supreme Court ruling. The abolitionists wanted the freedmen to show the American public that they had become “civilized” Christians, which the hardworking students were willing to do as long as they could simultaneously enact and explain their own independent African identity. They sang their own songs and recited their own history in their own language, even if the audience could not always understand precisely what was being sung or said to them. Those attending the events would, in fact, understand something more important than specific words: they would see a sovereign political entity called the “Mendi People” in action.
Booth emphasized to the audience that the Africans came from an inland area of the continent where “a higher degree of civilization prevails…than was generally supposed.” The condescension contained within it important facts. The Africans lived in towns and cities and engaged in manufacture, weaving in particular, examples of which he displayed, holding up a “number of specimens of cloth, in the shape of napkins…which the Africans had cut out and fringed after the African style.” Members of the audience purchased these after the performance “at liberal prices.” Booth added that the Amistad Africans were multiethnic and multilingual: they consisted of six different culture groups; one individual (probably Burna the younger) spoke Temne, Kono, Bullom, and Mende. Booth also commented on the moral characteristics of his students, who had worked hard and distinguished themselves by a “remarkable honesty.” Booth then introduced the Amistad Africans, a few of whom spoke about their personal histories—where they were from, how they were enslaved, how they reached Lomboko—reciting the narratives they had told in court, in the newspapers, and through popular publications for many months now. Their individual life stories dramatized the human ordeal of slavery. Woven into these accounts were comments by the “Mendi People” that they wanted, more than anything else, to go home.33
Booth assigned individuals passages to read from the Bible, usually from the books of Matthew and John, and words to spell. Some of the performers were nervous and had mixed success. The engaged audience offered encouragement, cheering the readers and spellers no matter how they performed. Young Kale, already known as the correspondent of John Quincy Adams, was the star of this portion of the program, reading the longest passages and spelling the most difficult words and sentences. The people who had come ashore in the United States unable to “say a word for themselves,” now read, spelled, spoke, and conversed in what they called the “Merika language.”34
Booth then invited members of the audience to ask questions. Many concerned Christianity: How will you explain God to your countrymen in Africa? How do you know the Bible is God’s truth? The Africans gave thoughtful, dutiful answers. Someone asked Kinna if he could “love his enemies” as a good Christian should. Kinna replied that he would pray to God to forgive his enemies their transgressions. Asked if the slaveholder José Ruiz “should come to Mendi, and should you meet him alone in the bushes, what would you do?” Kinna replied, “I let him go, I no touch him.” But knowing the ways of slavers, he added, quickly and spontaneously, “But if him catch our children—him see what he catch!” This answer brought a “loud shout of laughter and applause from the crowded audience,” who shared his perhaps unchristian “instinct of retaliation.”35
The Amistad Africans then sang “If I Could Read My Title Clear,” an old hymn that was a staple in the abolitionist musical pantheon. Based on lines of a poem by the antislavery poet William Cowper, the song combined the ideal of self-improvement by learning to read with the promise of a homestead in heaven, hinting that God’s poor might eventually find justice and even the land they had lost to expropriation and enslavement—which is one reason why the song passed into the African American musical tradition. The Amistad Africans sang it well, “in perfect time,” with their “sweet voices.”36
If the singing of a Christian hymn brought forth universal approbation from the audience, the singing of African songs earned a mixed reaction. Led by Sessi, who sang in a “high pitch,” the others joined in as a chorus, modulating their voices “from loud to soft expression” and from “rapid to slow movement,” growing quiet at the end of one verse, then bursting forth in sound with the next. It was done “in wild and peculiar measure,” said one listener. “It was wild and irregular, but not unpleasant,” added another. Booth had advised Tappan not to list the native song on the program. In the actual performance he translated the first verse of the African song, an appeal to a deity, as “Help me today, and I will serve you to-morrow.” This seemed to illustrate Kinna’s claim that the Mende acknowledge a “Great Spirit,” but they do not worship him. A second song was “an African welcome to newly arrived guests.” It asked, in a soft, friendly, and melodious way, “Will you stay? Will you stay?” The chorus answered, “I love you, and will stay with you.”37
The next part of the program featured the eighteen-year-old Kinna, an excellent student. The feminist abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who attended the final meeting at the Broadway Tabernacle, thought Kinna “the most intelligent and interesting” of the entire group. He sometimes explained how education worked among his comrades, but more commonly he concentrated on the history of the “Mendi People” as he had done in the abolitionist meeting—“their condition in their own country, their being kidnapped, the sufferings of the middle passage, their stay at Havana, the transactions on board the Amistad, &c.” This was a prelude to the event’s dramatic climax.38
Cinqué was the “great man of the evening.” When his comrades whispered to him, “he replied with a dignified bend of the head, not even turning his eyes.” When he rose to speak, the crowd greeted him with stormy applause. He was the undoubted leader of the Amistad Africans, the symbol of their cause. He had played the leading role in the revolt, and he was the keeper of the common story about it, around which the Amistad Africans had built a new collective identity as the “Mendi People.” Like Kinna, he recounted “a history of their capture” and the “various stages of their history” up to the present, but, as Lewis Tappan noted, he “related more minutely and graphically the occurrences on board the Amistad.” The battle was the centerpiece of the warrior’s story, as it would have been back in Mende country. He always addressed the audience in his native tongue.39
Knowing that Cinqué would give an active and energetic performance at one of the churches in Philadelphia, the organizers “thought prudent to remove the pitchers and tumblers that were on a table before him, lest he should sweep them off.” He began his speech slowly, speaking with a “deep and powerful voice” and using “a restrained action of the right arm, which moved from his elbow downwards, and increased in frequency and rapidly as he progressed, till at length his whole frame was excited; he moved quickly from side to side—now addressing the audience, and now appealing to his countrymen, who would answer his appeals with a low guttural exclamation.” Child wrote that his eloquence was “perfectly electrifying.” He moved rapidly around the pulpit, “his eyes flashed, his tones were vehement, his motions graceful, and his gestures, though taught by nature, were in the highest style of dramatic art. He seemed to hold the hearts of his companions chained to the magic of his voice. During his narrative they ever and anon broke forth into spontaneous responses, with the greatest animation.” He recalled the fateful moonless night aboard the Amistad.40
Precisely what Cinqué said about the rebellion is unknown, for no one in the numerous audiences translated his words for publication. Perhaps no one but James Covey could have done so. Yet Lewis Tappan, who saw and heard him deliver his speech numerous times and knew the story he told, provided a detailed summary. Cinqué described his origins in Mende country, how he was enslaved and sent to Fort Lomboko. He narrated the horrors of the Middle Passage aboard the Teçora and the dismal time he and his comrades spent in the barracoons of Havana. He recounted the harsh conditions of life on the Amistad, especially the struggle over water. He gave special emphasis to Celestino’s threat and the collective decision to rise up in revolt.41
In one of the most dramatic moments of his speech, Cinqué reenacted how, with the help of Grabeau, “he freed himself from the irons on his wrists and ancles [sic], and from the chain on his neck. He then, with his own hands, wrested the irons from the limbs and necks of his countrymen.” Like Child and everyone else who saw and heard Cinqué’s account, Tappan was tremendously moved by the drama that unfolded before him: “It is not in my power to give an adequate description of Cinque when he showed how he did this and led his comrades to the conflict and achieved their freedom. In my younger years I saw [the great British actresses] Kemble and Siddons, and the representation of Othello, at Covent Garden, but no acting that I ever witnessed came near that to which I allude.” What Cinqué had learned in the bari and its palavers outshone the brightest lights of the English stage.42
Other reviews of Cinqué’s performance were equally glowing. One observer noted, no one “can hear him, and resist the conclusion that he is a master-spirit, and a great natural pastor.” Another added, “so far as we could judge, without understanding his language, we should think him a natural and powerful orator. Indeed we could not resist the impression, that no ordinary mind was addressing us, though we were unable to sympathize fully with the sentiments expressed.” Even the correspondent for the hostile New York Morning Herald was forced to admit that the speech represented “a high order of oratorical display.” When Cinqué expressed gratitude for the solidarity of the abolitionists, he “shewed himself able also, to touch with a master’s hand the finer chords of the human heart.” He moved many to tears.43
After Cinqué finished his stirring speech, the organizers seized the moment to appeal to the audience for additional donations. They resumed, and concluded, the program with a singing of “Greenland’s Icy Mountains,” known as the “Missionary Hymn,” written in 1819 by Reginald Heber, who would soon become the Anglican Bishop of Calcutta. The song reflected the missionary desire to spread the Gospel to the “earth’s remotest nation,” to India, Ceylon, and Africa, where “the heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone” rather than to the Christian “Redeemer, King, Creator.” The Amistad Africans sang the hymn with “great propriety” and were joined in the final verse by the congregation. The song pointed the way to a Mende Mission in Africa. Once again “weeping eyes” looked on from the audience.44
Amid its many successes, the tour aroused controversy. Joseph Tracy, a Congregational minister from Vermont, complained that the tour events looked too much like a “show”—that is to say, a cheap popular entertainment unbecoming the lofty ideals of the Christian-based abolition movement. This may have been the issue in Springfield, Massachusetts, where an event was held in Town Hall rather than a local church as “as some of the Parish committee objected…fearing it would desecrate the place.” The New York Morning Herald had snorted early on: “if the performances had been diversified with a few summersets, in which the negroes are very skillful, the entertainments would have been more complete, and more agreeable to the audience.” A writer from Boston added, “if these men are carried about the country as shows, as they have been in one or two instances, they will be thoroughly spoiled for all missionary purposes, so that the necessity of being encumbered with them will be reason enough for not attempting a mission in Mendi.” Even abolitionists complained that after the first tour Kinna was “puffed up,” as “proud as Lucifer,” Cinqué was demanding and difficult, and three people refused to work.45
Someone at the Emancipator, probably editor Joshua Leavitt, a member of the Amistad Committee, insisted that these critics had given an incorrect impression of the meetings, which “were calculated to remove prejudice—awaken sympathy—excite prayer, and stimulate Christian enterprise.” He explained, “It was no part of the design to show off these Mendians for the purpose of indulging mere curiosity. Those who attended the examinations or exhibitions did not have such an impression, and it is carping to insinuate to the contrary.” No matter what their intentions, the organizers continued to attract criticism.46
Around the same time, an unnamed “Native African” joined the fray and took it to a higher level. He published a scathing critique of the “Mendian Exhibitions” in the Hartford Observer. He maintained that the Amistad Africans “enter very reluctantly into the exercises of the meetings at which they are exhibited, and are evidently disgusted at the idea of being made puppet shows.” Again, the point of reference was the “low” entertainment of popular culture. It is not clear whether the writer had actually talked to the Amistad Africans about the shows, but he had, he claimed, heard Cinqué say, in Hartford, “that he did not like to be carried to and from New York.” The critic added that the rehearsal of the traumatic events aboard the Amistad “must have an unhappy effect upon the minds of these his brethren, &c.” His harshest criticism was that the Amistad Africans did not appreciate being carried about “as a giraffe of their native plains.” Clearly the writer thought the exhibitions were in poor taste. They had crossed the line from humanitarian event to a crass commercial effort to make money, degrading the Amistad Africans in the process.47
The Amistad Committee, who had organized the tour, was stung by the critique and felt compelled to respond. One of its members, in all likelihood Lewis Tappan, answered that the committee had considered all of the issues the critic had raised. He admitted that the Amistad Africans initially resisted the idea of performing “before the public to exhibit their improvements,” but once it was explained to them that the events were necessary “not only to raise funds for their support and education, but to raise a fund to aid in their return to their native land,” they agreed to do them, and did them cheerfully, the organizer maintained. Yet Tappan’s answer did not entirely satisfy even himself, for he continued to feel uneasy about the matter. At an exhibition in November, he apologized to the crowd “for having the duties of ‘showman’ devolve upon him.”48
The social composition of the Amistad campaign and the larger abolitionist movement of which it was a central component was reflected in the decision to hold six meetings in fundamentally proletarian locations: one was held in a factory and another five were held in African American churches made up mostly of poor but extremely interested people. The Amistad Africans visited the cotton mills of the Boott Corporation in Lowell, Massachusetts, where they inspected the machinery and fabrics and met their fellow textile workers, who spontaneously and collectively gave $58.50 to the “Mendi Fund.” Other venues included the Reverend Amos Beman’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston, where it was “impossible for all to get in” to see the program; the Reverend James Pennington’s Talcott Street Church in Hartford, Connecticut; and the Reverend C. W. Gardner’s “Colored” Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. Pennington’s flock contributed a hard-earned $8 to the Amistad cause, which may have been a greater portion of their collective income than any other church visited on the tours.49
The two meetings held at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church at Church and Leonard streets in New York seem to have had special qualities and meanings, for both the abolitionist organizers of the events, who were, for the most part, African American, and the “Mendi People.” The church was a large one, into which a massive crowd consisting mostly of black people jammed themselves. A correspondent for the New York Journal of Commerce noted, “A more compact mass of human beings was perhaps never seen in a church,” while another, for the Colored American, added, “We do not recollect of ever having seen a larger assemblage of our people upon any occasion.”50
In the black churches, the content of the program changed. Tappan and Booth made briefer comments as the leaders of the black community—the Reverend Christopher Rush; the Reverend Timothy Eato (a founder of the New York African Society for Mutual Relief); and William P. Johnson—made the meeting their own. Dr. James McCune Smith, the first professionally trained African American physician in the United States, offered a series of resolutions, which were seconded by Charles B. Ray, publisher of the Colored American and a founder of the New York Vigilance Committee. Other leading black activists who took part in the resolutions were Philip A. Bell, George Downing, Junius C. Morel, the Reverend Theodore S. Wright, and John J. Zuille, all of whom were active in one way or another in the Underground Railroad.51
The resolutions affirmed the revolutionary implications of the Amistad rebellion and the larger struggle against slavery. The assembled resolved that in “their resistance against the captain and crew of the Amistad,…the Mendi people did no more than exercise that natural resistance against tyrannical oppression, which the consent of all ages of mankind, and the example of the American Revolution has sanctioned as both right and lawful.” They also resolved that the Amistad case, based on a “just and righteous decision” by the Supreme Court, “has a powerful influence on the question of human rights, not only in this country, but throughout the world.” It represented “the faint glimmering of a more auspicious morn, which will usher in that bright and glorious day, when the judges of our land, and men high in power, will be compelled by the force of reason and truth, to throw aside the bigotry and prejudice which too often soils the ermine of justice, and boldly declare that property in man cannot be held, wither by inheritance, purchase, or theft.” The “Mendi People” embodied the revolutionary force of reason and truth.52
When it came time for the Africans to speak, James Covey joined the program. Having studied with missionaries in Freetown after his liberation from a slave ship in 1834, he “made an admirable address, which drew tears from nearly every eye, and the manner in which he quoted and illustrated Scripture was amazing, and would serve as quite a lesson to a learned divine.” Covey also described his relationship with the Amistad Africans, especially their joy on meeting him and discovering that he was a Mende speaker. He and the other “Mende People” were, in the Zion Church, more expansive and “more interesting, we [the Colored American] thought, than at any of the previous meetings.” Kinna greeted the audience with “you are my brethren, the same color as myself.” He “seemed to feel himself at home, and his address was exceedingly concise, distinct and happy.” A joyous pan-African mood animated the occasion.53
Mission to Africa
At the May 17 meeting at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Reverend Theodore S. Wright resolved that “in connection with the ardent desire of these people to return to their own country to communicate the truths of the gospel, a favorable opportunity is providentially presented to the friends of missions, to unite for the evangelization of Africa.” According to Lydia Maria Child, who attended the event, this resolution “rejoiced the hearts” of the African Americans who heard it, for it promised a “pure mission,” in contrast to that of the detested American Colonization Society, which had “joined hands with the slaveholder” and accepted his money for the racist removal of black people to Africa. “Not a cent from those who bought or sold human beings would ever be allowed to pollute” the funds of what would become the Mende Mission. The project to establish a mission in southern Sierra Leone was gaining strength and momentum.54
The origins of the idea lay in conversations that took place in the New Haven jail. An anonymous visitor described an interaction between teacher Benjamin Griswold and the Amistad Africans in late November 1839. When Griswold suggested that the captives might go home to Mende country, they responded with joy. The teacher then pointed to himself and then to them, saying, “I, you, you, Mendi!” They did not understand his meaning. Then he said, “You, me, Mendi, go!”—or, “I will go with you to Mende country.” The Africans all agreed, yes, yes, but Griswold apparently thought the response tepid. He put on a stern look, rose from his seat, folded his arms, and walked away, indicating “neglect and ill-will.” They in turn extended their arms “as if embracing some object of affection, clasping it to their bosom,” insisting that they did want him to go. One man made a gesture of eating, promising that they would feed him in Africa, adding “you Merica man, yandinguo, yandinguo” (good, good). Griswold’s students then gathered around him, warmly grasping and shaking his hand, to emphasize the truth of their pledge.55
Griswold reported this conversation to Lewis Tappan, who construed it as an African request for the teacher to go home with them, as he wrote in a letter to abolitionist John Scoble on January 20, 1840: “Mr. Benjamin Griswold of the Theological Seminary was…strongly solicited by the Africans to accompany them home.” Tappan visited the captives in jail and asked “if they wished to have teachers go with them to Mendi.” They answered yes. Tappan then asked, more specifically, if they wanted Griswold to go with them. The teacher then interjected his own question: “I asked them what they would do to me, if I should go?” Cinqué, Griswold reported, expressed “a willingness to do whatever I should wish & all assured me that they would take care of me & not let any one injure me.” As the leader, Cinqué vowed to take responsibility for any missionaries who might accompany them to Mende country. Griswold trusted the response: “I think I have the certain confidence of these men & I believe they would defend & protect me at all hazards.” In a war-torn land he would certainly need protection.56
It is not clear how the Amistad Africans thought about this proposition. Did they understand the difference between a teacher and a missionary, especially in a time when communications remained difficult? The two roles were in many respects inseparable to the Christian abolitionists as they ministered to pagans, but the Africans probably held a different view. Did they support the idea for instrumental and strategic reasons, because they thought the arrangement would increase the likelihood of their eventually returning home? Is this why Cinqué declared his willingness to do whatever Griswold wanted? If so, his judgment was sure, for in the coming months the prospect of establishing a mission in Sierra Leone would become a leading motivation of many associated with the Amistad case, including a significant number of African American Christians. The mission idea became part of the working misunderstanding in the alliance between the Amistad Africans and the abolitionist movement.
As Tappan and others continued to think about a mission, a new initiative came from another quarter of the abolitionist movement. As Farmington attorney and abolitionist John Hooker later recalled,
The first public movement made with reference to doing something to carry the Gospel to Africa, and for the aid of colored people in America, was by the Rev. James W. C. Pennington, the colored pastor of the First Colored Congregational Church, Hartford, Conn., who called a meeting in his own church, May 5, 1841, at which a committee was appointed to call a general meeting of the friends of missions, which was held in Hartford, August 18, 1841, to consider the subject of missions to Africa. This was the origin of associated society work for Africa, and some of the antecedents of the American Missionary Association, which has done so great and good a work for the freedmen, Chinese, and Indians.57
At a large public meeting held at the Talcott Street Church (“1st Colored Congregational Church”) in Hartford on May 5, 1841, Pennington expressed “his sense of the obligations of Christians, colored Christians, to do something in relation to carrying the gospel to Africa.” Pennington challenged the members of his congregation, saying that unless “our whole people, and this church particularly” should do something, “I don’t know but that I shall have to go myself.” Many of the world’s greatest enterprises had “small beginnings” like their own. Deacon James Mars spoke about the “providential arrival, defence and deliverance of the Mendi people of the Amistad,” and hoped that young missionaries would accompany them home. The African Augustus W. Hanson, who had briefly served as a translator for the Amistad Africans, added that “the destiny of a portion of his brethren in the country, was ultimately connected with the regeneration of Africa.” Those attending the meeting resolved that because “Divine Providence has now, in the case of the citizens of Mendi, (late Amistad captives,) most evidently opened a wide door for access to the heart of that country” and that “a mission should be established in the interior [of Africa].” They decided to hold a larger meeting in August 1841 to unite all evangelical groups in the cause.58
The call for the missionary convention was reiterated and publicized in the Colored American in July 1841. Although directed primarily at the African American community, the message was come one, come all: “Let the artist forsake his studio, and the merchant his counting-room; let the student forego the fascinations of literature, let the mechanic quit his workshop, and the husbandman his rural domicil and healthful occupation.” It was of special importance that “something should be done by us for the land which our fathers loved as the land of their nativity.” The call quoted Mark 16:15 as its mandate from God: “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature.”59
Crisis
As the plans for a mission developed, the “Mendi People” were living in Farmington, under the care of abolitionist John Treadwell Norton, studying hard, cultivating fifteen acres of land, and hoping to go home. They still had no idea when, how, or if their ultimate goal would be achieved. The Amistad Committee had petitioned the administration of President John Tyler for the funds to pay their way back to their native lands, but the request had been unceremoniously denied as being without legal precedent. Getting thirty-six people across the Atlantic and back to their homelands was a complex and expensive proposition still under discussion in abolitionist circles. As the debate dragged on, several of the Amistad Africans began to despair.60
One of these was the normally bright and cheerful Foone, a rather short man at five feet two inches, with a “Herculean frame” and athleticism: he was an excellent swimmer. When news arrived from people knowledgeable about the Gallinas Coast that warfare might make it difficult for the “Mendi People” to find their way to their inland homes, the effect was demoralizing: “Nearly all of the Mendians became sad & became indifferent as to work or study,” recalled A. F. Williams, who was helping to oversee their time in Farmington.
Foone in particular was hit hard by the news. He “lost all activity of body & mind,” he became gloomy, and on several occasions he was seen weeping profusely. When asked what was the matter, he answered, “He was thinking about his Mother.” He felt he would never see her again. When Foone said he was going to swim (and bathe) in the Farmington River on Thursday, August 7, several of his comrades tried to talk him out of it, saying it was the same day of the week on which Mr. Chamberlain had drowned and was therefore unlucky. Foone was determined to go and was finally joined by two teenage members of the group. Soon after he went in, he sank in ten to twelve feet of water. His smaller mates, panic-stricken, tried to save him but could not. They climbed out of the river and cried for help. Grabeau and Burna came running and dove into the water to search for Foone. After Burna surfaced with his friend’s limp, muscular body in tow, a local doctor tried to revive him, without success.
The “Mendi People” were devastated by the death. Along with “a col’d man one of their best friends,” Williams spent two full days with them and came to a sad conclusion: “I have no doubt Foone drowned himself.” He had been seen weeping the morning of his death. He had expressed to Burna his fear of not living long enough to get home. Burna, ever the good shipmate, promised to “take care of his child” if he himself should return.
Williams discovered that most of the group no longer trusted the Americans to help them get home. They believed that they “should never see their Fathers & Mothers, Brothers & Sisters or their Children & that they will all die in America.” Williams also came to understand a traditional West African spiritual belief: “They believe that when they die they will go immediately to Mendi & some of them think the sooner the better.” It so happened that Foone was not the only person entertaining the thought. Sessi, who was something of an elder among the group, had considered jumping out of a tall tree, cutting his throat, or taking his life as Foone had done, in the Farmington River. Kinna, meantime, was keeping track of the deaths of his shipmates. He told Williams, “8 men die on board schooner, 6 die in New Haven, & now one die in Farmington.” He added, “I don’t know, I think all die pretty soon & we never see Mendi.”
Williams did his best to explain the meaning of the correspondence about the Gallinas Coast, and reiterated, as sincerely as he could, the abolitionist commitment to have them “restored to the bosom of their families” as soon as possible. The news of Foone’s death rippled through the antislavery community. Arrangements to go to Mende had to be made soon, lest others go back there by their own means, joining Foone and their own revered ancestors in spirit if not in flesh.
As the late summer gave way to their third fall in America, the remaining thirty-five Amistad Africans recovered their spirits, taking renewed interest in work and study. Williams was especially encouraged when several of the advanced students stepped up to teach while their regular instructor was away. But now a new problem approached—the chill of a New England winter. Cinqué complained, “Cold catch us all the time.” He and his comrades had had enough: “We want to see no more snow. We no say this place no good, but we afraid of cold.” This added greater urgency to the quest for both money and a plan to go home.61
A Mission Plan
Reverend Pennington opened the Hartford meeting of August 18–19, 1841, with a sermon to forty-three delegates from six states, including many of the leading black abolitionists of the day, some of them, like Pennington himself, formerly enslaved. They decided to form the Union Missionary Society and to undertake work in Africa. They elected officers, most of them African American. (The absent Tappan was made an “auditor” but declined the post.) The entire proceedings were concluded with “delightful harmony.” A special feature of the meeting was noted in the report of the Colored American: “Joseph Cinque and four of his countrymen were present, and enrolled their names as members of the Convention, which added much interest to the meeting.” Once again the Amistad Africans actively shaped their own fate.62
Moved by the initiative, less than a week later the Amistad Committee decided officially that “when these Mendians return to their native land, it is desirable that a mission should be formed in that country, and that an appeal be made to the Christian public for funds for that object.” The committee consciously separated itself from the American Colonization Society and its donations received of slaveholders, for such an association would be “contrary to the feelings and principles of a large majority of the donors to the Amistad fund, and of the friends of the liberated Africans.” The committee issued a new appeal for funds, highlighting the “evangelization of Africa.” What was presented to the public as an “Appeal on behalf of the Amistad Africans” was subtly mistitled: it was not an appeal for them alone, but rather a request to finance a new Christian abolitionist project, the Mende Mission.63
Cinqué and the “Mendi People” had their own idea about how this would work. “Their plan,” wrote one of their teachers, William Raymond, in October 1841, was “for all to help together & somewhere in the vicinity of Cinque’s town to settle down and commune a new town & persuade their friends to come & join them.” This was the traditional way a Mende warrior settled a town, but this one would have a cultural twist: they “would adopt American dress & manners so far as may be.” Out of gratitude for those who had worked so hard on their behalf, they would build a house for the teachers and a new community on an African model.64
Abolitionists had their own notion of a proper mission and it did not include leadership by a Mende warrior. They began to search for missionaries to carry the word of God to the heathens in Africa. Benjamin Griswold was the first and perhaps most likely choice, and indeed from January 1840 until November 1841 he seriously considered the prospect, but in the end he declined to go. Other candidates included the Quaker Joshua Coffin, who seemed a certain choice in September 1841: Tappan wrote that he had “been selected as the proper individual to go to Sierra Leone on this important mission.” His abolitionist credentials consisted of “his noble daring, skill and perseverance in visiting Mississippi, and bringing off Isaac Wright, a New York colored young man, who had been sold into slavery by a Yankee Captain.” This history, “together with his general intelligence, eminently qualify him for such an undertaking.” Coffin would later write 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, published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1860, in which he included the Amistad rebellion. Yet in the end he would not accompany the Amistad insurrectionists to their homelands.65
The committee finally chose five missionaries. William Raymond and James Steele, both former students of Oberlin College and committed abolitionists, led the way. Raymond, who was twenty-six years old, had worked among self-emancipated Africans in Canada, taught the Amistad Africans in Farmington, and assisted on the final fundraising tour. The thirty-three-year-old Steele had studied at the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. The “Lane Rebel” came to Oberlin, where he edited and printed the Oberlin Evangelist. In 1840 he married the beautiful Frances Cochran, but she died, suddenly and unexpectedly, prompting the young widower, who was suffering a “deep depression,” to sign on for the Mende Mission on short notice. The other three missionaries were Raymond’s wife, Elizabeth, and Henry and Tamar Wilson, free people of color from Barbados now living in Hartford and members of Pennington’s church. The Amistad Committee was now making preparations for the return of thirty-five Africans, with these five missionaries, to their native land.66
Reversing the Middle Passage
On Friday, November 26, the Amistad Africans boarded the barque Gentleman, commanded by a Captain Morris, in New York. They would spend the night on board, under conditions very different from the last time they had been on a deep-sea vessel. Lewis Tappan had arranged for the missionaries and the female passengers to be accommodated in the captain’s cabin, the African men in steerage. An observer noted, “Nothing could exceed the delight manifested by the Mendians as they found themselves started on their way.” The “Mendi People” continued to contribute to their own freedom struggle. Having raised through their tours more than enough money to pay for the voyage they were beginning, they now brought aboard food they themselves had produced, in their large truck patch in Farmington, for the voyage. The dream of going home was at hand.67
The day of departure brimmed with emotion. Lewis Tappan spoke on behalf of the Amistad Committee, Cinqué on behalf of the “Mendi People.” The former wished Godspeed to the mission. He was pleased that the Gentleman was “a thorough temperance vessel, and takes neither rum nor powder to the Coast of Africa.” Instead it brought free people and the word of God. The latter was his usual eloquent self, thanking his friends who had helped to make this historic day possible. He “pledged himself to take good care of them [the missionaries] in Mendi.” When the time came for parting everyone embraced. As abolitionist A. F. Williams noted, “the young ladies wept, the young men wept, the old ladies wept, & the old men wept, & all right together.” Some of the Amistad men sobbed aloud as tears streamed down their faces. Speaking “was out of the question, they could only express their deep regret at parting in a flood of tears.” Tappan later wrote “The vessel sailed this morning with a fine breeze.” His fondest hope was, “May the smiles of the Lord Jesus be upon it.” Now began a second freedom voyage, this time with proper navigational knowledge and equipment on board.68
The Atlantic recrossing was uneventful. No one was hungry or thirsty, no one was whipped, no one raised arms, and no one died. Everyone was in good health as the Gentleman neared the harbor of Freetown, Sierra Leone. While still at sea, Cinqué wrote to Lewis Tappan: “captain good—no touch Mendi People.” To people who had had traumatic experiences under three violent ship captains—on the Teçora and the Amistad, and in the person of William Pendleton, brother of jailer Stanton—this was in itself excellent news. Kinna also wrote to Tappan, although with difficulty because of the rolling of the ship: “We have been on great water. Not any danger fell upon us.”69
Yet all was not well aboard the Gentleman. The issue was, who was actually in charge of this repatriation. Was it the missionaries, William Raymond and James Steele? Or was it Cinqué and the “Mendi People”? Cinqué had no doubt about the matter. They were sailing to his country, where his local knowledge and connections would guide the mission. He wrote to Tappan, “big man” to “big man”: “You give Cinque two white men and one colored man to go with Cinque.” He would take them, first to Freetown, then to “my country.” Once there, he would “make house and take care of white man.” He still planned to create his own settlement in the way of the Mende warrior. Tappan, Raymond, and Steele, however, had other plans. The working misunderstanding that had been forged between the Amistad Africans and the American abolitionists was beginning to break down.
Return
The arrival of the Gentleman, full of people who had reversed the Middle Passage, was a big event and a rare one, in Freetown or anywhere else in West Africa. Those aboard the vessel understood just how unusual such returns were. Cinqué had written to President Tyler in October 1841: “When we are in Mendi we never hear such a thing as men taken away and carried to Cuba, and then return home again.” Mende people made up the largest share of those shipped out of the Gallinas Coast in the 1830s, and one of the largest groups brought to Cuba on slavers and to Freetown on captured slavers. Kinna agreed, during the “Mendian Exhibition” tour in November: “I ask Mendi people, ‘You ever know Mendi to come back to father and mother, when darkness-white man catch him?’ They say, ‘No, never come back. We never no more see him.’” Their comments revealed how widely known was the experience of enslavement and transatlantic shipment, and how unusual they knew their own return to be. They had waged a titanic struggle against the “darkness white men” for more than two years now, since they arrived at Pedro Blanco’s factory in early 1839.70
The Gentleman was not the only vessel to arrive in Freetown harbor on January 13, 1842. It so happened that a British naval vessel was bringing to port a captured slave ship, to be anchored alongside several others already awaiting condemnation in the Court of Mixed Commission. It must have been an eerie sight, and smell, as the soon-to-be-repatriated Amistad Africans encountered at close quarters the kind of vessel on which their Atlantic saga of slavery and freedom began. The memory of their own earlier experience must have increased their elation at the prospects of freedom that now lay before them.71
Homecoming excitement was not theirs alone. Previous communications with political and religious officials in Freetown had prepared the way, and many port city residents had been alerted to the imminent return of the wayward sons. Among Freetown’s forty thousand inhabitants, most of them Liberated Africans taken from captured slave ships, were thousands of “Kossa” or Mende people. “There are multitudes in this colony who speak their language—some of them being recaptured persons, and some having come here voluntarily,” observed missionary James Steele. Cinqué’s own brother Kindi fit both descriptions: liberated from a slave ship, he had returned home to Mende country, then chose to come back to work in Freetown. He and other relatives and friends of the Amistad Africans were among the hundred or so Mende people who greeted the arriving vessel.72
The arrival itself was a moment of truth for all of the transatlantic passengers, African and missionary alike. What would the Amistad Africans do when they were back among their own people, on African soil? The missionaries had hoped the Africans would go ashore singing a hymn, to show Christian discipline and announce new identities. The Africans had other ideas. They rushed ashore in an almost ecstatic state, encountering and embracing friends and family. Cinqué found his brother, Bartu found his “countrymen,” and Grabeau, who apparently knew more people than most because of his wide travels as a merchant, found his kin and “old acquaintances.” James Steele wrote that soon after going ashore, “The Mendians have found many of their friends and relatives.” For some, joy swelled to delirium.73
Especially striking, upon their arrival, was the Africans’ change in attitude to the Western clothing they wore. According to Raymond and Steele, “Some of them indicate a strong desire to lay aside their clothing and return to their former savage life of nakedness.” As they stripped off the most outwardly visible aspects of their newly acquired “civilization,” the missionaries saw a regression to heathenism and “licentiousness.” They solemnly denounced it at the time and in their correspondence to abolitionists in America after their arrival. The desire of the Africans to revert to “country fashion” was a continual source of friction.74
The shedding of clothes was not simply a repudiation of the hard work the abolitionists had done in the New Haven jail to educate the Africans and to make them Christians. It laid bare the cultural conflict that had been there all along, which the abolitionists now began, for the first time, to understand. Snatched from Africa without a trace and now returning to Freetown, home to more than fifty displaced African nations and ethnicities, the Amistad Africans had to show everyone who they were. The easiest and most convincing way to do this was to show one’s “country marks,” the ritual scarifications by which the peoples of Freetown recognized and understood, cooperated and fought with, each other. Raymond and Steele saw that the Africans were eager to show “the gree-gree marks as they call them, which are found upon their bodies.” The missionaries even came to see that these marks had deep cultural significance: “These are marks of honor, diplomas which have great meaning with them.” Because the Africans kept the secrets of the Poro Society while they were in America, no one had understood that they received these marks “when they pass through certain branches of learning, or acquit themselves of feats of agility or danger, and are then entitled to change their names or adopt an addition to them, and not before.” The cicatrices variously signified the young man’s initiation, the warrior’s conquest of fear and mastery of acrobatic maneuver, and the man’s quest for ultimate spiritual knowledge. These people were Africans, and indeed they had acted as such throughout their ordeal—no matter that the white men could not understand them. Now they were Africans back in Africa. The configuration of historical forces had once again been changed by an oceanic voyage.75
This set of truths, and the geopolitical situation in which they emerged, shocked the missionaries. They were taken aback not only by their own “brethren,” but by the Mende people they encountered in Freetown. They considered them “warlike” and “troublesome,” noting that some had been involved in the slave trade. Indeed a large group of them had recently caused a whole new set of problems for the Sierra Leone colony when they armed themselves, moved into a region of Temne territory called “Aquia,” and squatted on the fertile, unoccupied land to grow rice. They fought the Temne and they also fought each other.76
During the first few months in Sierra Leone, as the missionaries searched for land on which to build the mission, about two-thirds of the Amistad Africans deserted the project, a sure sign that the parties’ ideas about the future had diverged. Some found work as wage laborers in Freetown or other towns nearby. Several of the men worked with Cinqué on a trading expedition by canoe to Bullom country, while several others labored, together, in a nearby town called Waterloo. In new material circumstances the “Mendi People” transformed themselves into work teams. Yet probably a majority of the Amistad Africans managed, in one way or another, to get home to the fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, wives and children for whom they had longed. There is no way to be sure, for after leaving the mission most of them disappear from the historical record.77
For a few, there was no going home again. This was especially true for the children, who simply could not fend for themselves in an insecure world of warfare and continuing enslavement. Kagne, Teme, Margru, and Kale all stayed with the missionaries. They and several of the men signaled the seriousness of their cultural transformation by taking English/American names: Kagne became Charlotte; Teme, Maria; Margru, Sarah Kinson; and Kale, George Lewis. Steele wrote, “Those who remain are the very best of the company (except Cinque) and they had at their own request assumed English names, and thoroughly adopted civilized habits.” Yet even several of those who stayed, oscillated into and out of the mission over time. Ba, who took the name David Brown, stayed at the mission for more than two years, although some of the time he lived apart, much to the disapproval of William Raymond, who eventually excommunicated him for living “in adultery” and for having “taken some of the articles belonging to the mission and put them into the hands of his paramour.” Raymond had “required him to leave the woman or to leave me, and he chose the latter.” He was, the missionary solemnly intoned, “no longer one of my people.” The men who stayed basically became wage laborers at the mission, performing a variety of tasks in the crafts, agriculture, or manufacturing. They were “hard to manage” and they had fitful relationships to Christianity. Raymond himself believed that only Margru was a “true Christian.”78
In April 1842, Fuli wrote to Lewis Tappan that he, Cinqué, Burna, and James Covey had gone to Bullom country to look for land for the mission, and added that “all the rest gone away to Mendi to see their parents.” He thought many of them “will come again,” but he was not certain, and he assured Tappan that God would punish them if they did not. Most apparently did not return, for within four months, by April 1842, the number of the “Mendi People” at the mission had dropped to ten men and the three little girls. The number remained the same twenty months later, after the mission had moved in 1843 to Kaw Mende, about halfway between Freetown and Monrovia. A few, like Kinna and Cinqué, came and went according to the vicissitudes of their lives, coming when they had fallen on hard times and needed assistance, going when familial or working commitments called.79
In the end, perhaps the single most important thing those free people called the Amistad Africans did upon returning to Sierra Leone was to strengthen the struggle against slavery, the pervasiveness of which was obvious to one and all. The missionaries and the Africans not only saw hundreds of slaves, some domestic, some meant for Atlantic markets, they also encountered people such as Thomas Caulker of the infamous mulatto slave-trading family that had originally “sold two of our company” into slavery, noted Steele. To make matters worse, some of the Amistad Africans got caught up in the wars that surrounded the slave trade. Three of them were caught in Fuli’s hometown, Mperri, when it was attacked by the army of King Kissicummah. Fuli and Tsukama escaped, but Sa was killed. James Covey was likewise killed in war a short time later. His Mende name, Kaweli, which meant “war road”—that is, the path opened by war to the coast for the transit of slaves—predicted his own tragic end.80
Homecoming
The human meaning of the return was perhaps most poignantly expressed when Burna encountered his mother after a long and mysterious absence of more than three years. Leaving early to catch the flood tide, Burna and James Steele arrived by canoe at the woman’s small home of wattle and thatch while she was gathering wood in the bush. The men took a seat in the shade of orange trees to await her return. They soon heard a deep sigh and then a crash as the large bundle of wood the woman had carried upon her head fell to the ground. They caught sight of her as she came around the house, walking toward them slowly, with her hands raised to the level of her face, her “open palms presented.” Tears streamed down her “furrowed face” and soon she began to moan “most piteously.” The look on her face suggested that she had “seen one returned from the land of spirits.” The son she had long thought dead now “sat in full view before her.”81
She did not approach him directly. She walked around him, to the side from which she had first come, “continually weeping and moaning” and uttering exclamations in Gbandi. Burna himself did not move, but rather sat “like one petrified with the intensity of his feelings.” He placed his elbow on his knee, his head in his hand, and he too began to weep.
Eventually his mother came to stand directly in front of him, whereupon her “maternal feelings” rushed upon her “at once like a torrent.” She threw herself at his feet in the sand and embraced one of them, rolling from side to side, “still uttering her mournful cries,” in seeming “perfect agony.” The intensity of the moment was so great the missionary had to turn his face away. He wrote, “I had never before seen such an expression of nature’s own feelings, unrestrained by art or refinement.” After a considerable time, the mother began to sing the seno, a song of welcome, as she and her long-lost son joyously rubbed the palms of their right hands in the traditional way. The cold, ruthless hand of slavery had been replaced by the tender warmth of the mother’s palm. Burna, known for his strong feeling for his shipmates, probably thought of Foone, who on the other side of the Atlantic had so dearly longed to see his own mother.82