1. According to the “Protest,” the Creole left Richmond on 25 October and Hampton Roads on the 30th. There is confusion in the documents about these dates.

2. John Hewell, the agent for slaveowner Thomas McCargo on board the Creole, was the only white killed during the rebellion.

3. In the Bahamas, and at the time a colony of Great Britain.

4. Francis Cockburn (1780–1868) served as colonial governor of the Bahamas from 1837 to 1844. It was his decision to imprison Madison Washington and his eighteen fellow conspirators for possible charges of mutiny. In 1842, the rebels were released and granted their freedom after a British admiralty court ruled in their favor.

5. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 freed slaves in the British West Indies and nearly all the rest of the British Empire. In his famous ruling on the Somerset case of 1772, which affirmed that slavery was not supported by the laws of England, Lord Mansfield declared, “The air of England is too pure for any slave to breathe.”

6. Two rebels died during the rebellion: George Grandy (from a head wound) and Adam Carney.

7. The well-known slave rebellion of 1839 on the Spanish slave ship Amistad, which had been sailing out of Cuba with slaves taken from West Africa.

8. The leaders of the Amistad rebellion were captured by the U.S. Navy in Long Island, New York, and were held in Connecticut jails while their cases were litigated. In March 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the rebels should be freed on the grounds that the international slave trade was illegal.

9. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 resolved some of the U.S.-Canadian border questions, including extradition, that had contributed to tensions between the United States and Great Britain in the late 1830s and early 1840s.

10. See the next selection in this volume.