THE SUSPICIOUS-LOOKING SCHOONER CAPTURED AND BROUGHT INTO PORT

So began the first journalistic notice of the drifting ghost ship, the Amistad, in the Long Island Sound in 1839. The Amistad case raises an important issue from a contemporary perspective: why was this story virtually forgotten in the popular imagination both as national and as Connecticut history until the 1980s,Footnote ² when historians returned to the story, and Steven Spielberg's film gave it new life in the 1990s?Footnote ³ The ambivalence of newspaper accounts of the case as it unfolded gives us a sense of the multiple complex answers and the conflicting thoughts and feelings that troubled Americans and abolitionists then, and might have led to the omission of the Amistad from the vast majority of our school history books for the next century and a half.Footnote ⁴ In addition to the general absence of African Americans from our national historical consciousness until the twentieth century, and the discomfort of most Americans when confronting the historical realities of slavery,Footnote ⁵ there were frightening ideas and images raised by the Amistad case that white Americans of all political persuasions wanted to forget.

The story of the Amistad is now a familiar one in Connecticut and it is worthwhile to examine this Connecticut-based event of international import through the lens of local newspaper coverage.Footnote ⁶ A group of Africans was kidnapped from Sierra Leone, illegally imported into Cuba and sold into slavery in 1839; while being transported to another part of the island, on board the schooner Amistad, fifty-three of the newly purchased captives staged a mutiny, killing most of the crew, but not the two slave purchasers. The Africans then attempted to force the navigator to sail them back to Africa, but unbeknownst to the Africans, he turned the ship back toward the United States every night. Eventually, the ship, in obvious distress, drifted into the Long Island Sound, where the Africans could be seen from the shore. A Lieutenant Gedney aboard the USS Washington seized the ship and took it back to New London, Connecticut. Shortly thereafter, when the two Spaniards, José Ruiz and Pedro Montes, told their stories, the Africans were charged with murder in Connecticut courts. Sengbe Pieh,Footnote ⁷ called Cinqué in America, emerged as the leader of the rebellion and the voice of the African survivors.Footnote ⁸

US Marshall Norris Willcox immediately notified the Federal District Court Judge of Connecticut, Andrew T. Judson, who conducted an inquiry on the American brig in the New London harbor.Footnote ⁹ The Amistad's paperwork supported the Spaniards' story that the slaves were the property of Ruiz and Montes, and that the slave ship Amistad was authorized to move the fifty-three blacks from one Cuban port to another. During this short trip, the Spaniards claimed, the slaves rebelled and killed the crew.Footnote ¹⁰

Judson decided to confine the black adults until September 1839, when the US Circuit Court was scheduled to meet in Hartford. That court would adjudicate the property claims and the possible prosecution of murder and mutiny charges against the blacks. Antonio, a slave belonging to the owner of the Amistad, and four black children on board would be held as witnesses with the adults at a New Haven jail.

The legal arguments of the various parties posed every kind of difficulty. The Spanish government took the part of its citizen slave-owners; the American Attorney General represented the interests of the politically wary President Martin Van Buren; fervent abolitionists argued on behalf of the Africans, seeing in the Amistad case the opportunity to present the American public with the image of blacks as men, acting heroically in their own self-defense.

Ultimately, with the active intervention of abolitionists of various persuasions,Footnote ¹¹ along with evangelicals and their lawyers,Footnote ¹² including former President John Quincy Adams, the United States Supreme Court decided the case on the narrowest of grounds: the Amistad captives were illegally taken from Africa, and therefore they could not be the property of Ruiz and Montes. Justice Joseph Story did not push the case as far as some would have liked; in fact, by Story's decision, Antonio, a surviving ladino, was acknowledged to be legally enslaved and so had to be returned to his rightful owner. (Antonio shortly thereafter escaped to Montreal with the help of the leading abolitionist Lewis Tappan.) Eventually the Amistad Africans were freed; well-wishers raised funds to return them to Sierra Leone.Footnote ¹³ Since the Amistad captives were held in New Haven and Westville and the trials took place in Hartford, Connecticut newspapers thoroughly covered this local story.

The Amistad raised the image of Africans turning the tables on white Europeans, chaining up or killing their would-be enslavers; this had to strike terror in the hearts of slavery supporters everywhere, given that the bloody slave rebellions in Haiti (1791–1804) inspired more frequent uprisings throughout the American South. In fact, abolitionists recognized the depth of southern fear; in the Emancipator, William Lloyd Garrison suggested that the southern press was playing down the Amistad case for fear of inspiring similar slave rebellions, one reason that southerners would have preferred to bury the incident in oblivion.Footnote ¹⁴

At first, the New London Gazette, edited then by the fairly open-minded John J. Hyde, was especially unfriendly to the Amistad Africans. Hyde apparently authored the initial Amistad account that appeared in that paper because he was one of the first New Londoners to board the ship.Footnote ¹⁵ He later became an advocate for the Africans, but in his first story he portrayed the slavers sympathetically. Hyde's account may have also disconcerted readers with this description of the man who came to be known as Cinque:

Cinqué, called “the hero of this bloody tragedy,” is described as “a match for any two men”; this amazing power (the “master-spirit”) is more intimidating because it is paired with a countenance “unusually intelligent” for a native African, but in a final clause, the author confesses that there is “nothing to mark him as a malicious man.” This admission of his humanity (he is, after all, a man) is then tempered by the extreme violence of his coup, during which he cut the throats of the captain and crew with his own hand, and whipped other blacks. The image raised here would terrorize most white Americans; this is the stereotype of the violent “superman” African, what Wilson Moses would call an “avenging Messiah,”Footnote ¹⁶ one who appears not to be malicious, but could outwit and overpower a white crew with courage and sangfroid. To set Cinqué in a familiar American frame of reference, the author notes that he ‘is a negro who would command, in New Orleans, under the hammer, at least $1,500.” Placing Cinqué back in the context of slavery, even after noting his evident humanity, his strength and his intelligence, “puts him back in his place,” a reminder that ultimately even someone like him can be reduced to the status of chattel. The staggered nature of the author's assessments of Cinqué – manly and strong in one breath, a slave in the next – gives us some sense of the psychological whiplash that Cinqué inspired.

In this account, Cinqué is “credited” with agency, the ability to act on his own thoughts and plans, evil though they might be. Prelesh Lalu notes,

This agency implies free will on the part of Cinqué and the Africans, and far more troubling than the humanity that this implies is the clear role reversal played out in the Amistad story. Similarly, in the 1835 killing of a Xhosa chief, Hintsa, by British forces in South Africa,

The Spaniards Ruiz and Montes were in this same position in 1839. Having purchased people whom they knew to be recently taken from Africa, they were acting illegally to enslave them. After the uprising, however, they had to impute to the Africans the capability of intelligence and intrigue, while maintaining their superiority (evident in their gentlemanliness, their fine manners and their Christianity), and portraying themselves as the victims of the uncivilized Africans.

Hyde's account continues:

The rest of the Africans are depicted as less threatening than Cinqué since some are mere emaciated skeletons (barely human) and others are rendered as absurd as clowns or children in a costume shop. The cargo of the boat is carelessly and wastefully strewn about, indicating that the Africans have no notion of its value and are ignorantly playing in it and squandering it.

And yet, even among these apparently less threatening Africans, the disgust the journalist feels is almost palpable. Another scholar, Norbert Finzsch, has suggested that prior to 1860 racism thrived

The dominant culture evaluated savagery visually, “that is, the European gaze directed at the indigenous body.”Footnote ²¹ The author of this article wields the weapon of the European (or Euro-American) gaze carefully in the second paragraph of the New London Gazette article quoted above.

The “silks and finery” and “white pantaloons” worn by some blacks serve as a foil to the nakedness or partial nakedness of others. The “state of nudity”; the “sable shirt which nature gave”; the “emaciated … skeletons,” stripped even of flesh, encompass the worst of both the Western world and the African world. The indignity of the Africans in this partial state of dress arises from the juxtaposition of the most expensive fabrics and white pantaloons with the state of near starvation and desperation of the African men. As “bodies,” the exposure of so much skin would resonate as primitive and shocking, suggesting what George L. Mosse labeled “a visual ideology based on stereotypes,”Footnote ²²

This cultural “ugliness” might be evident to the white Connecticut reader imagining a bare-chested tattooed African, with a planter's hat upon his head (here assuming the clothing of the dominant race); a linen shirt embroidered by a dark-eyed Spaniard (evoking European beauty and civilized skill), above gauzily swaddled “nether proportions.” Concomitant with this “ugliness” is the tacit threat of Africans taking on the property and power of Europeans, while barely concealing the exotic nudity and sexuality under that gauze, combined with the proximity of “white” trappings to naked or near-naked black skin. Yet implicit in this description is the curious interest in, if not attraction to, the exoticism, the primitive sexuality, and the “otherness” of the Africans under duress.

Hyde's article goes on:

In addition to evoking the miserable stench from a ship carrying the unwashed, food remnants and corpses, the final paragraph, mentioning the dead and nude African, contains a passage reminiscent of the fearful letters written by missionaries and explorers about Africans:

The portrayal of the “cannibal” with his right-angle teeth raises another nightmare specter before the fascinated and terrified eyes of white Americans. One of the messages conveyed is that the savagery of some Africans inspires fear even in other blacks. Here is a “creature” sitting vulture-like, a “watching fiend” with “savage and demoniac” eyes, a black Gargoyle. Yet Hyde probably relied on Antonio, an African-born, Spanish-speaking slave belonging to the Amistad's owners for this mendacious information.Footnote ²⁶ It would be weeks before a translator could be found to translate the Mende spoken by some of the Africans,Footnote ²⁷ so it would be hard to imagine the other captives being able to communicate the cannibalistic tendencies of one of their number. (The filed-teeth captives, likely from the Kono and Mende ethnic groups, were named Nazha-U-Lu and Pu-gnwaw-ni; of course, tooth filing had nothing to do with cannibalistic tendencies and everything to do with aesthetics.Footnote ²⁸)

Yet the accusation of cannibalism (if not scavenging) suggests other contemporaneous European accounts of African cannibalism. John Ludwig Krapf, an explorer–missionary of the 1830s in Africa, claimed that cannibalism was but one of the sins of pagan Africans. His biographer recounts,

Notwithstanding such alarming colonial accounts of barbarism among Africans, it was the Amistad Africans who feared the cannibalistic urges of their European captors:

Furthermore, one of the Africans, Fuliwa, testified that the cook told the captives that all their heads would be cut off and that they would be eaten. Not surprisingly, when they attacked their Amistad crew, the Africans killed the cook first.

Nor was the myth of European cannibalism entirely fabricated:

Ironically, then, the attack on the Amistad crew was precipitated by the Africans' fear of being eaten, while the Europeans concluded that the Africans, or at least some of them, harbored cannibalistic tastes. The publication of this accusation, along with the pathos with which the slavers were portrayed, would taint the feelings of Americans about this case, and serve to alienate the Africans from any sympathy that might have flowed toward them in their dire circumstances. This reminder of the primitive “nature” of the Africans, coupled with the implicit knowledge of their suffering (in the starving, near-naked bodies) and their foreign exoticism, with its perceived ugliness, creates a story that might cause Americans to turn away, and to prefer ignorance.

Later in the same New London Gazette article, John J. Hyde opines that “the negroes … cost $20 to $30,000,”Footnote ³² reiterating their status as slaves. It is understandable that the editor would take the word of the slavers, with whom he could communicate, that the blacks were slaves, rather than the word of the Africans, with whom he could not communicate; however, the pandering of the Spanish slavers clearly impressed Mr. Hyde. In his final paragraph, he records the letter sent by them:

After the court decision, the New-Haven Herald also printed some hostile commentary about the Amistad Africans, which was reprinted in the Hartford Daily Courant.

In this account, the Africans' display of “great complacency,” rather than celebratory gratitude, was coupled with their “work no good” response to condemn them to “private charities, our almshouses or prisons.” The uncertainty of their future gives the writer cause to wonder if their struggle for freedom has been worthwhile, since they will end badly in almost any case, because they are “so divested of any moral principle.” Furthermore, the recording of their responses in broken English, especially juxtaposed with the author's elegant prose, seems to mock the Africans, for their lack of language skills, direction and ambition.

Yet the accusations against the Africans were immediately refuted in the Observer and reprinted intact in the Hartford Daily Courant:

This passionate defense of the Amistad men implies some African cultural superiority: the Africans abhor drunkenness, a major social problem in the United States; they also abhor lying and profanity, unlike some Americans. To refute the charge of laziness, the author cites Sokomah's refusal to work on the Sabbath; in this one incident, the African is shown to obey the commandments, while the “Christian” white does not. The Hartford Daily Courant insists on the morality of the Africans, making it clear that they are being transformed into the nonthreatening, virtuous Christians, whose conversions will work to breed more support for abolition.

Another piece published by the New-Haven Herald, and republished in the Hartford Daily Courant, after the conclusion of the Amistad trials is entitled “Memorandum of a Loco Foco.” The Loco Foco Party, considered a radical branch of the Democrat Party, was also called the Equal-Rights Party, and though the party was focussed on the rights of the working class, its sentiments appeared to be anti-slavery.Footnote ³⁶ In the New-Haven Herald, however, the author of the “Memorandum” seems to be in sympathy with the white crew who enslaved the Africans:

The author's sorrow that the African captives, who committed “black, atrocious deeds,” (a deliberate choice of adjectives, no doubt), would now go free, after much money had been spent on their defense, hardly comports with the supposed spirit of the Loco Foco Party, defender of the weak against the mighty forces of big business and monopolies. However, this passage reflects some of the fear and repugnance felt at the thought of whites being murdered by blacks, and exonerated, no matter what the context. Clearly, in the minds of such people, this episode, which stirs sorrow in the present and despair for the future, has left this writer profoundly disappointed.

Notably, these last two articles, which evinced little sympathy for the Amistad captives, were New-Haven Herald pieces, but not all New Haven newspaper pieces were unsympathetic. The authors of the following articles in the New Haven Record refer to the Herald's “marvelous fabrications,” and they refuse to dignify those fabrications with a response. However, when the ostensibly more objective Hartford Courant disseminates misinformation, that must be addressed:

This is one of the earliest allegations that Cinqué was himself a slave-trader. The New Haven Record takes pains to assert that Cinqué could not have communicated this information to Antonio and did communicate an absolute denial to his translators. (Howard Jones has thoroughly investigated the rumors, reprinted in the twentieth century in otherwise respectable texts, and he has found no proof that Cinqué engaged in the slave trade either before or after the Amistad incident.Footnote ³⁹) The New Haven Record continues:

Here, the authors switch back to the possibility that the accusation against Cinqué is true, comparing the “poor benighted African” with the Connecticut-educated “high-born Spaniard”; presumably, in the eyes of Connecticut readers, no social disparity could be greater. This point creates a moral equivalency between the Ruiz and Cinqué, excusing Cinqué somewhat because slavery exists in Africa “according to the laws and customs of the country,” where no one questions its morality. In contrast, Ruiz knows better; as a Connecticut-educated European, he knows he has victimized the Africans in “that abominable traffic which the laws of his own and every civilized country denounced as the vilest of crimes.” If Cinqué is guilty, then he is certainly less guilty than Ruiz. This rather quick acceptance of Cinqué's slave-trading, after citing the exculpatory testimony of Cinqué and his translators, speaks volumes about the writer's uncertainty with regard to Cinqué's innocence. He continues his argument assuming Cinqué's guilt:

If the accusation of slave-trading is to have any teeth, the authors say, it must come from people who recognize the evil of slavery; the New-Haven Herald does not oppose slavery, and thus cannot condemn the behavior of an alleged African slave-trader:

What is most alarming here is how easily the authors concede the high ground to the critics of Cinqué; they defend him in a cursory way, but then continue their argument granting his guilt, moving on to defend the children, while allowing that Mr. Tappan's exoneration of Cinqué was “supposed,” “hastily obtained” and “imperfect.” Ultimately, it is the Africans' status as victims that earns them concern, not their character, which the authors cannot or will not vouch for.

While Howard Jones traces the accusation against Cinqué only as far back as a 1953 novel,Footnote ⁴² this charge was made, as we have seen, immediately upon his arrival in Connecticut, perhaps based on the assumption that all Africans of power and high birth engaged in the slave trade. Jones considers the motivations of those who made the twentieth-century claim, and some of these could apply to the Cinqué of 1839: “historians might cite the charge against Cinqué to help absolve the guilt of white practitioners of slavery.”Footnote ⁴³ This is clearly plausible, as is the second reason, “the seductive appeal of irony.”Footnote ⁴⁴

While nineteenth-century newspapers used irony as a cudgel at times, the New-Haven Herald would see it only in the rumor that Cinqué was a slave-trader, but would, of course, fail to see it in Ruiz and Montes's claim to be crime victims. Simply printing the charge raises questions about Cinqué's standing as a victim of the slave trade, which is probably exactly the impression desired by the New-Haven Herald. While this allegation was forcefully refuted by the Hartford Daily Courant, we all know that, once circulated, such statements begin to assume a life of their own, apart from truth; in that new, second life, they emerged in a novel in 1953. Beyond granting absolution to white slave-traders and sharing a bit of irony with readers, it does seem that this early, unfounded charge was calculated to undermine the character of Cinqué in the public mind and poison any burgeoning fascination with him. The authors of the Hartford Daily Courant article suggest as much:

This point-by-point refutation of charges against Cinqué and the Africans is more than an attempt at fairness; the Africans are portrayed here with some respect. Even if the worst is true, the other captives are guilty of nothing but wanting their freedom. But the authors note that there has been an attempt “to make an impression unfavorable to the Africans, and favorable to their oppressors,” “to discredit the testimony of the Africans,” and to portray them as threatening, possessing dangerous weapons. Though they say, gamely, that these (hostile) “editors … do not choose to manifest any interest in favor of the Africans,” they imply, of course, that these editors do intend to stir up animosity toward the Africans. The article avers that pro-slavery editors of the New-Haven Herald have every motive to demonize Cinqué and his crew and cut short any public support toward them. In order to counter those false impressions, the writer reports progress in the “civilizing” process of the Africans: “The Africans are making encouraging progress in acquiring the English language under their instructors, and their interest in the matter continues unabated.”Footnote ⁴⁵

By ending the article with the English lessons the Africans are taking, the author paints a picture of people trying to better themselves; the Africans are hardworking, interested students. The English lessons suggest their attempts to improve in the eyes of American readers since their foreign tongue remains one of the distinct signs of their original savagery. Still, the value of the Amistad men as abolitionist symbols has been tainted by this slave-trading accusation and the passionate, defensive and somewhat convoluted arguments necessary thereafter.

In an editorial printed in January 1840, the Courant editors described the ordeal of kidnapped Africans with sensitivity and empathy. They asserted that they were “much gratified at the decision of the United States District Court” because

The last statement about human rights sounds amazingly contemporary, but also echoes David Walker's Appeal (1829),Footnote ⁴⁷ which asserts that all men share the rights they were endowed with by their creator. Nonetheless, the picture painted of the Africans as “poor, ignorant, degraded inhabitants” exhibits the lack of compassionate cultural understanding of the plight of these victims of violence. The inherent racism of even the good-hearted abolitionists is evident again. Nonetheless, the Courant defense could not be stronger or more radical, since the author endorses, encourages and even celebrates slave insurrections aboard slave ships, one of the rare written endorsements of the efficacy of “action” over moralistic appeals in a mainstream (rather than overtly abolitionist) newspaper.

In a similarly strong tone, on 10 February 1840, the Hartford Daily Courant questioned the actions of President Martin Van Buren on the Amistad case:

The sympathy here for the Africans is clear, as is the accusation that Van Buren was attempting to exercise his presidential power to influence the judge at the US District Court.Footnote ⁴⁹ The Hartford Daily Courant suggests that the “just and high-minded People” of the nation will have their say about the “tyrant” Van Buren in the election, and lays out the President's attempt as an effort to subvert the “inalienable rights” of the Africans to their liberty. Given the state of African Americans in 1840, this was forward-looking human rights speech that might be expected to come from a radical like David Walker, not a mainstream New England newspaper.

Another article favorable to the Africans was picked up by the Hartford Daily Courant from the Connecticut Observer:

This article conveys much the same condescending, but well-meaning, attitude of the earlier New-Haven Record article. Here again, the Africans are commended for their studiousness, their perseverance, their incipient Christian conversion, their implicit loyalty in their love of home. Every effort is made to see Christian virtues in the former “savages”; indeed, God has probably put them into the hands of American Christians to create native missionaries to “dark Africa.” In one piece, then, the Africans go from being “savages” at their arrival to “becoming civilized, and it is hoped, Christian, men.” These two stereotypes represent the “ideological constructions”Footnote ⁵¹ of black masculinity in a linear storyline; the violent, rebellious Africans are tamed and Christianized into becoming the only form of black manhood acceptable to white society, the “suffering servant,” to use C. Peter Ripley's phrase.Footnote ⁵² In this version of events, their experience in America, and specifically in Connecticut, has created an army of missionary “servants” who can please all Americans: colonizationists, first, by returning to Africa; abolitionists, second, by allowing themselves to be “civilized” and proving their worth by their submissive behavior (then living up to the tenets of moral suasion to be discussed later in this essay); and Americans in general, last, by their Christian example and possible proselytizing in Africa. This transformation, however, robs the Africans of what James Jasinski calls “the second archetypal ‘face’ of Christianity: the virile, militant Christian soldier and holy warrior personified in such slave rebellions as Nat Turner.”Footnote ⁵³ Of course, the image of the Africans as “suffering servants” and missionaries was much more palatable, and one more likely to garner support than the truer image of the Africans as “avenging Messiahs.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Of course, for all the progressive, good wishes expressed by the author, other racist assumptions also permeate the article. The statement that the mental powers of the Africans “fully equal those of our own race” expresses the surprise of the author, and presumably of his readership, in this discovery. The mention of the thriving good health of the would-be slaves may have been calculated to allay fears of exotic disease. The references to the “savages” of “dark Africa” reinforce the “otherness” of the men, so it might have seemed wise to balance this foreignness with their growing piety. All told, though, the account is intended to be kind, and it includes a call for donations from Christians for the further support of these new converts.

A few months later, another small article picked up by the Hartford Daily Courant from the New York Evening Post refers to those slavery proponents who would like to turn the Amistad case into a dispute about slavery. The author asserts that this construction of the case must not be allowed:

This display of northern “jealousies” seems to suggest that northerners want the case settled on its merits, without the discussion of the national slavery issue, but also want to claim the case as their own, free of southern efforts to reframe it. However, the commitment expressed here is the very one that southerners would choose: the author determines not to allow this case to “graze the question of slavery in our country.” Though conceding that the Amistad Africans deserved liberty, this refusal to expand the significance of the case tells us a great deal about the fears aroused here. Again, the desire, on the part of the Africans' most faithful defenders, to limit the consequences of the Amistad, in thought, feeling and action, becomes clear, even as the North ostensibly stands up to the South in this article. The author simply avoids the issue of answering how it is that the Africans deserve to be free simply because they were kidnapped instead of their parents. Raising the issue is dangerous in that it calls up southern white rage; in leaving the question unsaid, “The people of this part of the country will not endure” southern wrath since they have decided to take a more cowardly route. Better to protest even a decoy issue in a whisper.

The next day, the sectionalism concern arose again in an otherwise dry factual account of the case. Again, in an article copied from the New York Evening Post, the author in the Courant rails against southern domination of the discussion.

In this paragraph, northern resentment of the southern control of these issues seems greater than the disagreement about slavery-related issues. Moreover, in the author's attempt to disentangle the Amistad case from “the interests of the South,” there seems to be some fear of “awakening the whole fury of the South.” James Brewer Stewart recalls how the abolitionists were crushed by public antipathy as the 1830s wore on. The abolitionist movement

Given this recent history, newspapers like the Hartford Daily Courant would be careful to frame the Amistad issue as neutrally as possible, especially given the southern “howling” that southern white blood was being shed in slave insurrections and crimes with abolitionist support and instigation. Eventually, this dismay verbalized by northerners about the southern attempt to control the issues would culminate in Wendell Phillips's demand that northerners be free to disobey the dictates of southern slaveholders searching for runaways (as required by the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law),Footnote ⁵⁸ but in 1841 this kind of direct defiance of the South was avoided in continuing hope of compromise.

If, during this era, editors felt it was wisest to avoid the full implications of the Amistad case, complete with the imagery of Africans so motivated to be free that they risk their lives to fight for that freedom – countering the stereotypical passivity and simplicity attributed to blacks by American racists – then news stories should be focussed on the facts, and limited in scope. This is journalism careful not to incite the greatly feared white mobs so active in the 1830s.

In spite of this evident defensiveness about the Southerners' interests, consistent with most of its news and opinion up to that point the position of the Hartford Daily Courant was reiterated at the end of the Amistad case:

This article mentions the apparent objectivity the Amistad judges exercised in spite of their personal bias in favor of slavery; this is a strand of the story that could be a classic American point of pride. However, the story of the triumph of unbiased justice was later swallowed up by the multiple other vexatious issues raised by the Amistad.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the “forgetting” of the Amistad for over a hundred years not even this unambiguous virtue could redeem the story buried under the other fraught issues.

But none of this yet stopped the churchwomen of Connecticut from lending the “strangers” a hand. On 12 March 1841, a Hartford fair to support the Africans was advertised. The announcement is as cheery as that of a church fair. The Amistad men themselves, described as “these strangers in our midst from a benighted land,” would attend in person to sell their handiwork, and would attract the curious from across the state.

THE AFRICANS AND THE FAIR

The Africans have achieved a new status in this article; no longer are they prisoners, or pawns in a legal battle. Instead, they are students, and beneficiaries of ladies' fund-raising efforts. To further cement this new status, on 28 October 1841, the Courant printed a letter from Cinqué, expressing his gratitude toward his American friends and asking to be returned to Sierra Leone soon. While Cinqué's letter may have been sincere, he appears to have learned American culture thoroughly. After expressing his gratitude, he requests cloth, “For men's clothes – for pantaloons, coats and vests – not cut. For we think we wear 'Merica dress as long as we live, and we want our friends who come to live with us to wear 'Merica dress too.”Footnote ⁶²

Cinqué understands the anxiety with which Americans would picture the Africans “going native” again, and he takes care to mention that he and his men have resolved to wear clothing, American-style. In addition, Cinqué is providing evidence of his missionary zeal, in clothing, at the very least, in saying that these newly “Americanized” Africans will want their friends, too, dressing in “pantaloons, coats and vests” when they return to hot Africa.

After assuring Americans that they will take care of the American missionaries accompanying them back to Sierra Leone, Cinqué raises the image of their Christian conversion and their determination to share the Gospel with their people back home:

Knowing that Christians would be most likely to be responsive to religiosity, Cinqué had mastered this language, although this is not to say that his words were insincere. He simply seemed to know what Americans would appreciate hearing and he was building his new identity to suit the stereotype he knew to be the least threatening. Yet, one year later, a disappointing report was published in the Hartford Daily Courant:

The worst fears of the Americans who assisted the Amistad captives come true in this article. The conversion was a sham; the men had fulfilled the worst stereotypes of the sexually insatiable, naked black man. The letter from Mr. Raymond undermines all the hard work, fund-raising and commitment of Americans who worked to free these men, who seem to have returned happily to their African ways. Opponents of the Amistad Africans must have gloated over these allegations. This epilogue, merely a year after Cinqué's return, may also explain some of the silence of historians about this case. While southern slavery proponents may have not wanted to dwell on the success of this particular slave rebellion, abolitionists who invested great effort and tremendous resources in the Africans were now embarrassed by its ultimate “failure,” the Africans' swift literal and figurative shedding of Christian garb.

To add further insult to Amistad supporters, in 1847, the Senate quietly passed an appropriation bill to compensate the Amistad owners for the slaves they lost in the incident. The Hartford Daily Courant notes that this appropriations bill was not mentioned in other newspapers, and that

Again, here was evidence that the Southerners and slavers always seemed to triumph in the end. The dispirited tone of this epilogue also reflects the growing tensions over slavery, an issue that seemed to fracture the country more and more each day.Footnote ⁶⁶

While American newspapers eventually refocused on newer events, two physical souvenirs of the Amistad incident remained here in the United States. One was painting by John Warner Barber depicting the takeover of the ship by the Africans, The Death of Captain Ferrer, the Captain of the Amistad, July, 1839. Footnote ⁶⁷ This was a smaller version of a 135-foot painting by Amasa Hewins that was exhibited all over New England in the spring of 1840, reminding us that the American entrepreneurial impulse has long roots, and also perhaps suggesting how central and symbolic the Amistad drama was. Benjamin Griswold, a friend of Lewis Tappan's, expressed concern that these portrayals would have a “bad … moral effect.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Certainly the painter meant well, Griswold avers, suggesting that Cinqué and his men were understood to be fighting for their freedom like our Revolutionary forefathers. However, sensitive to the public mood at the time, Griswold, a professor of religion at Yale Theological Seminary, opined that the belief that “American audiences would interpret the painting's drama, and thus the Africans, in lurid, negative terms was not without a basic understanding of the American populace.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Griswold's perception reflects one of the great challenges of the Amistad incident: how did Americans define this man Cinqué?

Frederick Dalzell confronts this issue, saying,

These contradictory images made it impossible to view Cinqué dispassionately, without evoking fear, revulsion, or recognition – another reason to try to forget him all together.

Less controversial, but also troubling, was a portrait (followed by an engraving) of Cinqué commissioned by Robert Purvis, a Philadelphia anti-slavery reformer and a man of color. Purvis paid Nathaniel Jocelyn, the New Haven-born brother of Amistad Committee member Simeon S. Jocelyn, to work on the portrait.

Because it is clear that the portrait was painted between late 1840 and early 1841, before the Supreme Court decision was rendered in March 1841, Purvis's commission and engraving were probably ordered to achieve a certain purpose. Given the pro-slavery sentiments of the majority of the nation, there was good reason to be doubtful of a good outcome for the Amistad captives. Correspondence between the Tappan brothers suggests that the commission and mass distribution of the engravings were part of a careful strategy to move public opinion in the weeks before the Supreme Court decision.Footnote ⁷¹

The portrait reflects an African image new to America of 1840; the portrait of Cinqué, dressed in a toga-like robe, with dignity, sobriety and intelligence expressed in his posture and countenance, “presented him as an embodiment of republican (read abolitionist) ideal, an allegorical representation of Christian proselytizing and missionary work in Africa, and a symbol of black resistance and activism in the face of increasing white-on-black violence and sociopolitical unrest.”Footnote ⁷² Cinqué's portrait would remain in Robert Purvis's private collection until it was bequeathed in his estate to the New Haven Historical Society; many copies of it were sold to raise money for the abolitionist cause, while abolitionists endeavored to change perceptions of Africans and African Americans.

Yet there is no doubt that such a dignified portrait of Cinqué would arouse almost as much discomfort as his exoneration did. Paul Baepler reminds us that Barbary captivity narratives, in which white Europeans were enslaved by swarthy “savages,” were popular reading entertainment for Americans and Europeans of all ages. Although the Amistad rebellion took place off the coast of Cuba, Africans turned the table on Europeans and held them in thrall, raising several unsettling issues:

The reversal of fortunes on the Amistad raised the specter of what Paul Baepler calls the “African master,” a suddenly empowered African male with a taste for vengeance, Wilson Moses's “avenging Messiah.” According to John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, beginning in 1801 with the Haitian revolution, through the end of the Civil War, slave rebellions occurred all through the South, precipitating “a constant source of fear and anxiety for whites.”Footnote ⁷⁴

White anxiety would be deepened by the portrayal of Cinqué as a hero of dignity and natural leadership, especially given the earlier stereotypical descriptions of the Africans as sharp-toothed, half-naked, throat-slashing savages. Those suspecting that abolitionists' goals were not only to dismantle slavery, but to bring about the eventual equality of blacks and whites, would be especially troubled by the “heroification” process that the Jocelyn portrait exemplified:

Just as “Cinqué as a hero” was not a narrative that Jacksonian Americans wanted to hear, the other emerging truths about the Amistad were unnerving as well. From an evangelical abolitionist perspective, the way to change American attitudes about slavery was through Christian empathy. In order to spread their message, they chose an engraving of a slave reaching up piteously for help, asking, “Am I not a man and a brother?” However, Cinqué symbolized dignity, manhood, courage, intelligence, agency and rebellion against personal tyranny. The question raised in the engraving is carefully phrased: he does not ask to recognized as a man and a brother, but insists by his syntax that he is; in fact, he challenges the listener to deny it. Yet that message is tempered with a servile posture, clearly ceding dominance to a presumably white listener. If Americans came to see Cinqué through John Warner Barber's painting, as an actor rather than a victim, taking charge of circumstances outside the parameters of accepted black behavior, southern and northern fear of black-on-white violence and vengeance would grow into an insurmountable obstacle to the abolitionist movement.

Over a decade later, sensitive to her audience, Harriet Beecher Stowe created two vibrant black characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin. George, an intelligent, articulate man of action might earn respect, but not sympathy; a direct threat to white hegemony, he expatriates himself, probably to relieve the anxieties of nineteenth-century American readers, who would not want a George here, asserting his equality and brandishing his European education. Uncle Tom, on the other hand, is uneducated, submissive and pious to the point of martyrdom; he elicited only a condescending sympathy. This Uncle Tom “type” pre-dated the novel by decades, as is suggested by Stanley Harrold, who reflected the common American assumption, particularly in the early 1840s, in describing black men as less masculine and active than white men, and more apt to forgive and model Christian virtue, with the caveat that beneath these virtues lurked a capacity for great violence, springing from an essentially bestial nature.Footnote ⁷⁶

For the African American free community, this dichotomy of African American masculinity – the feminized passive “boy” versus the savage adult male – posed a major challenge of identity. James and Lois Horton noted that the Christian forbearance advocated by the Garrisonians led to black behavior that appeared to condone the slave owner's authority, while acting aggressively to assert one's manhood and independence, as Cinqué did, would “reinforce white stereotypes of the ‘brutish African nature’ restrained only by slavery.”Footnote ⁷⁷

The struggle over the terrible choice between these debilitating stereotypes reflected the burgeoning debate among abolitionists about the efficacy of moral suasionFootnote ⁷⁸ versus aggressive action. Moral suasion had two complementary belief systems: first, that the virtuous, hardworking, pious behavior of the free black man would naturally earn the respect of white people, and thus win them over to the anti-slavery cause;Footnote ⁷⁹ second, that the route to emancipation was “to persuade the nation to live up to its conscience.”Footnote ⁸⁰ By 1840, however, this philosophy of uplift and nonviolence was beginning to fray. As mentioned earlier, the 1830s saw anti-black riots in New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Ohio,Footnote ⁸¹ and in most incidents only blacks were arrested. Under these circumstances, moral suasion would seem to emasculate black men who wanted to defend their homes, their families and their freedom.Footnote ⁸² Bernard Boxill contends that Frederick Douglass saw violence in the name of justice as an extension of moral suasion,Footnote ⁸³ but only after his British sojourn in the mid-1840s, when he recognized that slaveholders had no conscience to which one could appeal.Footnote ⁸⁴

The Amistad case would certainly have tested the limits of some abolitionists' commitment to moral suasion, since Cinqué's actions accomplished what no amount of good behavior or nonviolence could have: he had forced Americans to examine the Africans' humanity, intelligence and agency, an issue that Milton C. Sernett asserts had been “sidestepped” until the 1830s by “political stratagems such as the Missouri Compromise and moral palliatives like the American Colonization Society”.Footnote ⁸⁵

Furthermore, while it was clear from the start that the fate of the Amistad Africans would have little impact on the daily lives of American slaves, Cinqué incarnated the newly surfacing debate about the value of moral suasion versus violent resistance.Footnote ⁸⁶ Abolitionists of all stripes recognized that without the violence aboard this ship, the captive Africans would have become illegal but de facto slaves in Cuba for the rest of their lives. To the extent that abolitionists fought for the Africans' freedom, they were condoning action, and even violence and murder, in defense of freedom. This recognition sat uncomfortably in the minds and hearts of white abolitionists, while it reinforced the conclusions of many black abolitionists like James Forten, Hosea Easton, Henry Highland Garnet and William Watkins. These men had responded strongly to David Walker's Appeal of 1829, and “[T]heir long and bitter trials with racial tyranny hardly fostered such optimism” that moral suasion alone could lead to progress.Footnote ⁸⁷

Whatever their brand of abolitionism, these men and others, most importantly James W. C. Pennington, were mobilized by the Amistad case. Richard Blackett has noted that

Inspirational though it might have been for African Americans, there seem to have been myriad reasons to consign the Amistad to the American history attic; in Iyunolu Osagie's essay, the nature of historical memory suggests other reasons for the century-long “forgetting.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In addition to the dearth of attention given to the role of African Americans in our history by white historians until relatively recently, there is the issue of which historical “stories” fulfill our present values and understandings. As Osagie reminds us, the scholars George Herbert Mead and Maurice Halbwachs both “believe that the past is … ‘a social construction shaped by the concerns and needs of the present.’”Footnote ⁹⁰ In other words, we recall certain incidents of the past when we need them to interpret our current reality. It became acceptable in the late twentieth century to see the struggles of marginalized peoples as noble and courageous; until that time, the actions of black rebels like Cinqué were subject to censure and fear. Recognizing the harsh repression of black nonviolent dissent in the 1960s, it is hardly surprising that that America would choose to forget the Amistad.

Regarding the Amistad incident specifically, Osagie asserts that while books were written about the incident, “the Amistad incident has never been studied as part of the official history of Sierra Leone, and it has never been studied in the school system … it is an event that Sierra Leoneans … never identified with as part of their national history,”Footnote ⁹¹ just as it was largely unknown by Americans before the 1980s, omitted from school history books. In Sierra Leone, Osagie claims, the sad ending of Cinqué (called “Pieh” in the extract belowFootnote ⁹²) made it likely to be left out of the history books:

Similarly, the epilogue of the Amistad story in the United States was hardly uniformly victorious. Allegations of slave-trading, polygamy, nakedness and heathenish behaviors embarrassed the Africans' supporters into silence and undermined their attempts to move Americans with moral suasion. The rumors would also have raised important issues about whether they had been duped by the Africans' “piety” and gloss of “civilization,” while underneath it all still lurked the stereotypical African brute of racist ideology. If the legal victory and repatriation, which had used so much abolitionist money, time and effort, ended in the resumption of an uncivilized life in Africa, then perhaps it was best forgotten here too. Recalling the “victory” of the Africans' freedom to return home would simply elicit the mockery of those who would choose to see them as murderers exculpated and rewarded by abolitionists.

The final chapters of the Amistad story, as they were recorded in a few missionary letters, called into question the whole colonization scheme as an ideal solution to a vexatious issue; since colonizationists felt that they were forging a midway course that provided political shelter from the criticisms on all sides – and this was a favorite hiding place for clergymen – the Amistad case made their efforts look foolish. Not only were such missions unlikely to succeed, but, once returned to Africa, the blacks had lost whatever “Christianity” they had acquired. For men supposedly concerned about the welfare of black souls, this was hardly a propitious sign, even if one could assume the best about fundraising, safe voyages and disease-free survival. This was never mentioned in Connecticut newspapers.

All in all, while Connecticut “media” coverage of the Amistad incident was largely favorable to the potential slaves,Footnote ⁹⁴ even though they had washed up onshore with the blood of white men on their hands, it was also clear that within that coverage was evidence of the many anxieties and contradictions that made it inexpedient to write the Amistad story into the history books. While racist assumptions permeate almost every article, a sense of justice ultimately prevailed in the writings of Connecticut journalists, perhaps reflecting and influencing public opinion. But Eric Foner has made several important points about the Amistad case, prompted by the release of Steven Spielberg's movie of the same name:

Barner Hesse believes that the Spielberg film erases African and African American memory and silences the voices raised against the predatory violence of slavery, focussing the story on the white legal drama as foreground to the background of African self-determination.Footnote ⁹⁵ Jesse Lemisch expands this point about the film. He contends that this film subtracts black agency from the story, making John Quincy Adams the “Schindler” savior of the Africans; this changes the narrative from one of black rebellion and self-determination to one of white heroism on behalf of black victims.Footnote ⁹⁶ According to Lemisch, this film version plays to familiar American themes of the heroic individual (Cinqué), the altruistic white savior/patriot (Adams) and the reliability of the American justice system. This, of course, is the kind of “history” white Americans can be presumed to be most comfortable with.

A truer reading of the times can be gleaned by an incident occurring only a short time after the Amistad, in 1841. American slaves on a ship called the Creole revolted, killing some sailors and directing the ship to the Bahamas. The American government insisted for fifteen years that those slaves were criminals and property of American citizens that must be returned.Footnote ⁹⁷ Notably, the majority of the Amistad justices were still serving on the Supreme Court for the Dred Scott decision in 1857 when the court declared that African Americans had “no rights which a white man is bound to respect.”Footnote ⁹⁸

The narrow decision of the Supreme Court, in effect, gave anti-slavery activists one desired outcome, the freedom of the Africans, but made no significant impact on American slavery or law. B. Holden Smith agrees, claiming that there is not “any word in the opinion about the immorality of either slavery or the slave trade.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Frederick Dalzell contends that “[A]s a moral victory, the Amistad case was muted at best.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ For abolitionists, knowing that only a rare American would read the legal opinion, it was best to publicize only the happy outcome of freedom, and get to work raising money for the trip to Africa. It would not have served their purposes to go too deeply into the bloody details of the case or the case law, or to attempt to keep the public up to date on the mixed results of the Amistad aftermath. These would be best forgotten.

Yet, by the 1990s, Americans were ready for the DreamWorks version of the Amistad. As Dalzell notes,

The publicity generated by the case, however, may have begun a metamorphosis in the way contemporary readers of Connecticut newspapers “saw” the victims of the slave trade, as individuals, as human and possibly even as heroic. Nonetheless, as here discussed, a plethora of obstacles stood in the way of this story sharing the iconic place of other historical vignettes in our shared memory. (Think, for example, of Paul Revere's ride, Betsy Ross and the flag.) The general unwillingness of earlier historians to confront slavery, the southern desire to keep slave revolts quiet, the northern desire not to incite mob violence, American discomfort with a black “avenging Messiah”, conflicts among abolitionists as to the proper “packaging” of Cinqué, the growing consciousness of the failure of moral suasion versus the immediate consequences of aggressive action, the alleged embarrassing return of the Amistad men to their native ways, slave-trading charges which undermined the heroism of Cinqué, the narrow legal decision: all these issues posed challenges for Americans that clouded the triumph of freedom. With what seemed to be tacit and universal consent, the Amistad incident was ignored in our history books and in our national consciousness until the civil rights era prepared us to understand the incident and ourselves better. That being said, however, Marcus Rediker argues persuasively that the Amistad case inspired more commitment and even militancy among several anti-slavery groups.Footnote ¹⁰²

Lastly, it must be remembered that the Africans were requesting what Connecticut citizens were only too happy to give; that is, a return to Africa. While it is impossible to estimate the percentage of white Connecticut or New England citizens who considered themselves colonizationists, some scholars believe that almost all of them saw blacks as “a degraded group that threatened the stability of society [and] could not hope to improve their condition in America.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Given this American mindset, white Connecticut residents could espouse the freeing of the African men, their education and their kind treatment, reinforcing their own Christian image of themselves in a fashion that cost them nothing, since ultimately these people would return to their homeland. The Amistad posed no dilemma to those who wanted to return American-born blacks to a continent they had not seen in ten generations; such Christian generosity came easily.