The Amistad Rebellion Read Free

in New York, posed a “delicate question” amid the debate about whether the
Amistad
rebels should go free: “Let us then see if the [American] Government establishes the principle that it is lawful for a slave to kill his master, because then they can with impunity rise up in Washington, and slay all masters and all members of the Government that allowed slavery.” The broad Atlantic struggle against slavery generated the larger meaning of the
Amistad
controversy. 5
    The meeting of African insurrectionists and American reformers in the New Haven jail was an unprecedented and historic moment. The rebels had made a revolution in miniature aboard the ship, which inspired sympathetic coverage in the press, especially the
New York Sun
, and in turn generated intense fascination among the public. Tappan and other abolitionists responded, struggling to control and direct the enormous popular interest toward their own purposes, building in the process a determined, energetic, interracial defense campaign. Many who supported the
Amistad
struggle were not, strictly speaking, abolitionists; moreover, they celebrated the heroic insurrection in ways that made moderate abolitionists uneasy. The Africans themselves, through their actions on the vessel and their noble bearing in jail, continued to inspire an unprecedented interest in the fearsome subject of slave revolt. To many, especially African Americansenslaved and free, the
Amistad
rebels rekindled the radical egalitarian hope of the American Revolution. 6
    The insurrectionists and reformers who met in Connecticut jails represented the two main wings of a global movement against slavery. Black rebels had long played an important role in America’s antislavery movement, especially by their audacious escapes from slavery, which inspired and mobilized abolitionists throughout the northern states. The
Amistad
case publicized a more controversial form of resistance—outright rebellion—and gave enslaved rebels and their resistance a more important place in an expanded, radicalized movement against slavery. This movement would help to establish the right of unfree people to seize freedom through armed self-defense and to claim their place as equals in society. 7
    Even though slave resistance was ubiquitous throughout the turbulent 1830s, revolts were infrequent, even rare, occurrences, especially in the United States. Slaveholders always enforced the consequences of a failed revolt with hangings, maimings, and violent repression of all kinds. Most slaves, like most other people, were reluctant to risk everything in a gamble few before them had won. But an example of success changed everything. This, of course, was part of the importance of the Haitian Revolution. The black men and women of Saint Domingue had demonstrated the bottom rail could be placed on top. Until 1839, slaves in mainland North America could find no similar example of success. Slave rebels had failed in New York in 1712 and 1741; in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800; in Louisiana in 1811; and in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822. That record of failure changed in 1839, and with it changed the worlds of American slavery and abolition.

    A history of the
Amistad
rebellion from below is supported by a collection of sources unique in the annals of New World slavery. Because the makers of the maritime insurrection spent twenty-seven months in Connecticut (nineteen of them in jail) and because their cause was both controversial and well publicized, they met thousands of people from all walks of life, both within the walls of the jails and without.Journalists and ordinary citizens visited them, conversed with them through translators such as the Mende sailor James Covey, and transcribed their life stories, noting their work and nationality (hunter, Temne), where they lived in Africa (“two moons march to the coast”), and how they were enslaved (captured in war, kidnapped). Other visitors drew their portraits and