The Amistad Rebellion Read Free Page A

silhouettes. Phrenologists measured the size of their skulls. Yale professors such as Josiah Gibbs compiled and published vocabularies of their languages. Many of these visitors published their findings in business newspapers such as the
New York Journal of Commerce
, in penny-press papers such as the
New York Sun
and
New York Morning Herald
, and in abolitionist periodicals such as the
Emancipator
and the
Pennsylvania Freeman
. As many as 2,500 articles were published altogether, many of them written by correspondents who had visited the African rebels in jail. No other makers of a modern slave revolt generated such a vast and deep body of evidence, which in turn makes it possible to know more about the
Amistad
Africans than perhaps any other group of once-enslaved rebels on record, and to get to know them, individually and collectively, in intimate, multidimensional ways, from their personalities and sense of humor to their specifically West African ways of thinking and acting during their ordeal. 8

    Throughout their odyssey the
Amistad
rebels struggled—sometimes alongside the American abolitionists, sometimes against them—for a voice of their own. As abolitionist Joshua Leavitt noted soon after they were brought ashore, “these unfortunate persons, who have been committed to prison and bound over to be tried for their lives” could not “say a word for themselves.” Of course the rebels could and did say many words for themselves, but for weeks no one could understand them. Here enter a group of African sailors, most notably James Ferry, Charles Pratt, and James Covey, whose cosmopolitan knowledge of multiple languages finally allowed the rebels to tell their stories of origins, enslavement, and insurrection. Ferry had been liberated from slavery in Colombia at age twelve by Simón Bolivar, Pratt and Covey by the British naval anti-slave-trade patrols. They wereexperienced in the struggle against slavery and they would be denounced by proslavery critics as “half-civilized, totally ignorant” sailors, who, like other men of color and low standing, were not to be trusted or believed. The motley crews of ship and waterfront played a critical role in the
Amistad
case. 9
    Leavitt’s observation lingers. The
Amistad
rebels’ struggle for voice led them to learn English, to study American political culture and to use it for their own ends, to tell both individual and collective stories about what had happened to them and why. Even so, it was no easy matter for them to be heard, in their own times, above or even alongside the voices of evangelical Christians; lawyers, politicians, and diplomats; middle-class antislavery reformers; and proslavery ideologues. And it has proved no easy matter to hear them today. This is a history of the
Amistad
rebellion from below. That, literally, is how and where the
Amistad
case began, with the eruption of armed rebels from the hold on to the main deck of the vessel. By viewing the courtroom drama in relation to the shipboard revolt, or, put another way, the actions taken from above in relation to those taken from below, the entire event, from causes to consequences, appears in a new light. This history puts the
Amistad
rebels back at the center of their own story and the larger history they helped to make. Theirs was an epic quest for freedom. 10

CHAPTER ONE

Origins
    O n a May evening in 1841, an overflow crowd at the Presbyterian Church on Coates Street in Philadelphia listened as a Mende man named Fuli spoke about “man-stealing” in his native southern Sierra Leone: “If Spanish man want to steal man, he no steal him himself, but hire black man; he pay him I don’t know how much.” Fuli referred to the urbane, cigar-smoking Spanish slave trader Pedro Blanco and his ally, the African King Siaka, who dressed in gold lace garments, drank from silver bowls, and mobilized soldiers and kidnappers in the interior of the Gallinas Coast. “The man catchers live in villages,”