Four of the fifty-three Africans who boarded La Amistad in Havana in 1839 were children under the age of ten.

We know from historical documents that the female captives Kagne and Margru were sold because their fathers did not pay a debt. Kale, a boy, was kidnapped on a village street. Teme, a girl, was seized by a gang of men who burst into her mother's house one night. She never saw her mother or any of her other relatives again.

Much more information is known about Margru. She returned to Africa following the Supreme Court decision to free the captives and return them to their homeland; she is the only one of Amistad's child captives who subsequently returned to the United States. This is her story.

Margru was born in West Africa in the village of Bendembu, in Mandingo country, about one hundred miles south of Freetown and forty to sixty miles from the West-African coast. Margru was one of only a few children among the hundreds of people who were jammed into the Dunbomo slave pens on Lomboko Island awaiting slave ships to carry them across the Atlantic. Transported to Havana, Cuba, Margru was among those who were destined for transport on board La Amistad.

Following the events on board La Amistad, Margru and the other captives were eventually brought to New Haven, Connecticut. Lewis Tappan, a New York philanthropist and abolitionist, was outraged at the way the captives were treated and quickly helped organize the Amistad Committee to raise money for the captives' legal defense. (This committee later became the American Missionary Association.) Tappan also became an advocate for the children and over time would become Margru's greatest benefactor. Recognizing how traumatic the situation was for the children, Tappan arranged for them to reside in the home of the jailer and his wife, Colonel and Mrs. Pendleton. While the children certainly enjoyed more comforts and privacy there, they also served as domestic servants and were most certainly ill-treated.

In March 1841, two-and-one half years after their capture, the captives, now free, were moved to the abolitionist community of Farmington, Connecticut, where they were housed, fed and tutored by residents while awaiting funds for their return to Africa. Teme was given the name "Maria" and Kagne was named " Charlotte." Margru was named Sarah Kinson (almost certainly by Lewis Tappan).

Sarah joined other captives on abolitionist-sponsored tours along the East Coast where they presented programs to raise money for their passage back to Africa. They read from the New Testament, performed dramatic enactments of the Amistad story and sang both African songs and Christian hymns. Newspaper accounts of Sarah's part in these performances often noted her intelligence and educational attainments.

In November 1841, arrangements were finally made for the Africans to return to Africa. Sarah, now age ten, joined the thirty-five remaining Amistad survivors on the trip. However, on this trip,

she was not forced to remain in the hold. Instead the three girls, Sarah, Maria and Charlotte, traveled in a large stateroom with the five missionaries accompanying them on the trip. John Raymond, his wife Elizabeth and their new baby were among the missionaries traveling with the Africans. The missionaries had agreed to come to Africa to build a new Christian and antislavery mission station for the Mendeans somewhere in Sierra Leone's interior. Raymond had attended Oberlin College. Eventually, Sarah, Maria, and Charlotte were able to settle for awhile in the temporary mission, Kaw Mende. After they were reasonably settled, Raymond began to write Lewis Tappan with news of Sarah. In a May 1845 letter, later published in the Oberlin Evangelist, Raymond wrote, "I am happy to say we are doing well.
Sarah I have made my housekeeper, Charlotte is cook, and Maria waits upon my wife and does the housework...Sarah is almost continually singing."

By November he wrote another Oberlin missionary that he had never seen any other African girl "equal" to Sarah and that ..."she ought to go to America to be educated, then she could be qualified to be at the head of the female department of our school."

Seven years after the famous Amistad Incident, fifteen-year-old Sarah embarked on yet another transatlantic voyage to America. In America, Sarah got to Oberlin where Lewis Tappan had arranged for Marianne Parker Dascomb, the Principal of the Ladies Department, to oversee her care and education. In 1846, Sarah began her first formal education at Oberlin's Little Red School House. The homesick girl wrote Tappan...

"I received your letter with much pleasure. I will now write and let you know how I am getting along. I am now studying very diligently so as to be qualified to do good in the world as this was my object in coming to Oberlin...I am now rooming all alone. This makes me think about home. Sometimes I feel low spirit[ed] and cry then...Mr. Tappan, don't forget me for I look to you as a Father and if you forget me I don't know what I shall do. Will you please send me a little present that will cheer me up? Your servant, Miss S. Kinson"

In the winter of 1848, Sarah was admitted to Oberlin College's Ladies' Department and began taking college-level courses. By all reports, she was successful, made friends and did very well in her studies. Throughout it all, her heart was always in Africa. She wrote...

" Africa is my home. I long to be there. Although I am in America, yet my heart is there with the people I love and the country I admire."

The Mende Mission in Sierra Leone

Sarah returned to Africa in November 1849 as the schoolmistress of the Mission's new girl's school. In September 1852 she married Edward Green, an African who had been educated in Freetown at British Mission schools. Green had converted to Christianity shortly before arriving at Kaw Mende to teach at the station's new boy's school.

Sarah appears to have lived a happy and productive life at Kaw Mende.

Excerpted from a speech by Marlene D. Merrill, documentary editor and Oberlin College affiliate scholar. Photo © New Haven Colony Historical Society