Some Precursors of the Amistad Revolt

 

John W. Blassingame

The 1839Amistad revolt perennially intrigues because of its dramatic affirmation of freedom. TheAmistad rebellion invites celebration of the possibilities of blacks and whites, Americans and Africans, reaching across the chasms of color, racism, oppression, and differences in language to grasp liberty. The black insurrection of the Mendi on theAmistad excites our admiration for oppressed people willing to give their lives that their brothers and sisters might live.

There is at least one facet of this many-sided story of heroism that few historians have explored: for more than a century before 1839, the spiritual ancestors of theAmistad freedom fighters had been continuously resisting their enslavement in the Americas. It is that part of the story I wish to address briefly.

With the king of England on its Board of Directors, the Royal African Company had powerful lobbyists who developed straightforward arguments favoring England's participation in the trade which would land about ten million Africans in the Americas between the sixteenth and middle of the nineteenth century. Typical of the European supporters of the trade in blacks was the novelist/journalist Daniel Defoe. He contended, for example, in 1709 that the trade was "useful, necessary and advantageous" to Great Britain because

1. It makes the best Export, and best Import of any Trade we drive; it exports nothing, but what we want to part with, and Imports nothing but what we can not be without....

2. It is the chief Support of another Trade, the Preservation of which, is of the last consequence to Britain, Viz. our Collonies in America , which could no more be maintain'd, the Islands especially , without the supply of Negro Slaves carried thither from Africa, Than London could subsist without the River ofThames.(1)

Few proponents of the African slave trade discussed the blacks in non property terms. Chained together below decks, fed and bathed in shifts, and guarded by crews armed with muskets, pistols, and light cannons, the Africans had relatively few opportunities to resist their enslavement. Even so, and despite elaborate security measures on the prison-like ships, rebellion rivaled disease as the greatest killer on the passage from Africa to the Americas. Jay Coughtry, in his study of Rhode Island's slave traders, for instance, found that sixteen shipboard revolts occurred between 1730 and 1800.

Although African place names in the eighteenth century were imprecise, scholars have determined that references to " Guinea" included the country known in 1839 as Sierra Leone, the homeland of the blacks on the Amistad. A complex Euro-American enterprise extending from roughly 1451 to 1870, the Atlantic slave trade proceeded normally without stories of black or white resistance entering the historical record. It is, therefore, of some consequence for historians to mine intensively the documents available to us and to illustrate this little-known side of the enslavement process.

A Pennsylvania surgeon, William Chancellor, survived an October, 1750, uprising while the shipWolf, cruised along the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and Ghana. When theWolf finally sailed for the Caribbean in 1751,
Chancellor wrote:

Safely departed Afric's shore at last,

I feel nor think on Dangers I have past,

And hope in time, to reach my native shore,

And never think of these dread voyages more.

Despite his having been wounded in putting down a shipboard African rebellion and his own homesickness, Chancellor recorded a conventional defense of the slave trade in his diary:

It is accounted by numberless people that a voyage to Africa in regard to the purchasing Slaves is very vile, but in my opinion, and I think I know, it is not in the least so, tis redeeming an unhappy people from inconceivable misery.(2)

Death on the passage from Africa to the Americas came in many forms. For example, in 1736 only two men survived the voyage of theMary from Africa with a "Cargo of Slaves, Bees-Wax and some Ivory." When the ship sprang a leak in early November, the crew unchained some of the slaves to man the pumps for several days. Unable to repair the ship, eight of the crew launched a rowboat and abandoned the sinking vessel and the three hundred slaves and fifteen whites trapped on it. A month after the Mary sank, the eight men who escaped were starving. By the 8th of December, the survivors testified: "Our Hunger then being intolerable, we were forc'd to kill one of our Companions to eat, and so agreed together to begin with one of the Portuguese, whom we accordingly kill'd out of pure Necessity, and cut his Flesh in small Pieces, dipt it in Salt Water, and hung it up to dry in the Sun, until it was hard and so eat it, tho' but very sparingly." And so on through four others on board before Simon McCone of Ireland and Thomas Thompson of Rhode Island made a landfall in Barbados on January 19, 1737.(3)

Considered in international law as moveable property, slaves seized on the high seas ended in admiralty courts, where judges ruled they were merchant goods subject to condemnation, sale, and division among the crews of the ships capturing them, as was true of theAmistad. An Antiguan correspondent, for example, wrote on November 9, 1746, that two Antiguan ships had attacked a small French island, brought off four of their vessels, and "secured about three hundred negroes.... The sloops will return in a day, to bring off the remaining slaves."(4) The French repaid the favor late in 1753, when the following brief report appeared: "The Fortune, of Jamaica, Capt.Hind, bound for Curacao, has been taken near St. Louis, by a French Guarda Costa, and carried into Port Prince, and the vessel, cargo, and several slaves, condemn'd and sold."(5)

Because of the risk involved, slave traders sharply curtailed their activities during naval wars. Merchants also consistently warned their captains en route to the Americas to place strong guards over the slaves to prevent uprisings. Unable to avoid sickly and careless crews, merchants lived with the spectre of revolts from the time captains loaded their human cargoes on the African coast until they disembarked in the Americas. Full counts of shipboard rebellions are well-nigh impossible, because there are so many gaps in the records. Fortunately, however, eighteenth-century periodicals and admiralty courts compiled a considerable amount of data on this subject, often in the form of depositions similar to that of McCone and Thompson.

Among the more popular times for rebellions was soon after the slave ships left the African shore. Given the element of surprise in shipping lanes with no other European vessels nearby, the blacks had some chance of succeeding in their quest for freedom. Colonial newspapers reported such an uprising in the fall of 1729:

We have an Account from Guinea, that the Clare Galley, Capt. Murel, having compleated her number of Negroes, had taken her Departure from the Coast of Guinea for South Carolina; but had not got ten Leagues on her Way, before the Negroes rose, and making themselves Masters of the Gunpowder and Fire Arms, the Captain and the Ship's Crew took to their Long-Boat, and got ashore near Cape Coast Castle. The Negroes ran the Ship on Shore within a few Leagues of the said Castle, and made their Escape.(6)

Raw courage, ingenuity, and perseverance sometimes paid huge dividends for Africans resisting enslavement. This was clearly the case in June, 1731, when ninety-five slaves fought an epic nine-day battle with the crew of the Little George, a Rhode Island vessel commanded by George Scot. The ship left the coast on June 1. At 4:30 a.m. on June 6, the thirty-five African males escaped from their chains, marched on deck, and killed three sleeping crew members who were supposed to be guarding them. Captain Scot and four crewmen awakened, barricaded themselves in Scot's cabin, and shot two of the Africans. When the crew filled a bottle with gunpowder, the Africans threw an axe at one of the men holding a fuse, causing a premature explosion and fire in the cabin and wounding all of the crew.

After the explosion, Scot sent one of the crew on deck in an unsuccessful attempt to negotiate with the rebels. Recovering somewhat, the crew killed several more of the blacks. Then the rebels found the ship's light canons and eventually fired one, blowing a hole in the upper deck. Unable to dislodge the crew from the cabin, the African rebels covered it with heavy articles to prevent their escape, and dumped water into the cabin to drown the crew. On June 10 the ship drifted back to the coast. After the Africans captured and shackled his cabin boy, Scot said he decided "to take some desperate Course," bored holes in the ship to sink it, and threatened to drown the Africans, which frightened them exceedingly. They then sent the Boy to the Cabin Door to tell us, that they had just made the Land and that when they got a little nearer the Shore, they would take the Boat and leave us with the young Slaves: I told them if they would do that I would not sink her.... They stood in for the Land about 12 o'Clock at Night, struck upon the Bar of Serrileon River, and were in great danger of being lost.... They persuaded the Women Slaves to go ashore, and drove the young Ones overboard and then followed them, making the Vessel shake at their departure.

With minimal skill and drawing on the limited knowledge of a young cabin boy they captured, the rebels had returned the ship within a few miles of their point of departure from Sierra Leone. Six Africans and five whites died in the nine-day epic struggle before the landfall on June 15. In what Scot described as "a weak and miserable condition," the survivors heard the Africans disembark. Scot detailed the end of the harrowing episode:

Our Boy assuring us the Slaves had all left the Vessel, we immediately went up with our Arms, and saw the Slaves just ashore. We found our great Guns loaded quite full: And as we hoisted out our Boat, the Natives mustered on the Shore, and fired at us several times. (7)

About two miles from the landfall a ship from Montserat picked up Scot and the remainder of his crew. Thanks to Captain Scot's deposition, we have strong evidence that residents of Sierra Leone had established a tradition of successful shipboard revolts more than a century before Cinque sought to imitate his ancestors' feat off the coast of Cuba. Since the blacks on theLittle George spoke to and cooperated with the Africans on the shore, they may have been Mendi. At any rate, we can be reasonably certain the story of this rebellion became part of the lore of Sierra Leone.

English journalists reported in November, 1743, the rebellion of three Portuguese-speaking blacks on the Rising Sun who killed all but four members of the crew soon after sailing from Barbados. The blacks ordered the crew "to carry the Ship to Oronocque; but they made for Curranteen, a Dutch Settlement," where the Governor ordered two of the rebels executed. They were hung repeatedly from the yardarm of ships in the harbor, where "after hanging some Time, the Executioners with redhot Pinchers pull'd off Pieces of their Flesh; then they were un-hung, and an Iron hook put into each of their Sides, by which they were hung up again for 24 Hours, and afterwards their Heads were cut off . . . and stuck up in a publick Place".(8)

The late fall of 1762 brought news to England that an accident had befallen the slave ship Phoenix and led to the drowning of 332 Africans after an exhausted crew abandoned the leaking vessel. Suffering great fatigue, thirst, and hunger, the crew first released the slaves, who "grew so mutinous that they were obliged to put 50 of the stoutest of them to death, when the piercing cries of the rest were almost insupportable. At length a ship came in sight, took in the crew, but suffered the poor negroes to share the fate of the ship, and it is supposed all went to the bottom together."(9)

Writing from Virginia on July 14, 1772, Captain Lawrence Hill recounted his adventures in the slave trade. After taking on 550 Africans, Hill picked up provisions in the Cape Verde islands for his trip to Virginia. A few days out, he spotted a large rowboat crowded, he said, with a "miserable lot" of Portuguese sailors:

[S]ome of them lay at the bottom of the boat, and the others that were at the oars were so emaciated that they were scarcely able to sit; however, we got them all on board.... [W]e inquired the reason of them being in such a situation, when one of them, who spoke good English, informed us, that they belonged to a large Portuguese ship which had been slaving on the Guinea coast; her name was Santa Amida, and the captain's Parodre; that they had taken their complement of slaves on board and were steering for the Brasils; but, about seven days before we took them up, the negroes had rose upon them, killed the captain, his mate, the gunner, and twenty four men, and the rest, in number 18, had with much difficulty made their escape in the boat . . . and had been without any kind of sustenance till they providentially met us.(10)

An Englishman supervising the purchase and loading of slaves in the River Gambia wrote to his employer in 1773 that a rebellion had occurred on Captain Deane'sNew Britannia on January 24 after 230 slaves were loaded on board. That morning the crew had conveyed on board by some of the black boys some carpenter's tools, wherewith they ripped up the lower decks, and got possession of the guns, beads, and powder, and early in the morning they rose and fought the white people for upwards of an hour, when a great many were killed and wounded on both sides; when they found they could not get the better, they set fire to the magazine, and blowed the vessel up, when no less than 300 souls perished in the wreck: . . . most of the officers were killed . . .; both doctors died, and a great many of the natives.(11)

Comparable to a state of total war, historically slave revolts on land and sea have been desperate affairs, with no quarter given and gruesome punishment for losers. This was especially the case in the Americas in the eighteenth century as the British moved aggressively to dominate the slave trade and replace white indentured servants with blacks in the Caribbean. One consequence of the "formidable Deluge" of Africans was to render the planters desperate in their efforts to discourage revolts. Symbolic was the aftermath of the 1736 Antiguan slave rebellion. A January 15, 1737, despatch from the island noted that officials Continued executing the Negroes concerned in the Plot to murder all the white inhabitants of that Island, and subvert the Government; that 69 had been executed, of whom five (one of whom in case they had succeeded was to have been made their King) were broke on the Wheel. Six were hung in Chains upon Gibbets, and starved to Death (one of whom lived nine Nights and eight Days without any Sustenance) their Heads then cut off and fixed on Poles, and their Bodies burnt; and 58 were at several Times chained to Stakes and burnt and above 130 remain in Prison.(12)

The prospect of death by medieval torture in the event of failure compelled slave rebels to adopt a scorched-earth policy, leaving none of their oppressors alive. Thus an English magazine wrote approvingly that during a January, 1763, revolt of 4,000 Christians enslaved in Algiers, the servile whites "killed their guards, and massacred all who came in their way.... [A] general massacre was apprehended, but after some hours carnage, during which the streets ran with blood, peace was restored".(13) Four years later the same magazine published, with considerably less approval, a description of the December, 1767, rebellion of Jamaica's slaves. Though the "alarming" insurrection of the "desperate wretches" had "been happily crushed," the slaves neither spared age nor sex in their fury, nor were they satisfy'd with barely killing the people, but they cut and mangled their bodies in a most shocking manner. Such of them as fell into our hands were burnt alive on a slow fire, beginning at their feet and burning upwards. It is astonishing with what resolution they bore the torture, smiling with an air of contempt at their executioners.(14)

Journalistic treatments of African attacks on the dealers in human flesh were ambivalent. They revealed, for example, little sympathy for the blacks in an October, 1765, report: "Advices fromSenegal on the coast of Africa, are very discouraging. The traders, who used to pay half in goods, and half in money, pay only in merchandise: no slaves to be bought at the lower end of the river, many men killed, in wars with the Moors, and the settlement of Podore ruined and abandoned."(15)

Accounts of black quests for freedom produced occasional sarcastic defenses by American planters. One of the earliest manifestations of the liberal/conservative debate came in 1735 when an English satirist penned a long address by a fictional leader of a Caribbean rebellion, Moses Bon Saam. The black explained the reasons for the revolution in remarks to his victorious army:

As soon as I cou'd read, I discover'd, in the Holiest of all Books, the Fountain of White Men's Religion, with Amazement, and prophetic Joy, that the very Man, from whom they derive the Name they had given me, of Moses, had been the happyDeliverer of a Nation! a Nation,chosen and belov'd by God ! from just such aSlavery as That which You, and your Forefathers have groaned under....

Will our Task-masters object, against the Lawfulness of our Revolt–that They have paid a Price; and therefore, claim us, as their Property ? Grant them the Life of a First unhappy Captive, to repay this Claim. But, did they, also, buy his Race?

My very Dreams are made bloody by your Whips. I am insulted by the Scoffs, the Cruelties, the grinding, biting insolence, which we train up our poor Children to Taste of! . .

In the Fastness of these inaccessible Mountains . . . let us repress Malice, and Cruelty: and rather stand to support our new Liberty, than revenge our past Slavery . . .

[A]nd assure yourselves, your Enemies will embrace you, in spite of your Colour, when they foresee Destruction in your Anger; but Ease, and Security, in your Friendship.(16)

A West Indian planter responded by placing countering words in the mouth of John Talbot Campo-bell and, less satirically, in a long essay in Fog's London Journal. With telling effect, the same planter in 1740 claimed that the first Authors of theTrade are the Gentry that rule in Africa, and sell them to theTraders from England; . . . the next are the English traders who buy them in Guinea, and retail them in the Sugar Islands; . . . the Third are the good People of England, who protect and encourage theTrade because all Gain, both of it and theSugar Trade, always centers among themselves....'Tis true, many Gentlemen of Figure may be met with in England, who are always talking of the Natural Rights of Mankind, whereofLiberty is One,which (say they) Men may be robbed of, but can never Forfeit; nay, they maintain, that to have any Hand in bringing any of the Human Species into Bondage is justly execrable, and that all who partake in the Sweets ofLiberty shou'd spare for no Cost to procure the same as far as possible, for the rest of Mankind everywhere, with more to the same Purpose."(17)

Increasingly after 1740 British intellectuals challenged the central premises underlying the slave trade. The Scottish lawyer George Wallace, for example, asserted in 1760 that if the African slave trade "admits of a moral or a rational justification, every crime, even the most atrocious, may be justified," Men and their liberty, he contended, "are neither saleable or purchasable." Given the fact that the slave trade was illicit, "every one of those unfortunate men, who are pretended to be slaves, has a right to be declared to be free, for he never lost his liberty; . . . As soon, therefore, as he comes into a country, in which the judges are not forgetful of their own humanity, it is their duty to remember that he is a man, and to declare him to be free."

Confronting directly Daniel Defoe's claim that the enslavement of Africans was essential to the development of England's colonies, Wallace asked whether fulfillment of British need meant "that the bulk of mankind ought to be abused, that our pockets may be filled money, or our mouths with delicates. The purses of highwaymen would be empty, in case robbery were totally abolished; but have men a right to acquire riches by such cruel, such flagitious means?" Believing that Africans were men like the Europeans, Wallace went to the heart of the American quest for wealth in his questions:

Has a robber a right to acquire money by going out to the highway? Have men a right to acquire it by rendering their fellow-creatures miserable? Is it lawful to abuse mankind, that the avarice, the vanity, or the passions of a few may be gratified? No; there is such a thing as justice; to which the most sacred regard is due.... Have not these unhappy men a better right to their liberty and to their happiness, than our American merchants have to the profits, which they make by torturing their kind?(18)

An anonymous essayist in 1769 considered claims by American planters that the slave trade was an economic necessity and that the blacks were content in their bondage. He found neither of these arguments persuasive. Reflecting on planter contentions that the blacks were happier enslaved than free, he asserted:

But this account of the matter was never given by any of those unhappy creatures themselves. If any should tell me, that he knows better what makes me happy that I do myself, I would laugh at his ridiculous self-conceit. The Africans do certainly know better what makes themselves happy, than those whose interest it is to enslave them. But did ever an African say, that he was happier when made a slave than before? Their whole behaviour declares the contrary, their very rebellions and insurrections declared that they are not satisfied with their condition; and their notion of a future state is . . . that they shall return back to their own country after death, and there live in freedom and happiness.

Since the planters raised formidable barriers to the blacks' learning to read and write, they could hardly point to the Africans' ignorance to justify their enslavement. The slave trade had even less to recommend it:

. . . [I]f it be a truth that modern government and modern commerce cannot be preserved without enslaving a great part of mankind, it is a melancholy truth indeed. But it is incumbent on those who urge this argument, to prove, that commerce is of more consequence than Christianity, and that the products of America and the West-lndies . . . are of more importance to mankind than justice and mercy. But the truth of the proposition is not affected by its consequences. We shall only add, that, if ever the negroes come to prevail in the world (which is not impossible), the very same arguments which are used to justify our enslaving them at present, will also authorise. their enslaving us; so that if the first be lawful, the second is also lawful of course.(19)

The author of a 1770 article on the cruelty of Virginia slavery complained of the "barbarous usage" and "continual sense of misery" of the blacks. Pretensions of Christianizing savages and saving the lives of Africans destined to be sacrificed to their gods rang hollow, for "in reality, it is the Europeans who are the idols, to whose cruelty and avarice these poor wretches are sacrificed." It was, the essayist argued, "doubly criminal" for the English to engage in "that kidnapping sort of trade." In urgent tones, the egalitarian writer predicted progress in the arts and sciences in Africa and Afro-America to the point when "the natives of these countries have it in their power to revenge the injuries done to their forefathers on the Europeans, who may, at that time, make as despicable a figure in the world as the natives of those places now do." It was, according to the essayist, time for whites to view slavery objectively, rather than treating Africans with "contempt and partiality."

What in a European would be called a glorious struggle for liberty, we call in them rebellion, treachery, &c. Perseverance we term obstinacy, and melancholy (the constant attendant on slavery in a thinking soul), sulleness and savage gloominess; nay, we put them so little on the footing of common humanity, that there is only an insignificant fine set on a white man that murders any of them.(20)

While the residents of New Haven reached back to the strain of eighteenth-century liberal thought, the Amistad revolt posed difficult questions of international law and national purpose which could be resolved only in the Supreme Court. Not widely known at the time, the Mendi, literate in their own language, challenged widely held stereotypes about African culture. The rebellion also brought into sharp relief the universality of the quest for freedom.

NOTES

1. Defoe's Review: A Review of the State of the British Nation, Vol. V, No. 140 (February 17, 1909), 559.

2. Darold D. Wax, " Philadelphia Surgeon on a Slaving Voyage to Africa, 1749-1751," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. XCII, No. 4 (October, 1968), 490.

3. The Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle, VII (July, 1737), 449-50. The eighth man was thrown overboard after striking McCone.

4. GM, XVII (January, 1747), 43.

5. GM, XXIII (December, 1753), 588.

6. The Pennsylvania Gazette, October 16,1729.

7. PG, May 6,1731.

8. GM, XIII (November, 1743), 609.

9. GM. XXXIII (January, 1763), 42.

10. The Weekly Magazine, or, Edinburgh Amusement [often referred to as Edinburgh Weekly Magazine], XVII (1772), 281-282.

11. Ed. Weekly, XXII (1772),122.

12. GM, VII (January, 1737), 187.

13. GM, XXXIII (March, 1763), 142.

14. GM, XXVII (1767),101.

15. GM, XXV (October, 1765), 489.

16. GM, V (1735), 21-23.

17. GM, XI (1742),145-47,186-87.

18. George Wallace, A System of the Principles of the Law of Scotland ( Edinburgh: G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1760), 96. Reprinted, with slight verbal changes, in Annual Register, 1760, p.234.

19. Ed. Weekly, VI ( November 30,1769), 257-60.

20. Ed. Weekly, VII ( March 15,1770), 330-32.