The Amistad Rebellion (27 page)

Following Barber and Moulthrop, Hewins dramatized the moment at which Cinqué and his comrades killed Captain Ferrer. He described the content of the painting: “The Scene represents the rise and struggle of the Africans, in which Capt. Ferrer and the cook lost their lives, and Don Pedro Montez, one of the owners of the Slaves, was dangerously wounded.” Hewins depicted the Cubans and about twenty of the Africans, most of whom were armed, and, according to another viewer, dressed in “cloth or skins fastened round the waist & extending to the knees.” At the center of the huge canvas was Captain Ferrer, surrounded by Cinqué, Grabeau, Konoma, and several others. Celestino’s corpse lies in the background. Pedro Montes, blood streaming from a wound to his temple and a look of “Terror…in his countenance,” surveys the scene and “seems to say, this catching and carrying negroes is bad business—not a very comfortable situation.” He looks for a “hiding place.” Ruiz stands nearby, in fear and misery. Antonio has climbed up the shrouds, and looks down on the uprising.
³¹

At the center of the tumult stood Cinqué, in the group amidships, armed with a cane knife, his eye on the Spaniards. He attacks Captain Ferrer, who “has one cut upon his head & another upon his breast” and “has fallen partially, rests upon one knee, his head drooping, his left arm hanging powerless.” As Cinqué prepares to strike the killing blow, two or three of his comrades attempt “to check his hand & restrain him.” Possessed by “the wildest rages,” with a desperate, even demonic, expression on his face, he struggles to escape them.

Ferrer is beset on other sides by Konoma “the cannibal,” who grips his right wrist and “points a dagger at his bosom,” and Grabeau, whose “right hand is elevated, firmly grasping a cane-knife, with which he appears about to strike.” Like Cinqué, Grabeau is “transported with anger.” In the background, Fuli looks upon the scene “with hellish satisfaction” and a “countenance expressive of deep malignity.” The youth Ndamma stands back from the rebellion, “his hand upon his breast, his eyes raised to heaven,” with much “veneration…in his countenance.” His was the only “commendatory representation” in the entire group.
³²

The similarities to Barber’s engraving are clear, in both form and
content. Hewins also depicted the
Amistad
Africans as “savages”: Konoma was a “cannibal,” Cinqué appeared demonic, all but one of the Africans were represented as outraged and brutal; the entire scene was a “massacre.” Hewins also drew on
The Murder of Jane McCrea
. Like McCrea, whose wrist is gripped by one of the barbarous warriors, the vulnerable Captain Ferrer, clutched by Konoma, stood at the center of the canvas.

Savage or not, the painting also contained a message of antislavery, as the artist himself was quick to explain to abolitionist Benjamin Griswold, divinity student at Yale University and one of the main teachers of the
Amistad
captives in the New Haven jail. Griswold wrote to Lewis Tappan that Hewins “seems to feel an interest in these men]
to sympathize with them
, &
their friends
,
to hope that they will be suffered to return to their own country
,
if they wish
.”
Indeed
,
Hewins went further
,
arguing that their cause was
,
in American terms
,
both honorable and revolutionary
: “
He compares the act of Cinque in liberating himself
&
companions to the efforts of the man who led the armies of the U
.
S
.
in her struggle for independence
, &
thinks that he has shown as much of the hero
,
considering the sphere in which he has acted
.”
By depicting what he described as
“
the rise and struggle of the Africans
”
and by comparing its leader to George Washington
,
Hewins produced a painting that might be seen
—
could we but see it
—
as a contradictory American equivalent of Eugene Delacroix
’
s
Liberty Leading the People
, the greatest work of art to come out of the revolutions of 1830.

The Abolitionist Dilemma

Hewins may have held antislavery beliefs, but his decision to depict the most violent moment of rebellion upset abolitionists close to the case. At a time when they increasingly described the
Amistad
Africans as “hapless victims” who had been miraculously “cast upon our shores”—as if they had made neither the rebellion nor the freedom voyage to Long Island—Hewins reasserted a militant, indeed revolutionary view of the case. Griswold, who had extensive, direct, personal
knowledge of the individual prisoners, wrote a long, detailed letter to Lewis Tappan describing the painting and offering his own thoughts about it. More than any other document produced in the era of the
Amistad
case, Griswold’s letter revealed the liberal abolitionist dilemma in the representation of slave revolt.
³³

Griswold’s complaints about the painting were many. The artist got the character of several of the individual Africans all wrong (the “kind-hearted” Fuli appeared in the painting with a malignant look); he did a poor job in rendering physical appearance (“none with the exception of Konomo & possibly Grabeau bear the most distant resemblance to the men in the New Haven jail”); his depiction of the uprising contained several factual mistakes (Ndamma appears angelic, removed from the fray, but he bore a scar on his head that suggested an active role in the attack).

The biggest worry, however, was the emphasis on violence, the killing of Captain Ferrer, and the effect this might have on the public. In short, Griswold believed Hewins to be dangerously misguided. The artist may have hoped that the
Amistad
Africans would be freed, but his painting would not help the struggle. Griswold wrote, “I have no reason to doubt his sincerity—the soundness of his judgment I may be permitted to question. The moral effect of the painting, so far as it has any, I do think will be bad—perhaps I err.” So worried was Griswold about the painting that he hesitated to publish his critique of it, fearing that it would draw attention to the violent representation and thereby do “injury” to “the cause of humanity,” that is, to the sacred struggle against slavery. He wrote Tappan, “I do not know whether it is best to broach anything about it in public or not.” He left the matter up to Tappan, who apparently decided against it.

Abolitionists fretted about the popular depictions of the
Amistad
rebellion, but in truth they themselves had originally done much to encourage them. As soon as the rebels were brought ashore, Dwight Janes had proclaimed that “the blacks had a perfect right to get their liberty by killing the crew and taking possession of the vessel.” He added, uncertainly, “I mean a legal right,” referring to Spain’s agreement with Great Britain to end the slave trade. Janes was thus the first
to address the dilemma: how would abolitionists, many of them committed to nonviolence, depict and defend a violent slave revolt in a society where there was a broad fear of such events and where they themselves were considered by many to be dangerous, fanatical extremists in their opposition to slavery?
³⁴

Abolitionists flocked to the
Amistad
case and defended the rebels and their actions as if nonviolence had never crossed their minds. If they were to use the case to attack the institution of slavery—and the opportunity seemed to them nothing less than providential—they would have to come up with arguments to justify the rebellion. Following the lead of Janes, they did so: the
Amistad
rebels, they would proclaim repeatedly over the next two and a half years, had the fundamental right, shared by all people, to resist tyranny and to seize their own liberty, by force if necessary. If this meant killing a tyrant—a slave ship captain—so be it. That act would not constitute murder, no matter how loudly slaveholders in Cuba or the United States might howl in protest. This radical argument would become a big part of the public debate on the
Amistad
rebellion and a centerpiece of the abolitionist defense.
³⁵

The argument possessed a deep ambiguity. What
kind of right
allowed the Africans to kill their oppressor and seize their freedom? Here the abolitionist movement was of two minds. The more conservative approach was to insist that the right was, narrowly, a legal right. Because the Spanish slave trade had been made illegal by treaty, the Africans aboard the
Amistad
had a right to rise up, kill Captain Ferrer, and seize the vessel. This was the argument of attorneys as they represented the
Amistad
Africans in court, and a persuasive argument it was. Other abolitionists took a more radical approach. They reached back to an argument that originated with Tacky’s rebellion in Jamaica in 1760, after which a man in London known as J. Philmore defended the rebels and articulated the “higher law” doctrine that would become central to the antislavery cause. Enslaved rebels had a “natural right” to their freedom, no matter what man-made law said on the matter. In contrast (and contradiction) to the legal approach stood what might be called an antinomian argument: rebels who took radical,
direct action were right to take the law into their own hands as long as it served the noble cause of freedom.
³⁶

Some abolitionists took the idea further than others, African American opponents of slavery leading the way. Their preferred image of the
Amistad
Africans was not that they were citizens doing what was proper and legal, but that they were free people doing what was glorious and right. Like Amasa Hewins, they repeatedly likened Cinqué to George Washington, and endlessly compared the
Amistad
rebellion to the American Revolution. The actions of the rebels were “in the highest degree noble,” as the
Colored American
explained:

This radical statement makes clear that not all abolitionists worried about the popular depictions of rebellion; some applauded them. Still, those conducting the defense campaign, who were uncomfortable with depictions of the rebellion, had to decide how to translate their own political commitments into images that would shape the public debate and affect the judgment in court.
³⁷

Jocelyn’s Portrait

The abolitionist dilemma of representation was finally resolved by Nathaniel Jocelyn, the best known of the artists who went into the New Haven jail, and the one most firmly connected to the movement.
Born in 1796 in New Haven into an artisanal family (his father was a clockmaker and engraver), Jocelyn was apprenticed to a watchmaker but soon took up drawing, engraving, and painting. His sensibilities about slavery were affected by the two years (1820–1822) he spent in Savannah, where he worked as a portrait painter for the Georgia aristocracy. He made his view of the world clear in 1833, when he painted a sympathetic portrait of William Lloyd Garrison, about which, the controversial abolitionist noted, its accuracy would be doubted as it had “no horns about the head.”
³⁸

By 1840 Jocelyn had become an active abolitionist, working in the nascent Underground Railroad in Connecticut. His brother Simeon was also a committed abolitionist: he had been the pastor at the predominantly African American church on Temple Street in New Haven, a victim of attack by an anti-abolition mob in 1837, and one of three founding members (with Joshua Leavitt and Lewis Tappan) of the Amistad Committee. Living and working in New Haven, Nathaniel Jocelyn was, like the other artists, close to the epicenter of the struggle. His antislavery views and activism, expressed in his commitment to break the
Amistad
Africans out of jail by force in January 1840, connected him to the man who commissioned the painting. The African American abolitionist Robert Purvis was a leading member of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee in 1840 and likewise involved in assisting runaways as they made their way toward freedom. The skilled, radical, and activist Jocelyn was just the man to paint the “official,” soon to become iconic, abolitionist portrait of Cinqué.
³⁹

Jocelyn’s painting could hardly have been more different from the images produced by Barber, Moulthrop, and Hewins. Painted during the winter of 1840–1841, the leader is composed, at rest, not on the ship or in jail, but at home in an idealized African environment. The moment appears to be sunset, with gentle clouds and a reddish sky above majestic mountains. Cinqué is not fighting for freedom in an act of slave rebellion; he is free, and has always been free. The artist imagines him in the happy home to which the abolitionists wanted him to return. The entire portrait radiates serenity. The eyes of the leader are
not demonic, but rather soft, intelligent, compassionate, liquid. The left hand is relaxed and almost aristocratic in appearance. Jocelyn manages to represent the famous leader of a violent revolt in a way that suggests no violence at all. He presents the abolitionist movement and its goals to the public in a profoundly peaceful way, embodied in a single individual rather than an armed collective.