The Amistad Rebellion (29 page)

The “Mendi People” was an unusual social formation, a complex compound for which there was no precise equivalent in West Africa, not even in Mendeland. Indeed, Professor Gibbs seemed to discover that Mende stood for all Africa. When he asked the captives to translate “I go to Africa,” they answered “
gna gi-ya Men-di
.” The “Mendi People” was thus a multiethnic entity, which included Mende, Temne, Kono, Gbandi, Loma, and Gola people. It was American in its genesis: it arose in relation to, and antagonism with, the learning of the English language and the ways of Christianity. In other words, as the abolitionists insisted that the
Amistad
Africans become new people, they in turn insisted on an African identity. This process of ethnogenesis was driven by specific struggles in jail: the Africans invented themselves as the “Mendi People” as they faced hardships that required a collective response. They used the new collective name to make three fundamental political demands: to shape their legal defense, to protect themselves against violence, and to insist upon their own rights to self-emancipation and ultimately repatriation.
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The earliest recorded reference to the “Mendi People” as a chosen form of identity and belonging appeared in a famous letter said to have been written by the young boy Kale to John Quincy Adams on January 4, 1841. In truth, the letter was a collective composition, explained teacher Sherman Booth: Kale was “assisted by some of the other Africans,” especially, it would seem, by Cinqué and Kinna, both of whom were leaders within the group and advanced in their own studies. They composed the letter after Adams visited the New Haven jail in November and “in view of his having been engaged as one of
their counsel” for the Supreme Court hearing. In other words, the
Amistad
Africans wanted to communicate to Adams who they were and what he should say on their behalf. The letter, which oddly has never been treated by scholars with the careful attention it deserves, is the single best surviving expression of collective goals and identity the
Amistad
Africans produced.
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The letter begins in the idiom of love and friendship: Kale addresses Adams as his friend at the outset, mentions the former president’s “love” for the “Mendi People,” emphasizes friendship as a primary human value, and closes with “your friend.” This is an African language of alliance, applied to the relationship that has developed between abolitionists and insurrectionists during the jail encounter. Kale wants Adams to know that he and his comrades have ideas about what to do: “Mendi people think, think, think,” but most Americans do not know what they think. Booth knew some of their thoughts: “We tell him some.” The eleven-year-old Kale therefore told the seventy-three-year-old Adams what to say on their behalf to the “Great Court,” the Supreme Court: “Dear friend, we want you to know how we feel.” The letter expresses both indignation and confidence in their cause: “We want you to ask the court what we have done wrong. What for Americans keep us in prison.” Their rebellion was a just act, warranting no incarceration.

Kale also states, and comments on, what he considers to be the most important legal facts of the case: first and foremost, the “Mendi People” were indeed “Mendi People.” They were born in Mende country. They had not been born, or had lived long, in Havana; they had been in the city only ten days before being taken on board the
Amistad
. They had not learned the Spanish language, Kale explained, and had not, therefore, become legal “ladino” slaves. José Ruiz had lied about these issues in his testimony to the court. Kale insisted, “We want you to tell court that Mendi people no want to go back to Havanna. We no want to be killed.” The goal was unequivocal: “All we want is make us free not send us to Havanna.” Freedom meant going home.

Kale also rehearsed basic historical facts about the rebellion. He stressed the threatened cannibalism of Celestino and the reaction of
his shipmates: “Cook say he kill he eat Mendi people. We afraid. We kill cook.” He also stated that the plan for the uprising did not originally include killing Captain Ferrer: “Then captain kill one man with knife and cut Mendi people plenty. We never kill captain if he no kill us.” He made a case for armed self-defense.

Kale recalled the powerful emotional moment at Culloden Point, Long Island, when the
Amistad
Africans learned from white men on shore that they had managed to work their way to a “free country.” The white men had said, “We make you free,” and indeed the promise had been reiterated endlessly by abolitionists during the time in jail. Even Judge Andrew Judson declared them free and commanded the government to take them home. Was it all a lie, Kale now wondered aloud in his letter to Adams, and does not the Christian God punish liars?

Most of the letter discussed what happened during the “17 moons” the “Mendi People” had spent in jail. Kale detailed the progress they had made in their studies: they had learned to read and write; they had studied the Bible. “We love books very much.” He objected to the implication that the “Mendi People” were somehow stupid, just because they spoke a different language. He asked, pointedly, “Americans no talk Mendi. Americans crazy dolt?” He answered those who had criticized the
Amistad
Africans as having been too happy, too sad, or too angry while in jail. He applied the Golden Rule from the book of Matthew, 7:12: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” He puts the shoe of African experience on the American foot: “Dear friend Mr. Adams, you have children and friends. You love them. You feel very sorry if Mendi people come and take all to Africa.”

The letter concludes with a strong assertion of collective agency: “If court ask who bring Mendi people to America,” you say “We bring ourselves. Ceci hold the rudder.” Throughout the letter, Kale maintains a parity between “the Mendi People” and “the America people.” Indeed, it seems that the idea of the “Mende People” was a creative adaptation of political language the
Amistad
Africans heard during their time in jail about the powerful, sovereign “American people.” But Kale
went further, commenting specifically on the relationship between the abolitionists and the insurrectionists, saying, in essence, we have held up our end of the deal. We have learned your language and your religion. Now you must hold up your end of the deal: you must win the court case here in your country and you must help us to get home to ours. In making these overt and subtle demands, Kale uses the phrase “Mendi People” nineteen times. The letter—and its sovereign subject—made quite an impression on Adams and others around the country.
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A second important moment in the use of the “Mende People” occurred soon after the letter was written, in the aftermath of jailer Pendleton’s visit to Farmington in early February 1841, when he threatened reenslavement, vilified the abolitionists, and tried to cut off access to food and water. Fuli referred to the “Mendi People” in a letter he wrote to Lewis Tappan about the attack, and Cinqué did the same, sixteen times, in a letter to Roger S. Baldwin about the tense, angry encounter. The closing of the ranks at a time of danger was inscribed in the “Mendi People.”
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The biggest danger was now at hand. The United States Supreme Court was scheduled to hear the
Amistad
case January 25, 1841. The Van Buren administration had appealed the lower court ruling in favor of the Africans, with clear intent. Now the fate of the “Mendi People” lay in the hands of nine justices, a majority of whom, including Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, had southern backgrounds. As the legal debate resumed and intensified, numerous newspapers reported a spate of rumors, all saying in one way or another that “these poor fellows are, after all, to be given up to the Spanish authorities.”
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B
y February 1841, the
Amistad
Africans had appeared in American court five times. The first was on the deck of the U.S. brig
Washington
at the docks of New London, Connecticut, where Judge Andrew Judson of the United States District Court held a hearing on August 29, 1839, soon after they came ashore, to consider charges of piracy and murder. A second set of hearings was held in Hartford between September 19 and 23, presided over by Judson and Smith Thompson of the U.S. Circuit Court. In October Lewis Tappan brought charges of violent assault and false imprisonment against José Ruiz and Pedro Montes on behalf of four of the
Amistad
Africans, which resulted in a new set of hearings before judges Inglis and Jones in New York. The original case resumed in Hartford November 19, but James Covey’s sickness required postponement to January 7–13, 1840, in New Haven. When the United States Supreme Court convened in Washington on February 22, 1841, to make a definitive ruling about whether the
Amistad
Africans would be returned to their “owners” under the provisions of the Pinckney Treaty of 1795, the Africans were not present in the courtroom. They awaited the verdict in jail in Westville, Connecticut.

Anxiety about the big palaver had settled over the Africans about two months earlier, reported their teacher Sherman Booth. The case was originally scheduled for January. Cinqué was losing weight because of “mental disquiet.” By the time the court began its deliberations, nerves were on edge in the jailhouse. Every day the leader of the
Africans came to Booth to ask, “What the Grand Court say? Tell me.” The “Mendi People” knew that this would be the final judgment. Their fates, and their necks, hung in the balance of pro-and antislavery forces that met in Washington, DC.
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By this time the adult
Amistad
Africans had enough experience with the law to be wary. Indeed, four of them were in Connecticut because they had fallen afoul of it in their homelands and were sold into slavery for “criminal conduct.” All were accustomed to palavers held in the
bari
, the communal meeting house where disputes about law and custom were argued and settled, often with eloquent speeches given by parties on both sides of the dispute to a king, chief, or head man, a group of elders, and the interested part of the community in attendance. The local leader usually consulted with the elders in reaching a judgment, which all parties would be obliged to accept. Occasionally a verdict might be appealed to the jurisdiction of a more powerful regional leader, but issues of justice were usually decided locally. Behind the palavers stood the Poro Society, which to a large extent determined the rules and practices that would be followed in the legal procedure. This would have been the framework in which the
Amistad
Africans interpreted their legal experience in the United States. They knew courtroom argument and drama, but not the larger American system of law, especially its federal jurisdictional structure and lengthy process of appeal. Amos Townsend Jr. noted that the Africans were accustomed to a “summary process” of trial “in their own country,” and that the delay caused by appeal was hard for them to understand and endure.
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In Washington, interest in the case quickened as the court date approached. Visitors surged into the capital from out of town, including abolitionists such as Joshua Leavitt, a member of the Amistad Committee, from New York, to report on the hearings. As excitement mounted, abolitionists circulated for sale John Sartain’s mezzotint portrait of Cinqué. The Spanish-language newspaper
Noticioso de Ambos Mundos
, published in New York, asked, provocatively, whether the United States government would consider “uprising, mutiny, and murder the best recommendation in order not to comply with the
provisions of a treaty.” Once again the court chambers would fill with spectators, including recent presidential candidate Henry Clay and Senator John J. Crittenden, both of Kentucky, among others. Everyone understood that the court would decide issues of national and international significance.
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Another interested party was the British government, which, at the urging of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, mobilized its diplomatic corps to apply pressure to Spain and the United States. Statesman G. S. Jerningham wrote to Spanish minister Don Evaristo Pérez de Castro in Madrid at the end of December 1840, reminding him of the treaty that made it illegal “to import negroes from Africa into the Spanish dominions” after 1820. He recommended that the
Amistad
Africans “be put in possession of the liberty of which they were deprived.” Britain had, after all, paid Spain £400,000 (almost $37 million in 2012 dollars) to agree to eliminate the evil trade. On January 20, 1841, Ambassador Henry Stephen Fox wrote Secretary of State John Forsyth that “a powerful and humane interest” in the case existed in the United States and Britain, reminding him of the treaty with Spain and the Treaty of Ghent (1814), negotiated by John Quincy Adams, in which Great Britain and the United States mutually pledged “to use their best endeavors for the entire abolition of the African slave trade.” Fox urged that the president of the United States act to secure the liberty to which the
Amistad
Africans were clearly entitled. Above these suggestions to Spain and the United States loomed Britain’s military capacity to seize the island of Cuba if it so desired.
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