The Amistad Rebellion (4 page)

Fuli

One night, in darkness, a group of King Siaka’s soldiers surrounded Mano and set it aflame. Fuli said that “some were killed, and he with the rest were taken prisoners.” Apparently separated from his family (their fate is unknown), he began a monthlong march through Vai country and ended up at Fort Lomboko on the coast, where he was purchased by the notorious Pedro Blanco. He was a victim of “grand pillage,” a brutal, plundering kind of warfare that had long helped to fill Atlantic slave ships with bodies.
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Margru, one of four children aboard the
Amistad
, took a different route to the slave ship. Born in Mendeland, she was about nine years old, a mere four feet three inches tall. Her name reflected parental love and affection. Townsend sketched her with a large, high forehead,
curly hair platted above each ear, and a slight smile at the corners of her mouth. Her manner was pleasant, quiet, reserved, and rather shy. She lived with her parents, four sisters, and two brothers. Her father was a trader, whose practices of credit and debt entangled him in some way with the slave trade. He pawned Margru, meaning that he left her in the possession of another trader for an agreed-upon period of time as a surety against commodities he had been advanced on credit—a practice common to many parts of West Africa. When he did not return in time to pay off his creditor—literally to redeem Margru—she was enslaved to satisfy the debt.
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Margru

Moru was a Gbandi man, born in Sanka. His life took a hard turn when, as a child, both of his parents died. Surviving evidence does not suggest how he grew up, or with whom, but it appears that at some point he became a warrior, and eventually a slave; perhaps he was captured in battle. His master, Margona, a member of what would become the ruling house of Barri Chiefdom in the Pujehun District of Gola, was a man of wealth with “ten wives and many houses.” At some point, for reasons unknown, Margona sold Moru to a slave trader, who marched him twenty days (probably a couple of hundred miles) to Lomboko, where he was sold to Belewa, or “Great Whiskers,” a Spaniard. Moru was described as “middle age, 5 ft. 8
¹
⁄
₂
in. with full
negro features,” and drawn by Townsend to have small eyes, full lips, high cheekbones, and a somewhat suspicious look.
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Moru

The webs of Atlantic slavery were broad and intricate, and many of the people who guided and shaped the destinies of Fuli, Margru, and Moru, as well as Siaka and his warriors and Blanco and his overseers, lived far from the societies where man-stealing took place. Decisions taken by kings and queens and presidents, imperial planners, merchants, and plantation owners profoundly influenced what happened to the two men and little girl who found themselves at Lomboko and eventually aboard a slave ship under sail to Havana. Intercontinental and transoceanic forces linked England and Spain to the Gallinas Coast, and, across the Atlantic, to the slave societies of the Americas, especially Cuba, Brazil, and the United States. The process and the logic that governed from afar the lives of captives at Lomboko, and indeed millions of others, were clearly explained a generation earlier in an unusual tract published in London.

The Voice of Blood

In 1792, at the peak of a broad popular agitation against the slave trade in Great Britain, an abolitionist published an anonymous pamphlet, in
which Cushoo, an African who had been enslaved in Jamaica, engaged an English gentleman, aptly named Mr. English, in conversation. Cushoo had been owned by a friend of Mr. English. He begins by saying, “Ah! Massa Buckra, pity poor Negroman.” Mr. English responds, “Why, Cushoo, what’s the matter?” The matter, in short, was capitalism and slavery—more specifically, how a violent, exploitative global system hid its true nature in the benign form of commodities, especially slave labor–produced sugar and rum, the likes of which Mr. English and others around the world consumed, without understanding how they were produced and at what human cost.
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Mr. English does not understand, but the ever-patient and outwardly deferential Cushoo answers his questions and, in so doing, challenges the rationalizations that lie behind them. He explains in simple, vivid terms how the slave trade and slavery actually work. He shows that the pleasure Mr. English takes in eating sugar depends on the misery of the many. Those who produce his sugar are violently exploited in Jamaica and yet invisible in England. The material chains of slavery and the global chain of commodities are linked.

As the conversation unfolds, Cushoo gives the English gentleman what amounts to a lesson in the political economy of global capitalism. The message is that everything turns on commodities. The “poor Negro was bought and sold like cattle.” The slave trade is fueled by “brandy, rum, guns, and gunpowder,” which create wars throughout West Africa and in so doing help to manufacture the ultimate Atlantic commodity: the slave. By consuming the commodities rum and sugar, Mr. English supports the slave trade and the extreme violence on which it depends.

“In what manner?” asks the agitated gentleman.

“You pay for kidnap and murder of poor Negro,” comes the quick retort.

Cushoo thus invites Mr. English to follow the money involved in creating the commodity, from England, to Jamaica, to Africa, and back again. He wants Mr. English to join the abolitionist boycott of sugar that was then gaining strength throughout England. Cushoo had learned from previous struggles what might now be possible. His friend “Yalko say dat good while ago dey drink no tea in ’Merica—de Bostonian trow all in de sea. Ha! Ha! Dey made tea wid salt water.” An Atlantic cycle of rebellion meant no tea then, hence the Boston Tea Party, and no sugar now. In the end, Cushoo’s combination of historical knowledge, worldly experience, and pidgin eloquence persuades Mr. English to join the sugar boycott.

The pamphlet articulated what would eventually become one of the slogans of the antislavery movement: “sugar is made with blood.” The point was announced in the title of the pamphlet:
No Rum! No Sugar! or, The Voice of Blood.
Cushoo would be the “voice of blood” in order to illustrate two passages from the Bible:

For perhaps the first time in history a member of a mass movement for fundamental social change had made a simultaneous popular critique of the exploitation of labor, the commodity form, and the capitalist world market. In this scenario, consumers were unconscious vampires.

Fuli, Margru, Moru, and indeed all of the
Amistad
Africans exemplified
Cushoo’s argument. The man-stealer may have walked crooked, as Fuli said, but the straight line of the Middle Passage, from expropriation in Africa to exploitation in the Americas, was an axis of modern capitalism. The profits to be made in a far-reaching system of sugar production shaped the enslavement of Mende, Gbandi, Temne, Kono, and others inland from the Gallinas Coast of West Africa, their transportation across the Atlantic aboard the Portuguese or Brazilian slave ship
Teçora
, their landing in Havana, Cuba, and their reshipment aboard the
Amistad
for Puerto Príncipe and its hinterland booming with the production of sugar. Cubans shared the early nineteenth-century aphorism: “Con sangre se hace azúcar”—Sugar is made with blood.
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The Atlantic in 1839

The Atlantic coordinates of the
Amistad
rebellion were London and Seville in Europe, the seats of the British and Spanish empires, whose monarchs, Queen Victoria and Queen Isabella, took an interest in the case; Cuba and the northern Caribbean, where the rebels were meant to work and where the revolt exploded; Connecticut and Washington, DC, where the trials took place and high-ranking American politicians, including presidents and ex-presidents, as well as middle-class reformers, got involved; and the Gallinas Coast of West Africa and its hinterlands, where Pedro Blanco, King Siaka, Fuli, Margru, and Moru lived. The growing capitalist economy linked these people, disparate of class and region, within a larger Atlantic economic transformation that combined bondage and industrialism.
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In 1839 Great Britain was the “workshop of the world.” It was the first industrial nation and the preeminent imperial power, not least because of its Royal Navy. Manufacturing and maritime power went hand in hand. Merchant ships linked the markets of the world and naval ships protected Britain’s interests therein. The island nation’s role in the
Amistad
affair was indirect but important. Because the social movement that produced
The Voice of Blood
had successfully abolished the slave trade in 1807, and had pushed the state to conclude treaties with Spain and Portugal to end their slave trades, the British
navy was deployed on the coast of West Africa to intercept illegal slave ships, waging a kind of war by sea against the trade. The Gallinas Coast was a major theater of battle, especially after the same movement abolished slavery throughout the British Empire in 1838. Pedro Blanco and his slave factories would be targets of special importance for the anti-slave-trade patrols.
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Spain had long dominated the Atlantic world, but was in decline in 1839, much of its vast empire destroyed by the Spanish–American wars of independence that took place between 1808 and 1829. Standing out amid the ruins, however, was the dynamic colony of Cuba, whose rise as a sugar-producing power owed everything to a successful revolution a generation earlier in neighboring St. Domingue, where 500,000 enslaved Africans had altered the course of world history. Until 1791 they had produced almost a third of the world’s sugar, made with blood under the most horrific conditions. Their revolution, coupled with the decline of sugar production in British colonies after abolition, opened the global market for sugar planters in Cuba and Brazil, who became the world’s hungriest consumers of transatlantic slave labor in the early nineteenth century. In 1839, enslaved people of African descent made up about 45 percent of Cuba’s one million people. The illegal slave trade boomed and sugar production soared. In the half century between the beginning of the Haitian Revolution and the
Amistad
rebellion, Cuba’s sugar production increased ninefold, making the Spanish colony the world’s new leading source of the sweet commodity. The voice of blood was calling with full-throated urgency.
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The United States was a fledgling power, an increasingly massive continental empire in its own right, and one deeply riven by conflicts over the institution of slavery. With a highly productive agricultural hinterland based on family farms and free labor in the north and on plantations and slave labor in the south, and a growing class of industrial workers located primarily in the northeast, the United States was pursuing continental expansion—its “manifest destiny”—and Native American groups, one after another, suffered bloody expropriation. As slavery expanded westward, the abolitionist movement grew amid a logic of polarization between north and south. The arrival of the
Amistad
rebels off the coast of Long Island in August 1839 was seen in some antislavery quarters as positively providential. It would rile the nation.
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When the
Amistad
Africans departed Lomboko in April 1839, they sailed head-on into a huge and historic wave of slave resistance that had been rippling around the Atlantic for a decade. From Toussaint Louverture to David Walker and Nat Turner, rebels throughout the Americas had struggled against a common plight. Resistance to slavery also convulsed the home region of the
Amistad
rebels in this period, as people captured by King Siaka and settled in “slave towns” rose up and waged a long, bitter, and partially successful struggle for freedom, the Zawo War, between 1825 and 1842. The
Amistad
rebellion may be seen as an oceanic extension of this struggle in West Africa and a linchpin that connected it to Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, and Virginia—an Atlantic geography of resistance. Taken together with the revolt led by former Virginia slave Madison Washington aboard the American slave ship
Creole
in November 1841, it capped a formative, decadelong wave of rebellion.
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