Amistad Revisited

by Allan Appel The New Haven independent

Below is Allan Appel’s latest entry in a yearlong series looking at the past 388 years of New Haven history, as America celebrates the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

As the July 4 hoopla marking the nation’s semquincentennial nears, we’re also approaching another date and moment of huge significance for New Haven.

That date — Aug. 26, 1839 — was a steamy day out on Long Island Sound when the USS Washington captured the “slave” schooner La Amistad off Montauk.

The next two years saw trials, publicity, complex legal wrangling, and a gut-checking of conscience for the nation — all centered on 53 Africans who had risen up against their Spanish captors, only to be recaptured by the U.S. Navy and imprisoned in New Haven.

A coalition of local, state, and national abolitionists fought years of legal battles to restore their freedom. In 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Mende, whose resistance aboard La Amistad represents one of the great, successful revolts in the history of the international slave trade.

Attention should be paid especially during this historic year, and the best place to do so is at the New Haven Museum’s ongoing Amistad: Retold exhibition.

For all the denizens of our town at the time — the passionate if ill-organized abolitionists, the opposers, and the many in between — the Amistad saga was a Rorschach test on race, the issue that 20 years later would tear the country apart with the outbreak of the Civil War.

Having immersed in the many ongoing lectures, re-enactments, workshops, exhibitions, books, and art marking of our New Haven 250^th, this reporter humbly offers that the Amistad story, by measure of how deep it goes into our sense of humanity as well as democracy, is the single most significant event or chapter in the history of our town since 1776 and, arguably, even since our deeper beginnings of 1638.

The New Haven Museum’s Amistad: Retold, along with interactive material mapping the saga, is an eye-opener — a clarifying, ground-level view of what happened focused on the Elm City and, taken all together, just as stirring as Anthony Hopkins/John Quincy Adams’ speech in Steven Spielberg’s eponymous 1997 movie. Much more on that below.

But, further, to make the case:

In 1839, the eyes of businessmen and merchants as well as slavers, prime ministers, royals, clergymen, abolitionists, and politicians from around the globe were on New Haven.

Newspapers around the country were filled with the regular headlines and graphic illustrations of the alleged bloody deeds, and even a book was written almost immediately after the resolution.

Thousands of tourists were drawn to the city where they lingered on the Green to catch a glance of these Africans who had unchained themselves from their shackles and then allegedly murdered their captors. The Amistad survivors were just across Church Street, prisoners awaiting their trial, and some eight dying before it arrived, in the freezing and fetid jail cells where City Hall stands today.

It was an almost carnival atmosphere, as people came to view the jailed Africans in the time allotted for the prisoners to exercise on the Green. One of the jailers even charged a “a New York shilling” to see the “exotics” perform cartwheels and somersaults; the country and the world were riveted.

If you stood on the abolitionist side of the debate, the story of Amistad was irresistible: Surviving the Middle Passage and the horrors aboard the slave ship Tecora en route from today’s Sierra Leone to Cuba; and then, on La Amistad, out of Havana on the way to enslavement in the sugar cane fields of Puerto Rico; then the breaking of chains and the fight for freedom. This was a tale not only of heroism but also proof of the dignity of every one of God’s human creations.

Or, for others, it was potent evidence of the murderous chaos that will overwhelm us unless laws are obeyed — even those that are, well, disagreeable, and the races controlled.

Just as in 1776, when you had to decide at some point whether you were patriot or loyalist, in 1839, if you were a New Havener, you had sooner rather than later to decide about race.

And yet the whole legal tangle turned not on the issue of freedom and natural rights but property law and international treaties.

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1841 that the Africans had been illegally kidnapped and as such were not anyone’s legal slaves, their mutiny was deemed an act of self-defense against unlawful captivity, rather than piracy or murder.

By that decision, however, no great legal precedent about race and slavery had been achieved.

By that narrow decision human beings could still be viewed as property and the Amistad court was in fact pretty much the same court that 15 years later ruled that runaway slave Dred Scott was chattel property and must be returned from the North to his owner in the South.

Bring on, then, the Civil War, so doesn’t that argue in a way against the significance of The United States v. The Libellants and Claimants of the Schooner Amistad?

And yet.

The defense of Sengbe Pieh or Cinque, Grabo, Konnoma, Margru, and the four dozen others had taken a huge step in humanizing Black Africans in the eyes of white people; it  brought together disparate abolitionists into an Amistad Committee, which mobilization led to other powerful advocacy groups and even the creation some years later of the first historically Black college (after that attempt had been thwarted in New Haven some years before), and other major advances in human dignity for African Americans.

Therefore one of the most enduring legacies of our year of celebration locally will be — no, already is, in my opinion — the exhibition Amistad: Retold, which opened in 2024 at the New Haven Museum.

Click here for an overview and for what I think is the central contribution of the exhibition: local NHPS teacher and New Haven Museum educator Eve Galanis’s interactive web page and map. Both exhibition and map center the story on the people — the Africans and the local Black activists, as well as their white allies.

And they both do a lot to brush away misconceptions that have persisted in the history telling over the generations, including in Steven Spielberg’s well-intentioned movie.

Created for teachers and students to take a deeper dive, it’s really for everyone.

In addition to this year’s Big Read of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, as our municipal required reading, I’d vote to urge everyone to take 20 more minutes to go through the museum’s map and follow the cartographic Amistad story it tells.

With human faces, documents, and a concision based on erudition, it puts our local story in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, and carries you, with wonderful graphics from the slave castle on the shores of West Africa to a veritable tour of sites in New Haven where the story unfolded for the 19 months the Africans were in our town.

They include the jails — yes, jails, because in addition to Downtown, there was one in Westville, where the Africans were placed waiting to hear the Supreme Court ruling. They also include the homes of many of the players: the jailer who resided in Fair Haven, the Yale student who did portraits of the captives; Grove Street Cemetery, where at least eight who died in captivity lie; the office at Elm and Church were local attorney Roger Baldwin wrote the initial briefs to defend them. They even go up to Farmington where, after the ruling, the prisoners were kept, as they waited and tried to raise money to get back to Africa. And it concludes with the Ed Hamilton statue adjacent to City Hall today and much info I didn’t know about that.

Below are a few of my favorite insights, factoids important and not, adding up to clearer ways to appreciate the Amistad story that I’ve gleaned from the materials:

*After the Africans were freed, the pro-slavery U.S. Congress refused to vote for money to send the Africans home, which is why they were compelled to stay many months longer, working with the Amistad Committee and others arranging lecture touring, performing, to raise money for a ship home.

*The president at the time, Martin Van Buren, was wishy-washy on slavery. Yet because he needed the Southern vote for his upcoming reelection effort, he did everything he could to turn down the Amistad heat, that is, to stifle justice. That included deploying a navy ship in New London, the first port the Africans were taken to after capture on the Sound, in the hope they could be shipped back immediately, and the issue defused.

*Unlike the bumbling, vaguely mercenary portrait of him in Spielberg’s movie, the real Roger Baldwin was Roger Sherman Baldwin, grandson of our Roger Sherman, New Haven’s poster guy for the 250th, all-purpose signer of founding documents and mayor of New Haven, and a very accomplished lawyer in his own right, future governor of the state, and ardent abolitionist.

*Yale’s language professor, Joshua Gibbs, who helped find James Covey, a rescued slave, on a wharf in Staten Island, to speak Mende, was not the fool of the Spielberg movie, but expert and committed. He helped organize Yale students to teach the captives English, although they were also very much a “captive” audience for the students — many in training to be clergymen — and so the students also tried, with some success, to convert the Africans to become Christians. That’s not surprising as a huge impetus to the abolitionist movement, especially early on, was religious.

*And the case provides huge precedence for the critical importance of having a translator in legal situations down to today.

*In addition to the Amistad Committee, other groups emerged out of the trial or had their membership dramatically increased including missionary and colonization societies. And reading about these groups is a real perspective-giver. One of the latter, the American Colonization Society, sought to solve America’s racial turmoil and trauma by working to deport American Blacks to Africa, particularly Liberia, which had been created for that purpose only a few years before. New Haven had a very active chapter. Future President Abraham Lincoln was a member of his chapter. All of which indicates that you could be an abolitionist and a racist at the same time, and likely many people were.

*Finally, a big lesson of the saga, valuable down to our own day, is that while white allies especially those in powerful positions — like Roger Baldwin, Simeon Jocelyn, and John Quincy Adams — were needed, African Americans, especially African-American clergymen, very much led the struggle of the Amistad captives, particularly in the phase of repatriation to Africa.

From the beginning, they literally and figuratively had more skin in the game. Which is why the free Black character played by Morgan Freeman in the Spielberg film is such a mistake; he wanders about mainly showing off his caring face and his role is somehow to prove to Cinque and the Africans that the whites with him are okay. He has little to say, and conveys charming passivity. While Spielberg’s film does make some exquisite contributions, such as capturing the horror of the Middle Passage (much as he captured the horror of the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan), this slighting of the role of the local Black community and clergy such as James W.C. Pennington, from Hartford, is notably glaring.

All the more reason, as we mark our 250^th anniversary year, that we should take the time to mark the Amistad story’s 187^th year. And the best way to do that is to visit the New Haven Museum’s Amistad: Retold, and then dial up on any computer the first-rate interactive map that was created in connection with the exhibition.