Cinque (Sengbe Pieh)
Mende, captive, leader
The central figure in the Amistad drama -- the man known as Cinque -- comes into sharp historical focus only during the ordeal of his enslavement and struggle for freedom. On either side of the three years from 1839-1842, we have little to work with to reconstruct his biography.
His Mende name (translated into English spelling) was Sengbe Pieh, which his Spanish enslavers translated as "Cinque" and which American journalists rendered as "Jinqua," "Cinquez," and a host of other spellings.
What we know of his background, youth and young adulthood we get from his testimony in America -- to court officers, to abolitionists, to crowds of gawking onlookers. He revealed he came from Mani, a town in Mende country, about ten days' march from the coast. In his mid-twenties in January 1839 when he was captured, he identified himself as the son of a local chief, married, father of three children. He said he had been a rice farmer. Many Mende were rice farmers. Cinque also showed that he could be a warrior as well.
Perhaps he had been a warrior in Africa. His testimony about who he was and where he came from was being screened, it bears noting. Cinque was fighting to win his freedom, and abolitionists were closely managing the Africans' presentation of themselves and their story. Still, Cinque's version of his past must have weight: it is the man himself, giving an account only he can provide.
In any event, biographical details start to become clearer after he was kidnapped by slavers and marched to the coast to be sold to Europeans. From that point through the next three years, Cinque's story becomes that of the Amistad Revolt itself. By all accounts, it was he who first freed the Africans in the hold of the Amistad, who led the revolt that captured the schooner, and who led the Africans on their subsequent voyage to the U.S. Virtually everyone who met him agreed he carried himself like a natural leader, with a charismatic magnetism, a forceful intensity. Somehow, even in chains in an American prison, he managed to hold center stage and to fix himself in the American imagination as a man not to be reckoned, but to be reckoned with.
Upon returning to Africa with the American Mende Mission, Cinque learned that his wife and family had been wiped out by slaving wars. Reportedly he procured a small stock of goods and set off to do some trading along the coast. Then he fell out of contact with the mission. Various legends and rumors had him becoming a slaver, or a tobacco merchant, or a chief, or an interpreter at another mission. One story claimed that as an old man decades later, he returned to the abolitionist mission to die. None of these versions of his life back in Africa can be conclusively confirmed.
That's one incarnation of this figure: a biography of facts and guesses at facts, describing a figure of flesh and blood. Cinque was more than flesh and blood, though, by the time he left the United States. He had become an icon, a figure embodying powerful, sometimes contadictory symbols and meanings. Americans were fascinated with this man. They lionized him, demonized him, soaked up images and accounts of what he looked like, what he sounded like, how he carried himself, what he said and did. In American eyes, "Cinque" became a bloody bogeyman, a jungle animal, a noble savage, a natural prince, a towering symbol of freedom
The library is filled with these images, these paper Cinques. Some examples include:
a first impression recorded by the New London Gazette: "On board the brig we also saw Cinques..."
a racist summation, both dismissive and fearful, by the New York Herald: "a sullen, dumpish negro..."
an abolitionist celebration originally published in the Herald of Freedom, and picked up by the Colored American: "The head has the towering front of Webster ... though some shades darker..."
This image is from a scientific investigation, or at least a psuedo-scientific one, via the antebellum concept of phrenology, which analyzed individuals and created racial categories by probing the contours of skulls. This image is from the phrenological evaluation of Cinque.
And an additional image of Cinque from the Stanley Whitman House.
Within the free African American abolitionist community in particular, Cinque
became a hero and an inspiring rallying point -- what historian James Horton identifies
as a symbol of black manhood:
The Colored American, a black abolitionist newspaper, reported extensively on the revolt and its leader. Like its white counterparts, the paper advertized lithographed and engraved portraits to raise money and to elevate him as a powerful image of freedom.
African American poet James Monroe Whitfield celebrated his legacy in an ode "To Cinque."
Radical black abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet also held up Cinque as a symbol of freedom in a speech he gave repeatedly on speaking tours and published a decade later.
Fred Dalzell
Documents: The Journal of Commerce's report of Cinque's testimony in the courtroom January 1840 gave his version of his African origins, enslavement, middle passage, revolt and recapture.
Cinque wrote a letter to the President of the Mendi Mission in October 1841. At this point still very much dependent on the abolitionists to ferry him back home, he predicted great things for the missionary project.
Further Reading: Arthur Abraham provides a Sierra Leonian perspective on Cinque in several short biographical essays: "Sengbe Pieh: A Neglected Hero?" Journal of the Historical Society of Sierra Leone, vol. 2, 22-30; and "Senbe Pieh," Dictionary of African Biography, (Algonac, Michigan: Reference Publications, Inc.) vol. 2, 141-144.
Eleanor Alexander's "A Portrait of Cinque," Connecticut Historical
Society Bulletin vol. 49 (Winter 1984), pp. 30-51, surveys the American imagery
representing Cinque and the Revolt he embodied.
James and Lois Horton briefly discuss the importance of Cinque as icon within the
free African-American community in In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and
Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997).
