Story Overview
Enslavement | The Baracoons of Gallinas | The Middle Passage
The Cuban Slave Market | The Revolt | The Black Schooner
The Africans in America | The Amistad Trials | Return to Africa
The Africans in America
The Amistad story gripped the American imagination. Tension began mounting while the schooner was still offshore as word spread of a mysterious schooner manned by armed, fierce-looking blacks, apparently roaming coastal waters off New York.The buzz intensified as the Africans were taken into custody and details of what had happened aboard the schooner began to emerge.The story took numerous forms as it worked its way into the consciousness of the American public. It became a legal battle and a diplomatic wrangle. And it became something even more volatile: a media circus, that Adams at one point called a "public raree show."
On September 2, a play went up on the stage of the Bowery Theater in New York City, offering a drama of the revolt, even though no one had figured out yet how to communicate with the Africans. It took in an impressive gate of over $1,500, and played to a week of packed houses.
In the New Haven jail, and in the Hartford jail when the Africans were moved there, throngs of curious visitors crowded cell windows to see the exotic captives. The jailers charged admission.
Beyond New Haven and Hartford, visual images of the Africans rapidly began circulating. An artist named James Sheffield sketched Cinque within a few days of his arrival in New London -- an image published in the New York Sun and sold widely as a lithograph.
Other images soon followed. A phrenologist, J.N. Fowler, took a cast of Cinque's head in September to conduct an analysis of the African -- phrenology was a pseudo science then in vogue that purported to reveal an individual's character traits by analyzing the contours of his skull. Fowler published the results of his examination in the November issue of the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany. And he exhibited his casting on the lecture circuit.
Wax figures of the Africans went on tour up and down the northern Atlantic seaboard, spending several weeks, for example, in Peale's Museum in New York City, enacting the revolt in wax tableau.
And A. Hewwes, a Boston artist, painted a 135-ft. mural depicting the massacre, zooming in on Captain Ferrer's murder -- a grim, gothic image that was translated into engravings and woodcuts. (An engraving of the mural subsequently made its way into an 1840 pamphlet collecting various newspaper reports and other sources of information about the Africans and their revolt.)
Meanwhile, other Americans put the Africans' plight to very different purposes. A team of New York abolitionists led by Lewis Tappan formed the Amistad Committee to defend the Africans' freedom in the courts. Finding some way to talk to them and extract their stories became a pressing problem.
The abolitionists' legal assistance evolved into something more
when religious- and reform-minded Yankees set up an impromptu schoolhouse and missionary
station in the New Haven jail to teach the captives English, reading, and the Gospel.
(Yale Professor Benjamin Griswold included a report on the Africans' "moral and intellectual improvement" in John Barber's pamphlet.) So the Africans became the subjects of an ambitious
social experiment, set up to demonstrate to skeptical white Americans that these
people were capable of being "civilized" without being enslaved.
The abolitionists staged a series of public events displaying the Africans' accomplishments.
The largest of these occurred at the Broadway Tabernacle in New York City on May 12, 1841, attracting several thousand spectators.
