¹ Columbian Register, 31 Aug. 1839, 3.

² There is no mention of it in the following Connecticut history books: History of Connecticut by Theodore Dwight (New York: Harper & Bros., 1859); The History of Connecticut by William Henry Carpenter and Timothy Shay Arthur (Philadelphia: Claxton, 1872); A History of Connecticut by George Larkin Clark (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1914); A History of Connecticut by Elias Benjamin Sanford (Hartford: The S. S. Scranton Company, 1905); History of New London, Connecticut by Frances Manwaring Caulkins and Cecelia Griswold (New London: H. D. Utley, 1895). The first mention of the incident is a paragraph on pages 88–89 in The Memorial History of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633–1884 by James Hammond Trumbull (Boston: E. L. Osgood, 1886).

³ Scholar Marcus Rediker notes that newly discovered archival sources relating to the Amistad, including the letters of Charlotte Cowles, a Farmington, Connecticut resident and firsthand witness to these events, inspired his book, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom (London: Verso, 2013.) In addition, this excellent account offers a view of the Amistad events from the oral traditions of elders in the regions of Sierra Leone from which the captives came. Rediker's revelatory dilation of the Amistad events back to their African roots is, perhaps, his most valuable contribution. This article, in some ways, attempts to do the opposite in situating this international incident into the microcosm of nineteenth-century Connecticut racial thought. See note 6 below on the value of this regional focus.

⁴ A study of the five most frequently used American history textbooks published from 1950 through 1998 (some of which are still in use today) was undertaken by Joseph Czerniak in 2006, and the Amistad rebellion was not mentioned in any of those books. His article confirms that the text is the primary and usually the only source of history for most American elementary- and high-school students. Joseph, Czerniak, “Black Slave Revolt Depiction and Minority Representation in U. S. History Textbooks from 1950–2005,” University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse Journal of Undergraduate Research, 9 (2006), 1–20Google Scholar.

⁵ See Horton, James Oliver, “Slavery in American History: An Uncomfortable National Dialogue” in Oliver Horton, James and Horton, Lois E., Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 35–55Google Scholar.

⁶ Several advantages accrue from the regional focus in the study of history. First, for the average pre-twentieth-century citizen, life was generally local, and limited to the distances that one could easily reach. Thus the attitudes, opinions and political inclinations of the “common man” developed in response to, and within the context of, local events, publications and community. While some early Americans certainly conducted business across state and sometimes international boundaries, the number of such broadly travelled Americans was limited until a national communication and transportation network linked disparate parts of the country, creating modern American culture. Scholar Robert Wiebe has postulated that locality is the preeminent factor to consider in attempting to understand the course of this country's evolution. In light of these facts, the study of the textual environment surrounding the issues of race may help us to address the intellectual metamorphosis of the common citizen, and offer insights into the more intangible aspects of history that are not often told. In addition, while the broad sweep of national history and thought rightly has a central place in our academic curriculums and research, the necessity of generalizing and synthesizing vast amounts of data into a coherent story without many exceptionalities naturally must omit substantial truths. Only by studying regional trends can a more precise picture emerge. So, while some generalizing to convey national history must be done, the truer picture emerges with the contrast and comparison of regional and national culture and events. Furthermore, such complex issues as race and class, ever-changing over the course of a century, can and should be evaluated broadly, but a regional approach supplies a nuanced look from a rooftop, rather than from an airplane. We can see individuals who are touched by their world, rather than groups who remain anonymous. Also, while national events reverberate on a state and town level in almost every society, the reverse may also be true. The events in a small state like Connecticut offered a view into the future for nineteenth-century Americans, in a way they might not have been able to understand.

⁷ “Pieh” has been appended to the name Sengbe by various sources, and is used by itself by scholar Iyunolu Osagie; the accuracy of this name has been called into question. Cinqué has also been called Joseph Cinquéz.

⁸ Jones, Howard, Mutiny on the Amistad (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 28–29Google Scholar.

⁹ Judson had earlier proven himself an enemy to African Americans by being the legislative force behind the prosecution of Prudence Crandall; he was also her next-door neighbor.

¹⁰ Jones, 28–29.

¹¹ The word “abolitionist” suggests one political type, but of course abolitionist sympathies came in many stripes; they included territorial separationalists, immediatists, integrationists, colonizationists and compensated emancipationists, among others. The Amistad case did raise the perennial question whether or not moral suasion could ever hope to overtake the deadly violence of slavery, and, if it could not, what ethical options could.

¹² Kirkpatrick, Frank G., “Religious Abolitionists in the Amistad Era: Diversity in Moral Discourse,” Connecticut Scholar: The Amistad Incident: Four Perspectives, 10 (1992), 44–63, 50Google Scholar. See also Essig, James D., The Bonds of Wickedness: American Evangelicals against Slavery 1770–1808 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

¹³ Arthur Abraham, An Historical Legacy of Sierra Leone and the United States, at www.amistadamerica.org/content/blogcategory/177/201, accessed 8 April 2008.

¹⁴ Jones, 195.

¹⁵ See www.amistadresearchcenter.org/amessays1.htm, accessed 25 June 2009.

¹⁶ Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth, rev. edn (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993) 54–55Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Lalu, Premesh, “The Grammar of Domination and the Subjection of Agency: Colonial Texts and Modes of Evidence,” History and Theory, special issue: “Not Telling”: Secrecy, Lies, and History, 39, 4 (Dec. 2000), 45–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ New London Gazette, 26 Aug. 1839.

²⁰ Finzsch, Norbert, “‘It Is Scarcely Possible to Conceive That Human Beings Could Be So Hideous and Loathesome’: Discourses of Genocide in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America and Australia,” Patterns of Prejudice, 39, 2 (2005), 97–115, 104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Mosse, George L., Toward a Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), xiiGoogle Scholar.

²³ Finzsch, 105.

²⁴ New London Gazette, 26 Aug. 1839.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ “The other two he said had escaped in the canoe – a small boat. The cabin boy is an African by birth, but has lived a long time in Cuba. His name is Antonio, and belonged to the Captain. From this time we were compelled to steer east in the day: but sometimes the wind would not allow us to steer east, then they would threaten us with death. In the night we steered west, and kept to the northward as much as possible. We were six or seven leagues from land when the outbreak took place. Antonio is yet alive. They would have killed him, but he acted as interpreter between us, as he understood both languages.” Barber, John Warner, A History of the Amistad Captives (reprinted from the New London Gazette account of the judicial record) (New Haven, CT: E. L. and J. W. Barber, 1840), 7Google Scholar.

²⁷ Mende is spoken in what is now present-day Sierra Leone and in parts of Liberia. The term “Mendi” is used in this paper only where nineteenth-century authors used it, in order to avoid misidentifying the multi-ethnic captives. See www.panafril10n.org/pmwiki.php/PanAfrLoc/MendeBandiLoko, accessed 3 Aug. 2009.

²⁸ See http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/02/0203_060203_viking_teeth_2.html, accessed 25 June 2009.

²⁹ Kretzmann, Paul E., John Ludwig Krapf: The Explorer–Missionary of Northeastern Africa (Columbus, OH: The Book Concern, 1909), 14–15Google Scholar.

³⁰ See http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/library/misc/barber.1840.amis.capt.html, accessed 25 June 2009.

³¹ Rice, Alan J., Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003), 130Google Scholar.

³² New London Gazette, 26 August 1839.

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ “Amistad Negroes,” Hartford Daily Courant, 18 March 1841.

³⁵ Hartford Daily Courant, 27 March 1841, 2.

³⁶ The publisher of the Evening Post of New York was a leader in the Loco Foco movement excoriated by the Republican Party because “his journal now openly and systematically encourages the Abolitionists.” Byrdsall, F., History of the Loco-Foco or Equal Rights Party: Its Movements, Conventions and Proceedings (New York: Clement & Packard, 1842), 19Google Scholar.

³⁷ Hartford Daily Courant, 10 Sept. 1842, 2.

³⁸ Emancipator, 7 Nov. 1839.

³⁹ Jones, Howard, “Cinqué of the Amistad a Slave Trader? Perpetuating a Myth,” Journal of American History, 87, 3 (Dec. 2000), 923–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ Emancipator, 7 Nov. 1839.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Howard Jones, “Cinqué of the Amistad a Slave Trader?”, 924. The fact that such a novel appeared on the subject in 1953 does not detract from the fact that the Amistad was unknown to the vast majority of Americans until it reached the popular imagination with the Spielberg movie in 1997. Its absence from American history textbooks, along with the absence of most other slave rebellions, was documented by Joseph Czerniak in his article “Black Slave Revolt Depiction and Minority Representation in U. S. History Textbooks from 1950–2005.” Jesse Lemisch disputes the statement of the DreamWorks coproducer of the Amistad film, Debbie Allen, when she says that the Amistad story was “unknown” until she discovered it. Lemisch asserts that the story was known to political activists in the sixties, and was certainly known to scholars. While this is indisputable, I would argue that both groups of people combined would make up a tiny fraction of the American population who, through no fault of their own, through all their American history classes, were never alerted that such an event transpired. Lemisch, Jesse, “Black Agency in the Amistad Uprising: Or You've Taken Our Cinque and Gone: Schindler, Morphed into John Quincy Adams, Rescues Africans – A Retrograde Film Denies Black Agency and Intelligence, Misses What Really Happened, and Returns to Conservative Themes of the Fifties; With an Account of What Really Happened, and a Few Words about Abolitionists as Fanatics,” Souls (Winter 1999), 57–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ Jones, “Cinqué of the Amistad a Slave Trader?”, 936.

⁴⁴ Ibid. To get a sense of the full story see Wyatt-Brown's, Bertram “Mea Culpa,” Journal of American History, 87, 3 (Dec. 2000), 947–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and McFeely, William S., “Cinque, Tall and Strong,” Journal of American History, 87, 3 (Dec. 2000), 949–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Finkelman, Paul, “On Cinque and the Historians,” Journal of American History, 87, 3 (Dec. 2000), 940–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ Emancipator, 7 Nov. 1839.

⁴⁶ Hartford Daily Courant, 18 Jan. 1840, 2.

⁴⁷ Montesinos Sale, Maggie, The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 1997)Google Scholar. See pages 46–57 for more about the antebellum rhetoric of human rights.

⁴⁸ Hartford Daily Courant, 10 Feb. 1840. Ironically, about 18 months later, when the Amistad Africans were set free, their friends the “Mendian Committee” requested the President's help in returning the group to Africa and freedom, but the ship available to send them to Havana and enslavement was no longer available to carry them home to liberty. The response from the President was printed in full:

⁴⁹ The irony here cannot be overstated. President Van Buren was attempting to influence Judge Andrew T. Judson, Prudence Crandall's angry neighbor; it was Judson who spearheaded the legal, legislative and popular assault on Crandall's school for young women of color in 1832, just seven years before the Amistad case. Although he must have struggled mightily, Judson, the author of Connecticut's “Black Laws,” did in fact rule according to the law rather than his prejudices, to his credit.

⁵⁰ Hartford Daily Courant, 10 Feb. 1840.

⁵¹ Jasinski, James, “Constituting Antebellum African American Identity: Resistance, Violence, and Masculinity in Henry Highland Garnet's (1843) ‘Address to the Slaves.’” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 93, 1 (Feb. 2007), 27–57, 28–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² Peter Ripley, C., “Introduction to the American Series: Black Abolitionists in the United States, 1830–1865,” in Ripley, , ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, Volume III (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 16Google Scholar.

⁵³ Jasinski, 30.

⁵⁴ Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms, 54–55.

⁵⁵ Hartford Daily Courant, 3 Feb. 1841, 2.

⁵⁶ Hartford Daily Courant, 4 Feb. 1841, 2.

⁵⁷ Brewer Stewart, James, “Reconsidering the Abolitionists in an Age of Fundamentalist Politics,” Journal of the Early Republic, 26, (Spring 2006), 1–23, 8Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Brewer Stewart, James, “From Moral Suasion to Political Confrontation: American Abolitionists and the Problem of Resistance, 1831–1861,” in Blight, David W., ed., Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory (New York: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 67–92, 88Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Hartford Daily Courant, 3 March 1841.

⁶⁰ Interestingly, the author focusses on the lesson that our Supreme Court taught Spain, and the exertions of the good-hearted people who fought for the African captives.

⁶¹ The article continues, “The Fair will be held at Hartford, on the 19th and 20th of May. It is expected that some of these Mendi-Africans will be in the city, and that articles of their own manufacture will be offered for sale on the occasion.” In their Circular the Ladies say, “Fancy and useful articles of every description will be appropriate and saleable. Let the farmers send us nice butter, cheese, eggs, c.c … Will not the Ladies in the country supply our table with those knick knacks they know so well how to prepare? N. B. – The place for holding the Fair will be Gilman's Hall, on Main street, but any articles intended for it, may be left at the A. S. Rooms, No. 7 Asylum Street.” Hartford Daily Courant, 12 March 1841, 2.

⁶² Hartford Daily Courant, 28 Oct. 1841, 2.

⁶³ Ibid.

⁶⁴ Hartford Daily Courant, 30 Aug. 1842, 2.

⁶⁵ Hartford Daily Courant, 3 March 1847, 2.

⁶⁶ See www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/amistad/AMI_ACT.HTM, accessed 5 Aug. 2008. Ultimately, the Spanish were not compensated, although every President until Abraham Lincoln advocated for compensation to be paid by the American government.

⁶⁷ From Barber, A History of the Amistad Captives.

⁶⁸ Powell, Richard J., “Cinqué: Antislavery Portraiture and Patronage in Jacksonian America,” American Art, 11, 3 (Autumn 1997), 48–73, 56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The original 135-foot long painting has since disappeared.

⁶⁹ Ibid.

⁷⁰ Dalzell, Frederick, “Dreamworking Amistad: Representing Slavery, Revolt, and Freedom in America, 1839,” New England Quarterly, 71, 1 (March 1998), 129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷¹ Powell, 62–63.

⁷² Ibid., 54. See also Honour, Hugh, The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume IV, From the American Revolution to World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 217–46Google Scholar.

⁷³ Baepler, Paul, “The Barbary Captivity Narrative in American Culture,” Early American Literature, 39, 2 (June 2004), 231CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁴ See Hope Franklin, John and Schweninger, Loren, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.)Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Powell, 69.

⁷⁶ Harrold, Stanley, The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 36Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ Horton, James Oliver and Horton, Lois E., “The Affirmation of Manhood: Black Garrisonians in Antebellum Boston,” in Jacobs, Daniel, ed., Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 127–53, 137Google Scholar. For Steven Spielberg's imagery of African manhood see Bernier, Celeste-Marie, Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia press, 2012), 196–99Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Moral suasion has been defined as the attempt to coerce virtuous behavior in a political or economic sphere; it was used by William Lloyd Garrison in the cause of abolitionism. Adeleke, Tunde, “Afro-Americans and Moral Suasion: The Debate in the 1830's,” Journal of Negro History, 83, 2 (Spring 1998), 127–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁹ “Many (black abolitionists) were imbued with a deep sense of responsibility, and believed strongly that the fate of those in bondage depended very much on how the freed ones utilized their freedom … Their economic success induced and strengthened faith in Jacksonian society – believing earnestly that whites would welcome and embrace a morally upright, industrious, intelligent and economically elevated black man.” Ibid., 129.

⁸⁰ Boxill, Bernard R., “Fear and Shame as Forms of Moral Suasion in the Thought of Frederick Douglass,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 31, 4 (Fall 1995), 713–744Google Scholar, 714.

⁸¹ Adeleke, 135.

⁸² Horton, James Oliver and Horton, Lois E., In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 244–47Google Scholar; Adeleke, 135. Also see the 13 Aug. 1841 letter of David Ruggles in The Liberator, in which he commands blacks to rise up and take action or die slaves.

⁸³ Boxill.

⁸⁴ Ibid., 720. In his essay “Enslavement, Moral Suasion and Struggles,” in Lawson, Bill E. and Kirkland, Frank M., Frederick Douglass (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1999), 243–310, 247Google Scholar, Frank M. Kirkland argues that Douglass's thought “has to make room for the moral relevance of political abolitionism,” in order to see action as an extension of moral suasion.

⁸⁵ Sernett, Milton C., “The Efficacy of Religious Participation in the National Debates over Abolitionism and Abortion,” Journal of Religion, 64, 2 (April 1984), 205–20, 216CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁶ Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad, 9.

⁸⁷ Stewart, “From Moral Suasion to Political Confrontation,” 82.

⁸⁸ Blackett, Richard, “Mutiny on the Amistad,” American Historical Review, 93, 1 (February 1988), 234CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁹ The silence of an oppressed people is abundantly heard as one studies the archive of writing about race in nineteenth-century Connecticut. All publications for public consumption were run by white men, printing the work of almost all white men, with the intended audience being white men. Of course, since the political, legal and journalistic power resided entirely with only white men, their conversations continue to command attention, even centuries after they too have been silenced by the grave. Impossible as it is to avoid this domination of the discussion, I have unearthed a few black voices, all male, to counter the overwhelming roar of white men. What these voices lack in numbers, they compensate for in eloquence and passion, but no doubt an injustice is perpetuated by this necessary concession to their scarcity. Of course, it is challenging to remember those whose words do not survive them, those whose missives were never thought worth keeping, or those who lived such lives of duty and labor that they never put pen to paper. Certainly there is much loss in their absence, one that I hope will be someday undone by the revelation of a trove of diaries or letters found somewhere. In my book The African-American Experience in Nineteenth Century Connecticut: Benevolence and Bitterness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), I suggest that Connecticut history sustained the memories and narratives that citizens approved of, erasing those unpleasant or inconvenient or too revealing, so it is also true that its history has heretofore heard only silence from its black women, and mostly silence from its black men and white women. We may read into the voice of the subaltern, as channeled by others, but the channeler is almost always a white male, hearing and relating what he recalls, no matter how good his intentions. Given the archival materials now available, perhaps this is all we can remember, record and discuss; the rest is silence. Additionally, the disenfranchisement of black voices is augmented by other silences, most notably that of the media when uncomfortable truths are unintentionally revealed. When Frederick Douglass is publicly humiliated in Connecticut, the newspapers turn their spotlight on another newspaper editor, rather than the rights of African Americans. When violence in the streets of Hartford and New Haven leave black people homeless, the entire state pretends it didn't happen. How we remember these events – or cannot remember them because they are nowhere recorded, or twisted into more palatable forms – is again controlled by those with all the power.

⁹⁰ Osagie, Iyunolu, “Historical Memory and a New National Consciousness: The Amistad Revolt Revisited in Sierra Leone,” Massachusetts Review, 38, 1 (Spring 1997), 63–83, 64Google Scholar.

⁹¹ Osagie, Iyunolu, “Historical Memory and a New National Consciousness: The Amistad Revolt Revisited in Sierra Leone,” Massachusetts Review, 38, 1 (Spring 1997), 66Google Scholar.

⁹² See note 7 above for the use of the name “Pieh.”

⁹³ Osagie, 69. Osagie also notes that while the Amistad was omitted from “official” history, the story has been revived in popular memory through the media of art, literature and theater.

⁹⁴ “Media” includes newspaper coverage and the publicity efforts of the Amistad Committee in the forms of pamphlets, art and Cinqué posters for sale.

⁹⁵ “So clearly framed against the foreknowledge of abolition, the ultimately American feel good quality of this picture reinforces Western culture's proprietorial memory of slavery as the memory of abolition. Using the trope of the slave as fugitive, seemingly displaced and sedimented in the cinematic convention of fugitive as genre, Amistad becomes a master/slave narrative over which the ex-slave has lost control … This of course says little about the role of the US courts in upholding slavery and legalizing racisism … Indeed the ubiquitous, unacknowledged Zeitgeist of racism is inexplicably exorcised in Amistad, its constitutive display of seemingly ineffable visual inequalities of racial categorization passed over in silence, leaving the profound if exoticized attempts to expose the unique traumas of slavery subordinated to the mass consumption of the fugitive story line. Ironic as it is perverse, the predatory violence of the capture, the voyeuristic stripping and chaining of the enslaved, the sadism of the middle passage where Africans are thrown into the sea, are used as background, not foreground to the court case.” Hess, Barnor, “Forgotten Like a Bad Dream,” in Goldberg, David Theo and Quayson, Ato, eds., Relocating Colonialism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 142–73, 149, original emphasisGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁶ Lemisch, “Black Agency in the Amistad Uprising.”

⁹⁷ The captives and rebel leaders in this case were freed by the British, so they could not be returned. The British eventually compensated the Americans for their loss.

⁹⁸ Eric Foner, “The Amistad Case in Fact and Film,” History Matters: The U. S. Survey Course on the Web, posted March 1998, at http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/74, accessed 25 June 2009.

⁹⁹ Holden-Smith, B., “Lords of Lash, Loom and Law: Justice Story, Slavery and Prigg v. Pennsylvania,” Cornell Law Review, 78 (1993), 1086–1151, 1113Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁰ Dalzell, “Dreamworking Amistad, 132.”

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 133.

¹⁰² Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion, 233–37.

¹⁰³ Davis, Hugh, “Northern Colonizationists and Free Blacks, 1823–1837: A Case Study of Leonard Bacon,” Journal of the Early Republic, 17, 4 (Winter 1997), 651–75, 653CrossRefGoogle Scholar.