U-Pitt.’s Marcus Rediker on Amistad Slave Rebellion & Black History Month
/in Education, Featured, Learning Curve, News, Podcast /by Editorial StaffRead a transcript
The Learning Curve Marcus Rediker
[00:00:00] Alisha Searcy: Welcome back to the Learning Curve podcast. I am one of your co hosts, Alisha Thomas Searcy. And hello, Albert. How are you today? My other co host. Hey, doing well, Alisha. Hope you are too. I am doing well. I am particularly well because it is not snowing in Atlanta. It’s actually sunny and pretty nice outside. I can see the sun. So it seems like when the weather is good, everything else can kind of fall in place, you know?
[00:00:43] Albert Cheng: Well, not to rub it into all our listeners here, maybe in the Northeast or, you know, in the upper Midwest. But yeah, we had a nice day in the 70s here down in Arkansas yesterday.
[00:00:53] Alisha Searcy: Oh, nice. Yeah, that that sounds good. I wish it were a sign that the winter was over, but I think it’s just a little temporary trick. What do you think?
[00:01:02] Albert Cheng: That’s right. A little taste for the joy that is to come.
[00:01:05] Alisha Searcy: Yes. I cannot wait. Well, I hate to bring up a subject that’s not so joyful, but we’ve got some new stories that we need to talk about. And I think the one that’s most pressing right now would be our NAEP scores. Yeah, that’s right. Not so joyful.
[00:01:22] Albert Cheng: Yeah, not a flattering picture. You know, how much you’ve dug into, I know a lot of people were, and I remember, was it last week that they came out? Um, I’m just kind of losing track of my weeks. I actually had a grad student here who was trying to grab the data and the website wouldn’t load because I guess apparently everyone was trying to look up the numbers and load that data.
[00:01:43] But Hey, I mean, look, you can go to the website now and it loads up pretty fine. But yeah, I mean, main takeaways, I think we haven’t regained what was lost post the pandemic. You know, there’s some upticks here and there, but the small gains are really concentrated among the highest performers, which, which I guess is good.
[00:02:02] We ought to celebrate any progress that’s made. But you know, I think what sours a little bit of that is that the small upticks in the higher performing group of students we have also came alongside, you know, continued drops among our lowest performers. And so, We’re seeing an even bigger gap in the distribution of scores among the highest and lowest performers.
[00:02:22] So yeah, not too much to really celebrate here, I think, you know, it was true for both math and reading. So I don’t know. I mean, if you have your thoughts about this or other observations that you’ve made in the data.
[00:02:35] Alisha Searcy: Yeah. To your point, I’m really concerned that the gap is getting wider. We definitely want all students to perform well.
[00:02:44] We want them to get better. And so, yes, when you see the higher performing students. Their numbers go up a little bit, still not enough, and certainly when you see lower performing students, the gap getting wider, you know that the problem is getting worse. And so, some of the observations that I also made, it doesn’t matter how many years we’ve seen it, but when you’re looking at under 35 percent of students in this country, of all racial groups, of all, you know, geographies across the country, gender, putting all those things aside, Essentially, less than 40 percent of our kids are proficient in reading and math.
[00:03:23] It’s sickening. It’s frustrating. We ought to be angry about it. And I’m not sure why we don’t have the level of concern that we should. I don’t know if we’ve gotten comfortable with it. But this is not okay. And I think all of us should be deeply concerned, not just those of us who are in education in some way, but as parents, we should be concerned.
[00:03:43] As business owners, we should be concerned. People who care about this country and the well being of our citizenry, we should all be concerned. What I also wonder is now that we have adopted the science of reading, you know, in multiple states, how that will have an impact. I will say that I expected that states that have adopted it.
[00:04:05] even before the pandemic that we would have seen greater gains, but we have not. So there’s a question for me. I also think, and this may be a little controversial, but I wondered the role that Common Core and math in particular has played in what we’re seeing as the decrease in math in many places in terms of proficiency.
[00:04:26] And there’s certainly not enough conversation in terms of math curriculum and math standards. to know that we’re even moving in the right direction. I’m hoping, you know, to those who are listening, those researchers out there, Dr. Chang, you are a researcher. Perhaps someone can kind of figure out the impact that common core math has had, you know, the impact that the science of reading is or isn’t having in terms of literacy so that we can really get a sense of, are we doing the right things?
[00:04:56] And if we’re not, Let’s stop, right, and recalibrate and do the right things because it’s just unacceptable to see the low numbers of proficiency in reading and math across the country. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:05:10] Albert Cheng: You’re right. You know, I, I forget who it was. Someone, uh, was reading some media coverage about this and some folks were essentially echoing the sentiment you were just expressing about how, Hey, look, this is kind of a, uh, seems to be a dire picture and yet there’s no kind of.
[00:05:25] political appetite or just will to want to address it perhaps as seriously as we should. And, you know, to your point, you know, Nate’s scores are great for kind of giving us a snapshot of nation generally. And, you know, it takes a lot more work to really disentangle a lot of the reasons behind why scores are the way they are.
[00:05:46] Certainly, as you say, it’s, I think it’s ripe for research to try to figure out what are the reasons some bright spots are bright? What are. You know, some of the reasons we’re seeing a large declines in other places. I mean, I saw a couple articles breaking down some of the results by state. And I think one of the articles, Chalkbeat Colorado said, I think it was that mentioned how the drops weren’t as bad in Colorado.
[00:06:08] And so this, of course, raises questions. Why is Colorado doing something that we might learn from? So. Definitely a learning opportunity and definitely a lot of questions to be answered. And yeah, I hope we can find some evidence to really shed light onto what we might do going forward, because there’s clearly a lot of work to be done, especially when there’s a lot of policy ideas out there.
[00:06:28] And so, you know, having some evidence to inform some of that decision making and to get some wisdom on what we should be doing.
[00:06:35] Alisha Searcy: Exactly. And one last thing that I’ll mention, we have allowed a lot of discussion about COVID. and blaming COVID as part of the learning loss. And certainly there was an impact there.
[00:06:48] But if you look back, you know, even to 2019, the numbers haven’t changed dramatically, right? And in some cases they’ve gone down. So we, we can no longer talk about COVID being the reason. We’ve got to look long term. In terms of what we’re delivering, in terms of an education quality, you know, how much support we are giving to teachers.
[00:07:09] Again, going back to the curriculum piece, do we have, and do we have the right standards? So you’re right, there’s, there’s a lot of work to be done, a lot more discussion to be had. I think it’s telling that, you know, we almost broke the site, right, to get the data. Maybe that speaks to the level of interest.
[00:07:27] And hopefully a commitment moving forward to changing this on behalf of kids and families.
[00:07:33] Albert Cheng: Yeah, there’s a level of urgency here and, you know, to all our listeners who maybe this is my last thoughts, all our listeners who, you know, maybe you’re listening and, you know, you’re not one that has a ton of influence in large scale policy.
[00:07:46] And, but look, I mean, you know, we all have our little roles to play. Often we talk about. On this show, the little ways we can get involved with our schools in the everyday, you know, get involved with getting to know your neighbor’s kids and seeing how they’re doing. So I think there’s a lot of little things we can do in the meantime to perhaps change the trajectory of that one kid.
[00:08:07] Alisha Searcy: Yes. Amen to that. I like that. Albert, thank you. So, with that said, it is Black History Month and we are hosting a number of guests who are prolific authors and folks who are doing great work. And so we’re excited about our guest today, Professor Marcus Rediker. on the Amistad Slave Rebellion. So when we come back, we will look forward to talking to our guest.
[00:08:47] Marcus Rediker is the Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. He’s the award winning author of The Slaveship, Human History and The Amistad Rebellion, An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom, books which have been translated into 19 languages worldwide. Professor Rettiger has also produced a film, Ghosts of Armistead, with director Tony Buba and written a play, The Return of Benjamin Lay, with playwright Naomi Wallace.
[00:09:17] He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University and attended the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study, earning a Master of Arts and Ph. D. in History. Welcome to the show, Professor. So happy to be here. Awesome. Let’s jump right in. So you’re a noted historian and author of the book, The Amistad Rebellion, An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom.
[00:09:41] Can you summarize for us the 1839 African slave revolt on board the Spanish slave schooner La Amistad, led by Sengbe Pie, Joseph Sinke, a West African Mende tribesman, and why it remains such a historically and legally important event.
[00:10:01] Marcus Rediker: The story of the Amistad Africans begins in. West Africa, in southern Sierra Leone, where a group of people, by various means, were captured and enslaved, sent down a riverine system to the coast, to a place called Lomboko, where they were sold to a Spanish or Cuban slave trader named Pedro Blanco.
[00:10:27] He then loaded several hundred people onto a large Brazilian or Portuguese ship called the Tesoura. And they sailed to Havana, Cuba. Once in Havana, 53 of the people on board that vessel, 49 men and four children, three little girls and a little boy, were then loaded onto the Amistad, the schooner, to be taken from Havana to a port on the north coast of Cuba where they were destined to work in a burgeoning sugar economy.
[00:11:03] It didn’t take very long, though, before a revolt broke out. I think they were four days into the voyage, a revolt broke out. The African people aboard the Amistad captured the ship. They killed a sailor on that ship named Celestino. They killed the captain of the ship, a man named Ramon Ferrer, and they kept two of the captives alive so that they could help them return to their homeland of Sierra Leone.
[00:11:36] That was their goal originally, and that was their goal for the rest of this entire saga. But the man who had been a ship captain, Pedro Montes, deceived his new masters, and he pretended to sail east towards Sierra Leone in the daytime, but did so in a way that he had the sails loose and lapping in the wind so they wouldn’t sail very fast.
[00:12:03] But at nighttime, he would tack and change course and head back towards the North American eastern coast in the hope of being discovered and saved. With the goal being to send the Africans back to Havana as slaves, the Africans were able to maneuver the ship into the Gulf Stream and took it all the way up north to the northern end of Long Island, New York.
[00:12:31] They were then captured by a U. S. Navy brig called the Washington, taken to New London, Connecticut, charged with piracy and murder. and jailed. Subsequently, they were shipped to New Haven and in New Haven jail, the local abolitionists flocked in great numbers, thereby establishing an alliance between the African insurrectionists and the mostly white middle class abolitionists that will prove to be a very important alliance.
[00:13:06] The case It goes through several stages. It’s a complex legal debate with Spain on the one side, supported by the United States, wanting to send the Africans back to slavery in Cuba, and on the other side, the Africans themselves and their abolitionist allies insisting that they had won their freedom under arms and that they should be allowed to go free.
[00:13:34] The case made its way all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court. A surprising decision because many of the members of the court at that time were Southerners. They did rule in favor of the Anasat Africans, which allowed the survivors to return to their native land, Sierra Leone, in 1842. So this particular event is very important because it’s an example of a major victory.
[00:14:04] For the abolitionist movement, it was a successful revolt and one that had very high visibility in the American press. The Amisat Africans in the northern states became celebrities, and when they finally gained their freedom and went home, this was a major victory for the abolitionist movement.
[00:14:25] Alisha Searcy: Incredible. Incredible.
[00:14:28] Beginning in the mid 1400s, Portugal and Spain bound themselves to commerce and human bondage and Britain and the U. S. later followed in the transatlantic slave trade. West Africa became the slave coast. Four million slaves were brought to Portuguese Brazil, two and a half million to Spanish America, two million to the British West Indies, and 500, 000 went to British North America and the U. S. Can you talk about the wider human toll of the slave trade so we can better understand the historical context of the Amistad Rebellion?
[00:15:08] Marcus Rediker: Alicia, the first thing I would say is that the slave trade as a prolonged event was very different from most of the extremely violent events in human history.
[00:15:19] which tend to be short, a paroxysm of violence, you might say, because the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade, went on for almost 400 years. Very important to keep that in mind, beginning roughly in 1500, and there were vessels still sailing illegally in the 1870s. So we’re talking about an extraordinary economic system in which these thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of slave ships, fed the Atlantic plantation system, which is producing sugar, tobacco, rice, coffee.
[00:15:58] And this results, as the famous West Indian scholar named C. L. R. James said, this results in the greatest planned accumulation of wealth. The world had seen up to that time. So Europe, the United States, Brazil, all other slave societies gained massive amounts of wealth from these systems of coerced human labor.
[00:16:25] Now the human cost of this is quite extraordinary. I’m sure most of your listeners have seen this image of the slave ship Brooks. With the tiny bodies jammed into the ship. This is actually an understatement of how bad it actually was. But to give you an example, the British abolitionist William Wilberforce once noted that never has so much human misery.
[00:16:53] been jammed into so small a space as on a slave ship. We’re talking here about somewhere between 12 and 15 million people who were loaded onto slaving vessels on the west coast of Africa. The violence against them was extreme, but I would also emphasize that they did resist in every way possible. This is a crucial part of the story.
[00:17:18] But just to emphasize the violence. People died routinely on board these vessels, so this grisly ritual was enacted every morning on practically every slave ship, where the crew would be ordered by the captain to go down below onto the lower deck and bring up the dead bodies. These bodies would then be thrown over the rail of the ship.
[00:17:43] To a pack of sharks that would follow these vessels all the way across the Atlantic, feeding on the human remains. So this, I think, gives you an idea of what the social reality on board the slave ship was like. When we look at the entirety of the slave trade, when we look at the wars waged in Africa to create human bodies for the slave trade.
[00:18:09] When we look at the long march from the interior to the coast, when we look at what happened to people when they were in these trading posts or factories on the West African coast, when we look at the slave ship itself, and when we look at what happened when people arrived immediately in the new world.
[00:18:29] All of these phases had very high mortality. So what we’re looking at, I’ve estimated, in my book called The Slave Ship, A Human History, is death on the scale of four to five million people.
[00:18:42] Alisha Searcy: It’s staggering. So the slave trade tried to create a faceless, anonymous mass of labors for the plantations you’ve written.
[00:18:53] But the Amistad Africans can be known as individuals. And you’ve conducted extensive research about the West African tribal kingdoms in Senegambia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and Benin. What did we know about the African slave trade and the Amistad revolt based on what you’ve learned about 19th century West Africa, the Galenus Coast and Fort Lomboko?
[00:19:17] Marcus Rediker: You know, the first thing I learned, Alicia, is that the way the slave trade operated is extremely complex and it involves many thousands of different players. The most important players are the merchants in the trading capitals of Western Europe in places like Liverpool, Bristol, London, Nantes in France, places like Rhode Island in the United States.
[00:19:44] These merchants use their capital to create this extraordinary trade, and in so doing, they mobilize ship captains and crews who will take these vessels to the west coast of Africa. These merchants are the driving force in all of this, and they will then make alliances usually with coastal African kingdoms who will then supply human beings for the slave trade.
[00:20:13] So there is this meeting of elites, you might say some European elites and coastal African elites, who form an alliance, like I mentioned with Pedro Blanco and some of the people he worked with in Sierra Leone, to make this trade in human bodies possible. Now in Sierra Leone, Pedro Blanco worked with a man named King Shaka.
[00:20:36] He was the king of a particular ethnic group on the coast called the Vai. That’s V A I, and they were the ones who primarily funneled enslaved people to this place called La Moco. This was a slave trading factory owned by Pedro Blanco right on the coast in southern Sierra Leone. This is where people would be held until a large slave ship would arrive, and they would be carried in canoes out to be loaded onto those.
[00:21:07] Ships, and in this case, in the case of the Amistad Africans, they were loaded on board the ship called the Tesoura, which was either a Brazilian or a Portuguese ship and taken to Havana, Cuba. As I’ve said, both Cuba and Brazil had tremendous hunger for slave labor in this period, and the trade went on even though it had been formally abolished.
[00:21:33] Great Britain had made treaties with both Spain and Portugal not to engage in the slave trade, but the demand was so great that the slave trade went on in illegal fashion. And this basically is the background of the experience that the Amistad Africans had.
[00:21:52] Alisha Searcy: You know, I visited Ghana last year this time, and all I can think about as you’re talking is going to a slave castle and imagining All the things that happened to African people as they were being prepared, as you said, to board these ships. It’s just unimaginable.
[00:22:09] Marcus Rediker: It’s truly that it staggers the imagination. I did work in southern Sierra Leone in this very area, and we did find the ruins, you might say, of this slave trading factory called Lomboko. And to think that the Amisat Africans were held in that place and then loaded. Onto a ship going places they couldn’t imagine. It’s just absolutely chilling.
[00:22:35] Alisha Searcy: It is. And to know that there are some who survived all of that.
[00:22:40] Marcus Rediker: Yes.
[00:22:41] Alisha Searcy: So I want to move to 1839 in February. Slave hunters abducted a large group of Africans from Sierra Leone and shipped them to Havana, Cuba, as you talked about. The two Spanish plantation owners, Pedro Montes and José Ruiz, purchased 53 Africans and put them aboard the Cuban schooner Amistad to ship them to a Caribbean plantation.
[00:23:07] Can you talk about the event in West Africa on board the slave ship of the Tocora and the barracoons of Havana that led to the Africans rebellion on the Amistad?
[00:23:18] Marcus Rediker: Okay, so here’s the context in southern Sierra Leone in the 1830s. It is a time of great warfare, and these are wars that are directly related to the slave trade.
[00:23:31] I’ve already mentioned King Shaka. He and his armies would go inland and attack other people, other ethnic groups, I might mention, especially the Mende, which was the largest group. Then they would bring these war captives, as they called them, back to the coast and then sell them to slave traders like Pedro Blanco.
[00:23:51] This is how it happened. We can use the example of, uh, Sengbepe, or Sengke, actually, as he called himself while he was in the United States. He was captured, taken to the coast. He had been a soldier who had fought against King Shaka. He was shipped downriver to Lomboko. He was held there and then loaded on board the Tesora.
[00:24:14] And some variant of this experience is what all of the Amisat Africans went through. Now I want to mention, there were uprisings both At Lomboko, and this I only really discovered when I went there and talked with local fishermen, there was an uprising there, and there was a second uprising on board the slave ship Tesora.
[00:24:39] In both those instances, Cinque and his fellow rebels did not face execution. They survived, but then when they got to Havana and were sold on to the Amistad, they had a third opportunity at an uprising, and this time they were successful. So when Ruiz and Montes purchased these three individuals, and place them on board the Amastan.
[00:25:04] Little did they know that this was going to be a major event in world history after that vessel was captured and commandeered by these Africans.
[00:25:17] Alisha Searcy: So a group of four men, and you’ve mentioned a little bit about this, Sinke, Fakorna, Moru, and Kimbo led the way as they climbed up and out of the hatchway onto the main deck, you write. They moved with the grace and precision of warriors accustomed to night attacks. Anything else you want to share about, in profile for us, major figures, the conditions of the Amistad slave ship and events leading up to the revolt at sea?
[00:25:44] Marcus Rediker: The first thing to be said here is that the Amistad was a small vessel.
[00:25:49] In other words, it wasn’t like these big transatlantic vessels. The schooner is a smaller kind of seagoing vessel. And that meant that it had a smaller crew, and this, of course, made it significantly easier to capture this ship than it would have been to capture a big slave ship with a crew of, say, 40 people, 40 to 45 sailors.
[00:26:12] In this case, there were only about six or seven members of the crew to defend the vessel. The trigger for this event is really quite fascinating. There was a black sailor working for the slaving captain. This was a man named Celestino who decided that he was going to taunt Cinque. This was not a good idea from his point of view or anyone else who wanted to maintain control of that vessel.
[00:26:40] And what he did was play upon a very common belief among West Africans that the Europeans who were coming to take them on board these vessels were cannibals. And the belief was that since these people went on these ships and never came home, that they had been eaten alive. And in a symbolic sense, they actually were eaten alive by the plantation system.
[00:27:03] But this man, Celestino, not speaking the same language, As Cinque, who was a Mende man, through sign language, indicated that he was going to be chopped up and eaten by the Europeans at the end of the voyage. That very night, Cinque began a conspiracy. In the hold of the vessel in which the Amistad Africans were deciding whether to go to war and capture that vessel.
[00:27:34] And apparently Sinke said in that meeting, it would be better to die fighting than to be a slave. So then very early, or I should say in the middle of the night, the rebellion unfolded. One of the little girls who was aboard the ship had discovered a box of cane knives, or machetes. And this was very important because this was the instrument of battle used by Mende warriors.
[00:28:01] So you can imagine, when they find these machetes, this seems like manna from heaven. And a sign that they are meant to be free. So, these men, who are deciding in the hold of the ship, they’re actually performing what is a Poro meeting. The Poro Society was a secret society throughout southern Sierra Leone.
[00:28:23] It governed village affairs, it trained soldiers, and it made the collective decision when to go to war. So this Poro meeting resulted in the decision, we will go to war to capture this vessel. They burst out of the hold. The first person they went after was Celestino, who had taunted Since, they killed him immediately.
[00:28:46] The captain came to his defense. They killed him too. And inside of about five minutes, they had control of the vessel. Two people that I want to mention as being especially important to this whole thing. Since, obviously, he was a man of military experience. Everybody trusted him. He was tremendously charismatic.
[00:29:08] Everyone noticed this about him, whether they understood the way he spoke or not. This was true in America. And the second man who was also very important to the enterprise was a man named Grabeau. Now, Grabeau was probably a warrior himself, but he would have been better known for being a high ranking member of the Poro Society.
[00:29:30] And the way the other Amisat Africans could see this was that he had body scarifications, almost like tattoos. With every level you rise in the Poro Society, you get new tattoos, new scarifications, and therefore everybody would see that you were a person of great spiritual authority. So these two figures, Sinke and Grabeau, represented the combination of military power and spiritual power.
[00:30:00] And I think that union helped to make the revolt a successful one.
[00:30:05] Albert Cheng: Well, thanks for sharing all of your insight into this account. Let’s continue with the story. And so you kind of left off with the Africans taking control of the Amistad ship. And so at that point, Sinke, as you’ve In your earlier summary, Senghia ordered Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montes to sell them all back to Africa.
[00:30:24] And instead, they were sailed to the east coast of the U. S. Again, in hopes that they’d be intercepted and the Africans returned to Cuba as slaves. So, tell us about that moment when a U. S. Navy cutter seized the Amistad off Long Island, New York, and then how Senghia and his fellow revolutionaries came to be imprisoned in New Haven, Connecticut, on charges of murder and piracy.
[00:30:46] Marcus Rediker: Pedro Montes had been a ship captain, and he was very wily, very tricky, and he did deceive the Amazigh Africans to make them think he might be taking them home, whereas, in fact, he was, as I said earlier, sailing at night back toward the west to stay in the sea lanes, hoping that someone would capture the ship.
[00:31:08] And after the Amazigh Africans sailed all the way up the north, and by the way, I would just mention here, I was able to speak at some length with a man named Sean Burkall, who was the captain of the Amistad replica ship. Based for many years at Mystic Seaport. And I told him that the Amisada Africans had actually stopped the vessel, anchored and gone ashore about 30 times in order to get food and water.
[00:31:35] And Sean was amazed that they had that level of skill to be able to maneuver the ship in that way. It turns out, I’m quite sure that one of the men had some quite serious maritime experience and that this assisted their sailing up to the northern end of Long Island. The U. S. Brig Washington was patrolling in that area.
[00:31:59] There had been sightings. by people of what they called the Long Low Black Schooner. And they saw Africans on board. They weren’t sure what that meant. Some people probably correctly reasoned that they had successfully waged an uprising. So the Brig Washington actually captures the Amisat Africans when a group led by Sinke had gone ashore in Long Island to talk with a group of white hunters.
[00:32:26] to see if they could help them get back to Sierra Leone. So the vessel, the Brigg Washington, took the ship. They ended up going after Cinque and the men in the canoe. They captured them too. They took them to New London, which wasn’t very far away, and that’s where the original charges of piracy for capturing the ship and murder of the ship captain were publicly charged.
[00:32:51] Now, once they got to New London, a very interesting and important thing happened. There was a local abolitionist there named Dwight Jaynes. He was a waterfront worker. I think he sold groceries to outgoing vessels, that sort of thing. He saw this vessel come in, and he managed to get on board the vessel.
[00:33:15] And start talking to people about what’s going on. So he basically figured out right away that this had been a successful revolt on board the ship. And that the Africans who were there now in New London were the ones who created this extraordinary event. So, he went home and started writing letters to leading abolitionists saying we’ve got the greatest opportunity now to bring publicity to the sacred cause of abolition.
[00:33:44] It turns out that everything Dwight James saw about how they should wage a publicity campaign and all the rest, all of it happened. He laid it all out in these letters. This, I thought, was one of the most interesting things about the research that I did. So, the Africans are not in New London very long because of issues of court and legal jurisdiction.
[00:34:07] They’re transferred to New Haven, and that’s where they will stay most of the time up until the moment when they are finally released. So, New Haven jail is a very important place in this story. Mm hmm.
[00:34:20] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s press on and pick up just there. So while they’re there, an Amistad committee was formed, headed by the New York City merchant, Lewis Tappan, and then with a Connecticut lawyer, Roger S.
[00:34:32] Baldwin. So tell us about how that part of the story unfolded. And really, let’s get into, you know, how these Africans retain legal representation as well as communicated with their legal advocates and then walk us all the way to. How this case really ultimately landed at the U. S.
[00:34:47] Marcus Rediker: Supreme Court. The key moment in the alliance formed inside the New Haven Jail came when a Yale law professor named Josiah Gibbs learned to count from one to ten in Mende from the three little girls who were there in the jail.
[00:35:07] They taught him. He was a linguist. He was a specialist in language. He then took that meeting and went down to the docks of New York. and walked up and down the docks counting in Mende from one to ten, hoping that someone would understand his language. And sure enough, a Mende sailor named James Covey walked up to him and said, May I help you?
[00:35:30] And suddenly, the Awasot Africans had a translator. One of the extraordinary things about their early time in jail was that they had no way of knowing They had no way of telling their side of the story. So the only people who were telling the story of the Amistad were the two Spaniards who had been freed once the vessel had been captured by the U.
[00:35:53] S. government. But now it’s a completely different story. So this extraordinary ability through the translator, this black sailor, they’re able to tell exactly what happened. They’re also able to communicate with all of the abolitionists. And this is a very important thing because these two groups, the African rebels and the mostly white abolitionists, educate each other.
[00:36:21] about the slave trade, about abolitionism. The jail is a place of great learning. This also enables the Amistad Africans to be very clear about what their political goals are in this struggle. Their definition of freedom, from the very beginning of this event to the very end, is that they wanted to go home to Sierra Leone.
[00:36:46] When they were finally free, many people thought they might stay in the United States, but they did not. And they communicated this desire to all of their legal representatives. They had discussions with John Quincy Adams. Legal aspects of the case were very complex. But it turns out the key there were these treaties made between Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal, in which the latter two nations agreed to desist in the slave trade.
[00:37:16] All their representatives, legal representatives, had to prove is that they had been in Cuba only a short time since the passage of that legislation, that agreement with Great Britain. And one of the crucial pieces of evidence here was that none of the Amisat Africans knew a word of Spanish. If they had been in Cuba for years, as the treaty would have required, then you could have argued that in fact they were legally enslaved.
[00:37:46] But since they weren’t, this became a key point. So the circuit and district courts rule in favor of the Amisat Africans. The United States government appeals the issue to the Supreme Court.
[00:37:59] Albert Cheng: Well, let’s get into the Supreme Court case. And so a former president, John Quincy Adams. Seventy three at the time defended the Africans in the Supreme Court case, which we now refer to as the United States versus Kunar Al Mustad.
[00:38:14] Yeah. Apparently he spoke very eloquently for nine hours over two days defending the Africans right to freedom on legal and moral grounds and referred to a variety of authorities, Roman law, Declaration of Independence, the treaties, as you were just discussing there. So talk about John Quincy Adams role in winning this case and the nature of his arguments.
[00:38:35] Thank you very much.
[00:38:36] Marcus Rediker: I must say, when I started my research on this, I was a little skeptical about John Quincy Adams place in this story. It seemed to me that the emphasis really needed to be placed on the Amistad Africans themselves. But as I did the research, my respect for him grew. Especially after he visited the Amistad Africans in the New Haven jail.
[00:39:00] He actually went to meet with them personally. A man of his stature didn’t have to do that, but he wanted to meet them if he was going to represent them. He also, I might add, was very critical of the conditions in the jail and abolitionists after his visit that they needed to have more heat. better clothes and better shoes.
[00:39:22] So he had a kind of sympathy. Now, the people who were in jail, they took on a new self description. They began to call themselves the Mende people. Now, this is true even though some of them were not Mende. Some were from other culture groups in southern Sierra Leone, but they called themselves the Mende people, I think because they wanted to be like The American people, they wanted to be the sovereign power in this court case.
[00:39:52] So what they did was to communicate with John Quincy Adams and to tell him what they wanted him to say. He did say what they wanted him to say, but of course over nine and a half hours, he said a great deal more than that, and it was a rhetorically brilliant address. But as one of the Supreme Court justices said.
[00:40:15] What Adams said in court actually had relatively little to do with the case. That’s because the case would be decided on very narrow legal grounds, not in terms of moral philosophy, not in terms of whether abolitionism was right or wrong, but simply on the issue of whether the Amistad Africans had been illegally enslaved, according to those treaties.
[00:40:40] And I think the attorney, Roger Baldwin, was actually more important in terms of that work. That was John Quincy Adams. So the Supreme Court makes a surprisingly strong ruling, although a narrow one, that the Amistad Africans had been illegally enslaved. But this kind of decision thereby safely protected all enslaved people in the United States.
[00:41:05] No, this ruling did not apply to anybody else. And this was something that the justices were very careful to do so as not to do anything dangerous to the American slave system.
[00:41:18] Albert Cheng: Let’s get into that. I mean, the implications of this are complicated. In fact, you’ve written that quote, the victory of the Amistad case contributed to a broad set of changes.
[00:41:27] And the complex struggle against slavery, end quote. So tell us about the legal and political significance of the Supreme Court ruling and its broader impact on the abolitionist movement, slavery. And of course, tell us what happened to Sinke and his compatriots afterwards.
[00:41:43] Marcus Rediker: It mattered hugely in this case that Ruiz and Montes were not American slave owners.
[00:41:51] And it mattered hugely that the Amisada Africans were not people enslaved in the United States. They probably would not have received a favorable ruling if those things had been otherwise. That’s a good place to start. As I’ve mentioned, the legal significance of the Amistad case was limited because the ruling was so narrow, but the social implications of it were great because you could not so easily confine the Amistad Africans.
[00:42:20] to this non American identity because everybody was talking about them. Artists are rushing into New Haven jail to draw their portraits, to make wax figures, to create pamphlets about them. They became essentially celebrities. So there was this tremendous impact that this case had. On the abolitionist movement itself, first of all, a great many more African American people joined the movement.
[00:42:48] Not that they had been disconnected, they’d always been abolitionists, but they felt now that this action, the defense of the Amistad Africans, made the abolitionist organizations feel like a better home for them. Another very important thing that happens after the Amistad case is that abolitionists, black and white, began to address the enslaved people in the South as important actors in the story, the struggle, to end slavery.
[00:43:19] And there was a phrase that was used many, many times in the Amistad case. It actually was originally written by Lord Byron about the Greek wars for independence in the early 1820s. He said, those who would be free. In other words, those people who know the oppression of slavery must rise up and fight and then other people will join you.
[00:43:48] So this is the example of successful resistance from below. And this is one of the things that makes the Amisad case so important. It was a win. It was a victory. And everybody identified with that. So Sinke and the Amisad Africans passed into the abolitionist pantheon of heroes because this was a great victory for that movement.
[00:44:11] When the Amazon Africans returned to Freetown, Sierra Leone in January 1842, they returned to a war ravaged land. And this is actually one of the ironies of this outcome. They had won their struggle in America, but the wars of the slave trade raged on in their home country. Now when they arrived in Freetown, they brought with them several missionaries.
[00:44:40] Black and white, who then established the Mende Mission, a place to spread the word of Christianity, but also to assist enslaved people in Southern Sierra Leone. So this is actually quite important. Cinque himself was a rather sad and tragic case. He went in search of his family and his children. He arrived at the place where his village had once existed, they discovered that had just been completely razed.
[00:45:11] Nshaka’s armies had completely destroyed that village. He was never able to find his children. Some of the other Africans were, some of the younger ones stayed at the Mende Mission. Those who lived a great distance inland tended to stay there too, because There was a real risk of being re enslaved. You’d go out into the countryside and a couple of the Amistad Africans were enslaved.
[00:45:37] And then the people at the mission purchased them or bought out their freedom. So the struggle of the Amistad Africans was a victory, but in the context of a global slave trade, He was still going strong.
[00:45:52] Albert Cheng: Well, you began the interview with a remark telling us to keep in mind the scale and scope of the slave trade and what was going on.
[00:46:01] And so let’s talk just, you know, legacy and how we should understand this. I mean, how should, particularly, maybe, you know, for how we teach this, how do we think about and teach the heroism of Sinke and honoring the Amnestad Rebellion so that we all can understand this legacy and our shared past here?
[00:46:18] Marcus Rediker: It’s important to look at the slave trade and the slave system as a totality, as a highly profitable social system based on extreme violence. The slave trade and slavery itself are always based on actual violence or the threat of violence to compel people to labor against their wills. And I just want to emphasize that the wealth of the slave system in the United States Which was, in the 19th century, the most lucrative in the world, produced a massive amount of America’s wealth.
[00:46:57] This is something to keep in mind. And it’s also important, as I mentioned briefly earlier, to show that there was tremendous broad based and multifaceted resistance to the slave trade. Resistance to slavery, and this ranged from day to day resistance to running away, to escape. I’ve just written a new book, come out in May, about the thousands of people who escaped southern bondage by getting on board of ships and sailing to northern ports.
[00:47:29] Very important act of resistance that helped to precipitate the Civil War, even on board the slave ships. Suicide could be seen as a form of resistance in which people were not going to be enslaved in the Americas and made to work for these plantation owner. Then, of course, the highest level of resistance is the insurrection.
[00:47:49] And we have in the Amistad Africans precisely that kind of successful event. So we need to show the agency of enslaved people. And the homicide event, I think, is a perfect example of that. So think of it this way, 53 people, 49 men, and four children, on a small vessel on the north coast of Cuba, take action, seize the ship, sail it all the way north to Long Island, New York, go to jail, wage a legal struggle.
[00:48:24] But those few people in that out of the way place commanded the attention of the most powerful people in the world. The Queens of England and Spain, American presidents, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices, all of these people are debating what these Amistad Africans did. And what should be the solution to this problem that they created?
[00:48:51] So this I’d like to emphasize is one of the great things about resistance from below. It is sometimes unexpected and the consequences of it can be extraordinary. And that was definitely the case in this small revolt. It led to an almost global debate about slavery.
[00:49:11] Albert Cheng: Well, Marcus, thank you for walking us through this story. I mean, you know, lots of hard things to think through, but we ought to be thinking through and reflecting on these things. Um, I want to give you the last word and invite you to read a portion from your book.
[00:49:26] Marcus Rediker: My pleasure, Albert. Thank you. This comes from the conclusion of my book, The Amistad Rebellion. A small band of multi ethnic Africans aboard the Amistad Succeeded against all odds.
[00:49:42] Enslaved in their homelands and shipped to Cuba, they planned and executed a revolt, worked their way to a free country, cooperated and allied themselves with a small, much despised group of anti slavery activists, then overcame the opposition of two powerful governments, Spain and the United States. To gain their freedom and go home, accomplishing precisely what they had always wanted to do.
[00:50:11] They carried out the entire epic cycle of loss, quest, and recovery. From beginning to end, their odyssey was unprecedented in the annals of New World slavery. Cinque’s revolution, in miniature, aboard the Amistad, reverberated around the Atlantic. Abolitionist Henry C. Wright noted in April 1841 that His name and his deeds have been heralded in every paper in this nation and in England, have stirred every heart, and been the theme of every tongue.
[00:50:48] Even when confined in a prison for 19 months, he and his comrades commanded debate and discussion in the United States, Spain, England, and France. Sinké’s name, one person said, will be the watchword of freedom to Africa and her enslaved sons throughout the world. Through a long heroic struggle, in which insurrectionists and reformers cooperated to create an interracial movement of great power, Sinké had come to symbolize a revolutionary future, the bright and glorious day on which slavery would be overthrown.
[00:51:27] Albert Cheng: Well, professors, thank you so much for that and giving us your time to help us recount the story.
[00:51:34] Alisha Searcy: Absolutely. Powerful and moving. And again, I appreciate your final answer about how we need to teach slavery and the different aspects of it. We, I think we’ve been learning one part, but to hear about the heroism and the courage.
[00:51:49] of all kinds is so powerful and so important. So thank you for joining us today.
[00:51:54] Marcus Rediker: My great pleasure to work with you.
[00:52:07] Alisha Searcy: Wow, Albert, that was incredible. I feel like there’s so much history that we’re still learning about slavery, about rebellion, about all of the many stories and heroes. And just the plight of African people in America. So just what a very powerful and informative interview.
[00:52:29] Albert Cheng: Yeah. I mean, it brought back memories to my 10th grade world history class.
[00:52:33] I mean, not just in, you know, we said, of course we studied the slave trade in that class, but I do remember watching the Steven Spielberg directed movie about these events and definitely, yeah, I guess. Of all things, I remember watching that movie in 10th grade, um, but, Hey, maybe we’re, you know, worth another watch.
[00:52:52] I mean, I didn’t know at the time, but star studded cast. I mean, Morgan Freeman, Anthony Hopkins, and I’m just looking at IMDB here just to recollect some of that, but Matthew McConaughey, you know, Nigel Hawthorne. So yeah, I remember it being a powerful movie and maybe not for the, you know, if you’re looking for a little lighthearted night, probably don’t recommend that, but perhaps another time.
[00:53:13] Alisha Searcy: Yes, but important to learn the history for sure. Well, before we let you go, we’ve got to talk about the tweet of the week, and this week, it comes from Education Next, ahead of the news. Are religious charter schools constitutional? As the U. S. Supreme Court prepares to take up the question, there’s a panel discussion that you can watch on the topic from the 2024 Emerging Schools Model Conference.
[00:53:39] Albert, this is a huge topic across the country. I think this question started in Oklahoma. You know, they’re wanting to have religious charter schools there. Certainly, we’ve got this discussion happening at the federal level in terms of more funds to private schools. And so I think it’s really important for all of us to pay attention to these conversations.
[00:54:00] And I would be very interested to see how this Supreme Court rules. on the question about whether or not religious charter schools are constitutional.
[00:54:09] Albert Cheng: Yeah, you’re right. This is going to be a landmark decision, whatever way it goes down. And so, yeah, glad we’re giving it some attention. And if you missed last week’s episode, we talked about this topic as well.
[00:54:21] Yes.
[00:54:22] Alisha Searcy: Well, thanks for joining me today for another episode of Learning Curve. It’s always great to hang out with you and interview very interesting people. That’s right, Alicia. Yeah, looking forward to the next one. Yes. And speaking of the next one, make sure to join us. We’ll have Stephen Wilson with us.
[00:54:38] He’s the author of The Lost Decade, Returning to the Fight for Better Schools in America. We definitely need to have that conversation, don’t we? Oh, yeah. Well, see you next week. Thanks for joining us. Hey, this is Alisha. Thank you for listening to the learning curve. If you’d like to support the podcast further, we invite you to donate at pioneerinstitute.org/donations.
In this episode of The Learning Curve, co-hosts U-Arkansas Prof. Albert Cheng and Alisha Searcy interview historian Marcus Rediker, Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh and author of The Amistad Rebellion. Prof. Rediker explores the 1839 slave revolt aboard the schooner La Amistad. He recounts the leadership of Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinqué) and the wider history and human toll of the transatlantic slave trade. Prof. Rediker details the Amistad Africans’ journey from Sierra Leone to Havana’s barracoons, their rebellion at sea, and their capture off Long Island. He examines the legal battle, from their defense by abolitionists to American statesman John Quincy Adams’ stirring legal argument before the U.S. Supreme Court, which helped secure their freedom. Prof. Rediker highlights the Amistad SCOTUS case’s impact on the abolitionist movement and the fate of Cinqué and his comrades upon returning to West Africa. He discusses how the Amistad revolt should be remembered and taught, ensuring that this extraordinary story of resistance and justice remains a vital part of our historical consciousness. In closing, Prof. Rediker reads a passage from his book The Amistad Rebellion.
Stories of the Week: Albert and Alisha delve into the alarming decline in NAEP scores, discussing the latest news and its implications for K-12 policy.
Guest:
Marcus Rediker is the Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the award-winning author of The Slave Ship: Human History and The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom, books which have been translated into nineteen languages worldwide. Prof. Rediker has also produced a film, Ghosts of Amistad, with director Tony Buba, and written a play, The Return of Benjamin Lay, with playwright Naomi Wallace. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University and attended the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study, earning a Master of Arts and Ph.D. in history.