The Amistad Case
and Cinque ["The African Strangers" and "Cingues"]
[From the Herald
of Freedom of Sept 21 and 28
1839; Miscellaneous Writings,
75-80]
In his book American
Abolitionists, Stanley
Harrold repeats the often-made observation that "It is unlikely that a
single white American of the antebellum era fully overcame racial bias against
African-Americans" (28). This can be shown by quotations even from
immediate abolitionists and advocates of universal human liberation such as
Garrison. But if anyone came close, it was surely Nathaniel Rogers. See, for
example, the essay "Color-Phobia." And consult the two essays below,
about the Amistad revolt of 1839.
We are inclined to
treat their case as an abolitionist, rather than as an inquirer into their
liabilities under the rules and regulations of this slaveholding countries,
called laws. As an abolitionist we say, defying contradiction, that they ought
not for a moment to be kept under duress. The whole procedure against them,
from King Sharka through the dignitaries of Cuba to Andrew Sharka Judson, is all of a piece. It is pro-slavery
violence all of it. This is what we take notice of. We shall not trouble
ourselves or our readers to go through the legal authorities or arguments
bearing on the case of these imprisoned men. If they would treat them as they
do white men, we don't so much care as to the result. Their lives are as
important and no more so, than any other equal number of human beings of the
great multi-colored and dispersed family. We look to see what hand slavery has
in disposing of them, and to make what use we can of the whole occurrence
against the infernal institution of slaveholding. And though we feel no small
interest in the heroic Cingues, we don't claim that he have his life merely
because he is a hero or a master spirit, but because he is a man. Had he been
ever so cowardly or ever so imbecile in mind or spirit, we should be equally
strenuous, and more so, in his behalf; for it is the poor and feeble brethren
of our race of whose rights we ought to be most tender. We are aware that a
good deal of enthusiasm displayed by the pro-slavery press is based upon any
thing rather than justice and a love of the right. It forgets Cingues' color,
in admiration of his valor and his talent and personal prowess. But all this
will evaporate by and by, when we call on it to carry out this feeling in
behalf of tghree millions of Cingues' brethren and sisters, who are now
weltering in the slough of slavery in the country. Why don't this sympathy rise
for them? Who shall kindle all the wrongs of Cingues, and sneer at the
infinitely greater sufferings of the plantation? If they hang Cingues, they
won't defeat him of the chief object of his rising. He rose for liberty. He got
that, and if he dies, he dies a freeman. Liberty will be cheaply purchased by
death. Death is infinitely lighter than slavery. He loses his country, his
sweet home, his dear wife and children. His heart will be with them -
"There
where his rude hut by the Niger
lay,
There
were his young barbarians, all at play,
And
there their Afric mother,
- he their sire
Butchered
to make a Yankee
holiday."
But they won't hang
him. We are fearful they won't try him. The sovereignty of Cuba is making application to Van Buren to
deliver up this stray property. See if he will incur the the frown of the
South, and hazard the bauble of the presidency by refusing. Try them and acquit
them and treat them as innocent men, or as men, the country won't dare do, unless in this
moment of excitement, and conquered for this hour by Cingues' William Tell
prowess. How could we look the South in the face after it; as Abner said to
Asahel, "How then shall I hold up my face to Joab thy brother?" What
will become of the Union? The South would get together in the Rotunda at
Charleston, and which flaming speeches from Calhoun and Preston, dissolve it
into non-entity. They would stare
at the North so fiercely, that it would go into dough-faced hysterics. They
won't dare acquit. And to condemn will be a delicate matter. Counsel are
engaged who will be compelled by their oaths to unfold the whole law, and to
show forth their right of acquittal by our own Venetian justice, and the full
reasons of acquittal will be recorded, and the nation will read it, and the
blood of the murdered Cingues will cry in ears that were deaf as the adder to
the voice of Lovejoy's. They will hardly dare hang. Cuba will relieve the
republic. She will ask her imperial sister for her slaves. She will get them.
The brave Cingues crosses the Gulf stream once more, and should God not open to
his mighty genius some second way to victory and liberty, or his unwary tyrants
slacken his chain, so that he might bound indignantly over the vessel's side,
and escape them in the depths of the ocean, they will revenge upon him the
daring effrontery that raised hand against the divine prerogative of mastery.
They won't attempt to get him to the plantation. They have no fancy to reducing
him, breaking him, making his Hannibal form handy in the reptile harness. No overseer would
covet management of him He
would as soon harness the "unicorn" to "harrow the valleys
after" him. He would gladly swap Cingues for almost any pro-slavery editor
in the New England states, and pay the boot which is due to the servility of
the spirit that would make a slave. No, they would save his more docile and
submissive companions for the plantation, but they would make the gallant hero
a signal example of slaveholder's vengeance, which knows no bounds. Those
laughing Afric girls would be reared to adorn, by and by, Don Jose Ruez's
harem, the young gentleman,
who so interested the New London editor, and the United States naval officer.
He would undoubtedly requite these republican sympathisers, should they
hereafter visit his Cuba plantation, with all sorts of hospitality.
We are inclined to call the
noble African by this name ['Cingue'], although he is called by as many titles
as our republicanism offers reasons for enslaving his people. We have seen a
woodcut representation of the royal fellow. It looks as we should think it
would. It answers well to his lion-like character. The head has the towering
front of Webster, and though some shades darker than our great countryman, we
are struck, at first sight, with his resemblance to him. He has Webster's
lion-aspect - his majestic, quiet, uninterested cast of expression, looking,
when at rest, as if there was nobody and nothing about him to care about or
look at. His eye is deep, heavy -
the cloudy iris extending up behind a brow almost inexpressive, and yet as if
volcanoes of action might be asleep behind it. It looks likie the black sea ofr
the ocean in a calm - an unenlightened eye, as Webster's would have looked, had
he been bred in the desert, among the lions, as Cingues was, and if, instead of
poring upon Homer and Shakespeare and Coke and the Bible, (for Webster read the
Bible when he was young, and got his regal style there) it had rested, from savage boyhood, on the sands
and sky of Africa. It looks like a wilderness - a grand, but uninhabited land,
or, if peopled, the abode of aboriginal man. Webster's eye like a civilized and
cultivated country = country
rather city - more on the whole like woods and wilderness than fields or
villages. For, after all, nature predominates greatly in the eye of our
majestic countryman.
The nose and mouth of
Cingues are African. We discover the expanded and powerful nostril mentioned in
the description, and can fancy readily its contractions and dilations, as he
made those addresses to his countrymen, and called upon them to rush, with a
greater than Spartan spirit, upon the countless white people, who, he
apprehended, would doom them to a life of slavery. He has none of the look of
an Indian - nothing of the savage. It is a gentle, magnanimous, generous look,
not so much of the warrior as the sage; a sparing and not destructive look,
like the lion's, when unaroused by hunger or the spear of the huntsman. It must
have flashed terribly upon that midnight deck, when he was dealing with the
wretched Ramonflues.
We bid pro-slavery look
upon Cingues, and behold in him the race we are enslaving. He is a sample.
Every Congolese and Mandingean is not, to be sure, a Cingues. Nor was every
Corsican a Napoleon, or every Yankee and Webster. "Giants are rare,"
said Ames, "and it is forbidden that there should be races of them"
But call not the race inferior,
which in now and then an age produces such men.
Our shameless people
have made merchandise of the likeness of Cingues, as they have of the originals
of his (and their own) countrymen. They had the effrontery to lock him in the
face long enough to delineate it, and at his eye long enough to copy its
wonderful expressions.
By the way, Webster
ought to come home to defend Cingues. He ought to have no counsel short of his
twin-spirit. His defence were a nobler subject for Webster's giant intellect,
than the Foote resolutions or Calhoun's nullification. There is, indeed, no
defence to make. It would give Webster occasion to strike at the slave trade
and at our people for imprisoning and trying a man admitted to have risen only
against the worst of pirates, and for more than life - for liberty, for
country, and for home.
Webster should vindicate
him, if he must be tried. Old Marshall would not be the man to try him. And
after his most honorable acquittal and triumph, a ship should be sent to convey
him to his country - not an American ship. They are all too near akin to "the
low, long, black schooner."
A British ship - old Nelson's line-of-battle, if it is yet afloat, the one he
had at Trafalgar; and Hardy, Nelson's captain, were a worthy sailor to command
it to Africa. He would steer more honestly than the treacherous old Spaniard.
He would steer them toward the sunrise, by night as well as by day. An old British sea captain would
have scorned to betray the noble Cingues. He would have been as faithful as the
compass.
We wait to see the fate of
the African hero. We feel no anxiety for him. The country can't reach him. He
is above the reach and above death. He had conquered death. But his wife and
his children they who "weep beside the cocoa-tree." And we wait to
see the bearings of this providential event upon American slavery.