Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling by Benjamin N. Lawrence (review)

In Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling, Benjamin N. Lawrence traces the lives of six West African children who were aboard La Amistad, a Cuban schooner famously seized by its enslaved cargo in 1839. The arrival of La Amistad in New London, Connecticut, garnered attention from local antislavery advocates and set off a chain of legal proceedings that ultimately won the captives their freedom. Throughout the work the author demonstrates that the most well-known version of La Amistad is an adult masculine narrative of captivity in the nineteenth century Atlantic world based on court proceedings that were concerned mainly with the fates of adult men. The author organizes the work around six myths associated with La Amistad that obscure the experiences of children: the myth that children were not important to the Atlantic slave trade (chapter 1), the myth of one common story of enslavement (chapter 2), the myth of only one path to enslavement in West Africa (chapter 3), the myth of one common middle passage shared by La Amistad’s entire human cargo (chapter 4), the myth of one definition of freedom that applies to both children and adults (chapter 5), and the myth of easy resettlement and reintegration in West Africa (chapter 6).

Lawrence thoroughly demonstrates the ways that enslavement for children was qualitatively different than for adults. He presents secondary and primary evidence that children made up greater and greater proportions of cargoes in the period and that they became more desirable commodities. Beyond numbers, Lawrence presents a clear analysis of children’s mobility by talking about enslavement and emancipation as unique processes experienced differently by each of the six children. The author recovers the children’s journeys as slaves, seamen, prisoners, students, migrants, and settlers in the Atlantic world before becoming captives on La Amistad. He also studies the way that children experienced freedom. Unlike adult men, these boys and girls were particularly vulnerable in ways that kinless children in the nineteenth century were vulnerable on both sides of the Atlantic. By dismantling the myth of “blanket freedom,” Lawrence challenges the reader to consider what freedom and autonomy could possibly have meant for minors, “constrained by a variety of social, cultural, legal, and spatial contexts”(217). Powerfully, Lawrence ends by presenting a counter-narrative to that of a seamless return to Africa propagated by abolitionists in the period. While antislavery advocates found a liner narrative from captivity to freedom useful, the children Lawrence is concerned with found the process of return to be full of even more disorienting and disruptive experiences. Having missed critical years of socialization as boys and girls in West Africa, the five children who journeyed back were ill-equipped to simply reintegrate and resettle upon arrival because of their lack of experience with gender, generation, and labor in the region.

Lawrence provides a well-researched and well-argued study that asserts the importance of the history of children to the broader history of the Atlantic slave trade. Building on a number of studies that attest to children’s presence, Lawrence highlights six individual stories that tell us about that experience. This book posits a provocative challenge to scholars of slavery and the Atlantic world to consider children and their histories as valuable because they offer insight into the technologies of the trade that a focus on adult men alone cannot.