The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone

Introduction

Introduction The many stories surrounding the Amistad revolt and its aftermath are compelling arguments in the nineteenth-century arena of identity politics and in twentieth-century discourse on the formation ofpolitical consciousness . The revolt and the subsequent trial cases in the United States are relevant to people living in both the United States and Sierra Leone, even to this day. Analysisof the social and political factors that precipitated the debate on slavery and the question of human rights, first in the United States and more recently in Sierra Leone, shows that the Amistad revolt of 1839 initiated key dialogues about race, culture, and the law. The Amistad case helped to ground abstract debates about the constitutional rights of American slaves through the corporeal reality of the Amistad Africans, whose rhetorical insistence throughout the trial focused the debate on the defendants' identity rather than on their actions. The Amistad case also produced a major paradigm shift in the approach of the U.S. North to the problem of slavery. The politics of abolitionism was effective at two levels: although the battle against slavery was necessarily fought in the American justice system, its success depended on the grassroots involvement of a sympathetic public. The implications of the Amistad event in the arena of identity politics are manifest in a specific body of commemorative processes in both the United States and Sierra Leone. These processes engage individual and collective "re-memory" of resistance in slavery. The Amistad story revolves around events that began in 1839 just off the waters of Cuba. African captives onboard an American-built schooner, named La Amistad ("friendship" in English), revolted against their Span- xii INTRODUCTION ish captors with the hope of freeing themselves and returning to Africa. In the ensuing struggle, the captain and his cook were killed; two of the Africans also lost their lives. The Africans spared the lives of the Spanish shipmasters, believing that the mariners would help navigate the ship to Africa. However, the Spanish crew tricked them by sailing east toward Africa during the day but at night sailing westward, following the North Star in an effort to reach the United States. Captured by an American naval crew two months later, the schooner ended its meandering route near Culloden Point, Long Island, New York. The ship was towed to New London, Connecticut. Charged with murder and piracy, the Africans were jailed in New Haven. Three major Western powers—the United States, England, and Spain— and two American presidents, President Martin Van Buren and former president John Quincy Adams, were involved in the diplomatic and legal battles that followed. With the support of American abolitionists, the Africans took their case to the Supreme Court and won their freedom. In November 1841 they boarded another ship, the Gentleman, along with black and white American missionaries, to return to Sierra Leone, the land from which they had been stolen. Today, the State of Connecticut, the city of New Haven in particular, takes pride in the legacy of the Amistad affair. Connecticut's 1992. celebration of the i5Oth anniversary of the Amistad event and the state's $2 million commission for a model of La Amistad, designed as a floating museum, are part of the institutional attempts to memorialize the Amistad story in America. Although the Amistad case is well documented and was widely known in the nineteenth century, it has until recently been largely ignored. Even though the Amistad rebellion is credited with being one of the first notable civil rights events in the United States, the somewhat arbitrary and inadequate commemoration of the Amistad story mirrored the extent to which most Americans were unaware of the Amistad case in American history. Individual historians, literary artists, and fine artists have, from time to time, returned to the event, but it is only in the last decade that corporate effort, both in the United States and Sierra Leone, has institutionalized the event. In the United States in particular, Steven Spielberg's film Amistad, released in December 1997, has precipitated much interest in the history of the Amistad and the legacy of America's slave past. In Sierra Leone, the event went unheralded for one hundred fifty years. Most Sierra Leoneans were ignorant of the grand events of the Amistad INTRODUCTION Xlll victory, but commemorative processes now in place have ignited the nation 's imagination and engendered a sense ofnational identity. The portrait of the Amistad...