Amistad Page 14

  “Jack’s right, captain. This crazed nigger he just starts swinging them chains and screaming like a wild jungle animal.”

  Colton looked at Singbe crouched in the corner. His jaw was swollen, his body shaking. He looked like a cat surrounded by a pack of hungry dogs.

  “Go wake the colonel, Tim,” Colton said. “Now.”

  One of the guards ran out. The man on the floor began to stand but Colton kicked him back to the floor.

  “You just hold there, Murtaugh.”

  Colton walked up to Singbe and motioned with the pistol.

  “This way, African.”

  As he passed Murtaugh, Colton let loose with another kick to his ribs.

  “No more shit outta you, Murtaugh. Or you either, Spivey. Otherwise, I’ll be back.”

  He walked Singbe down the hall to a small empty cell and unlocked the door.

  “In.”

  Singbe stayed standing for nearly an hour after the men with guns had left. He wasn’t sure if there would be another beating. He finally drifted off to sleep and dreamed again of his home and family. In the morning he woke up to the sounds and gestures made by a new blur of staring white faces walking by his cell. Later in the afternoon, a man named Nathaniel Jocelyn was allowed in the cell to paint Singbe’s portrait.

  Roger Baldwin was a dependable sight for the people of down-town New Haven. Forty-two years old, a little over five and a half feet tall, and gaunt with dark, thinning hair and small round spectacles that almost never left his face, he was distinguished in a schoolmaster sort of way. But in his case, Baldwin would be a schoolmaster of means. He always wore fine dark business suits, silk bow ties, and polished black boots; in the winter he was partial to long, heavy frock coats. He was a man who, despite his political leanings, commanded great respect from the community, a man of great intelligence, principle, and conviction. He was known as a gentleman, always courteous and polite. You could see it in his walk, straight, proud, confident, and perhaps a half step quicker and sprier than the average man’s. There was no doubt that he was the essence of propriety. Which is why people were aghast when late on the afternoon of August 29 they saw Roger Baldwin in his fine black suit and shiny boots, running madly down the middle of York Street.

  If he had stopped to think about it, he would probably not have believed it himself. He had not run at all since his days at Yale. And even then it was a rare occurrence. But as he left his office near the town green for Reverend Simeon Jocelyn’s church, he found himself walking more quickly than usual. His mind began moving faster and faster, spurred on by the possibilities of what he had just read. He was more than halfway down the street before he realized he was running. He hesitated only for a moment at the discovery, and then let his legs continue at their perilous pace, deciding that they were being moved by a force greater than himself.

  He reached the church fifteen minutes later, drenched in sweat and gasping for breath. Jocelyn was next door at his house trying to rescue the roses he had planted on the sunny side. They had bloomed late and lingered huge and bright, but the sweltering heat and dense humidity of the past week had wilted many of them. Jocelyn looked up to see Baldwin run his last few steps before staggering, stopping, and nearly falling into the church doors.

  After Jocelyn had helped his friend into the house and given him a mug of cool well water, Baldwin was finally able to speak.

  “Simeon. I received this letter from New London less than an hour ago. It was written by a friend, a dedicated man of the cause. He tells of Africans – Africans! – illegally captured and pressed into slavery, coming into his port. A federal judge has ordered them to be brought here, to New Haven.”

  “Your friend is right. They are here. They came in yesterday morning. Their story was in all the papers. In fact, my brother was allowed to paint the leader’s portrait. Where were you?”

  “I am just back from New York. On the afternoon train,” Baldwin answered.

  “Well, it is good that you are here. In fact, I have been approached by several people to speak to you about this issue in hopes that you would take sympathy with the Africans and perhaps hire yourself out in their defense.”

  “Hire myself? I will do no such thing.”

  “But Roger, don’t you find their situation compelling? At the very least it will draw attention to the cause.”

  “I think their situation is beyond compelling. So much so that it made me run here from my office. If the facts are as my friend has set them down, then I do not think I could face myself if I took one dime for their defense. I will do the job, yes, but money will not be a factor here.”

  “Bless you, Roger. You are a man of irreproachable principle, and the best attorney in Connecticut. I have always said it. But your generous offer aside, we will need money if we are to build a defense team around you, as well as to fight this in the press. Van Buren will want this to go away quickly and with as little public debate as possible. Which is why I wrote Mr. Lewis Tappan this morning after I read the accounts in the newspapers.”

  “Tappan?”

  “If anything has come to us that will finally draw the questions of slavery and abolition into public debate, it is this event. And if any one thing can increase the interest and attention that will be given to the event itself, it is the presence of Lewis Tappan.”

  Baldwin took a long drink from the mug and then let out a chortling laugh. “I do not think Connecticut is ready for our friend Mr. Tappan.”

  Jocelyn smiled. “Neither is the rest of the country.”

  “What if these black men were white!? What if they were Americans or Englishmen or Spaniards, held by native Algerians or Arabs? Certainly those cultures still ascribe to the practice of slaveholding. What, then, would be their fate, my friends, if an American brig waylaid them at sea and boarded? Would they be here, behind bars in a jail with the most vile of criminals? I think not. They would be heroes, honored in parades, wined and dined by politicians and society’s elite. But in our great wisdom we have not judged them by the virtue of their actions or the purity of their souls, but rather by the color of their skin. Their skin is black. So naturally, they are immediately treated as criminals. They are put on display as freakish carnival attractions. And yet, we live in a country built on the phrase, ‘All men are created equal.’ Equal? Please! We are a nation of hypocrites. For even if we do not personally own slaves, even if we do not hold prejudices against the darker races, if we permit such things to occur, we are as guilty and as sinful in the eyes of the Lord as the perpetrators of such heinous acts.”

  The crowd outside the jail erupted, some with cheers, some with cries of hate. Many others just stared, not quite sure what they were seeing. A dozen Connecticut militiamen stood nervously ready, muskets in hand, facing the crowd and separating them from Lewis Tappan and his small entourage. A potato, launched from somewhere in the crowd, landed just to the left of his feet. This sent the crowd into a new explosion.

  Lewis Tappan stood defiant. If not for the attention focused on him, he would be an unremarkable man, a healthy white New York businessman, average in height, face, weight, and dress, average-looking in every way, except for the hair. It was thick, wild, bushy and flaming red, streaked with patches of white, a frozen cloud of flame and smoke, a raging, burning thunderhead. The hair was completely immune to combs and brushes, and Tappan kept it free of oils or balms. Instead he let it grow on its own course, trimming it every so often, but not enough to damage its personality. He understood completely its effect and importance.

  Tappan was used to such treatment and spectacle. Wherever he went, crowds and boiling emotions seemed to follow. Sometimes only a few people would stop him for a debate or to listen to his words; sometimes it was dozens. Occasionally he drew a mob.

  Such was the case in 1834, in his native New York City, when more than a thousand angry people descended on Tappan’s Dry Goods, the largest such store in the city, calling for the heads of Lewis and his brother Arthur. Both m
en had been the founders of the American Antislavery Society and were conducting a membership meeting that night at the store. The mob outside had stomached enough of the agitating pamphlets, the probing articles in the Tappan-supported abolitionist newspaper The Emancipator, and the scathing street-corner stump speeches given by the Tappans and their followers. The filth and lies they were spreading about abolishing slavery and the equality of races had gone far enough, and the mob was there to put a stop to it all once and for all.

  But they hadn’t anticipated the massive iron shutters the Tappans had installed outside – which, when closed and locked, made the store as impervious as a bank vault – or Arthur and thirty of his clerks armed with muskets. Lewis spoke at length to the crowd from a second-story window and had to duck several times to avoid hurled rocks and rotted vegetables, but he and Arthur were eventually able to turn away the angry rabble without anyone having fired a shot.

  This is what open, honest talk about abolishing slavery did in New York during the 1830s. In the South, such talk never occurred, at least not in public. It would have been lunacy and courting almost certain violent retribution, if not a public lynching.

  Though often portrayed as a strictly North-South controversy with clearly defined pro and con camps, the issue of slavery was much more complex and muddy than its geographical delineations. At this time most Americans believed as firmly in the superiority and ruling destiny of the white Christian race as in the inevitability of the sun rising each day. Many of those same people had great sympathy for blacks. Some felt slavery was unfortunate but an inevitable consequence of the natural order of things. Others wished to see slavery eliminated.

  But anti-slavery sentiment did not always, or even frequently, translate into a desire for immediate abolition. There were those who believed that the “peculiar institution” of slavery should be subject to a gradual extinction, permitting the blacks to be freed slowly. Once free, they would enjoy the same rights other free blacks experienced in the United States at the time. These “rights,” which varied from state to state, often denied blacks educational and employment opportunities, and uniformly forbade voting or running for elected office. Other people held that free blacks should be sent back to their motherland of Africa. In the early 1800s the American Colonization Society was formed to do just this. They purchased land in what was to become Liberia and paid to transport free blacks there. Many saw the society as a thinly veiled attempt to eliminate free blacks from American soil and bring the U.S. one step closer to being a wholly white and completely Christian nation. U.S. Senator and Whig Party leader Henry Clay held little of his feelings back, saying that the society’s work was a blessing because it would eventually “rid our country of a useless, pernicious, and dangerous portion of the population.”

  The ideas of giving blacks limited freedom or directed resettlement were seen by most people opposed to slavery as reasonable positions. They also saw a gradual end to slavery as the most prudent way to solve the problem. But a very small percentage of the anti-slavery proponents went further. They were the religious extremists, the abolitionists. Abolitionists believed in immediate cessation of slavery and complete emancipation of all slaves. Though few in number, abolitionists were well organized, vocal, passionate, and possessed by a fervent, religious zeal for their cause. Many of their leaders were in fact members of the Protestant clergy who believed that enslaving fellow human beings was a sin and an abomination unto the Lord.

  To the vast majority of the American population, such talk of abolition was not only nonsensical claptrap, it was patently dangerous. Many recognized that if the abolitionists were permitted to spread their emotionally volatile dogma and rage, it would only be a matter of time before the country degenerated into some sort of civil war. Awareness of the incendiary capacity of such rhetoric was so acute that in 1837 the U.S. House passed a “gag rule” that prohibited petitions or discussions regarding slavery. But though attempts were made by the Congress, and even by Andrew Jackson during his presidency, to end public discourse regarding slavery, their efforts failed. And so the activities of abolitionists persisted.

  The Tappan brothers were early supporters of the abolitionist cause as well as grand-nephews of the founder of America’s first abolitionist society, Benjamin Franklin. They were despised in the South, so much so that a South Carolina plantation owner had put up a $100,000 bounty, for the delivery of the bodies of Lewis and Arthur Tappan to any slave state.

  But while both brothers believed strongly in the cause and worked tirelessly toward spreading its doctrine, it was Lewis who embodied abolition – word, deed, and spirit. He was righteous indignation incarnate, a man who not only walked his talk, but took every opportunity to share his beliefs with the world. Lewis had formed a committee to raise the money for Prudence Crandall’s defense. He had paid to send several promising young black men to Oberlin College, the only American college of the day that accepted black students. He had also once offered $5,000 to the American Bible Society to print 5,000 Bibles and distribute them to blacks across the country. The American Bible Society politely refused.

  Lewis Tappan believed that slavery was wrong on moral terms, an affront to God Almighty, and that anyone who permitted slavery or racial prejudice to occur without protest sinned as greatly as those who embraced the evils of oppression. He believed that the most important thing in a marriage was not social station, love, or commercial opportunity, but rather adherence to a Christian religion. As a result he saw nothing wrong with the intermarrying between races so long as both partners were confirmed in their belief in Jesus Christ.

  “In fact,” he once said, “if religious unity could be spread throughout the world and intermarrying between races accepted, then, within a thousand years or so, the planet will become peopled with a single copper-colored race of human beings, and the whole issue of prejudice and oppression based on skin color will fade away forever.”

  Regardless of a person’s beliefs about slavery, this last statement was enough for many people to label Lewis Tappan as thoroughly unbalanced and uncivilized, as well as dangerous. He received threats on his life regularly, and had more than a few times been confronted by angry men or surly mobs bent on doing him harm. But while Arthur was reputed to carry a small revolver in his vest pocket, Lewis claimed that he ventured out each day, only armed with his Bible, which he kept in a pocket close to his heart.

  Simeon Jocelyn’s letter asking for help from both Tappan brothers had reached Lewis in New York. The Tappans were good friends with Jocelyn, a white pastor of an all-black church in New Haven. However, Arthur was abroad on a business trip to England and wouldn’t be back for nearly six months. Lewis immediately wrote his brother to brief him on the events and then took the next available train to New Haven.

  And now, on the third day of September, 1839, he stood speaking to the crowd outside of the New Haven County jail. While he spoke, the men surrounding him, Simeon Jocelyn, The Emancipator’s editor, Joshua Leavitt, and nearly a dozen other men who had become members of his newly formed Amistad Committee, watched the agitated spectators and fidgeted nervously.

  “I can feel your rage at the injustice that is being perpetrated here, my friends,” Tappan continued. “That is why we are here. I and these gentlemen with me have formed a committee, the Amistad Committee, to ensure that the devilish machinations from the morally bankrupt presidential administration in Washington will not impede a just outcome for these poor African souls.”

  This hit another nerve with the crowd, provoking more outcries. Connecticut was a Democratic state and Van Buren enjoyed strong support among most of its citizens. Tappan waited, smiling, until the yelling subsided.

  “I’m glad you share my displeasure with Mr. Van Buren. Please feel free to show how much by making a donation to the Africans’ defense through our committee. Thank you, and good day.”

  Two militiamen ushered Tappan and his entourage into the jail through a door, away from the howling
crowd. Once inside, he was allowed to enter the cells and meet with all the tribesmen, including Singbe and the three girls. He stayed nearly three hours and spoke at length with the divinity students and faculty from Yale. After leaving, he accompanied Jocelyn to Roger Baldwin’s office to discuss the Amistads’ defense.

  Forsyth had seen enough. Daily reports of the Amistads had run on the front page of virtually every major newspaper in the country. Reporters had descended on New Haven like a plague of flies, gobbling up and spitting out every available detail. More troubling was that many Northern papers were canonizing the rebel leader Joseph Cinqué. The New York Tribune called him “a bold and courageous man reminiscent of Othello, proud, intelligent-looking, and of noble bearing.” The Boston Light declared, “Cinqué is obviously a chief whose veins are filled with royal blood. He has the mannerisms and appeal of all great leaders.” And the Philadelphia Daily Sunbeam stated, “Joseph Cinqué is definitely superior to others of his race. He has an air of intelligence and destiny about him, he is of calm humor and great pride. It is obvious that he was a prince or a king of his own tribe.” Forsyth was heartened to see that some of the editors still had sense, though. The New York Herald said Cinqué was “as miserably ignorant and brutalized as the rest of them, a rubber-lipped, sullen-looking negro not half as intelligent-looking as every third black you meet on the docks of New York.” The New York Daily Express said he and the other Amistads were “hardly above the apes and monkeys of their own country.” The Southern papers concentrated on the fact that the blacks, whether Africans or not, were seized on a Spanish ship and should be tried under Spanish law; there was little or no mention of Cinqué or any of the other captives as being in any way remarkable.

  In truth, however, Forsyth did not care one way or the other about the printed appraisals of this Cinqué or any of the other blacks. His concern was focused on the fact that the Amistads had captured the imagination of the country. That, and the fact that no one seemed to be denying that they were in fact Africans. With a trial scheduled, there seemed to be no way to avoid public discussion regarding the slaves, and more important, slavery. And now Lewis Tappan – Lewis Tappan! – and his horde of lunatic abolitionists had descended upon the scene, conjuring up a defense team that would no doubt do all they could to prolong the judicial proceedings for as long as possible. If something was not done, this whole affair could drag on well into the fall, giving the journalists and the Whigs plenty more fodder for pot shots at the Van Buren Administration.