In 1839 a correspondent of the ‘proslavery’ New York Morning Herald noted that
These blacks have created a greater excitement in Connecticut than any event that has occurred there since the close of the last century. Every kind of engine is set in motion to create a feeling of sympathy and an excitement in their favour; the parsons preach about them, the men talk about them, the ladies give tea parties and discuss their chivalry, heroism, sufferings, thews and sinews, over their souchong. (p. 111)
The ‘blacks’ in question were the mutineers from the Amistad, who had taken control of the ship and attempted it to sail it back to the west coast of Africa. While imprisoned in a New Haven jail they had become, as the correspondent complained, both a major spectacle and a focal abolitionist cause.
In The Amistad rebellion, Marcus Rediker offers a powerful re-telling of the story of the slave revolt aboard the ship and the events that it instigated. In many ways the book is a companion volume to his account in The slave ship; as Rediker notes, the Amistad rebellion ‘stood out as one of the very few successful uprisings ever to take place aboard a slaving vessel’ and he wanted to explore ‘this hopeful counterpoint to a gruesome history’ (p. 239). He develops key arguments from The slave ship through this account, most notably through his attention to the ways in which ‘fictive kinship’ was produced by slaves brought together in the horrific conditions of the ‘middle passage’ (see Rediker, 2007).Footnote 1 By this means, the book contributes to a re-imagining of the ‘middle passage’ as a site of ongoing struggles which were generative of new relations and identities. The book is also part of collective attempts to think about the importance of the diverse experiences of mutiny in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, offering a ‘fresh, sea-centred way of seeing the confluence between space, agency and political economy’.Footnote 2
The first chapter of the book traces the origins of the mutineers, positioning them in terms of their West African/Sierra Leonean roots using material from trial records and testimonies by the mutineers themselves. This is particularly useful for asserting the dynamic trajectories of the mutineers and giving a sense of the importance of West African political cultures and traditions of resistance in shaping the mutiny and subsequent events. It also notes their transportation across the Atlantic ‘aboard the Portuguese or Brazilian slave ship Teçora’ (p. 19) before being transferred to the Amistad in Cuba. A second chapter engages with the rebellion itself, reconstructing the mutiny and following the mutineers’ attempts to sail and navigate the vessel. In Chapter 3, Rediker explores the movement which developed around the ‘mutineers’ on their landing in the US. The fourth chapter, ‘Jail’, investigates the time of the Amistad Africans in the New Haven jail, which Rediker describes as ‘the latest link in a transatlantic chain of incarceration’ (p. 122).
Chapter 5 traces the ways in which, through their time in prison, the Africans constructed a ‘new cultural and political entity’ of the ‘Mendi People’, and also interrogates the politics of representation of the mutineers. The sixth chapter, ‘Freedom’, charts their final victory when a court found that ‘these negroes were never the lawful slaves’ of José Ruiz or Pedro Montes (p. 190). The chapter also includes fascinating material on debates about the ‘spectacularization’ of the Africans in shows put on to raise money for their return to Sierra Leone and on the tensions between missionaries and the Africans on their return to Africa. The concluding chapter explores some of the ‘reverberations’ of the mutiny, contending that ‘the Amistad Africans had become transoceanic symbols of insurrection against bondage’ (p. 227).
One of the most significant contributions of the book is to emerging debates and work on what Rediker describes here as ‘abolitionism from below’ (p. 104). As in The slave ship, he traces the importance of seafarers’ knowledge of different aspects of the slave trade in shaping abolitionists’ understandings of the actual experience and dynamics of slavery. There is a particular focus here on the ways in which the stories of the Amistad mutineers became known, circulated, and translated. Rediker recovers the role of two seafarers from the New York waterfront, Charles Pratt and James Covey, whose linguistic skills and knowledge of Mende enabled the ‘mostly Mende-speaking Amistad Africans’ to deliver ‘a full, detailed version of what happened aboard the “long, low, black schooner”’ (p. 136). In this regard, Rediker's account effectively traces some of the solidarities and also the fraught intersections and exchanges which resulted as middle-class white abolitionists, seafarers such as Pratt and Covey, and the Amistad mutineers mobilized together.
Rediker teases out the diverse and multifaceted dynamics at stake in the formation of such solidarities. There are points, however, where I felt that some of these dynamics could have been explored in more depth, especially in relation to their final trial. Thus Rediker asks ‘what role had the Africans played in their own legal defense?’ (p. 193). He notes how the trial rested on intersections between the legal counsels of Roger Baldwin and John Quincey Adams – not on interpreters such as Pratt and Covey or the mutineers. He concludes that, while Baldwin and Adams brought their own perspective, skills, and stature to bear on the case’ they ‘did say, by and large, what the “Mendi People” had wanted them to say’ (p. 193). It would, however, have been useful to engage in more depth with the dynamics through which different narratives were co-produced in the inhospitable environment of the court room. Elsewhere in the book Rediker gives a vivid sense of how the Amistad Africans transformed court-room spaces with a ‘kind of guerrilla theater’. Thus he notes that, ‘to make real the horrors of life below deck’, Cinqué, one of the leaders of the mutineers, sat on the ‘floor, acting out how they had been manacled, and shackled, their heads stooped low because there was so little room’ (p. 59).
The legal debates over whether the Amistad Africans were ‘legally held’ as slaves emphasize that central to the tale of the Amistad mutiny is a set of debates about the geopolitics of the ‘illegal’ slave trade. This post-Abolition slave trade, increasingly seen as more important in scale and scope than has hitherto been acknowledged, is thus a key context for the book. As Rediker argues ‘the trade thrived illegally, much of it in the 1830s beneath the American stars and stripes’, as the US ‘refused to sign an agreement that allowed British naval captains to inspect their vessels’ (p. 49). Engaging with this ‘hidden Atlantic’ is fundamental to reconstructing the story of the Amistad rebellion. New archival material unearthed by Michael Zeuske in Cuban archives suggests that there may well be further dimensions to the negotiation of the geopolitics of the illegal slave trade than is explored here. In particular, scant details exist of the slave ship Teçora, on which the mutineers are said to have made the Atlantic crossing. Zeuske goes so far as to suggest that ‘US writers, merchants, and lawyers in the days of the Amistad trials’ may have fashioned a myth of a ship named the Teçora to shift responsibility for ‘the crime of enslavement and contraband trade from Africa’ to ‘the Spaniards and to a never-located “Portuguese” ship and captain’.Footnote 3
Rediker notes that the memory of the Amistad waned in the wake of the American Civil War and ‘saw no major revival until new social movements’ such as the civil rights and black power movements ‘exploded in the 1960s and 1970s’ (p. 4). This book, with its focus on the role, agency, and political cultures of the African mutineers aboard the Amistad, and its assertion of innovative forms of ‘abolitionism from below’ forged in solidarity with the mutineers, makes a powerful contribution to the ‘history from below’ tradition. Rediker's focus on such ‘abolitionism from below’ demonstrates the continued ability of this tradition to disrupt the terms of academic knowledge and to challenge understandings of global social relations in both the past and the present.
