A Nation Rising (13 page)

A native of the British colony of Sierra Leone, Segbe Pieh was kidnapped and taken aboard a Portuguese slaver sometime in late 1838 or early 1839. He had been chained by the neck in a slave coffle, and then marched to the coast, where he was thrown into the
hold of the
Tecorah
. Pieh then endured the dreaded Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean—weeks chained in a cramped, filthy hold with little to eat and death all around. Aboard the
Tecorah
were some 500 Africans, mostly women and children, chained in pairs, hands to feet, and forced to lie in a deck space less than four feet high. Perhaps one-third of them would not survive the journey; sickness and death rode the slave ships with the human cargo.

Arriving in Cuba, Pieh was spirited—aboard a small boat in the dark of night—into the Cuban jungle, where he would be transformed into a “ladino,” a legal, Spanish-speaking slave: that is, a slave born on or brought to the islands before the slave trade was outlawed.

The slaves' first home in the Americas was the barracoon, an oblong hut-like enclosure with no roof. It was both market and prison. David Turnbull, an outspoken British abolitionist, once described the large barracoons built in Havana as a showplace for the slave trade.
*
One enormous barracoon, located beneath the windows of the Spanish captain general of Cuba, held 1,500 slaves; another held 1,000. A railroad passed by these barracoons, and Spaniards on Cuba took visitors there as a “tourist attraction.”
⁶

Fed, clothed, their skin rubbed with oil to make it glisten, the slaves were prepared for sale. Pieh and the other contraband slaves were given false identity papers and European names. Although he
and most other Africans with him spoke no Spanish, Segbe Pieh became José Cinque (pronounced “sin-kway”). He could now be sold legally on the slave market.

A Spaniard named José Ruiz and his partner, Pedro Montéz, purchased Cinque for $450 in May 1839. They bought another forty-nine blacks, each slave fetching approximately the same amount, and then four children as well—three girls and a boy, the oldest of whom was nine. From the slave market in Havana, these illegally acquired, but seemingly legal, slaves were taken aboard a small, sleek two-masted Baltimore-built schooner called
Amistad
(“friendship” in Spanish). All of the Spaniards—captain, crew, and Ruiz and Montéz—knew they were breaking the law. But with proper papers for their “legal” slaves, they were unworried.

In June 1839, the
Amistad
set sail from Havana for the Cuban port of Principe. Its fifty-four Africans, all captured by Portuguese in Africa but bearing papers as legal slaves, were bound for another slave market.

But the
Amistad
never reached Principe. On the fourth day out of port, led by Cinque, who used a nail to remove his irons, a group of the captives rose up. With cane-cutting tools stored on board the ship, the mutineers killed the ship's captain and a cook. But Cinque spared the lives of his “owners,” Montéz and Ruiz, on their promise to sail the ship back to Africa. For two months, the Spaniards played a game of sailing east toward Africa by day but then sailing north and west under cover of darkness, hoping to eventually reach an American slave state. Wind and currents took them farther north, however, until they reached land off Montauk Point on the eastern coast of Long Island, New York, where Lieutenant Thomas
Gedney of the U.S. Navy brig
Washington
boarded the ship. The two Spaniards immediately informed the American officer that the Africans were murderous pirates.

Gedney had the
Amistad
towed into the port of New London, Connecticut, where the ship and its human cargo were to become part of an elaborate debate and controversy. American abolitionists wanted the men freed; the Spanish government, acting on behalf of Montéz and Ruiz, claimed that the Africans were property and belonged to the Spaniards. The Van Buren administration agreed. But under naval law, Lieutenant Gedney claimed that he had the right of salvage and that the ship was his.

While the African men were held in a prison in New London, Connecticut, abolitionists came to their aid. Having become symbols of the abolitionist cause, the Africans—none of whom could speak English or Spanish—received legal advice from a sympathetic attorney provided and paid for by abolitionist leaders. Suing for their freedom, their attorneys claimed that they were enslaved illegally. To everyone's shock, a local judge agreed. President Van Buren, seeking to dampen southerners' anger and the Spaniards' hostility, pressed his federal attorney to take the matter to the Supreme Court. There, the former president John Quincy Adams, who had returned to the House of Representatives and was an outspoken abolitionist, argued the Africans' case. In an impassioned three-hour speech, Adams insisted that the African captives had never been slaves and that their revolt was similar to that of the American cause in 1776. In a major victory for abolition, the Supreme Court ruled six to one in favor of the Africans. They were freed and eventually
returned to Africa, educated in English and converted to Christianity.
⁷

 

L
IKE THE MORE
famous
Amistad
mutiny, the slave insurrection on board the
Creole
would also end up in an American court. The
Creole
case would ultimately be argued in a New Orleans courtroom and would involve insurance policies. As in the case of the
Amistad
, the
Creole
's “cargo” was not returned. Both cases created an international diplomatic crisis for the United States. Also, both cases provided ammunition for the increasingly vocal and politically powerful abolitionists of America—as well as their even more powerful and more vocal opponents. Most of all, both cases underscored the great fear that existed in America in the early nineteenth century—the fear of armed blacks fighting to the death for their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness; murdering whites without mercy; and getting away with it.

 

T
HE FEAR OF
violent slave insurrections in America was not new. In spite of the ringing words in the Declaration that men had the right to “abolish” the government, those words did not apply to blacks—slave or free. America was deathly afraid of armed black men. This was true in the eighteenth century, when George Washington was reluctant to allow blacks to serve in the Continental Army. It was even truer in the early nineteenth century.

These fears were not imaginary. There had been scattered slave
revolts in colonial America, as early as 1711 in New York, which had a large slave population. In 1741, just the fear of a rumored slave revolt had created a panic, and a crushing reign of terror was brought down on New York's slaves. Largely on the basis of unconfirmed rumors of a rebellion, dozens of slaves were tortured and executed. As the historian Jill Lepore of Harvard records in
New York Burning
, “Nearly two hundred slaves were suspected of conspiring to burn every building and murder every white. Tried and convicted before the colony's Supreme Court, thirteen black men were burned at the stake. Seventeen more were hanged, two of their dead bodies chained to posts not far from the Negroes Burial Ground, left to bloat and rot. One jailed man cut his own throat. Another eighty-four men and women were sold into yet more miserable bone-crushing slavery in the Caribbean…—‘Bonfires of the Negros [
sic
],' one colonist called it.”
⁸

But localized rumors of slave rebellions and black uprisings were small concerns when set against the reality of what almost every white American—slaveholder or not—feared most. This fear had a name that was well known among many of America's slaves: General Toussaint-Louverture, leader of the slave rebellion on the island of Saint Domingue.

It is quite astonishing that many Americans still grow up never having heard of Toussaint, unaware that Haiti, the nation that became the second independent republic in the western hemisphere, was created by former slaves. As the eighteenth century ended and the nineteenth began, Toussaint's ferocious legacy and the fearsome events on the island that Columbus once named “Hispaniola” had an enormous impact on the future of America.

In December 1791, a wave of rebellion had swept across Saint Domingue, then in French hands.
*
Inspired by both the American and the French revolutions, this rebellion united Saint Domingue's underclass—the many thousands of black slaves, along with the island's mixed-race mulattoes (from a Spanish word meaning “young mule”). Although technically free, most of Saint Domingue's mulattoes were second-class citizens who joined in the slave revolt against the white rulers. Emerging as their leader was a former coachman named Toussaint who soon adopted the nickname Louverture—“the opening.” By 1792, the uprising was so fierce and costly to France that the colony's governor was recalled to Paris and guillotined for his failure to end it.

Saint Domingue's revolution, like France's, was brutal and bloody, fought guerrilla-style, with no mercy shown to civilians. The savagery resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands on both sides, and eventually the exodus of thousands of white refugees fleeing the island for the safety of New Orleans, still in French hands, or elsewhere in the United States. In large part owing to the slave revolt on Saint Domingue, France freed all the slaves in its empire on February 4, 1794, a little-noted outgrowth of the French Revolution and its idealistic call for “Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!”

The British fretfully watched the carnage on Saint Domingue, from both London and their neighboring West Indies colonies. While happy that their longtime French rivals were suffering a catastrophe, they feared that the virus of slave rebellion might
spread to their other Caribbean possessions, such as Jamaica. When war between Britain and France broke out once more in 1793, the English decided to take advantage of the situation and crush Toussaint's slave rebellion before it could spread. At the same time, they were seizing an opportunity to gain a valuable possession in Saint Domingue, with its rich sugar fields where most of the slaves had been employed in the grueling and deadly work of harvesting cane.

But the British would get far more than they bargained for in the charismatic former coachman. As Adam Hochschild notes in
Bury the Chains
, his history of British emancipation, “Unknown to them, Toussaint L'Ouverture was rapidly turning illiterate rebel slaves into a formidable force. Roughly forty-seven years old when the fighting began, he was described as ‘small, frail, very ugly.' Nonetheless, like his similarly short contemporary, Napoleon, he had a powerfully commanding presence. He lived frugally and ate little. Everyone noticed his ever-moving eyes that missed nothing. Perhaps only in Leon Trotsky in the Russian Civil War has history seen another person with no military training or experience so quickly become a leader who could hold great armies at bay.”
⁹

For the British, the Saint Domingue campaign soon turned into a military disaster of epic proportions. Fighting in the tropical climate in their red wool uniforms, the British soldiers quickly fell prey to the heat and then tropical diseases. Yellow fever swept the ranks. The English suffered greater losses fighting on Saint Domingue than they had earlier in the American Revolution. Finally, they capitulated to the former slave, even establishing trading agreements with Toussaint in exchange for a promise that he would not invade Jamaica.

The proportions of the disaster were truly astonishing. “Of the more than twenty thousand British soldiers sent to St. Domingue during five years of fighting,” records Hochschild, “over 60 percent lay buried there. In October 1798, the Union Jack was lowered and Toussaint rode into Port-au-Prince and Cap François—on whose streets he had once driven as liveried coachman.”

These horrific casualties were part of the even greater losses the British suffered fighting in the wider West Indies campaign against France. Hochschild writes, “Of the nearly 89,000 white officers and enlisted men who served in the British Army in the West Indies from 1793 to 1801, over 45,000 died in battles or of wounds or disease.”
¹⁰

In 1801, following a power struggle within the ranks of the rebel armies on Saint Domingue, Toussaint proclaimed himself a military dictator. He was about to encounter another military dictator. In France, Napoléon Bonaparte had come to power in 1799, made peace with England in 1802, and decided to retake France's former island possession with an eye to making further conquests in North America.

But Napoléon failed to learn from the recent disastrous mistakes of the British. He dispatched his brother-in-law, Charles-Victor-Emanuel Leclerc, with the largest invasion fleet ever to sail out of France. His orders were to “annihilate the government of the blacks of St. Domingue.” London quietly acquiesced in Napoléon's invasion plans.

In 1802, the 35,000 French soldiers sent to the island would be greeted by guerrilla warfare and Toussaint's “scorched earth” defense of the island. Across Saint Domingue, drinking wells were
polluted with dead animals, and roads were blocked with stones. Some of Napoléon's finest fighting men were astonished at the intense resistance they encountered from the army of former slaves, fighting desperately to retain their hard-won freedom.

Writing from the island, where he would soon succumb to yellow fever, Leclerc warned the emperor, “You will have to exterminate all the blacks in the mountains, women as well as men. Except for the children under twelve. Wipe out half the population of the lowlands, and do not leave the colony a single black who has worn an epaulet…. Send 12,000 replacements immediately, and 10 million francs in cash, or St. Domingue is lost forever.”

When a long, devastating war of attrition finally reached a standoff, Toussaint agreed to a French offer to negotiate. But it was a ruse. His French opponents simply captured him, threw him into the hold of a ship, and sent him back to France. With Toussaint in chains, hundreds of his officers were similarly swept up and exiled to France. Toussaint died in a French cell on April 7, 1803, ten months after he was taken prisoner.