The Amistad

http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/amistad/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSx9tjj_jyYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvhKeJ6m3rY

SLAVERY in CONNECTICUT

• Slaves were mentioned in Hartford from 1639 and in New Haven from 1644.

• Connecticut citizens did not participate directly in the slave trade in the late 17th century (at least that's what the colonial governor assured the British Committee for Trade and Foreign Plantations) - But the governor's report in 1680 implied that Massachusetts merchants were bringing in three or four black slaves a year from Barbados.

• Since the average price of a black slave in Connecticut was £22 that year and the rate in Massachusetts was £10 to £20, this was a worthwhile venture for a Boston slaver.

• Even in the early 1700s, however, direct slave imports to Connecticut were considered too few to be worth the trouble of taxing.

• The governor reported only 110 white and black servants in Connecticut in 1709.

• In 1730, the colony had a black population of 700, out of a total enumeration of 38,000.

The American Revolution

• Yet on the eve of the Revolution, Connecticut had the largest number of slaves (6,464) in New England.

• Jackson Turner Main, surveying Connecticut estate inventories, found that in 1700 one in 10 inventories included slaves, rising to one in 4 on the eve of the Revolution.

• Between 1756 and 1774, the proportion of slave to free in Connecticut increased by 40 percent - All the principal families of Norwich, Hartford, and New Haven were said to have one or two slaves - By 1774, half of all the ministers, lawyers, and public officials owned slaves, and a third of all the doctors.

• But Connecticut's large slave population apparently was based in the middle class.

• More people had the opportunity to own slaves than in Massachusetts or Rhode Island, so more did so.

• "The greater prosperity of Connecticut's inhabitants and their frugal and industrious habits were responsible for this situation. The wealth of the colony was also more equally distributed, with few extremes of riches or poverty.”

Discrimination in CT• Discrimination against free blacks was more severe in Connecticut than in other

New England colonies.

• Their lives were strongly proscribed even before they became numerous.

• In 1690, the colony forbade blacks and Indians to be on the streets after 9 p.m. It also forbid black "servants" to wander beyond the limits of the towns or places where they belonged without a ticket or pass from their masters or the authorities.

• A law of 1708, citing frequent fights between slaves and whites, imposed a minimum penalty of 30 lashes on any black who disturbed the peace or who attempted to strike a white person.

• Even speech was subject to control. By a 1730 law, and black, Indian, or mulatto slave "who uttered or published, about any white person, words which would be actionable if uttered by a free white was, upon conviction before any one assistant or justice of the peace, to be whipped with forty lashes."

United States v. The Amistad• United States v. Libellants and Claimants of the Schooner Amistad, 40 U.S.

518 (1841), was a United States Supreme Court case resulting from the rebellion of Africans on board the Spanish schooner La Amistad in 1839.

• It was an unusual "freedom suit" which involved international issues and parties, as well as United States law.

• The rebellion broke out when the schooner, traveling along the coast of Cuba, was taken over by a group of captives who had earlier been kidnapped in Africa and illegally sold into slavery.

• The Africans were later apprehended on the vessel near Long Island, New York, by the United States Revenue Cutter Service and taken into custody. The ensuing, widely publicized court cases in the United States helped the abolitionist movement.

• In 1840, a federal trial court found that the initial transport of the Africans across the Atlantic (which did not involve La Amistad) had been illegal, because the international slave trade had been abolished, and the captives were thus not legally slaves but free.

• Given that they were illegally confined, the Africans were entitled to take whatever legal measures necessary to secure their freedom, including the use of force.

• After the US Supreme Court affirmed this finding on March 9, 1841, supporters arranged transportation for the Africans back to Africa in 1842. The case influenced numerous succeeding laws in the United States

Background

• In February of 1839, Portuguese slave hunters abducted a large group of Africans from Sierra Leone and shipped them to Havana, Cuba, a center for the slave trade.

• This abduction violated all of the treaties then in existence - Fifty-three Africans were purchased by two Spanish planters and put aboard the Cuban schooner Amistad for shipment to a Caribbean plantation.

• On July 1, 1839, the Africans seized the ship, killed the captain and the cook, and ordered the planters to sail to Africa.

• On August 24, 1839, the Amistad was seized off Long Island, NY, by the U.S. brig Washington.

• The planters were freed and the Africans were imprisoned in New Haven, CT, on charges of murder.

• Although the murder charges were dismissed, the Africans continued to be held in confinement as the focus of the case turned to salvage claims and property rights.

• President Van Buren was in favor of extraditing the Africans to Cuba.

• However, abolitionists in the North opposed extradition and raised money to defend the Africans.

• Claims to the Africans by the planters, the government of Spain, and the captain of the brig led the case to trial in the Federal District Court in Connecticut.

• The court ruled that the case fell within Federal jurisdiction and that the claims to the Africans as property were not legitimate because they were illegally held as slaves.

John Quincy Adams

• The case went to the Supreme Court in January 1841, and former President John Quincy Adams argued the defendants' case.

• Adams defended the right of the accused to fight to regain their freedom.

• The Supreme Court decided in favor of the Africans, and 35 of them were returned to their homeland.

• The others died at sea or in prison while awaiting trial.

Law Suits Filed

• Lt Thomas R. Gedney filed a libel (a lawsuit in admiralty law) for the African captives and cargo on board La Amistad as property seized on the high seas.

• Henry Green and Pelatiah Fordham filed a libel for salvage, claiming that they had been the first to discover La Amistad.

• José Ruiz and Pedro Montez filed libels requesting that their so-called "slaves" and cargo be returned to them.

• The Office of the United States Attorney for the Connecticut District, representing the Spanish Government, libelled that the so-called "slaves", cargo, and vessel be returned to Spain as its property.

• Antonio Vega, vice-consul of Spain, libelled for "the slave Antonio," on the grounds that this man was his property.

• The Africans denied that they were slaves or property, nor that the court could return them to the control of the government of Spain.

• José Antonio Tellincas, with Aspe and Laca, claimed goods on board La Amistad.

SLAVERY in MASSACHUSETTS http://www.slavenorth.com/massachusetts.htm

• Massachusetts was the first slave-holding colony in New England, though the exact beginning of black slavery in what became Massachusetts cannot be dated exactly.

• Slavery there is said to have predated the settlement of Massachusetts Bay colony in 1629, and circumstantial evidence gives a date of 1624-1629 for the first slaves.

• "Samuel Maverick, apparently New England's first slaveholder, arrived in Massachusetts in 1624 and, according to [John Gorham] Palfrey, owned two Negroes before John Winthrop, who later became governor of the colony, arrived in 1630."

The Puritans

• The Puritans regarded themselves as God's Elect, and so they had no difficulty with slavery, which had the sanction of the Law of the God of Israel.

• The Calvinist doctrine of predestination easily supported the Puritans in a position that blacks were a people cursed and condemned by God to serve whites.

• Cotton Mather told blacks they were the "miserable children of Adam and Noah," for whom slavery had been ordained as a punishment.

• The first certain reference to African slavery is in connection with the bloody Pequot War in 1637 - of central Connecticut

• The Desire (ship) arrived in Massachusetts in 1638, after exchanging its cargo, according to (John) Winthrop, loaded with "Salt, cotton, tobacco and Negroes."

• A Massachusetts law of 1641 specifically linked slavery to Biblical authority, and established for slaves the set of rules "which the law of God, established in Israel concerning such people, doth morally require.”

Slavery Has Officially Begun in New England• "Such exchanges became routine during subsequent Indian wars, for the danger of

keeping revengeful warriors in the colony far outweighed the value of their labor.“ - In 1646, this became the official policy of the New England Confederation.

• Most, if not all, of the limited 17th century New England slave trade was in the hands of Massachusetts.

• Boston merchants made New England's first attempt at direct import of slaves from West Africa to the West Indies in 1644, but though the venture was partially successful, it was premature because the big chartered companies still held monopoly on the Gold Coast and Guinea.

• By 1676, however, Boston ships had pioneered a slave trade to Madagascar, and they were selling Africans Virginians by 1678.

• Massachusetts merchants and ships were supplying slaves to Connecticut by 1680 and Rhode Island by 1696.

• The break-up of the monopolies and the defeat of the Dutch opened the way for New England's aggressive pursuit of the slave trade in the early 1700s.

• At the same time, the expansion of New England industries created a shortage of labor, which slaves filled.

• From fewer than 200 slaves in 1676, and 550 in 1708, the Massachusetts slave population jumped to about 2,000 in 1715.

• It reached its largest percentage of the total population between 1755 and 1764, when it stood at around 2.2 percent.

• The slaves concentrated in the industrial and seaside towns, however, and Boston was about 10 percent black in 1752.

ANTI-MISCEGENATION

• The colony, along with Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland, punished both races for miscegenation.

• But Old Testament abhorrence of "mixed natures" may help explain why the Massachusetts statue was more severe than that of any other colony on the continent.

• The Massachusetts law against mixed marriage or sexual relations between the races [Massachusetts Acts and Resolves, I, 578], dating to 1705, was passed "for the better preventing of a spurious and mixt issue."

• It subjected a black man who slept with a white woman to being sold out of the province (likely to the cruel plantations of the West Indies).

• Both were to be flogged, and the woman bound out to service to support any children resulting from the illicit union.

• In cases involving a white man and a black woman, both were to be flogged, the man fined £5 and held liable for support of any children, and the woman to be sold out of the province.

Slavery in the United States

• The American Revolution set the northern states on the road to abolition.

• A group of Quakers in Philadelphia organized an antislavery society in 1775.

• In 1780, Pennsylvania began the process of emancipating the slaves within its borders.

• The next year, a court in Massachusetts found slavery incompatible with the new state constitution and declared it abolished.

• In 1784, New Hampshire also ended slavery, while Connecticut and Rhode Island instituted programs for the gradual emancipation of their slaves.

EMANCIPATION in MASSACHUSETTS

• The Massachusetts Legislature in 1777 tabled a proposal for gradual emancipation.

• The 1778 draft constitution legally recognized slavery and banned free blacks from voting.

• It was rejected at the polls, for other reasons.

• The more liberal state constitution approved two years later contained a bill of rights that declared "all men are born free and equal, and have ... the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberty."

"the Quock Walker Case”

• This provided the basis for abolishing slavery in Massachusetts, but it clearly was not the intent of the Legislature to do so

• .Popular sentiment and the courts were pro-abolition, however. And it was a 1783 judicial decision, interpreting the wording of the 1780 constitution, that brought slavery to an end in Massachusetts.

• • Collectively known as "the Quock Walker case," it was actually

a bundle of judicial actions concerning a Massachusetts slave known as Quock Walker (the name is variously spelled).

SLAVERY in RHODE ISLAND

• Black slaves were in Rhode Island by 1652, and by the end of that century Rhode Island had become the only New England colony to use slaves for both labor and trade.

• After overtaking Boston by 1750, Newport and Bristol were the major slave markets in the American colonies.

• Slave-based economies existed in the Narragansett plantation family, the Middletown crop workers, and the indentured and slave craftsmen of Newport.

• Little Rhode Island generally had a smaller population of black slaves than its neighbors, Massachusetts and Connecticut, but with a very small white population as well, Rhode Island's blacks made up a higher percentage of the total population than elsewhere in New England.

• In the mid-18th century, Rhode Island had the highest proportion of slave-to-white of any colony in the North.

• This tended to make slave laws more severe in Rhode Island.

• As early as 1708, slaves outnumbered white indentured servants in the colony almost 8 to 1.

• The biggest increase in black population fell in the years from 1715 to 1755, which coincided with the industrial development of the colony and its emergence into the slave trade

• Commercial success bred a wealthy class that became a slave owning aristocracy. Rhode Island's black population tripled from 1715 to 1730, and almost tripled again by 1755.

• From 5.9% in 1708, black slaves rose to account for 11.5% of the colony's population by 1755.

• By 1774, Rhode Island's 3,761 blacks were the third highest total in New England.

• The white population had grown since mid-century, but the colony's slaves still made up 6.3% percent of the total population, almost twice as high as any other New England colony.

Rhode Island – most active in slavery

• Rhode Island, of course, was among the most active Northern colonies in importing slaves.

• Between 1709 and 1807, Rhode Island merchants sponsored at least 934 slaving voyages to the coast of Africa and carried an estimated 106,544 slaves to the New World.

• From 1732-64, Rhode Islanders sent annually 18 ships, bearing 1,800 hogsheads of rum, to Africa to trade for slaves, earning £40,000 annually.

• Newport, the colony's leading slave port, took an estimated 59,070 slaves to America before the Revolution.

• Bristol and Providence also prospered from it. In the years after the Revolution, Rhode Island merchants controlled between 60 and 90 percent of the American trade in African slaves.

• As a Rhode Island historian writes, "All together, 204 different Rhode Island citizens owned a share or more in a slave voyage at one time or another. It is evident that the involvement of R.I. citizens in the slave trade was widespread and abundant. For Rhode Islanders, slavery had provided a major new profit sector and an engine for trade in the West Indies." Slaves that were not auctioned off were put to work aboard merchant ships. By 1807, black seamen made up 21% of Newport crews.

• As a Rhode Island historian writes, "All together, 204 different Rhode Island citizens owned a share or more in a slave voyage at one time or another.

• It is evident that the involvement of R.I. citizens in the slave trade was widespread and abundant.

• For Rhode Islanders, slavery had provided a major new profit sector and an engine for trade in the West Indies."

• Slaves that were not auctioned off were put to work aboard merchant ships.

• By 1807, black seamen made up 21% of Newport crews.

The Legacy of Brown University• The Browns, one of the great mercantile families of colonial America, were Rhode

Island slave traders.

• At least six of them -- James and his brother Obadiah, and James's four sons, Nicholas, John, Joseph, and Moses -- ran one of the biggest slave-trading businesses in New England, and for more than half a century the family reaped huge profits from the slave trade.

• "When James Brown sent the Mary to Africa in 1736, he launched Providence into the Negro traffic and laid the foundation for the Brown fortune.

• From this year until 1790, the Browns played a commanding role in the New England slave trade.“

• Their donations to Rhode Island College were so generous that the name was changed to Brown University.

EMANCIPATION

During the Revolution, Quaker abolitionists and the powerful Newport shipping interest clashed over slavery.

In February 1784 the Legislature passed a compromise measure for gradual emancipation.

All children of slaves born after March 1 were to be "apprentices," the girls to become free at 18, the boys at 21.

As with other Northern instances of gradual emancipation, this gave slaveowners many years of service to recoup the cost of raising the children.

No slaves were emancipated outright.

The 1800 census listed 384 slaves, and the number fell gradually to 5 in 1840, after which slaves were no longer counted in the censuses for the state.

And, in an essential element of the 1784 compromise, the right of Rhode Island ship-owners to participate in the foreign slave trade was undisturbed.

Emancipation

• Legislation against slave-trading proved difficult to enforce in Rhode Island.

• John Brown, a merchant, state representative, and powerful slaveholder, was tried in 1796 for violating the federal Slave Trade Act of 1794, which prohibited ships destined to transport slaves to any foreign country from outfitting in American ports.

• He was found not guilty. The acquittal convinced many that the new legislation was useless against the wealthy and powerful.

• A year later, he saw his ship, the "Hope," confiscated for violations.

• As was the case throughout the North, Rhode Island, having ended slavery, also sought to make it difficult for blacks to remain in the state or move there.

• In the early 19th century, Rhode Island towns especially turned to the old New England custom of "warning out" strangers to purify themselves racially.

Emancipation

• The custom continued to have as a stated goal the removal of poor and undesirable strangers from a community.

• But blacks were increasingly its targets, out of proportion to their numbers and without regard to whether they were long-term residents or not.

• A study of Rhode Island records showed that only 5 percent of the transients warned out in the 1750s were identifiable as black - This rose sharply after the end of slavery, however- The figure was up to 22 percent by the 1790s, and 50 percent by 1800.

• Providence, after 1785, apparently made wholesale evictions of blacks who were deemed "liable to become chargeable."

• Yet of the records examined between 1782 and 1800, some 37 percent had been in the town five years or longer, and 26 percent had been there for 10 years or longer.

• Reports of the city's overseers of the poor from the early 19th century show no great disproportionate burden on taxpayers for care of indigent blacks.