White supremacists were quick, when the movie was first released, to link Steven Spielberg's Jewishness with the "anti-white" bias of the story (despite the fact that the focus is mainly upon three whites, Lewis Tappan and Roger Sherman Baldwin, and ex-president John Quincy Adams, who together secured their release). Another frequently repeated charge is that Saygbe, the leader of the mutineers, himself became a slaver when he returned home to Sierra Leone, repeated by the distinguished American historian, Samuel Eliot Morrison, in his Oxford History of the American People (Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 520: "The ironic epilogue is that Cinqué, once home, set himself up as a slave trader." This is a calumny based on a confrontation Saygbe had with the missionaries who conducted him home, who complained that many of the returned slaves "had rushed into their former licentious habits". In other words, they had practised polygamy. In fact, slaving was not endemic among the Mende of Sierra Leone, though it was practised to the north of the country. The Mandingo king Sao, from what is now Liberia, terrorised an area 300 miles from his home; his warriors went into battle with the cry, "Stand and you are a slave; run and you are a corpse". As a Muslim, Sao (King Boatswain to the white slavers), believed all non-Islamic Africans were infidels, and therefore ripe pickings to be enslaved. It is interesting that Saygbe and his compatriots pretended to be Mandigo when they were first brought to USA, since they were afraid that if they gave their true homeland other slavers might track down their families and enslave them also. Spielberg's movie hints at - but does not emphasise - John Quincy Adams' opposition to the Abolitionist cause. In fact, it was Quincy Adams who was directly responsible for the return to slavery in the United States of 37 Africans who had escaped from the slaveship Antelope in 1820. A similar court case to the Amistad ruled that 120 of 281 escaped Africans should be returned to Africa, and they were, but Adams cancelled a court-ordered bond that required 37 others to be removed from the United States, and refused to pay an $11,700 bond to purchase their freedom (the remainder died in captivity while the case dragged on). Relationships between Adams and the Abolitonists were not good: he called them fanatics, and their newspapers "inflammatory"; they described him as "the madman of Massachusetts". The freed slaves from the Amistad clubbed together to give him a Bible as a token of their thanks, but he refused to meet them to accept it. However, he did receive the Bible and it was displayed for many years in the Adams National Historic Site, in Quincy, Massachusettes, from which it was stolen in November 1996, but returned two years later.
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David Pesci ISBN: 0 7490 0387 1 £7.99 paperback Allison & Busby 360pp Historical Fiction |
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It is difficult to understand what purpose is served by another fictionalised version of the Amistad story. William Owens' Black Mutiny (see below) is the recognised classic account, which inspired the Spielberg movie, which in its turn also inspired a number of spin-off books. What we lack, in fact, are factual accounts which set the events in the setting of their time, that do not skate over uncomfortable issues like John Quincy Adams' hostility to the Abolitionists, and the fact that the favourable court verdict was not a rejection of slavery as such, but a technical knock-out based on the minutiae of the treaties between USA and Spain. Pesci's account is as good as any of its predecessors, but not in any way superior to them. The cover quotes a New York Times verdict - "Amistad reads like a thriller" - but despite one or two melodramatic touches like the opening image of Saygbe (called Singbe throughout the narrative) being woken by the dead hand of a boy's corpse falling on his face in the slaveship hold, it is actually rather leaden in its story-telling. Though the Antelope incident is referred to briefly, there is no reference to the disreputable part John Quincy Adams played in the affair, and indeed he is depicted as a secret sympathiser with the slaves, sending sub rosa legal advice to their attorneys signed, (not so cryptically, since he also signs other communications in the same handwriting with his real name), "A Friend". Hence it makes no reference to the notorious Bible incident, when he refused to meet with the successful litigants, and has him shaking Sagbe's hand, though in fact it's doubtful that they ever met one-to-one. Adams' address to the Supreme Court is paraphrased more accurately than the totally irrelevant speech in the movie, addressing the legal issues rather than the somewhat histrionic Perry Mason-style advocacy which owes more to other movies, like Orson Welles' Clarence Darrow performance in Compulsion, than to actual American judicial process, as anyone who has sat through the O.J. Simpson and Bill Clinton hearings will be aware. The book contradicts the Spielberg narrative in at least one respect; the film says at the end that his wife and children had disappeared when he returned home, but this novel reunites them on the last page. The story has some interesting dialogue when the erstwhile slaves debate in their cells the Abolitionist missionaries' attitudes to polygamy, but says nothing of the dispute Saygbe had with them on this very issue. And there is no African-American Morgan Freeman character, either in Pesci's book, or in reality; the defence was entirely in the hands of whites. Pesci is not so hard on the missionary Abolitionists as Spielberg, who come across in the movie as a rather dour, unappealing lot. But Pesci's description of the returned slaves throwing away their top hats and other articles of European clothing on their return to Africa seems a little unlikely; more probably, they'd be retained as marks of prestige. Additional reading: United States Supreme Court, United States Reports, Volume 38-42 Slavery: A Collection of Pamphlets in the New York Public Library, "Circuit Court of the United States:District of Connecticut" Reel #13. A History of the Amistad ,compiled by John Barber, 1840; also reprinted by Arno Press, 1969. Christopher Martin: The Amistad Affair ,1970. Argument of John Quincy Adams before the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case of the United States, appellants,vs. Cinque, and others, Africans, captured in the Schooner Amistad. Reprinted by Negro University Press, 1969, A Division of Greenwood Publishing Corp., New York. The Diary of John Quincy Adams 1790-1845 . Edited by Allen Nevins, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1951. Bennett Champ.Clark: John Quincy Adams - "Old Man Eloquent" , Little, Brown, and Company, 1932. Useful linksOther books you can order: |
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Black Mutiny - The Revolt on the Schooner Amistad, |
Amistad : A Long Road to Freedom, |
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