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Joseph Cinque, painted from life by Nathaniel Jocelyn in New Haven
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Yale’s Role in the Amistad Rescue The “Amistad” incident, dramatized in Steven Spielberg’s recent movie, is familiar to most New Haveners. In 1839, West Africans illegally sold into slavery in Cuba were put on the schooner “Amistad” to be shipped to a port on the other side of that island. While at sea, they overpowered their captors and tried to return to Africa, but through a series of mishaps ended up off the coast of Long Island, where they were taken into custody by a revenue cutter. They were brought to the New Haven jail, and held for trial.
The Spanish government demanded the Africans’ return to their so-called owners, and President Van Buren was all too eager to comply. Fortunately, abolitionists became interested in the case.
“Yale, Slavery and Abolition” concedes that Yale had a “minor” role in obtaining the captives’ release, but it is hard to imagine how the college could have had a greater part. Joshua Leavitt, a member of the original “Amistad Committee” that obtained legal representation for the Africans, was a graduate of Yale. Though the prosecution team was composed of Yale men, so was the entire defense team.1
Another Yale man, Josiah Willard Gibbs (Professor of Sacred Literature at the college, and one of Timothy Dwight’s students) weakened the prosecution’s case by locating an interpreter for the Africans so that their story could be told in court.2 Roger Sherman Baldwin (Yale, 1811), the key lawyer for the defense, was patriot Roger Sherman’s grandson and came from a family with a tradition of antislavery activism stretching back to 1773.3
Though the slavery report implies that the Yale men supporting the captives were simply interested in getting rid of them by sending them back to their native land, the historical record clearly shows otherwise. George E. Day, a Yale Divinity instructor, supervised the captives’ education, and Divinity students taught them English and the Bible. A couple of Yale students gave as much as five hours a day between them to working and talking with the Africans, and at least one, Benjamin Griswold (Yale Div., 1841) became a missionary in Africa partly because of his experience with them. Several Yale graduates, including Thomas H. Gallaudet (Yale, 1805), Leonard Bacon (Yale, 1820), worked to liberate the captives.4
Though it was John Quincy Adams’s successful argument before the U. S. Supreme Court that finally freed the Amistad victims, Yale men protected them and paved the way for their release.
Partly because of his work on behalf of the Amistad captives, Roger Sherman Baldwin was elected governor of Connecticut in 1844. In an address to the legislature he urged enfranchisement for African Americans, and a law to restrict slave catching in the state, but neither proposal was approved.5
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1. Franklin B. Dexter, Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College with Annals of the College History, (New York, H. Holt and company, 1885-1912), v. 6, pp. 673-678.
2. Clifton H. Johnson, “The Amistad Case and its Consequences in U. S. History.” Journal of The New Haven Colony Historical Society 36:2 (Spring 1990), pp. 3-22.
3. Samuel W. S. Dutton, An Address at the Funeral of Hon. Roger Sherman Baldwin February 23, 1863, (New Haven, Thomas J. Stafford, 1863), pp. 7-8.
4. African Repository and Colonial Journal, 15 (November 1839), pp. 317-318; American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Missionary Herald 39:12 (December 1843), p. 449; Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad (New York, Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 81, passim; http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/librar
5. Robert Austin Warner, New Haven Negroes A Social History, (New York, Arno Press, 1969), p. 95.
© 2002 The Yale Standard Committee
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