What Hath God Wrought (77 page)

VIII

Sengbe Pieh, a twenty-five-year-old farmer, lived in the Upper Mende country of what is now Sierra Leone in West Africa. Married, the father of three children, he came from a prominent local family. One day in late January 1839, four assailants kidnapped Sengbe as he tended his fields. Turned over as a slave to the son of the Vai King Manna Siaka, he was marched to the coast and sold to a Spanish slave trader named Pedro Blanco. Sengbe’s plight illustrated the efficiency of the flourishing West African slave business. After captivity in one of the forbidding slave prisons (called “factories”) of Lomboko on the Gallinas coast, he and five hundred other men, women, and children found themselves loaded onto the Portuguese slave ship
Tecora
for shipment to the Spanish colony of Cuba in April. Their ensuing ordeal illustrated all too well the horrors of the notorious Middle Passage: In suffocatingly close confinement under unsanitary conditions, with a shortage of water and no protection against contagious diseases, over a third of the captives died on the two-month trip.
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Instead of sailing openly into Havana, the
Tecora
unloaded its human cargo quietly at night in a secret cove, from which the survivors marched across country in June to the barracoons (slave pens) of Havana for auction. This back door entry into Cuba reflected the fact that although slavery was legal in the Spanish Empire, the importation of slaves from Africa was not. Officially, the Spanish government had followed the example of Britain and the United States in outlawing the Atlantic slave trade. Royal Navy cruisers patrolled both the African and Cuban coasts and from time to time seized a ship engaged in the slave trade, confiscating the vessel and liberating its cargo. (The U.S. Navy did a little patrolling against slavers too, but less effectively.) Unfortunately, this evil commerce yielded profits so high that traders could afford to write off the loss of an occasional ship as a business expense. In Cuba, high slave mortality on the sugar plantations necessitated continued importation, so the colonial authorities ignored Madrid’s pronouncements and notoriously collaborated with the smugglers of slaves in return for unofficial payoffs. The local authorities issued fake documents indicating that the
Tecora
’s Africans were Cuban-born slaves and giving each one a Spanish name. Singbe Pieh became José Cinquez (later rendered Joseph Cinque in U.S. records). In the barracoon, a Cuban plantation owner named Pepe Ruíz bought Cinque and forty-eight other men (sugar planters preferred males) for $450 each; Pedro Montes bought four children (three girls and a boy). The two agreed to send their new chattels together along the Cuban coast to Puerto Principe, where their plantations were.

On the night of June 18, 1839, a coasting vessel called the
Amistad
(built in Baltimore, where she had been christened the
Friendship
) took on board the fifty-three Africans, their two owners, and a small crew. The captain expected the trip to take three days but storms slowed them down. On the third night, Cinque picked the lock on his collar-chain with a nail, then freed his companions. They found knives for cutting sugarcane in the hold. Bursting onto the deck, the mutineers quickly overpowered the crew, killing the captain and the cook. They left Ruíz, Montes, and the black cabin boy alive to navigate the ship, ordering them to set course for Africa. Cinque took charge, doling out the precious water and food (he allowed the children more, and took the smallest ration for himself ). But Montes managed to trick the Africans by sailing slowly eastward during the day (when they could tell direction from the sun) and more rapidly northwest at night. By August 25, when the
Amistad
wound up in Long Island Sound desperately short of provisions, ten of the Africans had died. Cinque had no choice but to lead a party ashore to buy supplies with Spanish gold doubloons. There the
Amistad
was apprehended and seized by the USS
Washington
, commanded by Lieutenant Thomas Gedney, who took her into the port of New London, Connecticut. Her passengers were confined to the jail in New Haven until the courts could sort out what to do about them.

The Spanish government demanded that the Africans be returned to Cuba, both as slaves who should be restored to their owners and as accused criminals who should be extradited. The Van Buren administration, wanting to demonstrate abhorrence of slave uprisings with a presidential election a year away, seemed only too eager to comply with Spain’s wishes. It looked like Cinque and his companions would end up on a hangman’s rope in Havana as an example to slaves considering rebellion. But a committee of abolitionists headed by Lewis Tappan arranged for a skilled legal team to aid them. To solve the problem of communicating with their clients, the lawyers turned to Yale’s professor of linguistics. Professor J. W. Gibbs correctly identified the language the Africans spoke (Mende) and after a search of New York and Connecticut wharves found an African-born sailor who could interpret. When the case went to trial in November, the defense could argue that Cinque and the others had never been rightfully enslaved; they were free people kidnapped and sold in violation of Spain’s own laws. To underscore this point, the lawyers brought charges in a New York state court against Ruíz and Montes for kidnapping. Arrested, the two Spaniards jumped their bail, fled to Cuba, and did not appear in the U.S. courts again.

The issue was tried (as an admiralty case, without a jury) before federal District Judge Andrew Judson. United States District Attorney William Holabird argued that Ruíz and Montes legally owned the prisoners, relying on their Cuban documents. Judge Judson, a lifelong Democrat appointed to the bench by Van Buren, had earlier led the movement to shut down Prudence Crandall’s high school for black girls in Connecticut. Everyone now expected him to rule against the prisoners. The administration went to the extraordinary lengths of having a navy schooner await the verdict in New London’s dangerously icy harbor, ready to spirit them away to Cuba before an appeal could be lodged. But the dramatic testimony of Cinque and other Africans, given through an interpreter and substantiated by an Englishman resident in Havana who knew how widely the laws against importing slaves were flouted, demolished the credibility of the false documents. On January 13, 1840, Judson ruled that the Africans were legally free and had therefore been justified in resisting their captivity. The judge ordered the government to send Cinque and his companions back to the Mende country. The district attorney, upon orders from the president, appealed.
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The federal circuit court affirmed the district court’s decision in May 1840. Again the administration appealed. The United States Supreme Court heard argument in January 1841; by then the presidential election was over. All this time Cinque and the other Africans awaited the outcome in New Haven jail, suffering unfamiliar diseases and cold temperatures, trying to keep up their spirits, studying English and Christianity. More of them died. To reinforce the abolitionist legal team, Tappan persuaded seventy-three-year-old former president John Quincy Adams to participate. A lawyer in his youth, Adams had last appeared before the High Court in 1809. Roger Baldwin, who had ably represented the Africans throughout, covered the legal issues in oral argument. Adams used his appearance to denounce the conduct of the administration, which had denied documents to the defense, misrepresented the case to congressional committees, and tried to take control of it away from the judiciary. A hearer interpreted Adams’s speech as one president putting another president on trial.
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Joseph Story delivered the opinion of the Supreme Court on March 9, 1841. By a vote of 6 to 1, with one justice not participating and another having recently died, the Court declared the Mendeans free. Only Antonio the cabin boy had been legally a slave of the ship’s captain. (Rather than accept return to Cuba, Antonio escaped along the underground railway to Montreal.) The chief difference between Story’s decision and the original verdict in district court was that the Supreme Court did not order the government to take the Africans home.
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Instead, the abolitionists faced one more responsibility: raising money to hire transatlantic transportation. The four African children had become fond of their Connecticut foster-parents (the jailer and his wife) and did not wish to leave, but were forcibly separated from them. On November 27, 1841, the bark
Gentleman
set sail for Africa, bearing thirty-five of her lost people back, along with James Covey, the Mendean sailor who had acted as their interpreter, and five Christian missionaries, two of them African Americans. Shortly before their departure, Cinque and two other Mendeans wrote a letter to John Quincy Adams revealing, among other things, their progress in English.

Tragically, Cinque returned to find his home village ruined by war and his family missing. It was all too typical of the turmoil in West Africa during the era of the slave trade. But with Cinque’s help, the American Missionary Association founded a Mendi Mission. The association exerted a lasting influence with its schools for Africans and (after the Civil War) for African Americans in the South.
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Despite the Supreme Court’s decision, the Spanish government continued to press the American government, not to return the slaves themselves (now obviously impossible), but for financial compensation to their owners. The Spanish invoked precedent: When American ships engaged in the coastwise slave trade had blown off course from time to time into the British West Indies, the British had freed the slaves but, after strenuous representations by the Van Buren administration, paid compensation for them.
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The administrations of Tyler and Polk recommended appropriations to reimburse the Spanish owners of the
Amistad
and its human cargo, but faced with strong northern Whig opposition, Congress never acted.

To a large extent Van Buren’s term played out events that Jackson had set in motion. Andrew Jackson succeeded in stamping his character upon the Democratic Party, which remained loyal to the policies he had defined even after he left the White House. The party proclaimed itself the tribune of the common white man, as against all other groups in the society, whether of class, race, or gender. In particular, it defined itself, even in the North, as the protector of slavery. Jackson’s opposition to abolitionism turned out to be of more long-term significance to the Democratic Party than his opposition to nullification. Jackson’s loyal follower, the prominent Pennsylvania Democrat James Buchanan, future president, spoke for the whole next generation of his party. “All Christendom is leagued against the South upon this question of domestic slavery,” he acknowledged; slaveholders “have no other allies to sustain their constitutional rights, except the Democracy of the North.” Democrats from the North, Buchanan proudly proclaimed, “inscribe upon our banners hostility to abolition. It is there one of the cardinal principles of the Democratic Party.”
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Some of the shortcomings in the party’s policies became apparent during the term of Jackson’s chosen successor: in limitations on debate that exacerbated debate, in prolonged and unpopular war to enforce Indian Removal, in futile litigation to return kidnapped Africans into illegal slavery. Most important in turning public opinion against Jacksonianism in 1840 was the economic crisis that, arising to a considerable extent out of Jackson’s actions, cast a shadow over the term of his genial heir. The talent for manipulation that had served Van Buren so well in pursuit of his presidential ambition proved no help in the face of economic depression. Meanwhile, beyond the swings of the business cycle, long-term economic developments were transforming America in directions that Jacksonians did not always approve and certainly did not wish the federal government to foster.

When John Ball reached his twenty-first birthday in 1815, he finally felt free to leave home, his father’s semi-subsistence farm atop a thousand-foot hill near Plymouth, New Hampshire. The youngest of ten children, he had worked on the farm from his earliest memories. He looked back on the time of his growing up matter-of-factly but not fondly. “With me it was all work and no play.” Sunday brought surcease from physical labor, but Calvinist strictness made it “the dullest day of all.” What he minded most was “having so limited an opportunity for an education.” Eventually his father had allowed the youth to walk four miles to the home of a clergyman who tutored him, not only in English and history but also in Latin, a prerequisite for college. Soon John knew enough to teach school in the winter, when his work could be spared from the farm. By the time he could gain admission to Dartmouth he was much older than most of the undergraduates, and his father warned him that “you must not look to me for help.” Still he managed to graduate in 1820. John Ball went on to a career as a lawyer in New York. Meanwhile, John’s sister Deborah, a woman of “vigorous body and mind, quite self-reliant,” had also left home, learned the tailoring trade, and married a man named William Powers, who founded a factory in New York making oil cloth. When William died, Deborah carried on the business, and John suspended his law practice to become her factory foreman. After Deborah’s factory got on a firm footing, John Ball departed for a well-publicized trip to Oregon, speculated in Michigan land, and despite the hard times following 1837 found both fortune and a happy late marriage there. Remembering his own early struggles, he played an influential role in creating the Michigan public school system.
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The experience of John Ball and Deborah Ball Powers—as well as two other Ball brothers who also left their home—was replicated countless thousands of times during these years, if not always with such happy outcomes. Many an American yearned to escape the painful thrift and drudgery of a small farm, growing some necessities of life and trading with neighbors for others, once alternatives presented themselves. Most felt eager to improve their standard of living, either through increased production for the market or by leaving the agricultural sector altogether. In those days, fathers enjoyed a legal claim on the earnings of sons who had not yet come of age; nevertheless, many sons contrived to “buy their labor from their fathers” and leave home. The drop in market prices for agricultural commodities after 1839 prompted some people to leave their family farm and go to town. Overall, in the years between 1820 and 1850 the sector of the population considered “urban” (residing in places with more than 2,500 people) multiplied fivefold and increased its share of the total population from 7 percent to 18 percent—commencing the period of the most rapid urbanization in American history. In 1820, there were but five cities in the country with more than 25,000 people, and only one—New York—with over 100,000. Thirty years later, there were twenty-six cities with populations over 25,000, and six that exceeded 100,000.
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Though John and Deborah responded to the “pull” of the city, some migrants also felt a “push” to leave the farm. Some people came to the cities and towns of the young republic for much the same reasons that people in countries like Brazil and Mexico migrate away from the rural areas today. With improvements in agricultural productivity, farmers in Europe and the United States needed fewer hands even while more of their children were surviving to adulthood. While some grown children went west to start farms of their own, others moved to towns and cities to look for jobs there. Increased farm productivity and improved transportation made it easier to feed people not engaged in agriculture, raising the ceiling on the number of people who could occupy a given urban area. Ironically, even when northern agriculture became more successful economically, it shrank as a sector of society.
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The transportation revolution also made it easier for the surplus agricultural population to move around, both within the continent and across the ocean. So American cities and towns received migrants not only from the farms of their own hinterland, but also from those of Europe. Although the nineteenth century witnessed enormous urban growth throughout the Western world, it occurred most dramatically in the United States. During the 1820s and ’30s, more than 667,000 overseas immigrants entered the United States—three-quarters of them through the port of New York. (This does not include people who came overland from Canada, nor illegally imported slaves.) These numbers, while significant, came to seem low by comparison with later ones. After years of gradually improving harvests, Europe’s most dramatic crop failure prompted enormous migration. When blight wiped out a third of the Irish potato crop in 1845 and nearly all of it the following year, the human tide reaching North American shores suddenly became a flood. The 1840s and ’50s saw 4,242,000 immigrants arrive from overseas, and three-quarters of them still came through New York. Enough of them stayed there, joining the migrants from American farms, that the city tripled in size during the first half of the nineteenth century, growing twice as fast as Liverpool and three times as fast as Manchester.
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In the South, cities and towns grew less rapidly. There, the surplus in agricultural laborers could be handled differently. The farm laborers were not free to seek jobs on their own. Enslaved laborers sold off by their owners were more likely sent to plantations on the frontier than to urban areas. Immigrants from overseas did not relish the prospect of having to compete for jobs with slave labor. Yet they did not avoid the South altogether: The port of New Orleans received 188,000 immigrants in the decade of the 1840s, and its population included 40 percent foreign born, the same percentage as New York City.
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Most of the cities and towns of this period grew up more oriented to commerce and its ramifications (including professional, financial, and artisan services) than to industry. Along the inland waterways, new cities like Cincinnati, Chicago, and Buffalo developed, and older ones like St. Louis and Louisville (eighteenth-century foundations named for French kings) expanded. They were
entrepôts
, places for the collection and shipment of staple commodities in exchange for provisions, equipment, and services. In a way, the city itself formed a commercial commodity, the sale of its own urban real estate being vital to its prosperity. Developers eager to make sales did not differentiate between commercial and residential areas; they reserved little land for public uses like schools and parks. Traders gathered to negotiate and stayed to pool information about mercantile conditions. In the city, ships bearing news docked, the news got printed, and businessmen could talk over lunch. The cities became nerve centers, not only of transportation but also of the communications revolution.
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Prosperous residents and businesses concentrated in the city centers. Unlike today, the poor lived on the outskirts of town, where the absence of public transportation made getting to work less convenient. Rapid urban growth far outpaced the development of all municipal services, including police forces, firefighting, sanitation, and water supplies.

Although the waves of rioting in the 1830s posed the most critical threats to urban law and order, unpunished individual crimes also undermined personal security in the days before police forces. More common than murder and robbery were assaults and batteries.
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Working-class urban neighborhoods now rivaled the southwest frontier as centers of violence. In the all-too-numerous taverns, youths proved their manhood by drinking, fighting each other, attacking members of different ethnic groups or political parties, and beating up or gang-raping women. A culture of violence prompted working-class males to preserve their honor in the face of hardship and uncertainty by acting tough. Walt Whitman celebrated their feelings of gender pride in his poetry: “O the joy of a manly self-hood! / To be servile to none, to defer to none.” A less romantic New York diarist complained in 1839 that “the City is infested by gangs of hardened wretches…brought up in Taverns.” Tavern gang members most often victimized, next to each other, African Americans and working-class women. Urban mob violence manifested this male tavern culture on a larger scale.
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In some of the burgeoning cities, commercialized vice constituted a big business. It is said that ten thousand prostitutes plied their trade in New York City in 1844, though estimates varied. Young women from the countryside, originally hoping for either domestic or factory employment, might find an alternative in a brothel—particularly during economic hard times. Although prostitution per se was not yet illegal in New York, streetwalkers could get arrested for vagrancy. Working in a brothel was safer. Otherwise respectable landlords found whorehouses profitable lessees. Notoriously, theater galleries served as places of assignation. Formerly confined to certain neighborhoods and a hard core of professionals, prostitution spread to become one of the urban working-class options exercised by women and girls. Not all of these prostitutes thought of themselves as degraded and oppressed. The historians Christine Stansell and Patricia Cline Cohen have emphasized the opportunities commercial sex provided women: It paid well and offered them a measure of independence. (At a time when a journeyman in the building trades earned twelve dollars a week, a working girl in a fancy brothel could earn fifty dollars.) Apparently they were not always victimized by pimps. Urban philanthropists like the Tappan brothers sought to rescue women from sin and shame, only to find that many prostitutes felt content with their occupation.
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Immoral by any standard, however, were the houses of prostitution that made use of enslaved women. Evidence survives of a thriving commerce in “fancy maids” to supply the sex trade in New Orleans and other southern cities.
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The most terrifying danger to urban life and property had always been fire. Early attempts to respond by creating volunteer fire companies produced mixed results. In their firehouses, the volunteers gloried in manly fraternity and public respect. Sometimes they performed heroically, but they might be more eager to race each other to the scene than to fight the fire once they got there. Too often fire companies constituted rival gangs, wielding political influence sometimes Democratic and sometimes Whig, waging violent turf wars. In the worst cases, fire raged while companies battled each other for the chance to loot the burning buildings.
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When New York City encountered the great fire of December 16, 1835, its volunteer firefighters still insisted on showing off their strength by pulling their own fire engines through the streets instead of using horse-drawn engines or steam-powered ones such as London had employed since 1829. Worse, bitter cold weather froze the water with which they tried to quench the flames. The conflagration only stopped spreading when they obtained gunpowder to blow up buildings in its path. By the time the fire burned itself out, 674 structures, including almost everything south of Wall Street and east of Broad, had been damaged or destroyed. The remains of Dutch colonial New Amsterdam disappeared forever. When cities began to replace wells with municipal water mains and hydrants, they did so more for the sake of firefighting than as a convenience to householders.
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City air had always been polluted by the flames used every day for cooking, heating, and lighting, and of course tobacco smoking was widespread. Coal-and steam-powered factories now added their soot to the unhealthy pall of smoke hanging over urban areas. But the most hazardous feature of life in the expanding cities was neither crime nor fire nor polluted air but the lack of hygiene. Municipal authorities seldom supplied water to urban residents; people dug wells in their backyards, despite the contamination from nearby outhouses. When it rained, the pits below outhouses could overflow, spreading stench and filth. Even in dry weather, horse manure littered the streets. Beginning in the 1830s, horse-drawn omnibuses carrying commuters facilitated urban growth but added their droppings to those of horse-drawn delivery wagons, taxis, and private carriages. To get rid of garbage, city authorities loosed hogs and geese into alleys where dogs, rats, and vultures joined them in scavenging. Warnings appeared that unattended infants were in danger of being eaten.
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Those who sought out such an unsafe urban environment put themselves at no small risk of life and health. Male children born in cities grew up to be shorter than those born on farms, an indication of diminished physical well-being during their formative years.
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The death rate in the cities was not only higher than the countryside but also higher than the urban birthrate. Only a constant influx of new arrivals kept the urban population from falling. American cities compared unfavorably with European ones; New York’s death rate was nearly twice that of London. In Philadelphia and New York, the life expectancy of newborn babies averaged only twenty-four years during the 1830s and ’40s, six years less than that of newborn southern slaves. The horrendous death rate in the growing cities contributed to the declining overall American life expectancy during these years.
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Thomas Jefferson’s warning that large cities would constitute “great sores” on the body politic seemed well on its way to grim fulfillment. The most putrid urban carbuncle of all was the “Five Points” slum neighborhood of Manhattan, overcrowded with poor people from a variety of origins, native born and immigrant, notorious for its filth, disease, gangs, crime, riots, and vice. Charles Dickens, no stranger to urban wretchedness, expressed horror when he visited Five Points. “From every corner as you glance about you in these dark retreats,” he wrote, “some figure crawls as if the judgement hour were near at hand, and every obscure grave were giving up its dead. Where dogs would howl to lie, women and men and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of better lodgings.”
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