e-Newsletter | July 22, 2022
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Joshua Coffin and the Amistad Captives
by Bethany Groff Dorau
Today Joshua Coffin (1792-1864) is most often seen as the stern-faced man in the dark portrait that seems to stare down at visitors from the third-floor landing as they tour the Museum of Old Newbury. A similar portrait hangs at the Historic New England’s Coffin House in Newbury, and for many years, visitors to both museums were likely introduced to him as the historian of old Newbury, descendant of Newbury’s early European settlers, and teacher of poet John Greenleaf Whittier.
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Portrait of Joshua Coffin (from the 1850s). Oil on canvas. By Thomas Bayley Lawson (1807-1888).
This picture of a New England antiquarian is not the Joshua Coffin his contemporaries knew, however. To them, he was a fire-breathing radical who led an extraordinary life dedicated to justice and freedom for enslaved people. Coffin was, as newspaper publisher William Lloyd Garrison wrote, one of the twelve “apostles of the cause” who founded the first abolitionist organization in Massachusetts, the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and “set in motion that ball which now shakes the world.” Coffin “ever after ardently acted in behalf of the slave.”
It is little surprise, perhaps, that Coffin was compelled to assist in one of the most prominent self-emancipation court cases in American history, that of the illegally enslaved prisoners of the Amistad. Aiding Coffin in his efforts was Lahy (also called Levi) Ganges
In August 1839, the U.S. brig Washington seized the Spanish schooner La Amistad off the coast of Long Island, New York, and brought it into port at New Haven, Connecticut. There were 53 kidnapped Africans on board—forty-nine young men and four children - who had been taken to Havana, Cuba, where two sugar plantation owners enslaved them. The enslavers shackled the captives on La Amistad and set off for their plantations. However, the captives freed themselves and killed the vessel’s captain and cook. They spared their two enslavers in exchange for a promise to take them to Sierra Leone. Instead, the enslavers sailed up the East Coast, eventually attracting the attention of a U.S. government revenue cutter. The plantation owners were set free while the kidnapped Africans were imprisoned for murder.
Abolitionists closely watched the Amistad case as issues of freedom and criminality were debated internationally. The narrative of the case seemed to be controlled by the enslavers, who spoke Spanish and whose testimony could be easily translated and was widely published. The African prisoners were members of various ethnic groups and spoke a variety of languages, and they were unable to communicate with anyone but each other. Though the murder charges were dropped, there was continued legal wrangling about the status of the Amistad captives, as their enslavers, and the Spanish government, sought to have them declared property and returned.
On September 13, 1839, desperate to assist the men, abolitionist Lewis Tappan published this plea in the New-York Commercial Advertiser:
If there are native Africans in this city, or elsewhere in this country, who were born near the sources of the river Niger, or in Mandingo, or who can converse readily in the Susoo [Susu, also Soso], Kissi, Mandingo, or Gallinas dialects, they will confer a great favor by calling or sending to the undersigned, for the committee, at 143 Nassau Street, New York City.
Two days later, while attending the afternoon service of a Philadelphia church “for colored people,” a member of the congregation introduced Joshua Coffin to Levi Ganges. The following day, Coffin penned a lengthy letter to Tappan in New York.
“(I) was introduced to a native Soosoo (the son of a Soosoo chief) who was kidnapped from Africa when a man grown. I went last evening with John Shain (a white man who had spent his boyhood on slave ships and spoke several African languages). I was grateful to find them both well acquainted with the language. The old man Levi Ganges, alias Lahi, the son of Mulcauba. He can speak the Soosoo, the Mandingo, the Mandingo Foulah, the Timmanee and the Lambar languages & how many more I know not.
He also suggested that Shain could be a useful eavesdropper at the trial, as he “can speak the Spanish both the classical & creole & not improper to suggest the propriety of not saying a word about his knowledge of Spanish unless the question is asked him in Hartford.
Coffin ended his letter with his standard closing: Yours for the slave,
Joshua Coffin
Levi Ganges was himself had been a victim of the legal limbo of the slave trade. Ganges was in his forties when he was kidnapped from West Africa and sold into slavery, one of 135 captives held aboard two illegal American slave-trading schooners. The U.S.S. Ganges intercepted the vessels off Cuba. The captives were taken to Philadelphia on August 4, 1800, where the Pennsylvania Abolition Society placed them under its guardianship; all were given the surname Ganges. After serving out indentures, which provided for their education, many became part of the free Black population of Pennsylvania. At the time of the Amistad trial Ganges was about eighty.
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Portrait of Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinqué) Painted by Nathaniel Jocelyn, 1840. Painting held by New Haven Colony Historical Society.
John Shain was sent to Connecticut first, but was not able to communicate with the leader of the Amistad captives. It was initially unclear whether this was a language barrier or a trust issue, as the leader, Sengbe Pieh, also known as Joseph Cinqué, did not appear willing to speak with a white man.
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Coffin and Ganges went together from Philadelphia to Connecticut (various court cases were held in both New Haven and Hartford), as the bill for expenses incurred was published in The Emancipator, an antislavery newspaper that Tappan funded, on February 6, 1840.
Ultimately, Ganges was not able to effectively communicate with the Amistad prisoners. Tappan had misunderstood the language that they shared, not Mandingo but Mendi, in his initial plea for assistance. The abolitionist committee called on Josiah Gibbs, a professor of linguistics at Yale, for help. Gibbs learned from the captives how to count to ten in Mendi and began walking up and down the docks in New Haven and New York City shouting the words. It was a free Black teenager from Sierra Leone, a sailor in the British Navy named James Covey, who heard his language of origin and responded to Gibbs’s plea for a translator.
Coffin continued to write to “Brother Tappan,” determined to help the Amistad captives. In January 1840 he consulted his former student and dear friend, poet John Greenleaf Whittier, on the best way to secure permission to accompany them back to Sierra Leone. Coffin suggested that their lawyers submit a petition on his behalf to the president of the United States, Martin van Buren, even though the chief executive supported Spain’s position on the status of the captives. Coffin had a secret plan, he said, to write a damning expose of the American Colonization Society, which had been advocating for the relocation of all people of African descent from the United States to Liberia, regardless of their preference or background. If he went to Africa with the Amistad captives, Coffin thought, he could get to Liberia unnoticed. However, this plan also came to naught. Ganges returned to Philadelphia, where he died of apoplexy on September 13, 1846, at the Philadelphia Almshouse. He was interred at Bethel Colored Burial Ground.
The fate of the Amistad captives was determined on March 9, 1841, by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that they were free men who had been captured and transported illegally. The surviving thirty-five captives returned to Sierra Leone in 1842.
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Coffin, who worked as a postman, lost his job in 1840 because of his abolitionist activities. He left Philadelphia in 1843 in poor health and returned to Newbury, to the house where he was born. Though he continued to be deeply involved in abolitionist work, lecturing around the country as his health allowed, he turned to research and writing, intending to prove, in part, that influential Puritans rejected the institution of slavery, particularly those associated with his beloved Newbury. He completed his magnum opus, A Sketch of the History of Newbury, Newburyport, and West Newbury, in 1845, along with family histories of early Newbury settlers.
By 1857, former students and fellow abolitionists were raising money for their teacher and friend, who was “now suffering the united evils of old age and poverty.” Yet he battled on. In 1860, fighting depression and dementia, and with the nation on the cusp of the Civil War, he completed his final book. An Account of Some of the Principal Slave Insurrections was Coffin’s answer to those who claimed that immediate emancipation was dangerous. Not so, Coffin argued. “The consequences of holding slaves in bondage…have always been disastrous.”
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Note: A version of this article appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of Historic New England Magazine. |
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Cecilia Beaux and Margaret Cushing - a Cape Ann Sojourn
Save the Date! Museum of Old Newbury Annual Meeting
Wednesday, September 14, 6:30 pm. All museum members welcome. (Not a member? Join here ) Business meeting followed by highlights of recent acquisitions of the museum, including the Newbury Common Pasture book, a locally made 1811 sampler, Moulton silver, and a 20th century painting. Register here.
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Join Ghlee Woodworth, noted author, historian, and 12th generation Newburyport native for one of her highly informative and entertaining walking tours. Proceeds from these tours benefit the museum and her wonderfully illustrated books can be purchased exclusively in our online store.
July 31, 10am - Walking Tour – Vanished Churches and Public Buildings of the South End Meet at 98 High Street. Join Ghlee for a Sunday morning stroll through the neighborhoods around the Cushing House and Museum of Old Newbury. This tour will focus on the commercial, civic, and religious buildings that are no longer standing, or have been converted to residential use. $15 adults, $10 Museum of Old Newbury members. Tickets.
August 21, 10am - Tiptoe Through the Tombstones: Oak Hill Cemetery Starts at 4 Brown St. Prior to 1842, Oak Hill Cemetery was known as Old Maid’s Hall and consisted of about fifty burial sites in a small area. In January of 1842, Reverend Thomas B. Fox, pastor of the First Religious Society of Newburyport, and other leading citizens formed a board of trustees to oversee the design and management of a rural garden cemetery, which was to be one of the first in the United States. The new cemetery was consecrated in July 1842. Join Ghlee for a stroll through Oak Hill, final resting place of shipwrecked sailors, sea captains, and merchants, architects and photographers, writers and poets, silversmiths and newspaper editors, and adventurers who travelled to the Klondike gold rush. $15 adults, $10 Museum of Old Newbury members. Tickets.
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Woman on the MOON
...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau
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"Until Christmas next"
I went for a walk through my old stomping ground in Newbury last week, a participant in a tour led by Dr. Tricia Peone, a research scholar at Historic New England. The walk, A Story of Slavery and Resistance in Newbury, centered on the story of an enslaved man named James, who escaped from the house of Richard Dole in 1690, near the site of the present Dole-Little House. James set off to join an ultimately unsuccessful uprising intended to free Newbury’s enslaved people and kill the townspeople. Dole-Little was under my management for two decades, a sleepy place better known for its repurposed timbers than its connection to enslavement and revolt and revisiting the site with this new and fascinating information was a rich and enlightening experience.
At the end of the walk, we all stood in a circle chatting and asking questions of Dr. Peone. One man asked how Dole’s descendants must feel knowing that he enslaved at least eight people on that site. He cast his eyes around the group. “Any Dole descendants here?” Several people I know in the crowd pointed to me, as my hand was slowly raised. The man turned to me, eyes flashing. He was having an experience. “How do you feel about that?” he said, pointing his finger at me. “Your family owned slaves. How does that make you feel?”
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The c. 1715 Dole Little House, 289 High Road, Newbury. Photo by Bob Watts.
When confronted by something terrible or tragic, I often find myself at odds with the people around me. In my youth, I would have tried to determine how this man wanted me to feel and pretend to feel that way. He was angry, rightfully so, but what I felt was not shame, or anger, or guilt, although there is plenty of that to go around. My prevailing feeling at that time was that this story, this research that had illuminated a part of the past that had been ignored for so long, was beautiful and wonderful, and I was thrilled, and I said so. Let the sun shine on all of it, I said.
Let me just say, being at odds with the crowd has its advantages. I am great in an emergency. If the house is on fire, you want me there, methodically counting the pets and the silver. For many years, I felt bad about this. One of the beautiful things about getting older, however, at least for me, has been a calm curiosity about how I am reacting to a situation, a certain forgiveness when I am awkward, or silly, or detached when all around me are reacting. But I don’t get to skip it, whatever it is. It comes for me.
As I left the tour of the Dole-Little House, a heaviness settled on me. It is the same feeling I had when I found a death certificate for an early 20th century ancestor who had died under somewhat mysterious circumstances, and who I had been researching. The record proved a family story that they had choked to death. First, elation at being able to find the elusive thing, a research victory. Then a crush, a heaviness. Whatever my genealogical victory, they were human, and they suffered, and being human, I feel some measure of it.
Last night, I woke suddenly from another dream in which armed men with dogs hunted me and my children as we hid in the dark woods. There were three children in the dream, and I knew immediately why.
We were contacted last week by a man from Exeter, New Hampshire. He had purchased a collection of letters and found within the collection several receipts relating to Newburyport town business during the American Revolution. Men were working on the schoolhouse chimney, repairing the poor house, and in the case of Abel Greenleaf, taking care of a Mrs. Havoy at the town’s expense from March 1782 to January 1783. The man on the phone asked if we had ever heard of the Greenleaf family. I snorted and consulted my chart, packed with Greenleafs, and there was Abel, my 1st cousin, 7x removed. I talked the possible donor into coming down to visit the museum, knowing that he would be utterly charmed. I was right, and he was, in turn, utterly charming, a lover of history and family, whose interest was in returning these valuable documents to a place where these people could be known. He took a tour, we had a lovely chat, and then, just as he was leaving, he paused.
“Can I just ask you…” he trailed off. “I have these other things, and I really don’t know what to do with them.”
And then, as he pulled another sheaf of letters from a folder, he said, “my Black friends said to burn them”.
He handed me the letters and asked me to help find the right place for them to be of use to future generations, and he signed the necessary paperwork to donate all his treasures to the Museum of Old Newbury. He choked up as he left. He had been carrying a heavy burden.
There were three separate documents in the collection he had given us, ten pages total. All of them are from Kentucky, and all relate to the sale, rental, and barter of enslaved women, children, and men, identified by name, age, and in some cases, monetary value. As I sat down with them and began to read, I had a familiar feeling, like I was outside my body, curious and detached. I paid attention. The last document I read was a March 1859 agreement between John Denison and V.G. Wheat for the hire of “a negro woman and her three children until Christmas next”. The woman, Ann, and her children, were owned by a 16-year-old, B.D. Estill, for whom Wheat was the guardian, and they were rented out to John Denison in exchange for their food and “two cotton dresses, two chemmies (chemises), two linsey dresses, two pair stockings, two pair shoes, one undershirt of linsey, and a blanket.”
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Maybe it was her name, Ann, or the intimacy of the clothing, but despite the calm in my conscious mind, my body had a reaction to holding this 163 year old letter, to the texture of the parchment and the blots of ink. Wave after wave of nausea came over me. I sat with it, allowed myself to take it all in. This woman had been removed from her home, sent away with her children, her labor and theirs bartered for some clothing that would never belong to any of them. They were to be returned at Christmas, as the week after Christmas was typically the only time off for enslaved people during the whole year and new business arrangements often began on January 1. A note at the bottom of the letter indicates that B. D. Estill continued to send Ann and her now four children to labor in exchange for their “victuals and clothes”. They were joined by “Joe, worth $75.00”.
On the face of it, this is not the worst of the three documents. Another divides up the enslaved people of a Madison County, Kentucky, estate, specifying that they were to go to public sale “to the highest bidder”. The other trades the lives of a woman, Louisa, her four-year-old son Henry, a 14-year-old girl named Sorissa, and an 18-month for the settlement of a debt. But it was Ann and her three children who came for me in my sleep.
Two weeks ago, the Museum of Old Newbury led a community reading of Frederick Douglass’ powerful 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” in the shadow of the William Lloyd Garrison statue in Brown Square. It is a community event, supported by Mass Humanities, where volunteers take turns reading passages from the speech to the assembly. No passages are assigned, and so I found myself reading these lines.
Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call into question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery – the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgement is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.”
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Reading Frederick Douglass Together in Brown Square, Newburyport on July 3, 2022. The statue of William Lloyd Garrison bears the words that Douglass quoted in his speech.
Standing with my face to the statue upon which were written these very words, I read them as Douglass wrote them. “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse…” and I felt those words as a punch to the chest, my body reacting to Douglass’ quoting of Garrison, who stood in front of me, grown from the soil of my town, surrounded by my family. Garrison, who went to prison for pointing out how Newburyport families were directly involved in the buying and selling of human beings in the United States, laying plain our community’s responsibility for the life of a woman and her three children in Kentucky in 1859.
We are working with archivists in Kentucky to ensure that these letters go to a place where they will be preserved, digitized, and available. If Ann’s children lived, if they told their children about their mother, if they know what county they lived in, if they are looking, they will find this document. But I will never forget her. This is the power of the original artifact. It will come for you. We must not equivocate. We must not excuse.
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Something is Always Cooking at the Museum |
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Cheddar Cheese "Coins"
In June, we had an small party to thank the garden owners that were part of this year's Garden Tour. These "coins" were a hit - delicious and crisp, with a little bit of spice! We couldn't stop eating them and we were asked for the recipe. We are happy to be able to provide it here. Made by Museum Board member Sally Chandler, she advises not go over on the spices. Enjoy!
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon cayenne - don't overdo
2 sticks butter, softened
1 cup shredded cheese
1/4 cup sesame seeds, toasted until light brown in a dry frying pan (half for dough, half for sprinkling)
Sift together the first four ingredients. Then add the butter and the cheese. Add 2 tablespoons sesame seeds to the dough. Roll into a 1 1/4" diameter log (about 10" long) and wrap in plastic wrap. Chill for about an hour. Slice fairly thin and sprinkle with remaining sesame seeds. Bake on parchment paper at 350 F for about 20 minutes. Cool completely on the pan. Makes 64 coins.
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Click on image above to play the puzzle |
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This photograph by J.M. Chase shows the Coffin House at 14 High Road in Newbury, home to Joshua Coffin (1792-1864). The house, built in the 1678, is still standing and can be visited on Saturdays through Historic New England.
Click the image above to play the puzzle.
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