Child Slaves in the Modern World

Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, Joseph C. Miller

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780821443743
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

Child Slaves in the Modern World is the second of two volumes that examine the distinctive uses and experiences of children in slavery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This collection of previously unpublished essays exposes the global victimization of child slaves from the period of abolition of legal slavery in the nineteenth century to the human rights era of the twentieth century. It contributes to the growing recognitionthat the stereotypical bonded male slave was in fact a rarity.

Nine of the studies are historical, with five located in Africa and three covering Latin America from the British Caribbean to Chile. One study follows the children liberated in the famousAmistad incident (1843). The remaining essays cover contemporary forms of child slavery, from prostitution to labor to forced soldiering.

Child Slaves in the Modern World adds historical depth to the current literature on contemporary slavery, emphasizing the distinctive vulnerabilities of children, or effective equivalents, that made them particularly valuable to those who could acquire and control them. The studies also make clear the complexities of attempting to legislate or decree regulations limiting practices that appear to have been—and continue to be —ubiquitous around the world.

Contributors: Benjamin N. Lawrance, Gwyn Campbell, Cecily Jones, Sue Taylor, Nara Milanich, Martin Klein, Bernard Moitt, Trevor R. Getz, William G. Clarence-Smith, Jonathan Blagbrough, Philip Whalen, Malika Id' Salah, Zosa de Sas Kropiwnicki, Sarah Maguire, and Mike Dottridge.

SECTION I

CHILD SLAVES IN THE ERA OF ABOLITION

1

“ALL WE WANT IS MAKE US FREE”

The Voyage of La Amistad’s Children through the Worlds of the Illegal Slave Trade

BENJAMIN N. LAWRANCE

In Amistad, Steven Spielberg’s 1997 cinematic dramatization of the multiple trials of the African survivors of the slave ship La Amistad, Joseph Cinqué, in a trancelike state, standing only a few feet from his erstwhile Spanish-Cuban captors, faces the judge and chants “Give us, us free!” The demand is a powerful and persuasive testament to man’s inhumanity to man and an unmistakable call to correct the injustice of enslavement. It is also a multidimensional fabrication.¹ Not only was the adult Cinqué (a European rendering of the Mende name Singbe Pieh) only briefly in the Hartford, Connecticut, circuit court, and not to give his personal (translated) testimony until 8 January 1840, in New Haven, before Judge Judson of the United States District Court for Connecticut, but the utterance itself is an infantilizing corruption of the penultimate line of a letter to former president John Quincy Adams by Ka-le, one of a group of child survivors.²

The collapsing of multiple hearings and the attribution of a real child’s words to a fabricated adult protagonist are variations of a classic cinematographic technique of compression, but this compression doubly silences the historical subjects.³ First, Cinqué is reduced to a childlike caricature. But a second and, I would venture, more deleterious, historical erasing unfolds in this scene: silencing the voices of the five child captives aboard La Amistad, and of Ka-le in particular. An unknown number of “slave” children were aboard the Portuguese vessel Teçora, on which the eventual La Amistad captives had purportedly sailed from Sierra Leone in 1838.⁴ In 1839, after arriving in Cuba, where many of the group were surely sold, a number were placed aboard a coastal schooner, La Amistad, which then made for another port on the island. Among them were at least five children; and the ship’s crew included at least one child. The status of the child captives featured in the legal arguments in the multiple hearings that followed the eventual seizure and landing of the vessel and its human cargo in the United States. In particular, there were multiple habeas corpus hearings for the children, and a separate ruling regarding ownership of the cabin boy, Antonio. The four surviving children were claimed as property in a libel action by Pedro Montez (as opposed to José Ruiz, claimant of the adults aboard La Amistad). They were listed as “Francisco, Juan and Josepha” and, while “the Spanish name of the fourth was not mentioned,” in the context of the trials “the four were … called Teme, Mahgra, Kene and Carria.”⁵ All four were among those eventually returned to West Africa aboard the Gentleman in the fall of 1841. One of these, a girl called Mar-gru (Mahgra), subsequently returned to the United States and attended Oberlin College.⁶

Despite this double silencing, the film—perhaps inadvertently—underscores how adult slaves in antebellum America were often viewed socially and culturally as children.⁷ Discourses infantilizing Africans were deployed by abolitionists and proponents of Liberian colonization, active at the time, to garner support among liberal white Northerners, and became increasingly widespread as the slave trade was phased out in stages.⁸ But what happens to our understanding of slaving and slaves in this context of illegality when the focus is returned to the children enslaved? How did the social, cultural, and legal status of children who became slaves in the Western Hemisphere shift between their moments of initial enslavement, via sale, relocations, and resales?

This chapter traces the lives of the children of La Amistad as they proceeded across the Atlantic to elaborate the processes of enslavement as they pertained to children, the legal regimes to which these children were subject as they moved from Africa to America and back, and the children’s limited capacity to express the autonomy and agency of the freedom that Ka-le claimed and Spielberg exploited. My hope is that this story will stimulate others to reexamine evidence of the enslavement of other children, particularly in expanding the context of illegality characteristic of the nineteenth century, in order to better understand how and under what conditions children were enslaved.

I am attempting to “make free” the stories of the children of La Amistad by bringing to light lives that have been relatively ignored by historians. Like the adult males, the children of La Amistad had no legal standing in the United States to bring suit in its courts of law or to seek international diplomatic representation.⁹ But the youth of the children contributed the outcome of the case insofar as “it was impossible for the children to have been native Africans enslaved before 1820,” that is, enslaved legally under the terms of the U.S. laws and treaties in effect in 1839.¹⁰ As these youthful captives from La Amistad were indeed children, infantilizing discourse was redundant. Instead these children capitalized on the protection that their status as children enabled them to claim, regardless of their standing as slaves, and actively participated in winning their own freedom. Ka-le in effect translated the shelter of their families in Africa into the safeguards afforded citizens under the U.S. Constitution.

A range of documents from this familiar story, some well known and others relatively unexplored, provide a rare window into the historical contexts of child enslavement and illegal slave smuggling in the nineteenth century in places ranging from Africa to Connecticut.¹¹ The lives of La Amistad’s children are emblematic of the often overlooked but “dramatic increase in the proportion of children” in the mostly “illegal” slave trade of the nineteenth century.¹² Whereas Vincent Brown has shown that in the 1790s it was possible to transport “too many children,” over the course of several decades in the nineteenth century, until the termination of the transatlantic trade in the 1860s, the percentage of children among slave cargoes increased, by some estimates, from 22 to over 40 percent.¹³

The conceptual complexity of the slave identity of children is particularly visible in the context of the illegal trade, because slavers consciously tried to circumvent accepted practices of enslavement and of emerging international law. At a number of stages in the legal process, aspects of their lives, such as their ages and cultural backgrounds, were deployed to strengthen the case that they were born and raised free in West Africa. Furthermore, a careful examination of the evidence suggests the intriguing possibility that their youth and dependence were partly responsible for why they had become “slaves” in the first place in Africa. A focus on the lives of the children of La Amistad will demonstrate how the multiple cultural, social, and legal worlds through which the children moved proved significant to the outcome of their case for liberty.

The very singular testimonies of Ka-le (occasionally referred to as Ka-li) and his girl companions, parts of which were recorded by Yale divinity professor Josiah Willard Gibbs, form the basis for this chapter.¹⁴ Letters from the abolitionist Amistad Committee and information about other individuals (including Antonio, the ship’s boy, and James B. Covey, the Mende interpreter during the trial) experiencing similar processes of enslavement as children, provide additional context with which I interpret the experiences of the child slaves aboard La Amistad.¹⁵ This documentation is primarily personal and petitionlike correspondence and should be examined with the cautions and attendant biases Natalie Zemon Davis and others have outlined with regard to the formulaic nature of letter writing.¹⁶

CONCEPTUALIZING THE CHILD SLAVE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE ILLEGAL SLAVE TRADE

Illegal transatlantic slaving operated in the context of multiple, sometimes overlapping, legal regimes. The children in the case of La Amistad passed through at least six separate moments of illegality and eleven separate legal jurisdictions. The “illegal” North Atlantic slave trade operated under steadily tightening legal constraints between 1792 and 1867. The ban on Britishflagged and American vessels transporting slaves came into effect in 1808. From about the same period the British used Sierra Leone, and its port of Freetown, as a base and command center for its antislaving naval patrol. The Portuguese trade was eroded by a treaty in 1810 and banned in the North Atlantic in 1815. In 1817, Louis XVIII abolished the French slave trade by decree, and Portugal signed a treaty with Britain conceding the Right of Search (allowing the Royal Navy to search vessels suspected of trading slaves), and establishing so-called Mixed Commissions to regulate the slave trade south of the equator. Spain also signed a treaty with Britain abolishing the slave trade north of the equator with similar conditions, and committed to abolishing the slave trade entirely after 30 May 1820. In 1820 a U.S. law declared the American slave trade an act of piracy punishable by death. Illegality via bilateral and multilateral treaty continued to fan out across the Atlantic, both North and South, over several decades. Between 1838 and 1839, when the Teçora purportedly sailed from an illicit harbor on the Sierra Leone coast, however, trade in the North Atlantic was completely banned to all parties.

The children aboard La Amistad transgressed the expanding illegality of slavery at six crucial points. The zone on the African mainland whence the captives came was off-limits to slave trading because it was the hinterland to the British-protected (and thereby free) territory of Sierra Leone; the North Atlantic passage itself was illegal under the international treaties in force, as was the sale of newly arrived Africans in New World Spain (Cuba); and the subsequent smuggling of those same Africans from one Cuban city, Havana, along the coast to another, Guanaja, aboard La Amistad was also banned. Finally, when Ka-le and the men were imprisoned, and the three girls placed under the guardianship of the New Haven jailer Col. Stanton Pendleton and his wife, they were registered as Pendleton’s slaves, which sat uncomfortably with Connecticut’s Nonimportation Act of 1774 and the “gradual and piecemeal” law that had progressively ended slavery in the state from 1784, as well as federal law that deemed children to be “incapable … of the crime of murder or piracy.”¹⁷ Ultimately the Supreme Court determined that La Amistad’s “cargo” comprised people “unlawfully kidnapped,” in Africa “and forcibly and wrongfully carried on board a certain vessel,” then illegally imported into Cuba (and not illegally imported into the United States).¹⁸ They were therefore not property and not subject to the law of salvage; nor were they fugitives, murderers or criminals, but rather free individuals whose “lives and liberties” were to be restored.¹⁹ The primary adjudica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editors’ Introduction
• Section I: Child Slaves in the Era of Abolition
• Section II: Child Slaves in the Modern Era
• Contributors
• Index