Benjamin N. Lawrance. Amistad’s Orphans

It is no small thing to propose a name change for the so-called “Age of Abolition.” However, African historians would agree that such a change is warranted, since they have long recognized that the period did not usher in an end to slavery. Indeed, slave emancipation in the Americas served as the gateway to the mass enslavement of Africans in the late nineteenth century. But scholars specializing in other parts of the Atlantic World in this period have remained trained on the theme of freedom and its meaning. Benjamin N. Lawrance does not reject this theme so much as he turns it inside out by tracking the lives of the nineteenth century’s most powerless witnesses. According to Lawrance, “[f]ar from being an age of abolition—and if we must name epochs—the nineteenth century should more accurately be called the age of child enslavement” (34). “Amistad’s orphans” are the six children associated with the well-known story of La Amistad. The slave ship carrying people illegally brought from Sierra Leone that left Havana, Cuba, in 1839 and set sail for a Caribbean plantation. The enslaved men on board seized control of the ship and murdered the captain, demanding the ship return to Sierra Leone. La Amistad was captured off the coast of Long Island and after a high-profile trial, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that because the men were held illegally, they should be given their freedom. There were five children aboard the ship—Mar’gru, Kag’ne, Te’me, Ka’le, and Antonio. The sixth member of “Amistad’s orphans” was a young man, Covey, who was enslaved as a child and liberated, and served as interpreter for the others.

Ancient history · Emancipation · Ethnology · Genealogy · Political science · Politics · Sierra leone · Theme (computing) · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies