Mea Culpa

Bertram Wyatt-Brown

Howard Jones offers a cautionary tale that all historians, seniors as well as newcomers to the profession, ought to heed: Be careful to document any statement purporting to be fact. Nowadays some scholars take liberties with this cardinal rule of the profession and pursue novelistic inventions, providing imagined scenes and conversations about which the sources are deadly silent. Postmodern manipulation of historical data may have its uses, but for the more traditional among us, the obligation to adhere to the rules of fact-finding remains vital. Jones remonstrates against some historians, alas, myself included, who did a pretty sloppy job when claiming that Cinqué, leader of the Amistad prisoners, had himself become an active slave trader once he returned to native soil. We lacked solid evidence for that dubious conclusion. I feel particularly at fault because in a reprinted paper edition of Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery I did not correct the error of judgment. Not until after its publication did I recognize the problem. As Jones correctly observes, I compounded the error by an inadequate reference to my sources. If I and others had proceeded, as Jones has done, with a careful and skeptical reconstruction, we could only have carried the point this far: that two writers of the 1940s and 1950s, Fred L. Brownlee, a major functionary of the American Missionary Association (AMA), and William A. Owens, a novelist, had identified Cinqué as a slave trader. But in view of their undocumented assertions, we should have added that the charge was wholly unsustainable according to surviving records.

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