Cinqué of the Amistad a Slave Trader? Perpetuating a Myth

Howard Jones

I think the Journal of American History owes Cinqué an acquittal.

—Anonymous reader of manuscript for the Journal of American History

For more than fifty years a story has circulated both inside and outside the history profession that Joseph Cinqué (Sengbe Pieh), leader of the Amistad mutiny in 1839 and the central character in Steven Spielberg's movie Amistad, became an international slave trader upon his return to Africa in 1842. The release of the movie in 1997 heated the controversy by subjecting Spielberg to the charge of romanticizing a black figure who preyed on his own people. Debbie Allen, the film's producer (who had convinced Spielberg to do what he called his "most important movie"), encountered the allegation while on a TV talk show and, both there and later in the press, attributed the story to rumor and innuendo. Soon afterward, Richard Grenier made the same indictment in the Washington Times. But the most widely known accusation came in USA Today and on CBS's Face the Nation from the noted film critic Michael Medved of the New York Post (and was repeated by Martin F. Nolan in the Boston Globe). Medved quoted the two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison. In The Oxford History of the American People, a 1965 Book-of-the-Month Club selection still available in Penguin paperback, Morison wrote: "The ironic epilogue [to the Amistad story] is that Cinqué, once home, set himself up as a slave trader."1

1

During the early 1980s, in writing my book Mutiny on the Amistad, I tried to find evidence that would resolve this serious charge against Cinqué.2 The effort proved fruitless. Research in archival holdings in Spain, England, Cuba, Sierra Leone, and the United States failed to uncover documentary materials that fleshed out Cinqué's life after his return to Africa. Indeed, even among the extensive records of the American Missionary Association (AMA, founded in 1846 as a result of the Amistad affair and the first American missionary group in Africa), I found nothing conclusive on the issue. But in my recent attempt to deal with this issue anew, I came to realize that tracing the tale's origins was almost as fascinating and historically revealing as finally answering the touchy question of whether Cinqué had become a slave trader would have been.

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