Amistad:
The Federal Courts and the Challenge to Slavery
Media Coverage and Public Debates
“Keep Cool”
The Colored American
, November 2, 1839.
The editors of the nation’s leading African American newspaper closely followed the coverage of other New York newspapers during the
Amistad
proceedings. The city’s papers presented a broad range of opinion about the case, although many, especially those among the “penny press,” expressed exaggerated prejudice against the Mende and their abolitionist supporters. The
Colored American
reserved special criticism for the “brothel Morning Herald,” which had sent a reporter to Connecticut and printed some of the cruelest and most vulgar accounts of the African captives. Here the
Colored American
explicitly linked the racist coverage in northern newspapers with the southern defenders of slavery.
We have been highly pleased, for some weeks past, with the independent and fearless tone of the N.Y. Sun, while discussing the rights and wrongs of the Amistad affair. It views this matter as it ought, and reasons it with sound judgement and good sense. We are also happy to find a like spirit alive in several others of our most respectable penny papers, of which are the SIGNAL and the TATTLER. … These paper do not permit their columns to be disgraced, in this matter, with the low born and vulgar prejudice – the mean and contemptible spirit - the absurd and weak dogmas, and the fiend-like nature, which are the characteristics of a junto of infamous prints in this city ycleped [sic] as follows: the
N.Y. Star
,
N.Y. Gazette
,
Courier & Enquirer
, the brothel
Morning Herald
, and a few others equally detestable in character.
Ever since the capture of the Amistad, and the confinement of the Africans, the editors of these latter papers have been growling and firing volley upon volley of abuse from their
smut-machines
upon these men, because, forsooth, they had dared, after having been stolen from their native land, and torn from the arms of their wives and children, and forced on board a slave-ship, being bound in irons and otherwise cruelly treated, to break their shackels and assert their “inalienable rights to life, LIBERTY,” &c. Yes, because they had dared to this, they have been denounced as pirates, as murderers, and have had every epithet heaped upon them which these editors could cull from their natural vocabulary. Chiveralrous, high-minded editors, they! How valiantly – how corageously they fight those forty poor African prisoners!!! The South will owe them much – perhaps, grant them a pension!