Shipboard Rebels

 “The Creole Rebellion – the Most Successful Slave Revolt in U.S. History” by Bruce Chadwick, 2022

...and, if that's true, it happened on a ship in 1841. The Creole was a slave ship heading from Virginia to New Orleans to deliver its 'cargo' to the large plantations of the deep South. It had to 'round Florida and that meant sailing close to the British Bahamas and Nassau. In 1833 the U.K. had outlawed slavery so any U.S. slaves were free from servitude if they got to British soil. The leader of the rebellion, Madison Washington, a formerly free man who had been captured trying to free his wife, knew that. He planned a slave uprising on the ship and an eastern voyage to Nassau Town on the former pirate island of New Providence that was now a multi-ethnic haven.

It's an extraordinary story that mostly devolves into a legal and political struggle between the U.S. and Britain. Unlike the prior story of the Amistad that was loaded with Africans who had never been formally put in bondage, the U.S. considered the 140 slaves on board the 'property' and 'cargo' of slave buyers in New Orleans. They were just like bananas or guns or barrels of oil. Earlier slave ships had foundered on the reefs of the Bahamas - the Hermosa, the Comet, the Enterprise and the Encomium - and all slaves aboard were freed by British Bahamian authorities. Nassau itself was now mostly a black town with black police and soldiers. The twist in this story is that the 19 mutineers, in the chaotic fight onboard, killed one passenger who was a slave trader and severely injured the captain. When the rebels arrived off Nassau in control of the ship it became a legal question of murder and violence.

In an amazing scene off the harbor of Nassau, dozens of boats manned by black Bahamians surrounded the anchored Creole hoping all would be freed. The U.S. tried to seize the vessel with a small group of soldiers from a nearby fleet ship. Their boat was blocked by the civilians around the Creole and Bahamian soldiers on board. 116 slaves who had not participated in the mutiny left the brig and later escaped to the rest of the Caribbean. The tough British Governor did not stop them, as he told them there were no charges against them. 5 women and children stayed onboard. The remaining 19 were locked up, including Washington, pending a decision on what to do by London.

Politics, Slavery and War

To abolitionists in the North and a few in the South they were heroes. Washington, a strong, careful and smart leader, was lionized. Frederick Douglass wrote a novella about him. Washington had protected the crew and captain's family, nursed all the injured and tamped down any further bloodshed – perhaps to his detriment. Some thought he should have run the ship aground and fled onto the island, avoiding any legal process at all.

However to president Tyler, a Whig Virginian who inherited the presidency after the death of Harrison, these men were pirates and murderers. Prior to this Tyler had vetoed a proposal for a National Bank of the United States that was passed by Congress in the face of a disastrous recession, showing his free-market 'Jacksonian' tendencies. This is something that would get Congress labeled communist nowadays, but then it was just a sensible solution the insolvency of so many private banks. This veto had brought the ire of Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams and nearly all of his Whig Party. The Creole changed that. Now Tyler could play the nationalist hero by thundering against Britain, even though he himself supposedly opposed unpaid forced and imprisoned labor. The Creole was part of a line of uprisings on ships – the Deux Soeurs, the Augusta, the Decatur – that had freed captive slaves. The British, with international support, had even boarded suspect U.S. slave ships in the Atlantic and released the captives. This had all pissed off U.S. nationalists and Southern slavers to no end.

Madison Washington - Knowledge, kindness & force

The Crown's barristers concluded that the murder happened in international waters, so the U.K. had no jurisdiction. There was no present extradition treaty with the U.S., so the men were not required to be sent back. The Governor had acted correctly in not blocking the remaining freedmen from leaving the Creole. The action of the slaves was not an act of piracy and the assertion that 'cargo' and human beings were equivalent was nonsense. They concluded that the only way for the 19 to be returned to the U.S. for trial would be by a voluntary act of 'international goodwill.' A U.S. Supreme Court justice and the head of the DOJ privately agreed that the U.S. had no legal jurisdiction over the matter.

It was up to the politicians to negotiate in the context of an outraged South gunning for war and many irritated nationalists of both parties. Daniel Webster, an ostensible U.S. opponent of slavery and Lord Ashburton, a prominent British lawyer and politician, conducted the talks in 1842.  Ashburton was part of the Baring family of prominent bankers.  At the same time J.Q. Adams was advocating the freeing of the 19 anti-slavery rebels. He thundered against Southern human bondage in an address to Congress over his being accused of criminal treason and breaking a gag order. The Creole issue had reinvigorated the abolitionists in the U.S. and this had intruded into the Congress. The ghosts of Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, the Stono rebels and various lessor insurrectionists haunted the South, and now Madison Washington had done the same.  Some white men were hung for helping the rebellions, such as in north Georgia and other southern areas.

What happened? Chadwick covers the micro-history of all the twists and turns of the Tyler presidency, the chief characters involved, the testimony of the crew, a look at the anti-slavery movement; the end of the gag rule in the House over talking about slavery and the inclusion of Texas in the U.S. as a slave state. Tyler wanted to absorb Texas as part of compensation for losing the Creole case. On April 16, 1842 a Nassau court released the remaining 17 freedmen prisoners, as 2 had died in gaol. No one knows what happened to Washington after that. In 1855 the blasted slavers got partial compensation from the U.K. for their losses from ship incidents like the Creole. They nevertheless hoped that Britain would eventually take their side in a war, given it needed cotton. But like the Bahamians surrounding the Creole, the British people would have no truck with bondage. All of this, partly spurred by the national sensation of the Creole mutiny, became a prelude to the Civil War 5 years later.

P.S. - Slaver ship wrecks found off Bahamas far north of Nassau - 2/25/24 Guardian story: Sunk Slave Ships Discovered

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “American Myth,” “Black Sails,” “The Civil War in the United States” (Marx-Engels); “Mr Turner” (Mike Leigh); “12 Years a Slave,” “Slavery By Another Name,” “Caste” (Wilkerson); “Fire on the Mountain” (Bisson); “Life Under the Jolly Roger,” “Spartacus” (Fast); “Class Struggle in the Roman Republic” (Woods).

And I got it at the Athens, GA library. Support your local library!

May Day has books on slavery, both fiction and non-fiction, where every month is 'black history month.'

Red Frog / 2/25/24