History

New Haven Congregationalists, Abolition, and The Amistad Event: Historical Summary

[This historical summary is adapted from M. H. Mitchell's, History of the United Church of New Haven, 1942]

Another question which agitated the church from time to time as it did the whole country was slavery. Out of it developed some of the most famous events in the history of the churches on the Green...

Simeon Jocelyn, a founding member of the Third Church and first pastor of the "United African Society" which became Dixwell United Church of Christ, and his brother Deacon Nathaniel Jocelyn of North Church, along with Roger Sherman Baldwin and Arthur Tappan, were closely connected with one of the most famous incidents in the history of slavery agitation, the trial, in 1839-40, of the Amistad captives.

Fifty-three Mendians, men, woman, and children, had been seized in Africa as slaves and were being taken from Havana to Guanaja, Cuba. During the voyage they mutinied and succeeded in getting control of the ship, killing the captain and some of the crew, permitting others to escape in a small boat. They ordered the remaining Cubans to pilot the ship to Africa, but as the Africans knew nothing of navigation, Ruiz and Montez were able to deceive them as to the course and change direction at night from east to northwest. After sixty-three days, the Africans landed on the shore of Long Island to obtain water and supplies, where they were captured and arrested by US government officials. They were ultimately deposited in the New Haven jail while the case involving them was brought to trial.

The Mendi understood and spoke no language but their own, but through the efforts of Professor Joshiah Gibbs of Yale Divinity School a means of communication was finally established. The men who claimed ownership of them as slaves brought suit for their return. The question before the courts was complicated, involving also charges of piracy, claims of salvage, international treaty, and diplomatic relations.

Meanwhile much sympathy for the captives had been roused in New Haven. At a meeting in New York City in September, 1839, three prominent abolitionists - Lewis Tappan, Simeon Jocelyn, and Joshua Leavitt - formed the Amistad Committee to raise a defense for the captives. They appealed to the public for funds, both for the legal and the living expenses of the Africans, including clothing and food. Roger Sherman Baldwin, a member of North Church and New Haven attorney, offered his legal services, and he and his defense team ably represented the Mendians in US district and circuit courts, Former President John Quincy Adams joined with Baldwin in arguing the case before the Supreme Court. But so strong was the desire in Washington not to offend pro-slavery interests, that Jocelyn and Tappan feared the outcome and planned to spirit the Africans away if the case went against them or if there was any attempt to kidnap them. For that purpose they provided a boat which for a number of days cruised about the Sound and often approached the harbor of New Haven.

When the case for the captives was won and they were free, the committee arranged for their return to Africa. They had been given instruction by students in the Divinity School, and asked to have missionaries sent back with them. On November 27, 1841, the thirty-five surviving Mendians, accompanied by five missionaries and teachers, sailed from New York to Sierra Leone.

Nathaniel Jocelyn's portrait of the leader, Cinque, hangs in the rooms of the New Haven Colony Historical Society as a permanent reminder of this extraordinary event. In 1846, in order to support the Mendi Mission and to promote the cause of Christian abolitionism in the US, Lewis Tappan and other evangelical abolitionists established the American Missionary Association, from which the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries has evolved.

Excerpt from a Sermon

The following is an excerpt from a sermon preached by the Rev. Louise B. Higginbotham, senior pastor of United Church on the Green, New Haven. on the occasion of the Meetinghouse's dedication as a site on the Connecticut African-American Freedom Trail.

I find it to be a matter of deep spiritual importance that those of us who gather in this Meeting House remember who we are. As United Church on the Green in 1997, we are the heirs of both the North and the Third Congregational Churches. That is, we are religious descendants of contentious believers like Simeon Jocelyn who founded Dixwell Ave. Congregational Church so that his African-American neighbors would not have to sit up in the balcony of this Meetinghouse, invisible and segregated from those seated in the pew boxes downstairs. We owe much to activists like Roger Sherman Baldwin, the Rev. Samuel Dutton, Lewis and Arthur Tappan, and Nathaniel Jocelyn, who worked fearlessly for the freedom of the Amistad captives in the judicial system and in the courts of public opinion, while their wives, who are not mentioned in the histories, sewed clothes for the captives and stormed heaven for their release.

Here is the plaque which will be mounted by the front doors. You will note that in the center is a lighted lantern, the concrete symbol of the Abolition Movement. As slaves seeking freedom "followed the drinking gourd" toward the North, many New England Congregationalists greeted them with a lantern to guide their feet on the Holy Way to Canada.

It is not too hard to imagine the Rev. Samuel Dutton, Pastor of North Church in those years, reading our Scripture Lesson in a clandestine prayer circle in the church's lamplit parsonage, looking into the eyes of hunted men and women and children and declaring to them God's Word of promise:

"Be strong. Do not fear. Here is your God. He will come and save you."

I think it is important to remember that those who led slaves to freedom and those who supported and defended the Amistad captives did so out of a profound moral imperative which was rooted in their own deeply held experience of God and the Gospel of grace.

The Abolitionist believed in grace and so they knew that social and political transformation was possible. As the abolitionist Wendell Phillips declared: "My friends, if we never free a slave, we have at least freed ourselves in the effort to emancipate our brothers."

Let us remember that once, this Meetinghouse stood as a lantern of hope illuminating a very present darkness. Let us remember that we are now custodians of that lantern - gatekeepers of God's safe dwelling place and fellow pilgrims with the disabled and the despised on the Holy Way home.

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