The power of Holywood to shape popular images is legendary. With one $75 million holiday film, Amistad (1997), Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks Pictures have set public perception on antebellum race relations. With characteristic social concern, Spielberg turned, once again, to African-American themes as he had done earlier in his controversial movie of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple. The subject was the successful slave revolt in June 1839 aboard the Cuban schooner woefully misnamed the Amistad (friendship). Those dramatic events lent themselves not only to cinematic interpretation but also to a brief for cultural understanding and social justice in present-day America.

Much of the film is well done, particularly for a historical drama. The imagery is powerful; the portraiture intimate; and the emotions raw. The cinematography of Janusz Kaminski pays homage to the dark and somber tones of a Goya. The scenes of the “barracoon” at Lamboko and the middle passage bear a horrific analogy to Nazi brutality against the Jews, the subject of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The bloody mutiny, captured in slow motion, is shocking but righteous. With a focus on the Mendi leader Cinque played by the imposing Djimon Hounsou, Spielberg celebrates the heroic and buries the myth of black passivity. The Cuban enslavers were Spanish subjects, so there is conveniently no direct indictment of the United States to upset the audience. Nonetheless two million blacks were enslaved in the South at the time, and white supremacy knew no sectional boundaries.

The civics lesson is clear. The courts freed the fifty-three Africans according to international law despite the efforts of the mendacious and unprincipled. The eloquence of former President John Quincy Adams and the nobility of Cinque set the stage for the Supreme Court to uphold the rule of law. Mingling past and present, Spielberg has sitting justice Harry Blackmun deliver the 1841 decision in a cameo appearance. The machinations of President Martin Van Buren and Secretary of State John Forsyth to placate the South and Spain are thwarted. The intricate legal issues are engagingly and clearly presented (see Jones for the best historical account).

Entirely imaginary, however, is the encounter between Cinque and Adams at the latter’s home. Whatever the merits of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s charge that David Franzoni’s script plagiarized her 1989 novel The Echo of Lions, the scene is pivotal to the movie (see “Filmmakers of ‘Amistad’ Rebut Claim by Novelist”; “Writer Who Cried Plagiarism Used Passages She Didn’t Write”). Tension crackles as Theodore Joadson, an African-American everyman, and Roger Baldwin, a callow attorney, behold a frustrated Cinque confronting the crusty but wise Adams. Mutual regard for a resplendent African violet allows both to recognize their common humanity while appreciating their cultural differences, the theme of the movie. The epiphany permits Joadson further insight into his character; Baldwin’s respect for the law grows; and the audience is artfully instructed on the evil of racism.

The creator of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. has a talent for making the alien accessible, even attractive. The African encounter with Yankee mores is shown humorously from the stranger’s perspective. The dour hymnists are seen as bad entertainers; the lawyer is nicknamed Dung Scraper. The surmounting of the language barrier becomes a metaphor for bridging human differences. Spielberg’s radical goal in Amistad is not unlike that eloquently stated by the historian W. E. B. DuBois almost a century ago in speaking for the African American: “He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face” (17).

The New York Times dismissed the movie as “an earnestly high-minded historical film that educates more than it entertains” (“Amistad”; see also Maslin). Contrary to Times’s instructional report card, Spielberg flunks on a crucial aspect of United States history. He gratuitously maligns abolitionism, the momentous struggle for racial justice during the 19th century and precursor of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Spielberg ironically portrays these crusaders as self-interested fanatics, a stereotype that W. D. Griffith gave cinematic life to in his 1915 classic Birth of a Nation, a blatantly Negrophobic melodrama.

Hostility to abolitionism well predates apologists for Jim Crow segregation at the dawn of the 20th century. The vocal minority of blacks and whites, women and men who called for racial justice were maligned and mobbed in their own day. They were radicals who recognized after 1820 that slavery, colonization of free blacks, and bigotry contravened fundamental republican ideals and Christian ethics. For their efforts they were outlawed in the South and victims of violence in the North (see Goodman; Goodheart and Hawkins).

Nor have the abolitionists always fared well at the hands of historians. The so-called Civil War revisionists of the 1930s and 1940s, in part disillusioned with the tragedy of World War I, blamed America’s own bloody conflagration on “a blundering generation.” They faulted fanatics, such as the abolitionists and southern fire eaters, with contributing to an atmosphere of distrust and dissension that destroyed the Union. Slavery for them did not predestine national breakdown. Instead, leading revisionists, such as James G. Randall and Avery O. Craven, argued that the Civil War was a repressible conflict that could have been avoided if cooler heads had prevailed (see Randall; Craven, The Repressible Conflict; Craven, The Coming of the Civil War). From a different perspective—that of the institutional instability of the Cold War—Stanley M. Elkins in 1959 castigated abolitionists as “truly men without responsibility” (141).

In the same vein, the movie casts abolitionists as grim Puritans for whom religious zealotry thinly masks their antislavery commitment. Perhaps Spielberg, a Democratic Party partisan, has confused the antebellum crusaders with the current evangelical right wing. At any rate he has mixed up Catholicism with Congregationalism, because the latter had long eschewed the popish crucifix which he has the joyless, hymn-singing abolitionists venerating.

Lewis Tappan, a leader of the evangelical struggle against slavery, seems a premonition for Spielberg of an early-day Newt Gingrich, Jesse Helms or others of that ilk whom Hillary Rodham Clinton has recently accused of conspiring against her priapic husband. If Van Buren is Machiavellian and the young Queen Isabella a royal brat in the script, Tappan is a fanatic, not unlike the way Griffith or the historical “revisionists” would have depicted him. Tappan not only fails to appreciate the stranger’s culture (a sin against “multiculturalism”), but he is not genuinely interested in gaining Cinque’s freedom.

Instead, the doctrinaire Tappan seeks to exploit the captives for his extreme social agenda. Joadson, the level-headed but nebulous abolitionist, is shocked to hear Tappan suggest that a legal defeat may be most useful for the cause. In an aside to the audience, Joadson realizes, “There are some men whose hatred of slavery is stronger than anything—except for the slave himself” (qtd. from Amistad). Tappan’s extreme inclinations surface again when he plots a jail break rather than let the law take its course. The legally attuned Baldwin sensibly forestalls the plot.

Tappan’s movie character is a caricature. A central figure in the development of American abolitionism, Tappan formed the committee on behalf of the Amistad Africans and worked tirelessly for their release over a two-year period. No less a historian than Bertram Wyatt-Brown wrote in 1971, “By some peculiar alchemy, Tappan had made the Amistads’ case a ‘safe’ cause. Gentlemen who were silent about more pressing questions of slavery, gentlemen who for years had muttered about the Tappans’ [Lewis’s and his brother Arthur’s] subversive activities, congratulated themselves on their liberality in supporting the Amistads” (209).

Spielberg has perversely demonized a principled man and a courageous biracial crusade that acted upon the nation’s highest ideals in the face of overwhelming racist opposition. Tappan was pivotal in first assisting the Africans, guiding the successful legal appeal, and then at their request aiding the home-coming to west Africa. In addition, his tactful handling of this complex situation secured broad appeal among whites, some of whom increasingly came to realize that the violation of human rights was not bound by color or race.

In the mostly white audience in Portland, Maine where I saw the movie at Christmas time, there was widespread applause at the movie’s conclusion. DreamWorks’s worthy goal of cultural understanding in a racially divided nation is largely achieved. The significance of Amistad is nonetheless diminished by the nightmarish interpretation of Tappan and the abolitionists.
 
 

“Amistad,” New York Times (9 Jan. 1998): B12.

Craven, Avery O. The Repressible Conflict. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana University Press, 1939.

Craven, Avery O. The Coming of the Civil War. 1942. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957.

DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. 1903. New York: Fawcett, 1961.

Elkins, Stanley M. Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.

“Filmmakers of ‘Amistad’ Rebut Claim by Novelist,” New York Times (4 Dec. 1997): B1.

Goodheart, Lawrence B. and Hugh Hawkins (eds). The Abolitionists: Means, Ends and Motivation. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1995.

Goodman, Paul. Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Jones, Howard. Mutiny on the Amistad. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987; rev. ed. 1997.

Maslin, Janet. “Pain of Captivity Made Starkly Real.” New York Times (10 Dec. 1997): B1.

Randall, James G. “A Blundering Generation.” Mississippi Valley History Review 27(1940): 3-28.

“Writer Who Cried Plagiarism Used Passages She Didn’t Write,” New York Times (19 Dec. 1997): A1.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery. New York: Atheneum, 1971.