Word: cinque
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...this point, the Abolitionists, led by a New York merchant named Lewis Tappan, began to protest. To return the Africans to Spain was to sentence them to death. A legal staff was assembled to defend Cinqué and his people. Sketches of Cinqué, suggesting a rare nobility of nature, roused public support in the North; friends of the Africans quoted William Cullen Bryant's poem...
...that the U.S. had no jurisdiction over the Africans, but refused to return them to Spain. The Government appealed. John Quincy Adams, the aged lion who had been President and now sat in the Congress, came roaring to the Africans' defense before the Supreme Court, which decreed that Cinqué's people should be freed immediately...
Back to West Africa. The Africans had at last been delivered from their enemies. It was almost harder to escape their friends. For still another year the Abolitionists kept Cinqué's people in New England, drilling them in Calvinist hymns, training them to wear clothes and shoes and to preserve decorum, exhibiting them to the curious public to raise funds for a mission to be founded in West Africa...
...Cinqé quarreled with the missionaries, the other Africans grew restive. At Sierra Leone, when they saw many of their countrymen, they flung off their clothes to show their tribal tattoos. The missionaries were aghast. Worse yet, some of the Africans deserted the mission, hit out for home. Cinqué went with them...
From this point to its end, the story is a play of ironies. Cinqué arrived home to find his village burned, his family sold into slavery. Wise now in the white man's ways but primitive as ever in his ethics, the black apostle of freedom turned slave runner to recoup his fortunes. He died old and famous in his country, and was buried, by his deathbed wish, in the cemetery of the little mission...