Amistad Case

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Public Domain

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CONTENTS

1. Illegally Captured and Sold Into Slavery

2. Revolt at Sea

3. The Court Battle Begins

4. John Quincy Adams for the Defense

5. The Verdict

6. Sources
In August 1839, a U.S. brig came across the schooner Amistad off the coast of
Long Island, New York. Aboard the Spanish ship were a group of Africans who
had been captured and sold illegally as slaves in Cuba. The enslaved Africans
then revolted at sea and won control of the Amistad from their captors. U.S.
authorities seized the ship and imprisoned the Africans, beginning a legal and
diplomatic drama that would shake the foundations of the nation’s government
and bring the explosive issue of slavery to the forefront of American politics.

Illegally Captured and Sold Into Slavery

The story of the Amistad began in February 1839, when Portuguese slave
hunters abducted hundreds of Africans from Mendeland, in present-day Sierra
Leone, and transported them to Cuba, then a Spanish colony. Though the
United States, Britain, Spain and other European powers had abolished the
importation of slaves by that time, the transatlantic slave trade continued
illegally, and Havana was an important slave trading hub.

The Spanish plantation owners Pedro Montes and Jose Ruiz purchased 53 of
the African captives as slaves, including 49 adult males and four children,
three of them girls. On June 28, Montes and Ruiz and the 53 Africans set sail
from Havana on the Amistad (Spanish for “friendship”) for Puerto Principe
(now Camagüey), where the two Spaniards owned plantations.

Revolt at Sea
Newspaper's depiction of the revolt aboard the Amistad.
Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Several days into the journey, one of the Africans—Sengbe Pieh, also known
as Joseph Cinque—managed to unshackle himself and his fellow captives.
Armed with knives, they seized control of the Amistad, killing its Spanish
captain and the ship’s cook, who had taunted the captives by telling them they
would be killed and eaten when they got to the plantation.

In need of navigation, the Africans ordered Montes and Ruiz to turn the ship
eastward, back to Africa. But the Spaniards secretly changed course at night,
and instead the Amistad sailed through the Caribbean and up the eastern
coast of the United States. On August 26, the U.S. brig Washington found the
ship while it was anchored off the tip of Long Island to get provisions. The
naval officers seized the Amistad and put the Africans back in chains,
escorting them to Connecticut, where they would claim salvage rights to the
ship and its human cargo.

The Court Battle Begins

Charged with murder and piracy, Cinque and the other Africans of the Amistad
were imprisoned in New Haven. Though these criminal charges were quickly
dropped, they remained in prison while the courts went about deciding their
legal status, as well as the competing property claims by the officers of the
Washington, Montes and Ruiz and the Spanish government.

While President Martin Van Buren sought to extradite the Africans to Cuba to
pacify Spain, a group of abolitionists in the North, led by Lewis Tappan, Rev.
Joshua Leavitt and Rev. Simeon Jocelyn, raised money for their legal defense,
arguing that they had been illegally captured and imported as slaves.

The defense team enlisted Josiah Gibbs, a philologist from Yale University, to
help determine what language the Africans spoke. After concluding that they
were Mende, Gibbs searched New York waterfronts for anyone who
recognized the language. He finally found a Mende speaker who could
interpret for the Africans, allowing them to tell their own story for the first time.

In January 1840, a judge in U.S. District Court in Hartford ruled that the
Africans were not Spanish slaves, but had been illegally captured, and should
be returned to Africa. After appealing the decision to the Circuit Court, which
upheld the lower court’s decision, the U.S. attorney appealed to the U.S.
Supreme Court, which heard the case in early 1841.

John Quincy Adams for the Defense

To defend the Africans in front of the Supreme Court, Tappan and his fellow
abolitionists enlisted former President John Quincy Adams, who was at the
time 73 years old and a member of the House of Representatives. Adams had
previously argued (and won) a case before the nation’s highest court; he was
also a strong antislavery voice in Congress, having successfully repealed a
rule banning debates about slavery from the House floor.

In a lengthy argument beginning on February 24, Adams accused Van Buren

of abusing his executive powers, and defended the Africans’ right to fight for
their freedom aboard the Amistad. At the heart of the case, Adams argued,
was the willingness of the United States to stand up for the ideals upon which
it was founded. “The moment you come to the Declaration of Independence,
that every man has a right to life and liberty, an inalienable right, this case is
decided," Adams said. "I ask nothing more in behalf of these unfortunate men,
than this Declaration.”

The Verdict
On March 9, 1841, the Supreme Court ruled 7-1 to uphold the lower courts’
decisions in favor of the Africans of the Amistad. Justice Joseph Story
delivered the majority opinion, writing that “There does not seem to us to be
any ground for doubt, that these negroes ought to be deemed free.”

But the Court did not require the government to provide funds to return the
Africans to their homeland, and awarded salvage rights for the ship to the U.S.
Navy officers who apprehended it. After Van Buren’s successor, John Tyler,
refused to pay for repatriation, abolitionists again raised funds. In November
1841, Cinque and the other 34 surviving Africans of the Amistad (the others
had died at sea or in prison awaiting trial) sailed from New York aboard the
ship Gentleman, accompanied by several Christian missionaries, to return to
their homeland.

Sources
Educator Resources: The Amistad Case. National Archives.

John Quincy Adams and the Amistad Case, 1841. Gilder Lehrman Institute of
American History.

The Amistad Story. National Park Service.

Joseph Cinque. Black History Now.

Douglas Linder, The Amistad Trials: An Account. Famous Trials.