For millions of Americans, understanding of the remarkable story of the
Africans of the schooner Amistad comes not from school or reading historical
non-fiction, but rather from the mind of Steven Spielberg, producer of the 1997 movie
based loosely on the actual events of 1839 to 1841. The real story of the Amistad
is quite different than the movie’s version, but no less remarkable. Freedom
for the Africans was won not by the eloquence of John Quincy Adams (and his
part-time law clerk, Cinque) as Spielberg suggests, but largely by the hard
work and moral courage of abolitionist Lewis Tappan and the team of lawyers he
assembled in Connecticut.

Few great dramas have appeared on the nation’s stage so suddenly or
unexpectedly as the one brought on August 26, 1839 when a mastless schooner anchored off
the eastern tip of Long Island.

Douglas Linder
University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law
linderd@umkc.edu

June 2001

The improbable voyage
of the schooner Amistad and the court proceedings and diplomatic
maneuverings that resulted from that voyage form one of the most significant
stories of the nineteenth century. When Steven Spielberg chose the Amistad
case
as the subject of his 1997 feature film (Link to reviews), he finally brought it the attention the case had long
deserved, but never received. The Amistad case energized the fledgling
abolitionist movement and intensified conflict over slavery, prompted a
former President to go before the Supreme Court and condemn the policies
of a present Administration, soured diplomatic relations between the United
States and Spain for a generation, and created a wave of interest in sending
Christian missionaries to Africa.

Two sea captains, Peletiah
Fordham and Henry Green, were shooting birds among the dunes at the eastern
tip of Long Island on the morning of August 26, 1839, when they were startled
to encounter four black men wearing only blankets. Once the blacks were
assured through sign language that they were not in slaveholding country,
they led Fordham and Green to a point in the dunes where they could see
a black schooner, flagless with its sails in tatters, sitting at anchor
a mile or so from the beach. Another smaller boat was on the beach, guarded
by more black men, many of whom were wearing necklaces and bracelets of
gold doubloons. One of the black men, who appeared to be the leader of
the group, told Fordham and Green that there were two trunks full of gold
aboard the schooner, and that they would be given to whoever outfitted
them with provisions and helped them sail back to their African homeland.
Green suggested that if they got the trunks he would help them return to
Africa.

Green’s and Fordham’s dreams of riches were interrupted by a brig of the U. S. Coast Guard, the Washington,
which intercepted the rowboat as it made its way back to the schooner.
The commander of the brig, Lieutenant Thomas Gedney, boarded the schooner
and ordered, at gunpoint, all hands below the deck. Two Spaniards emerged
from below.  One was old, bearded, and sobbing.  The other was
a man in his mid-twenties. Jose
Ruiz, the younger man, spoke English and eagerly began to tell the
tale of mutiny, blood, deceit, and desperation aboard the Amistad.

The schooner had
left Havana on June 28, bound for Puerto Principe, a Cuban coastal town.
Aboard the Amistad were five whites, a mulatto cook, a black
cabin boy, and fifty-three slaves. Ruiz had bought forty-nine adult male
slaves at the Havana market. The older, bearded white, Pedro
Montes, had bought four child slaves, including three girls. On the
fourth night at sea, the slaves managed to free themselves from their irons.
In the ensuing struggle, the Africans killed the captain, Ramon Ferrer,
and a mulatto cook. (According to the story later told by the Africans,
the mulatto cook had told the slaves that they would be chopped to pieces
and salted as meat for the Spaniards when the ship arrived at its destination.)
Two crewman abandoned ship in the stern boat. Montes and Ruiz were spared,
apparently because their help was thought necessary in steering the ship
to Africa. Montes sailed toward Africa, but slowly and only during the
day. At night, he reversed course and headed due west, hoping to landfall
in the southern United States. After six weeks of zig-zagging at sea, the
Amistad
arrived
in New York.

(What Ruiz did not say
was that the slaves were were recently brought from Africa and brought
to Cuba in direct contravention of an 1817 treaty between Spain and Britain
prohibiting the importation of slave to Spanish colonies. Using falsified
passports, corrupt officials, and nighttime landings, slave traders often
were successful in eluding the British ships that patrolled waters in an
effort to enforce the importation ban.)

As Ruiz told his story,
an athletic-looking black man, naked except for a gold necklace, suddenly
appeared from below and leaped off the boat. The Washington gave
chase, but the man was a strong swimmer, constantly diving as the ship
neared. Tiring, the man took off his necklace, letting it–to the dismay
of Gedney–fall to the bottom of the sea. Finally, crew members recaptured
the black man, later known as Cinque,
and put him into chains. The Amistad was towed to New London, Connecticut,
where its arrival would dominate the news for weeks to come.

The United States Attorney
for Connecticut, William
S. Holabird, ordered a judicial hearing on the Washington. It
was unclear to Holabird, as it was to many, whether a crime had been committed,
who had committed it, or whether U. S. courts even had jurisdiction. 
There was also the matter of salvage rights, which were claimed by Gedney
and the Washington crew.  The Amistad’s cargo of wine, saddles,
gold, and silk was worth an estimated $40,000 in 1839 dollars, and the
slaves had a market value of at least half that much.

The district judge for
Connecticut was Andrew
T. Judson, an appointee of then President
Martin Van Buren. Judson was not likely to sympathize with the Africans,
having six years earlier prosecuted a Connecticut schoolmistress for establishing
a school for Negroes that Judson claimed violated a state law against encouraging
black migration. (When the jury was unable to reach a verdict in the case,
a mob set fire to the schoolmistress’s house.)

On August 29, 1839, three
days after the schooner’s discovery, Judge Judson opened a hearing on complaints
of murder and piracy filed by Montes and Ruiz.  Thirty-nine Africans
(of the forty-three who had survived the weeks at sea) were present, including
Cinque, who appeared wearing a red flannel shirt, white duck pants, and
manacles.  He appeared calm and mute, occasionally making a motion
with his hand to his throat to suggest a hanging.

The three principal witnesses
at the hearing were the first mate of the Washington and Montes
and Ruiz. The first mate described what happened when the Amistad
was first boarded.  Montes and Ruiz described the mutiny and subsequent
weeks at sea. Ruiz testified:

“I took an oar and tried to quell
the mutiny. I cried ‘No! No!.’ I then heard one of the crew cry murder.
I then heard the captain order the cabin boy to go below and get some bread
to throw among the negroes, hoping to pacify them. I did not see the captain
killed.”

Montes added his description of events on the
fourth night at sea:

“Between three and four was awakened
by a noise which was caused by blows to the mulatto cook. I went on deck
and they attacked me. I seized a stick and a knife with a view to defend
myself….At this time [Cinque] wounded me on the head severely with one
of the sugar knives, also on the arm. I then ran below and stowed myself
between two barrels, wrapped up in a sail. [Cinque] rushed after me and
attempted to kill me, but was prevented by the interference of another
man….I was then taken on deck and tied to the hand of Ruiz.”

After
listening to the testimony, Judge Judson referred the case for trial in
Circuit Court, where in 1839 all federal criminal trials were held, and
ordered the Africans put into custody at the county jail in New Haven.
The Amistads became a huge attraction. As many as 5,000 people a day visited
the jail.  The jailer charged “one New York shilling” (about twelve
cents) for close looks at the captives. The Africans also attracted scientific
interest. A phrenologist examined the captives and took “life masks” which
were later put on public display. The New Haven jail was relatively loose.
Jailers took the children, “robust” and “full of hilarity,” on wagon rides.
The adults were allowed daily exercise on New Haven’s green, where their
cavorting, somersaults, and acrobatic leaps surprised residents unaccustomed
to such public displays of exuberance.

For most New Englanders the Amistads were a curiosity.
For a small, but growing, group of abolitionists, however, they were a
cause and an opportunity. Abolitionist leader
Lewis
Tappan described the capture of the Africans as a “providential occurrence”
that might allow “the heart of the nation” to be touched “through the power
of sympathy.” The “Amistad Committee” was quickly formed and soon the group
had enlisted legal help, including that of Roger
Baldwin, who would later become the governor of Connecticut.

Spain, meanwhile, pressed
the United States to return the schooner to its Cuban owners, concede that
the U. S. courts had no jurisdiction over Spanish subjects, and return
the Amistads to Havana. The Van Buren Administration was anxious to comply
with the Spanish demands, but there was this matter of due process of law.
The Administration, through District Attorney Holabird, crafted legal arguments
that it hoped would produce the results sought by Spain.

On September 14, 1939,
the Amistads were sent by canal boat and stage to Hartford for their trial
in the Circuit courtroom of Judge
Smith Thompson, who also served (as was then the custom for Circuit
Court judges) as a justice on the United States Supreme Court. Holabird
asked the court to turn all the prisoners over to the President and to
let him decide this matter that bore heavily on the relations between great
powers. Baldwin, for the defense, argued that “no power on earth has the
right to reduce [the Africans] to slavery” and the United States should
never stoop so low as to become a “slave-catcher for foreign slave-holders.”
Judge Thompson preferred to evade the larger debate over abolition and
rested his decision on jurisdictional grounds. He decided after three days
of argument that because the alleged mutiny and murders occurred in international
waters and did not involve U.. S. citizens, the court had no jurisdiction
to consider the criminal charges. Were the slaves “property”? That was
a matter, Judge Thompson ruled, that had to be decided first in the district
court. Thompson ruled that the Africans, although no longer considered
prisoners, should be detained until the district court could decide whether
they were property and–if they were property–who owned them.

The defense devoted considerable
time to the task of trying to locate someone familiar with the language
spoken by the Africans. Dr.
Josiah Gibbs, a Yale philologist, and a clergymen who trained the deaf
and dumb examined the Africans. They concluded that the Amistads were Mende,
from a region south of Freetown in what is now Sierra Leone. Gibbs learned
to count in Mende, then wandered up and down the waterfronts of New York
counting in Mende, looking for signs of recognition among the Africans
he encountered. Finally his efforts were successful, and a Mende speaker,
James
Covey, was brought to New Haven.

The full story of the
Africans’ adventures began to come out. The Amistad captives had first
met at a slave factory in Lomboko after having been kidnapped by African
slavers. They along with about 600 other Africans were loaded aboard the
Portugeese ship Tecora and taken via the infamous “Middle Passage”
across the Atlantic. The slaves were kept naked, flogged for not eating,
and chained in a half-lying position. Many died and sea and were tossed
overboard. Landing at night in Havana, they were taken to the “barracoon,”
or slave market where ten days later they were bought by Ruiz and Montes.
On the fourth night of the Amistad’s voyage, Cinque used a nail
to break the chain that fastened all the slaves to the wall, and the mutiny
began.

Life in Connecticut
for the Amistads began to take on a semblance of normalcy. For two to five
hours a day they were instructed in English and theology by students of
the Yale Divinity school. Bonds between some of the Africans and their
teachers began to develop. Still, it was a trying time for many of the
Amistads, experiencing their first harsh weather, exposed to new diseases,
and the length of their separation from their homeland growing with no
end in sight. Tu-a became the first African to die in New Haven, occasioning
a raucous funeral that raised many New Englanders’ eyebrows.

The Amistad civil trial began
on November 19, 1839 in Hartford. After two days of testimony, the trial
was adjourned until January 7, 1840. In the New Haven harbor was the naval
schooner Grampus, sent there by President Van Buren to sail the
Amistads back to Cuba should the court rule, as expected, in the government’s
favor. Van Buren’s secret orders provided that the Africans were to be
rushed immediately to the ship and placed in irons before an appeal could
be filed, and that the Grampus should sail for Havana unless an
“appeal shall actually have been interposed.”

Baldwin and the Amistads’
lawyers produced several witnesses to support their claim that the Africans
were illegally imported from Africa and were therefore the property of
no one. Dr. Gibbs, as a linguistic expert, testified that the Amistads
spoke Mende, not Spanish. Cinque and Grabeau, another of the Africans,
recounted (through James Covey, their interpreter) the story of their capture,
voyage across the Atlantic, sale in Havana, mutiny, and eventual arrival
in Long Island. Spectators reportedly listened to Cinque “with breathless
attention.” The New Haven Herald reported that he “manifested a
high degree of sagacity, of keenness, and decision.” Sullivan Haley testified
that Ruiz, now back in Cuba, had admitted that the captives were not legal
slaves. Francis Bacon, a local resident who had visited the west African
coast in the summer of 1839 described how Lomboko was frequented by Cuban
traders and how the slave trade was “the universal business of the country.”
(The slave factory at Lomboko, incidentally, had been raided by the British
one month before the trial, an all slaves held there had been liberated.)
Baldwin also introduced the deposition of Dr.
Richard Madden, an abolitionist and the British anti-slavery commissioner
in Cuba. He described how Cuban authorities “winked at the slave trade
in return for $10 to $15 a slave,” used fraudulent documents to deceive
inspectors, and would without hesitation kill the Amistad blacks
should they be returned to Cuba. (Link to Madden Deposition)(After giving his deposition, Madden returned
to London where, in an audience with Queen Victoria, he explained the facts
surrounding the Amistad Affair.)

District Attorney Holabird
introduced statements from the Spanish consul urging that the Amistads
be returned to Spain and presented testimony and depositions of crew members
of the Washington describing their discovery and capture of the
Amistad
,
while Gedney’s counsel tried to establish that Cinque was himself a slave
trader.

Judge Judson announced
his decision on January 13, 1840, after a weekend of deliberation. He ruled
that the Amistad captives were “born free” and kidnapped in violation
of international law. They had mutinied, he said, out of a “desire of winning
their liberty and of returning to their families and kindred.” He ordered
that the Amistads be “delivered to President Van Buren for transport back
to Africa.” He ended his opinion with the observation, “Cinque and Grabeau
shall not sigh for Africa in vain. Bloody as may be their hands, they shall
yet embrace their kindred.” The Grampus sailed out of New Haven harbor
without its black passengers. Van Buren was described as “greatly dissatisfied.”

The Administration appealed
Judson’s decision, but it was affirmed by Circuit Judge Thompson. 
The Administration again appealed, this time to the United States Supreme
Court, where five of the nine justices were southerners who either owned
or had owned slaves.

After an appeal was made
to the Supreme Court, Lewis Tappan visited John
Quincy Adams at his home in Massachusetts in an effort to persuade
“Old Man Eloquent” to argue the Africans case in Washington. Former President
Adams, then 74 and a member of Congress, at first resisted, pleading age
and infirmity. But Adams believed firmly in the rightness of the cause,
and eventually agreed to join Baldwin in arguments before the Court. “By
the blessing of God, I will argue the case before the Supreme Court,” Adams
was quoted as saying. That October, 1840 date he wrote in his diary: “I
implore the mercy of God to control my temper, to enlighten my soul, and
to give me utterance, that I may prove myself in every respect equal to
the task.”

The next month Adams
stopped by Westville, near New Haven, to visit his clients. He found them
all in a thirty-foot-by- twenty-foot room, taken up almost entirely by
thirty-six cots. Adams shook hands with Cinque and Grabeau, telling them
“God willing, we will make you free.”  Later, Adams would receive
touching
letters from two of the younger Africans, Ka-le and Kin-na.

On Monday, February 22,
1841, arguments began in the Supreme Court’s crowded chamber in the U.S.
Capitol.(Among those in attendance was Francis Scott Key, author of the
Star
Spangled Banner and now an attorney, who approached Adams and offered
his advice on the case.) Attorney General Henry Gilpin, arguing for the
government, told the Court that it should not “go behind” the Amistad’s
papers
and make inquiry as to their accuracy, but should accept them on their
face in order to show proper respect for another sovereign nation. Roger
Baldwin followed Gipin, making many of the same arguments that been persuasive
in the district and circuit courts. (Link to Baldwin Argument). John Quincy Adams began his argument on February
24th.  He did not disappoint. He argued that if the President had
the power to send the Africans to Cuba, he would equally as well have the
power to seize forty Americans and send them overseas for trial. He argued
that Spain was asking the President to “first turn man-robber,…next turn
jailer,… and lastly turn catchpole and convey them to Havana, to appease
the vengeance of the African slave-traders of the barracoons.” He attacked
the President for his ordering a naval vessel to stand ready in New Haven
harbor, he attacked a southern intellectual’s defense of slavery, and he
quoted the Declaration of Independence: “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. I ask nothing more in behalf of these unfortunate
men than this Declaration.”

Adams ended his Supreme Court argument on a personal, reflective note:

“May it please your Honors: On the
7th of February, 1804, now more than thirty-seven years past, my name was
entered, and yet stands recorded, on both the rolls, as one of the Attorneys
and Counselors of this Court. Five years later, in February and March,
1809, I appeared for the last time before this Court, in defense of the
cause of justice, and of important rights, in which many of my fellow-citizens
had property to a large amount at stake. Very shortly afterwards, I was
called to the discharge of other duties–first in distant lands, and in
later years, within our own country, but in different departments of her
Government. Little did I imagine that I should ever again be required to
claim the right of appearing in the capacity of an office of this Court;
yet such has been the dictate of my destiny–and I appear again to plead
the cause of justice and now of liberty and life, in behalf of many of
my fellow men, before the same Court, which in a former age, I had addressed
in support of rights of property. I stand again, I trust for the last time,
before the same Court — hic caestus, artemque repono. I stand before
the same Court, but not before the same judges — nor aided by the same associates — nor
resisted by the same opponents. As I cast my eyes along those seats of
honor and of public trust, now occupied y you, they seek in vain for one
of those honored and honorable persons whose indulgence listened then to
my voice. Marshall — Cushing — Chase — Washington — Johnson — Livingston — Todd–
Where are they? . . . Where is the marshal — where are the criers of the
Court? Alas! where is one of the very judges of the Court, arbiters of
life and death, before whom I commenced this anxious argument, even now
prematurely closed? Where are they all? Gone! Gone! All gone!– Gone from
the services which, in their day and generation, they faithfully rendered
to their country. . . . In taking, then, my final leave of this Bar, and
of this Honorable Court, I can only ejaculate a fervent petition to Heaven,
that every member of it may go to his final account with as little of earthly
frailty to answer for as those illustrious dead, and that you may, every
one, after the close of a long and virtuous career in this world, be received
at the portals of the next with the approving sentence, ‘Well done, good
and faithful servant; enter thou into the joy of they Lord.'”

On
March 9, 1841, the Supreme Court announced its decision.  Justice
Story, speaking for the Court, said that the Amistads were “kidnapped
Africans, who by the laws of Spain itself were entitled to their freedom.”
As justification for the Court’s decision, Justice Story relied largely
on the narrower arguments of Roger Baldwin, rather than the “interesting
remarks” of John Quincy Adams. (Link to SCT Decision)
The Africans were free: they could stay or they
could return to Africa. (The decision was, of course, by
no means a  repudiation of slavery, and clearly implied that if the
Amistads had been brought from Africa prior to the 1820 treaty banning
importation of slaves, they would have been considered property of Ruiz
and Montes and been returned to Cuba.)

Reactions to the decision
varied. Adams wrote that he was filled with “great joy.” The Amistads were
described as “ecstatic.” Lewis Tappan and other evangelical abolitionists
saw an opportunity for the Amistads to become the key to an effort to bring
Christianity to black Africa. The Spanish government angered and somewhat
mystified by the Court’s action, began a long series of unsuccessful diplomatic
efforts to obtain indemnification for loss of the Amistad and the
her cargo.

Efforts began to raise
the money necessary to transport the Amistads back to their Mende homeland. 
Some local residents complained when the need for money caused some of
the Africans to begin to charge for jumping, talking, and singing. Cinque
asked $3 for a song. The Amistad Committee put together a sort of traveling
show, holding church “meetings” in which the Africans would describe their
homes and their kidnapping, sing native songs, and read from the Bible.
Cinque quickly developed a reputation as a powerful orator.

The Amistads, strangers
in a strange land, were not without their problems. One of the Amistads,
Fon-ne, drowned in a pond, an apparent suicide. Grabeau was the victim
of an assault. Others were the victims of racial taunts. Cinque was involved
in a brawl with some local rowdies. It was, everyone recognized, time to
go. Tappan redoubled efforts to recruit missionaries to accompany the Africans
back to Sierra Leone.

In November, 1841, the
ship Gentleman was chartered for $1840 to carry the Africans back
to Freetown, where the Governor of Sierra Leone said the group would be
met and guided on a four day journey to Mendeland. After a moving and tearful
round of goodbyes, the thirty-five surviving Africans of the Amistad
and
four American missionaries boarded the Gentleman, bound for West
Africa. (Only one African, Sarah, would ever return to America. She attended
Oberlin College.)

After fifty days at sea,
the Gentleman put down anchor in Freetown harbor. It didn’t take
long for the missionaries to realize they had their work cut out for them.
After disembarking, some of the Africans began to strip and engage in “heathenish
dancing.” British missionaries in Freetown told the Americans that their
plan to establish a mission in Mendeland was folly.  Soon the missionaries
wrote letters complaining of their Amistad students: some fell back
to their “licentious habits,” some disappeared, some were just trouble.
Others, such as Kin-na, were clearly torn by the pull of two different
worlds, becoming an ordained minister but practicing polygamy.  The
missionaries also contended with rats (Brother
Raymond killed 164 in a single day), the 175 annual inches of rain,
malaria and yellow fever (“black vomit.”) One by one, the missionaries
died and were replaced by others. With the new arrivals, the character
of the mission might also change. Tolerance might turn to hell-fire and
ex-communication.

The last of the Amistad
Africans
to have contact with the mission was Cinque. In 1879, old and emaciated,
he stumbled into the mission to die and was buried among the graves of
the American missionaries.

Although every American
President from the time of the Amistad decision of the Supreme Court until
1860 urged that Spain be compensated, efforts to appropriate funds for
such a purpose were consistently stymied in the House. John Quincy Adams
led the opposition to compensation efforts until his death in 1847, calling
the proposal “a robbery of the people of the United States.” With the election
of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Spain’s efforts came to an end.