Amistad Case (1839-1841): The Revolt and the Supreme Court

The Amistad case began in July 1839, when 53 Africans held captive aboard the Spanish schooner La Amistad rose up off the coast of Cuba and took control of the ship. Seized off Long Island two months later, they became the centre of a legal battle that reached the US Supreme Court. In March 1841 the court, after an argument by former president John Quincy Adams, ruled that they had been illegally enslaved and were free.

Background

Most of the captives were Mende people from the region of present-day Sierra Leone. In early 1839 they were taken to the slave-trading post of Lomboko and shipped across the Atlantic on the Portuguese slave ship Tecora to Havana. This voyage was illegal: under a treaty with Britain, Spain had banned the transatlantic slave trade to its colonies from 1820, though Cuban officials widely ignored the ban.

In Havana, two Spaniards, José Ruiz and Pedro Montes, bought 49 adult men and four children with false papers describing them as ladinos, enslaved people already living in Cuba. On 28 June 1839 they sailed on La Amistad for Puerto Príncipe, further along the Cuban coast.

The revolt

A few nights later, around 1–2 July, Sengbe Pieh freed himself and others from their chains. The captives killed the captain, Ramón Ferrer, and the cook, Celestino; two crew members escaped in a boat, and two Africans also died in the fighting. Pieh’s group spared Ruiz and Montes on condition that they steer the ship east towards Africa.

Instead, the Spaniards sailed east by day and north and west by night. For about two months La Amistad zigzagged up the American coast as food and water ran short and several captives died. On 26 August 1839 the US survey brig Washington, under Lieutenant Thomas Gedney, seized the ship off Culloden Point, Long Island, while some of the Africans were ashore seeking supplies. Gedney took the ship to New London, Connecticut, a state where slavery had not yet been fully abolished, rather than to New York, where it had.

In the courts

The case quickly became tangled. Ruiz and Montes claimed the Africans as property; Gedney claimed salvage; and Spain demanded their return under Pinckney’s Treaty of 1795. President Martin Van Buren, anxious about relations with Spain and the support of Southern voters, wanted them sent to Cuba.

Abolitionists led by Lewis Tappan, Joshua Leavitt and Simeon Jocelyn formed the Amistad Committee to fund the defence. The Yale linguist Josiah Gibbs learned to count in Mende and searched the docks of New York until he found James Covey, a Mende-speaking sailor, who could interpret. For the first time the captives could tell their own story in court.

On 13 January 1840 District Judge Andrew T. Judson ruled that the Africans had been illegally kidnapped and should be returned to Africa. The circuit court upheld the ruling, and the Van Buren administration appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court

The case, United States v. The Amistad, was argued in February and March 1841. Roger Sherman Baldwin, the captives’ lawyer from the start, argued the case on the law. John Quincy Adams, 73 years old and a congressman from Massachusetts, spoke for about eight hours over two days, accusing the executive of trying to bend justice to please a foreign power.

On 9 March 1841 Justice Joseph Story delivered the court’s opinion. With one justice dissenting, the court held that the Africans were free people who had been kidnapped in violation of the law and that they had a right to resist. It rejected Spain’s claim but set aside the order for the government to send them back to Africa, leaving them free to go where they wished.

Return to Africa

The US government refused to pay for the voyage home, so abolitionists raised the money. While funds were collected the Africans lived in Farmington, Connecticut, studying English and Christianity. In November 1841 the 35 survivors sailed from New York on the ship Gentleman with missionaries, arriving in Sierra Leone in January 1842. One of the children, Margru, later returned to the United States to study at Oberlin College before going back to work at the mission.

Legacy

The Amistad case did not touch slavery inside the United States, which would be strengthened by later rulings such as the Dred Scott decision. But it gave the abolitionist movement a famous victory and showed enslaved Africans as people with a voice of their own in an American courtroom. It is remembered in Sierra Leone and the United States, in a replica ship launched in 2000, and in Steven Spielberg’s 1997 film Amistad. The story is part of the wider history of the Middle Passage and the fight to end the slave trade after the Slavery Abolition Act in the British Empire.

Timeline

• 1839, 28 June: La Amistad leaves Havana with 53 African captives.
• 1839, about 1-2 July: The captives revolt and take control of the ship.
• 1839, 26 August: The USS Washington seizes the Amistad off Long Island.
• 1840, 13 January: Judge Judson rules that the Africans are free.
• 1841, February-March: The Supreme Court hears arguments, including John Quincy Adams.
• 1841, 9 March: The Supreme Court rules the Africans are free.
• 1841, November: The 35 survivors sail for Sierra Leone.
• 1842, January: They arrive in Freetown.

Why it matters

The Amistad case was one of the rare occasions when enslaved people won their freedom in a US court by their own resistance. It exposed the illegal Atlantic slave trade, energised abolitionists and remains a symbol of resistance to slavery on both sides of the Atlantic.