The Amistad controversy centered around a slave mutiny off the coast of Cuba in July 1839. The African captives who mutinied on board the Spanish ship Amistad had originally been transported to Cuba in a Portuguese slave ship sailing from Lombokor, an island off the West African coast. This transport violated the 1817 treaty between England and Spain which banned the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Thus, the contraband Africans were smuggled into Havana after dark. Two Spaniards, Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montes, purchased 53 of the Africans and sailed with them toward Puerto Principe aboard La Amistad.
The captives revolted soon after the ship set out from the northern coast of Cuba. Sengbe Pieh (also known as Joseph Cinque) led the revolt. The captives freed themselves and then strangled the captain and stabbed some of the crew. Ruiz and Montes were spared, on the condition that they guide the ship back to Africa. Instead of returning them, the Spaniards deceived the mutineers by steering east by day, then west by night, slowly directing the vessel northward. By August the tattered ship had reached U. S. waters off the coast of Long Island near Montauk, New York, where the desperately hungry passengers went ashore to find food. The USS Washington discovered them, and the mutineers surrendered after some resistance. The Africans were sent to a New Haven jail, where they would remain for the next two years. News of the Amistad case spread quickly, and legal arguments over the fate of the Africans began in the Connecticut courts. Central to these legal proceedings was a conflict between the human right to rebel when held by force and the rights of property owners to recover their property. The same could be said for all legal arguments over slavery, but adding to this controversy was the problem of international laws and treaties. Thus, the fate of the Amistad rebels was shaped not only by state courts, but by federal and international concerns over U. S. relations to Spain.
Abolitionists in the United States reacted strongly to the incident, as did southern slave owners. Each side viewed the fate of the mutineers as a statement about the morality of the slave system. Ruiz and Montes maintained that the mutineers had been slaves in Cuba prior to the voyage, and thus as the legal property of the Spaniards, they were subject to punishment for their actions aboard the Amistad. Prominent abolitionist Lewis Tappan and others created the Amistad Committee to help defend Cinque and the other rebels. Tappan argued that the “Mendians” (as they became known because many were from Mende) were illegal captives who had the human right to defend their freedom through revolt.
The committee began to publicize the plight of the captives in an effort to raise money for their defense and promote awareness of the evils of slavery. Along with receiving substantial newspaper coverage, the Mendians were also sketched, and the sketches circulated at abolitionist speaking engagements. With the help of two African-born sailors, supporters were able to communicate with the prisoners, especially with the leader Cinque. While imprisoned awaiting trial, sympathetic activists taught the Mendians some English and introduced them to Christianity. Tap-pan secured the services of attorney Roger Baldwin for the upcoming legal battle.
In September 1839 the Amistad case was brought before the U. S. Circuit Court in Hartford, Connecticut. This court denied the prisoners’ pleas for release, remanding the case to the higher U. S. District Court. In January 1840 District Judge Andrew T. Judson ruled that the Africans had been illegally kidnapped and sold, in violation of the 1817 treaty. Judson also ruled that, as legally free
This engraving depicts Joseph Cinque and about 50 other enslaved Africans rising up against the captain and crew of the Amistad. (Library of Congress)
People, Cinque and his followers had the right to revolt against their captors in order to regain their freedom. Jud-son ordered that the mutineers be returned to Africa.
H owever, the federal government and President Martin Van Buren had expected a verdict that would have required the mutineers to be returned to Spain in accordance with Pinckney’s Treaty of 1795 between the United States and Spain. Worried that Judson’s verdict would provoke further diplomatic tension with Spain as well as southern hostility toward his administration, Van Buren appealed the District Court decision. The Court of Appeals upheld the verdict in May 1840, so the government continued the appeal at the highest level, the U. S. Supreme Court. The attorneys for the Amistad mutineers convinced former president John Quincy Adams to address the Court on their behalf. Baldwin’s arguments and Adams’s stirring address persuaded the Court. Although the majority of the justices (including Chief Justice Roger Taney) were southerners and slave owners, they affirmed the original District Court decision in March 1841 by a margin of 8-1: The mutineers had been kidnapped, which entitled them to use force to free themselves. The sanctity of property did not apply in this case, because the property was taken illegally through fraud and deceit. The rebels were free to return to Africa. Tap-pan and the Amistad Committee began to raise funds in order to return Cinque and his comrades to Africa. Only 35 of the original captives remained, the others having died in the New Haven jail.
In November 1841 the remaining Africans, their translator, and five white missionaries set sail for Sierra Leone. Cinque maintained some contact with Tappan after his return, but for the most part historians know little about the fate of the mutineers after 1841. Whether the Africans were able to return to their homelands and families is not known. Cinque supposedly lived until 1879, coming to the surviving Tappan mission in Freetown to die. Still claiming material damages, Spain continued to ask for reparations from the United States for its lost “cargo.” These demands for recompense were drowned out by the sectional controversies in Congress that eventually led to the Civil War.
The Amistad controversy itself helped kindle the flames of sectional dispute, pitting human-rights arguments against property-rights arguments in ways that influenced the domestic battle over slavery. The incident did not set a legal precedent that contributed to slavery’s demise; indeed, the Taney Court that affirmed the mutineers’ rights would go on to rule against the human rights of American blacks in the 1857 Dred Scott decision. Nevertheless, the arguments presented by Tappan, Baldwin, and Adams resonated within the antislavery community, and the publicity surrounding the captives helped illuminate the horrors of the slave trade and strengthen the argument for the human rights of African-American slaves.
Further reading: Mary Cable, Black Odyssey: The Case of the Slave Ship Amistad (New York: Viking Press, 1971); Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
—Eleanor H. McConnell
World History
