The Amistad Test of Law and Justice Although the story of the Cuban ship La Amistad was long ignored in American history textbooks and standard works on slavery and anti-slavery, it received enormous publicity in 1997 as a result of Steven Spielberg's somewhat inaccurate but powerful film Amistad. I have chosen to begin with this historical narrative because it presents a concrete test of American law and justice, and also dramatically illustrates the multinational character of the Atlantic slave system. Indeed, if the American courts had reached a different decision, one can well imagine England imposing a naval blockade on Cuba, and even a war exploding between Britain and the United States, and perhaps Spain. The Amistad case involved American politics, the judiciary, and foreign relations at the highest levels.
It also epitomized slavery's deepest contradictions, both legal and philosophical. Early in 1839, in the Mendi region of Sierra Leone, the 25-year-old Joseph Sinké, whose real Mendian name was Sengba, was seized by four black strangers from his own tribe or clan while he was working on a road between two villages. Chained by the neck to other blacks, Sinque was marched like a prisoner of war three days to Lomboko, on the Sierra Leone coast.
Having no way to get word to his wife and three children, Sinque suspected that he had been seized to pay a debt he owed to a business associate. For nearly four centuries, West Africans had been devising techniques, including war, to enslave other Africans, usually members of other lineage or ethnic groups. to sell to European and American traders on the coast, and thus meet the continuing and generally rising demand for the cheapest and most exploitable form of drudge labor. One should note that African slave traders almost always sold their captives some distance from where the captives had lived. Today, many readers are shocked to learn that virtually all of the enslavement of Africans was carried out by other Africans.
But as the African-American historian Nathan Huggins pointed out long ago, the concept of an African race was the invention of Western rationalists, and most African merchants saw themselves as selling people other than their own. On the coast, after being sold to Portuguese merchants working for the Cuban House of Martin in Havana, Sinque and some 500 other Africans, mostly women and children, were loaded on the slave ship Tesora. During the two-month voyage to northern Cuba, over one-third of the slaves died from disease and dehydration, a staggeringly high and atypical proportion for the 19th century. Then, as the ship approached the Cuban coast, the captain had the captives unchained and brought up on deck, where as valuable property they were bathed, better fed, and given clean clothing. Since the slave trade to Cuba had been illegal since 1820, The Portuguese traders smuggled Cinque and the other slaves at night in small boats, to a deserted beach, and then into warehouses in a tropical forest.
There they recuperated for two weeks before being marched to the roofless, oblong barracks that stood as part of the slave market in Havana. While crossing the Atlantic from Sierra Leone to Cuba, the Tesora always faced the danger of being intercepted by an armed British cruiser. After outlawing its own gigantic slave trade in 1808, the same year in which the United States took similar action, Britain adopted a long-range policy of pressuring and bribing other maritime powers, even at the cost of millions of pounds, to say nothing of decades of diplomacy and the expansion of anti-slave trade naval patrols, with the goal of stopping the flow of African slaves into both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. According to an Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1817, reinforced by Spanish positive law, any Africans imported into Cuba after May 1820 were supposed to be legally free.
The African slave trade to Cuba was not only illegal, as with piracy, violators of the law were subject to the death penalty. Unfortunately, the Spanish government never took these measures seriously. In Cuba, the laws were not considered to be in force, especially after new shipments of Africans had been successfully landed. Partly as a result of the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, which devastated the world's major producer of sugar and coffee, the 19th century Spanish government reaped enormous profits from Cuba's relatively sudden emergence as the world's greatest producer of sugar.
By 1856, Cuba was producing over four times as much sugar as Brazil, though slave-grown sugar was still Brazil's major export. Moreover, by 1839, at the end of a decade when Cuba illegally imported around 181,600 slaves from Africa, This supply of labor was becoming even more valuable for Spain. When Britain emancipated its own colonial slaves in 1834 and then abolished the coercive system of apprenticeship in 1838, the production of British sugar and other slave-grown staples plummeted, thus opening an even larger global market for the slave societies of Cuba and Brazil.
And since Spain had lost Mexico and her South and Central American colonies in the Wars of Liberation, the Spanish government was extremely anxious to preserve the surviving bonds with Cuba and Puerto Rico. Both planters and Spanish leaders viewed the slave system as the central link in maintaining the loyalty of the two Caribbean colonies. In June 1839, two Spanishs joined the throng of shoppers at Havana's Barracons.
Everyone understood that when newly imported slaves were sold, officials, often bribed, would issue fraudulent passports certifying that the slaves were not bozales, illegally imported from Africa, but ladinos, who could speak Spanish, and who had either been born in Cuba or legally imported before May 1820. Though only 24, Joseph Ruiz, the first Spanish, was an experienced slave merchant. He examined the bodies and teeth of the recent involuntary immigrants and bought Cinque and forty-eight other adult males for four hundred and fifty dollars apiece. Pedro Montes, who was fifty-eight, bought four young Mendian children, three girls and a boy, and joined Ruiz in chartering La Amistad, a sleek black schooner built in Cuba on a Baltimore model for coastal trading.
The following people boarded the vessel. the fifty-three Africans, an enslaved Ladino mulatto cook, Celestino, the captain's sixteen-year-old slave cabin boy, Antonio, and six whites, including Montes, Ruiz, two sailors, and the captain and ship-owner, Ramon Ferrer. That done, La Amistad set out at midnight for Puerto Principe, about three hundred miles east of Havana. On July 1st, following three nights at sea, Sinque determined to lead a revolt after Celestino indicated by sign language that the blacks would be killed, cut into pieces, salted, and eaten. There was a widespread African belief that whites were cannibals, just as many Euro-Americans believed that Africans were cannibals.
With a nail, Sinque picked the locks on his own and others'iron collars. The captives then found boxes filled with sugarcane knives. Within minutes, they killed Captain Ferrer and his cook. The two sailors disappeared, probably overboard, and the rebels wounded and captured Ruiz and Montes, their supposed owners. Discovering in some way that Montes was a former sea captain, Cinque ordered him to sail the ship into the morning sun until they returned to Africa.
Secretly, the two Spanishs devised a plan of heading north at night, hoping to be rescued by a British cruiser. or to land at a southern slave-holding port in the united states la amistad encountered a number of other ships which usually fled at the sight of blacks on deck with long knives though berna a mendian who spoke some english succeeded in obtaining a keg of water and some apples from one captain ten of the africans died mostly from drinking dangerous medications to quench their terrible thirst finally in late august An American revenue cutter seized La Amistad near the tip of Long Island, after Cinque had anchored the ship and gone ashore with a small group to find provisions. At first, the American officers suspected that the blacks were pirates, but then Montes and Ruiz dropped to their knees and pleaded for liberation. Ruiz could speak some English, and Lieutenant Richard Me could understand Spanish.
Having heard the Spanish's story, Lieutenant Thomas Gedney commander of the revenue vessel, towed La Amistad to New London, Connecticut. He had no warrant or legal authority to do this, as former President John Quincy Adams later pointed out, but he probably knew that slavery was still legal in Connecticut. It would not be outlawed until 1848, 21 years after New York took such action in accordance with the law of 1817. Gedney planned to file a claim in Admiralty Court for salvage, hoping to win the value of the ship and its cargo, including the slaves. At this point, it is helpful to glance at the state of New World slavery and anti-slavery in 1839-42, the Amistad period. Largely as a result of the American Revolution from 1777 to 1804, the states from Vermont to New Jersey had either abolished slavery or enacted laws that freed all children of slaves sometime in their twenties, in Rhode Island, at age 18 for females.
A similar pattern followed the Spanish-American Wars of Independence, and slavery gradually disappeared as the older generations died off. Thus, by 1840, Slavery had been outlawed in Mexico, Central America, and Chile, and only small numbers of aging slaves remained in Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru. Though racial slavery had been legal throughout the Western Hemisphere in 1775, by 1840 it flourished only in Brazil, the southern United States, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, and to a certain degree in the French and Dutch Caribbean. Britain, from 1680 to 1808, the major carrier of African slaves across the Atlantic, had taken the lead in abolishing its own slave trade and then in curtailing and attempting to suppress the slave trade of other nations. While the French, the Spanish, and many Americans saw such policies as a hypocritical instrument of British imperialism, in 1834 Britain freed nearly 800,000 of its own colonial slaves, including those in South Africa and the Indian Ocean.
and in 1838 ended the institution of West Indian apprenticeship. In the revolutions of 1848, France and Denmark would emancipate their own colonial slaves, including the African slaves in the French plantation colony of Réunion in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar. Yet despite these encouraging trends, by 1839, American abolitionists had failed in their concerted efforts at moral suasion.
That is, in convincing significant numbers of Southern Christians that every minute they kept their slaves in bondage, they were compounding the guilt of the original act of enslavement. Although they were highly successful in utilizing new steam-driven technology for printing and distributing mountains of pamphlets and pictures that Southerners said were calculated to rouse and inflame the passions of the slaves against their masters, the abolitionists were wholly unprepared for the Southern fury they aroused. They were even more shocked by the northern racist backlash that took the form of violent mobs, usually organized by gentlemen of property and standing, who at best pelted black and white abolitionist speakers with rotten eggs and stones. Thus, by 1839, two years after an Illinois mob shot and killed Elijah P. Covey, an abolitionist martyr who was trying to defend his fourth printing press from destruction, Anti-slavery leaders were desperately searching for ways to challenge any national authorization of slavery.
They mobilized vast petitioning campaigns against slave markets in the nation's capital, against the growing interstate slave trade to the lower Mississippi Valley, and against the settling of slaves in the publicly owned and federally governed western territories. All three of these demands seemed to fall within the constitutional powers of Congress. It was in this context that Americans read the news that federal judge Andrew T. Judson, having examined La Amistad's papers and having heard the testimony of Montes, Ruiz, and Antonio, a Ladino slave who made it clear that the others had recently arrived in Cuba from Africa, had asked a grand jury of the U.S.
Circuit Court in Hartford to decide if American treaties with Spain applied to this case, and if the African captives should be tried for mutiny and murder. Judson, a Jacksonian Democrat with a notorious record of anti-black racism, had also ordered the federal marshal to take all the blacks to jail without bond in New Haven, an unthinkable action if the ship La Amistad, meaning friendship in English, had been in control of whites who had freed themselves from pirates or kidnappers. Once the circuit court trial had determined in September that the captive's legal status fell under the jurisdiction of the federal judiciary, Abolitionists saw the coming trial before the U.S.
District Court as a providential opportunity to dramatize the illegal violence in which all slaveholding originated. The central issue for key leaders like Louis Tappan, the wealthy silk merchant, who with his brother Arthur largely financed the American Anti-Slavery Society, was the glaring discrepancy between American positive law, that is, the explicitly enacted statutes that recognize slaves as legitimate private property, and the fundamental doctrine of natural rights embodied in the Declaration of Independence. By September 1839, President Martin Van Buren's mind focused on one issue, an issue that seems almost glued to the high office he held, re-election.
And even in 1839, news spread quickly from New London and Hartford to the nation's capital. Lacking the popularity of his predecessor and mentor, Andrew Jackson, Van Buren had been weakened politically by a disastrous economic recession. Because he faced an uphill struggle for re-election in 1840, any prolonged controversy involving slavery could bring acute embarrassment to the reigning Democratic Party, whose power depended on appeasing the increasingly volatile and aggressive South. From Jefferson onward, slave-holding Southern Democrats owed much of their power to the Three-Fifths Clause in the Constitution, which counted three-fifths of the slave population in apportioning presidential electors and congressmen.
It is probable that neither Jefferson nor Jackson would have been elected president without taking count of non-voting slaves, a fact that greatly embittered New England Federalists. For almost twenty years, Van Buren had been obsessed with the need to suppress sectional discord. Van Buren was a New Yorker who came from an old Dutch slave-holding family.
His supporters had taken the lead in anti-abolition riots and demonstrations intended to reassure the South. that the northern public would not tolerate abolitionist fanatics. Thus, the President and his southern pro-slavery Secretary of State, John Forsyth, were prepared to bypass the judicial system, if necessary, to prevent the abolitionists from exploiting the Amistad affair. Van Buren and Forsyth relied heavily on treaties made with Spain in 1795 and 1819, which contained detailed provisions for the return of ships and other property rescued from pirates or robbers.
The Spanish government demanded that the ship, cargo, and slaves be immediately delivered to the Spanish consul in Boston, in order to be returned to Cuba for trial. When it became apparent that the Mendian status as slaves was in doubt, Spain insisted on their return as assassins. The American government, some of whose leaders had long looked on Cuba as a rich island that should be annexed sometime in the future, was eager to support Spain's ties with Cuba and thus head off any British plans to intervene or even seize Cuba on the pretext of gross slave trade treaty violations. Aside from unpaid debts from 1834 to 1845, Spain was shaken by the carlist civil war and successive uprisings that raised the threat of British or French intervention.
Unlike Britain, the United States had never signed a treaty with Spain for suppressing the slave trade. In fact, in 1825, John Marshall, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, had even ruled that the slave trade, though outlawed by most nations, was sanctioned by international law.
Moreover, American courts had no jurisdiction over Spanish subjects or over crimes, aside from piracy, committed on Spanish ships. And since slavery was legal in both Cuba and the United States, it appeared to Spain, and to the Van Buren administration, that American courts had no right to question the ship's papers, which falsely affirmed that the blacks were Ladinos, or bona fide slaves, not Bozales from Africa. On September 11, 1839, Secretary of State Forsyth ordered the Federal District Attorney in Connecticut, William S. Howard, to make sure that no judicial proceedings permitted the cargo and slaves to go beyond the control of the federal executive.
Van Buren felt so strongly about returning the blacks to Cuba and avoiding the publicity of a long trial that he was willing to subvert the federal judicial system and deprive the captives of the right of due process. In the United States, the right of even free blacks were still an unsettled question, interpreted differently in different states. When the trial began in the Federal District Court in New Haven in the extremely cold January of 1840, the President diverted a small naval vessel, the USS Grampus, to New Haven Harbor. He issued secret orders to the District Attorney to have the captive smuggled to the ship, presumably in the wholly expected event of a court decision favorable to the President and to Spain. Such action would immediately cut off any right of an appeal to the Supreme Court.
But as John Quincy Adams, the 73-year-old congressman, former president and defender of the Africans, would later point out to the Supreme Court, Van Buren's order was not conditional to be executed only in the event of a decision by the court against the Africans, but positive and unqualified to deliver up all the Africans in his custody while the trial was pending. Speaking as a former president, Adams added, that Van Buren had also violated his oath to protect and defend the Constitution by treating all 36 persons in a mass, totally ignoring the supreme point that the right of personal liberty is individual. Moreover, because of the Grampus'limited space below deck, Cinque, Grabeau, Fabana, and many of the others would have been chained to the deck in icy winter weather. Those who survived and landed in Cuba would almost certainly have been executed for murder.
This point was confirmed by the testimony of Dr. Richard Madden, the English veteran of the Anglo-Spanish Mixed Commission in Cuba, who, on his return to Britain, came a thousand miles out of his way to testify in New Haven. Later, the Van Buren administration obstructed every effort of the defense to obtain copies of treaties and other official documents, and was probably responsible for what Adams called a scandalous mistranslation of Spanish words which, if undetected, might well have destroyed the entire case of the defense. To avoid confusion, it may be helpful here to summarize the sequence of Amistad trials. After Judge Judson examined the ship's papers on the American revenue brig in New London Harbor, the Federal Circuit Court tried the captives in Hartford.
Then the Federal District Court trial began briefly in Hartford, but moved to New Haven. After Judge Judson ruled that the captives were free and should be returned by the President to Africa, the federal government appealed the case first to the Circuit Court and finally to the Supreme Court in Washington. At the first federal Circuit Court trial, before a packed courtroom in Hartford, the four Mendian children appeared to be in great affliction and wept exceedingly.
The Colored American, the leading African-American newspaper in New York City, continued, Public opinion is decidedly in favor of the Africans'liberation, inasmuch as they have committed no crime, either legal nor moral, notwithstanding which they are held as prisoners. Associate Justice Smith-Thompson, on circuit from the U.S. Supreme Court, denied even the three girls'release on a writ of habeas corpus, but ruled that the Africans would not stand trial in the United States for murder or piracy.
The issues regarding their status were not discussed. The treaties with Spain and claims for salvage were referred to the Federal District Court, with specific provision for appeal. These procedural decisions allowed Louis Tappan to enable the Mendian to sue Ruiz and Montes, who were arrested and temporarily jailed in New York City on charges of assault and battery and false imprisonment, a development that evoked outrage in the South, as Tappan had intended.
Meanwhile, for a period of some 18 months, until the Supreme Court in March 1841 upheld Judge Andrew T. Judson's startling decision to free everyone except Antonio, who was a true Ladino, the surviving 36 African men were imprisoned in or just outside New Haven. John Quincy Adams told of seeing them confined in a 30-by-20-foot room while the four children lived with the jailer and his wife. Thousands of visitors paid 12.5 cents for the site of these African savages. On the other hand, the New Haven District Court allowed the blacks, when weather permitted, to exercise and do gymnastics on the New Haven Green or Central Park.
Onlookers were amazed by the Africans'graceful agility. Louis Tappan paid for their religious instruction from members of the Yale faculty, an exercise in learning that was clearly a two-way street. Given the realities of power, one must emphasize that without the religiously motivated aid of lewis tappan joshua levitt simeon jocelyn and other abolitionist members of the amistad committee who skillfully cooperated with outstanding non abolitionist attorneys like roger sherman baldwin and john quincy adams the africans would surely have been shipped back to cuba and executed as i have suggested that outcome which spain and president van buren demanded might well have provoked a British blockade or even seizure of Cuba, and the United States threatened military intervention in response to any such action. The United States and Britain, having already fought two wars, were now in sharp conflict over unrelated incidents along the Canadian border. What made the Amistad case so distinctive was the fact that the slave trade to Cuba was illegal after 1820, a violation of Spanish law as well as treaties.
Thus, Sinque and his fellow prisoners were not slaves even by any positive law, unless one recognized local African law from Sierra Leone, and if no positive law applied, there was no room for an appeal to natural law. In the New Haven District Court, Judge Judson overcame some of his racial prejudices and ruled that a mutiny by men who were wrongfully enslaved was not cognizable, that is, capable of being recognized as a crime in an American court. Since there was no Spanish or American law that authorized the slavery of the Amistad blacks, they were entitled to fall back on natural law, even if that meant revolution. After the Van Buren administration appealed the case to the Supreme Court, John Quincy Adams used the Declaration of Independence to assert the natural right to revolution. I know of no law, no code, no treaty, applicable to the proceedings of the executive or the judiciary, except that law, pointing to the copy of the Declaration of Independence, hanging against one of the pillars of the courtroom, that law, two copies of which, are ever before the eyes of your honors.
I know of no other law that reaches the case of my clients but the law of nature, and of nature's God. on which our fathers placed our own national existence the circumstances are so peculiar that no code or treaty has provided for such a case that law in its application to my clients i trust will be the law on which the case will be decided by this court adam seemed to have meant that nature's law which he was not at liberty to argue applied because no other law was in effect the abolitionists went much further and cited the famous English Somerset case, 1772, as proof that local laws allowing slavery were confined to a specific territory and could not extend out to sea. They also asked why, if it was a capital crime to transport an African captive to the New World, it was legitimate to buy or sell a captive or her descendants, who by chance had arrived in Cuba before 1820, or in the United States before 1808. The Spanish, at least, gave the appearance of consistency when they thumbed their noses at what they saw as an externally imposed law intended to prevent them from reaping the profits that the English and Americans had reaped from the Atlantic slave trade from the 17th century to the early 19th. In the United States, as the Amistad case demonstrated, slavery was indeed becoming, given its coexistence with the belief in equal human rights, a peculiar institution. And the key to that American dilemma was race.
The Amistad trials evoked grotesque outbursts of racism. The New York Herald depicted the captives as blubber-lipped savages with baboon-like expressions. Critics ridiculed Louis Tappan as a fanatic when he compared Sinque to Othello. Even in the North, there were deep fears of racial intermixture, disunion, or national suicide sparked by the abolitionists. But the Amistad Trials also confirmed the strength of America's revolutionary ideals.
John Quincy Adams, born in 1767, was the last surviving American leader with strong ties to America's founding. As a young diplomat, he had been praised and respected by Washington, Jefferson, and Madden. Under President Montes, he had been one of America's greatest secretaries of state, perhaps the greatest. Though party politics had undermined the goals of his own presidency, as an aging congressman, he led the ultimately successful nine-year battle against Southerners to defeat the House of Representatives gag rule against the reception of anti-slavery petitions.
In the midst of this battle, Adams served as the key legal advisor to Roger Sherman Baldwin, before becoming the senior defense attorney in the Amistad trial before the U.S. Supreme Court. At ages seventy-three and seventy-four, as Adams fought slavery on two fronts, he exemplified the noblest meaning of the revolutionary heritage.
As he told William Jay, the abolitionist son of the first Chief Justice, John Jay, the blacks had vindicated their own right to liberty by executing the justice of heaven upon a pirate murderer, their tyrant, and oppressor. Adams's view that the Africans had freed themselves by self-emancipation One surprising support from the northern press. The southern press gave the issue slight coverage, and the Cuban press was mostly silent. The Africans'mutiny was a better rising than Bunker Hill or Lexington, according to the Herald of Freedom, a white abolitionist paper reprinted in the Colored American. The courts, according to this writer, Nathan P. Roger, would not dare to acquit the blacks, since that would be seen as sanctioning of Negro insurrection, and the Southern chivalry would not sleep again.
This, Roger extravagantly predicted, would turn Nat Turner into a Sir William Wallace. the Scots hero who died for liberty. Yet even Andrew T. Judson, the racist and anti-abolitionist federal district court judge, affirmed that the blacks had revolted against illegal bondage only out of the desire of winning their liberty and returning to their families and kindred. The abolitionists feared the decision of Roger Taney's southern-dominated Supreme Court and made plans to defy the law and enable the blacks to escape to Canada. But it turned out that Van Buren blundered by appealing Judson's ruling, which would in fact have kept the blacks under the president's control while being returned to Africa.
The captive's case was brilliantly argued before the Supreme Court by Roger Baldwin, and especially by John Quincy Adams. Adams's two-day oration juxtaposed the ideal of justice, defined by the ancient Justinian code as the constant and perpetual will to secure to everyone his own right. with the federal government's racial prejudice or what adams termed the sympathy for the two white slave-traders for adams the case had been governed from the beginning by sympathy with the white antipathy to the black which precluded any possibility of justice with withering irony and sarcasm adams also exploited the spaniard's assumption that the american president could act like a dictator and dominate the judicial system he made much of the spanish minister's claim that the Spanish public's demand for vengeance had not been satisfied. Chevalier Argaïs, the Spanish minister to the United States, did not seem to realize that American law was not based on a popular cry for vengeance. On the other hand, the Senate had earlier given unanimous approval to a resolution presented by John C. Calhoun that in effect affirmed that only Spain had jurisdiction over a ship like La Amistad, sailing on a lawful voyage in peacetime.
All the same, Associate Justice Joseph Story ruled for the Supreme Court that the captives had exercised their basic right of self-defense, since they had been kidnapped in Africa by Africans and unlawfully transported to Cuba. They were not legally slaves and therefore should be allowed to go free. The single exception was Antonio.
He was supposed to be returned to Cuba, but the abolitionists succeeded in smuggling him to Montreal. This verdict undercut the emerging Southern view that black Africans were naturally suited to be slaves, and that even free blacks had no rights of due process. Even so, Justice Story had no intention of inviting slaves to rebel.
Both Judson and Story were scrupulously careful to uphold the positive laws that sanctioned black slavery, which helps explain why all the Southern Supreme Court justices supported Story's decision. Judson and Story restricted the application of natural law, to those rare situations in which no positive law applied. Thus, if the African captives had been imported into Cuba as small children in 1819, and had then revolted in 1839 while being shipped from Havana to Puerto Principe, they undoubtedly would have been returned to Cuba.
Still, if the abolitionists failed to win full judicial approval for their higher law doctrines, the arguments of Baldwin and Adams before the courts exposed the irreconcilable contradictions between American slavery and the principles of America's revolutionary heritage. Furthermore, in 1840, at the very moment when the American abolitionist movement was splintering into fragments, Louis Tappan and other non-Garrisonians showed rare skill as tacticians, effectively publicizing the Amistad case while keeping themselves in the background. American free blacks led by the Reverend James W. C. Washington, also joined white abolitionists in efforts to raise money, organize missionary support, and communicate with the Amistad captives.
The main proof that the captives were not Ladinos, as the ship's documents claimed, was their inability to speak or understand Spanish. It was on the key issue of language that some of Yale's faculty came to the rescue. Joseph William Gibbs, the distinguished orientalist and philologist, and father of the physicist and mathematician of same name, first learned the names for numbers in the Africans'languages, mainly Mendi.
He then searched the waterfronts of New York and New Haven, hoping to find a native African who could understand the captives. In New York, Gibbs discovered on a British warship two African sailors, James Covey, a former slave from Sierra Leone, and Charles Pratt. A Mendian like Cinque, who had been seized by a Spanish slaver seven years earlier. Gibbs took both Africans to New Haven, where, according to the Colored American and the New Haven Record, as soon as one of the newcomers addressed them in their native tongue, there was an instant explosion of feeling. They leapt and shouted and clapped their hands, and their joy seemed absolutely uncontrollable.
Thanks to Professor Gibbs, who learned Mendian from Covey, and conversed with twenty or more of the captives it was possible for sinque and other africans to give testimony and depositions at the new haven trial professor gibbs also testified on the significance of language and of mendy in personal names another yale professor george e day also learned some mendy from one of the sailors and testified on behalf of the captives much to the government's annoyance at the district court in new haven beginning in january eighteen forty Yale students, especially from the law school and the theological seminary, crowded in, eager to hear blacks testify. Sinque was the last to be called to the stand, tall, wrapped in a blanket. He seemed magisterial in his bearing, as Covey interpreted his words.
When telling of the voyage from Africa, Sinque sat on the floor and held his hands and feet together to show how he had been chained. He then gave a vivid description of how Ruiz, had inspected him at the Havana slave market, and of the slaves'whippings during the coastal voyage before the mutiny. When the Supreme Court finally ruled in 1841 that the Amistad captives were free, Sinque replied to the news from Washington, Me glad. Me thank the American men.
Me glad. Asked if he wanted to return to Africa, he replied surprisingly, I don't know. I think one or two days.
Then say. We all talk, think of it, then me say. Unlike Judson, the Supreme Court did not order the President to return the blacks to Africa.
The Amistad Committee was relieved that the Mendian were free from any control by Van Buren, who might conceivably have shipped them to Cuba instead of Sierra Leone. But there was a serious problem of what to do with the Africans in a deeply racist society, especially given the end of any government support for their maintenance. The diary of the abolitionist John Pitkin Norton gives fascinating glimpses of the Mendian'experiences after they were removed for safety in mid-March 1841 to Norton's small village of Farmington, Connecticut, to the west of Hartford.
In New Haven, Norton noted, circus proprietors and managers of theaters swooped in like so many sharks, hoping to exploit the blacks in exhibits, as white reformers scrambled in Farmington to put up bunks and berths, and to transport the blacks over snow and a dozen sleighs, the question arose whether Africans undressed at night. Norton soon became much more familiar with an alien culture, as he and others became involved in teaching the Africans in daily classes. Even while riding with a group of the blacks in a sleigh, where the men shivered despite many blankets and buffalo skins, Norton exclaimed, they have not yet learned the contempt felt for their race here, and consequently have the looks and actions of men i brought seven of them and to my surprise found that i could easily talk with them they talked to each other in their own language constantly and laughed frequently evidently having a good many jokes among themselves by march twenty third norton could write teaching them is a perfect pleasure some of them read very well indeed kenna with fluency Sinque, despite having caught a bad cold, exhibited a truly noble countenance.
Yet by April, Norton was shocked to see that Kenna, in response to his treatment by whites, probably has already learned to feel the inferiority of his race. It is melancholy to see such a mind as his feel the iron of oppression and prejudice. The cutting edge of this prejudice became apparent on the night of September 3rd, when four local farmington toughs led by one henry hart assaulted grabot cinque then led about half of the mendians up the street to protect any of their brethren who were still outdoors Norton wrote that, according to Sinque, they came into a rascally gang in front of Phelps, and were with great difficulty restrained from making an attack upon them. As it was, noble Andrew struck Sinque. In response, Andrew got pretty well flogged, and if the Africans had not been restrained by Sinque, they would have routed the whole crew and probably have killed some of them.
The general feeling of the town is one of deep indignation against Hart and his comrades. In some ways, the Mendian fit in surprisingly well at Farmington. In a great farewell meeting at the local church, after funds had been raised by the African American Union Missionary Society in Hartford and in England to help the blacks return to Sierra Leone, the minister preached a sermon to an immense crowd, according to Norton, which pretty completely demolished the rationality of the prejudice against color.
The Mendian then sang and danced with great skill. and Cinque delivered what seemed to be an eloquent speech in Mendian. It was generally agreed that the former captives should be returned to Sierra Leone. Though Margrue, one of three young girls, would later return from Africa to attend Oberlin College. On November 27, 1841, as Howard Montes writes, 35 black survivors, two others had died, of the initial 53 on the Amistad, including the three girls along with James Covey, departed New York on the bark Gentleman.
The ship also carried five white missionaries and teachers. Because of the danger of a Spanish attack or attempts at re-enslavement, the British naval patrol along the African coast was put on alert. The freed captives landed in Sierra Leone in January 1842, nearly three years after they had been forced to leave their homeland.
Some of the group remained in the small British colony of Sierra Leone. and worked with christian missionaries sinque and the majority returned to their mendi homeland and as howard jones has pointed out there is no justification for the oft-made assertion that sinque himself engaged in the slave trade on his return home until the civil war the u s government was plagued by continuing disputes over spanish claims and demands for monetary compensation The Amistad Affair underscored the interrelationships within the Atlantic slave system, from a ship built on an American model and a treaty between Britain and Spain, to an 1844 House of Representatives committee report that attacked the Supreme Court's decision and called for payment of indemnity to Spain, an action that reflected the South's growing interest in acquiring Cuba. Similar moves for indemnity payment were made in the Senate, And President Polk, in his address to the nation of December 9, 1847, in the midst of the Mexican War, called for appropriations to pay Spain for the value of the Amistad slaves, as the only way of restoring friendly relations between the two nations.
The trials clearly represented a crucial test of the American judicial system. The two courts'affirmation of freedom may well have helped to motivate Chief Justice Roger Taney to issue his later defense of slavery and official racism in his infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857. One can only speculate whether the abolitionists, if their national movement had not been seriously divided in 1840, might have built on and further exploited the court's limited but still significant affirmation of freedom. Certainly anyone who reads the full text of Adams's powerful indictment of slavery can understand why he became in all likelihood the statesman who passed on to abraham lincoln via charles sumner the conviction that a president as commander-in-chief during a war or civil war had the power to emancipate america's slaves