The Amistad Rebellion

Black Mutiny

The zigzagging vessel was the Amistad, a Spanish slaver whose mutinying “cargo” of several dozen African captives had killed at least two of their captors.

Were they men—or were they property?

Why the Amistad Still Matters

In recent years, the Amistad affair has taken on greater and greater significance for those seeking an understanding of African American history and culture. I have decided to devote a chapter to it here for five important reasons:

• The Amistad case serves as a kind of pivot-point between the uneasy racial compromises of the Constitution and the later tumult of the Civil War.
• The case was a landmark event in the development of the American abolitionist movement. It proved to abolitionists that they could successfully appeal to the conscience of northerners.

• As a result, the case affected racial attitudes in the North, and in so doing presaged the momentous conflict of the Civil War. Although most southerners regarded the Amistad controversy as abolitionist propaganda, the Africans at the -center of the case won considerable sympathy among northerners. This fact presented President Martin Van Buren with another variation on the endless, exquisitely difficult dilemma of governing a nation that was half-free and half-enslaved. The Amistad episode is among the most revealing of a still-young America's social and political fault lines.
• The case highlighted a number of pressing questions that had been (and would continue to be) left unresolved by the American legal system. Among these questions were the following:
• Were freed slaves citizens of the United States?
• Were those enslaved to be regarded solely as property, or did they possess any natural rights whatsoever?
• To what degree can one human being (say, an officer of the U.S. Navy) claim salvage over another (say, a captive who has launched a rebellion on a slave ship)?
• Finally, the Amistad case offers a compelling story of freedom lost and won. It made (and still makes) great copy, which is why abolitionists did everything they could to fill the newspapers of the day with the story—and why Hollywood eventually decided to make a big-budget movie out of it.

A Strange Northward Journey

When his attempt to be captured by the British had failed, the Amistad's white navi-gator steered an erratic course northward toward the United States, hoping to be intercepted by some official vessel there.

He had succeeded, for some time, in convincing the Africans who now controlled the ship that he was following their orders and heading for Africa. During the day, the ship's white navigators sailed east—toward the sun—as the Africans, led by a charismatic ringleader known as Cinque, demanded. At night, however, the ship changed course.

Naval officers of the U.S. brig Washington found the ship anchored near Montauk Point, New York. There Cinque (who apparently had come to realize he was being played for a fool by the two whites he had spared) ordered the ship to a stop—and made an attempt to spend some of the ship's gold pieces on board for food and water.

While the ship—much the worse for wear and tear—stood anchored, Lieutenant Thomas Gedney boarded it and got the Spaniards' side of the story. After a brief period of confusion, he apprehended the Africans on board as well as those who had gone ashore. He then headed away from New York (a free state) and toward Connecticut (where slavery was, as of 1839, still legal). He attempted to claim the captive Africans as salvage property. Gedney's claim to take possession of the mutineers on the Amistad, however, failed, and they were eventually charged with piracy and murder.

The ensuing legal wrangle—and the question of whether the Africans, who had been illegally brought to Cuba, were slaves—would captivate America and the world.

Piracy and Murder—or Self-Defense?

The two Spaniards who had survived the mutiny on board the Amistad aimed to have their ship and its human cargo returned to them by the American courts. Eventually, the Spanish government joined in the demand; the Spanish wanted the Amistad mutineers tried for piracy and murder. Abolitionists, who saw the uprising as a clear case of self-defense (and who also knew a good news story when they saw one) fought Spanish efforts to win control of the mutineers and sought to find a way to return the captives from the Amistad to Africa.

At the center of the controversy was a critical question: Were the mutineers murderers, or had they acted in appropriate self-defense? To answer that question—from the point of view of the American courts, at least—one had to determine whether the captives on board the Amistad were slaves. (No slave, under the prevailing U.S. law, had a right of self-defense against a master.)

The entire wrangle became a major headache for the administration of President Martin Van Buren, who was trying to win reelection by maintaining the fragile balance between the northern and southern wings of the Democratic party. (This was, of course, a balancing act that many a future Democratic presidential candidate would be forced to undertake in the decades to come.)

The Biggest Story of the Day

The dispute played out for month after month—serving the “what-the-nation-is-talking-about” role that might today be associated with an inescapable media event like the Florida election fiasco of 2000, a long-running celebrity scandal, or a major business upheaval. Cinque, the leader of the uprising, received what would today be described as heavy media coverage. Abolitionist papers emphasized his dignity and patience; papers hostile to the mutineers' cause portrayed him as a crazed, bloodthirsty beast.

According to the testimony of the mutineers, they had been kidnapped, denied adequate provisions, chained together, and packed into a tiny hold. Four of them had been whipped. Led by Cinque, the Africans had risen up against the Spaniards shortly after a cook had made the strategic error of informing the captives that they would eventually be beheaded and eaten alive.

If the remark was meant as a jest, it was a costly one for the Spaniards. Convinced that they had nothing to lose, the captives used nails to pick their locks, found a supply of cane knives, killed the captain and the cook, and took over the ship. (Two members of the crew jumped overboard and were, apparently, never heard from again.)

Once the Africans were apprehended by the U.S. Navy, they were placed in captivity once again, and with questionable legal justification. For an extended period, they occupied a legal limbo because American law couldn't quite determine how to classify them.

A Challenge to the American Legal System

The American legal system didn't have an immediate answer to the question of the day: Should the Amistad mutineers be permitted to return to Africa as free men to Africa, as the abolitionists wanted … or should they be handed over to the Spanish authorities to face trial, as the Spanish government demanded? The White House, however, had its answer.

President Van Buren, eager to keep his coalition in the Democratic Party intact, sought at first to position the Amistad affair solely as a foreign policy question—one that could be resolved quickly, and with as little offense to southerners as possible, by simply handing the Africans over to the Spanish. As the legal challenges from anti-slavery forces escalated, however, and Van Buren realized that he could not make the issue go away before the 1840 presidential election, he decided to use a variety of delaying tactics to ensure that the long legal battle was not resolved until after the election took place.

This is why it took until early 1841—long after Van Buren had lost the presidential election to William Henry Harrison—for the Supreme Court to decide the fate of the Amistad captives.

A White Man's Nation?

The Amistad case is fascinating for a number of reasons, one of which is the light it casts on racial perceptions among whites in the United States before the Civil War. There were many attitudes, of course, but the following quote from the decade of the Amistad affair, from Judge Andrew T. Judson, can serve as a representative example. Judson was a Connecticut official who claimed to oppose slavery, but who once argued before a jury that …

[the United States of America is] a nation of white men, and every American should indulge that pride and honor, which is falsely called prejudice, and teach it to his children. Nothing else will preserve the American name, or the American character. Who of you would like to see the glory of this nation stripped away, and given to another race of men? [Emphasis in original.]

Judson was, in short, one of the majority of white northerners who considered the immediate abolition of slavery, or the idea of the “amalgamation of the races,” to be the kind of dangerous extremism that was likely to lead to the end of the Republic. His views reflected the mainstream of northern thought during the period. As a judge, however, Judson would go on to play an important role in the long-running legal dispute that centered on the Amistad captives. He delivered a ruling that refused to return the captives to Spanish authorities in Cuba. It was appealed.

Enter John Quincy Adams

Former President John Quincy Adams, now a Congressman from Massachusetts, had been an informal advisor to abolitionists on the Amistad matter for many months. He expanded his role in the controversy after determining that there was (as he confided to his diary) “an abominable conspiracy, Executive and Judicial, against the lives of these wretched men.”

Adams was born into a family known for its commitment to principle and public service, and was raised in the expectation that he would serve his nation at a high level. His father was the legendary John Adams, second U.S. president. In 1824, the younger Adams (by then a former senator and the current secretary of state) fought a breathtakingly close and bitterly disputed election contest with Andrew Jackson that ended up in the House of Representatives. The House awarded the election to Adams.

Historians have not been particularly kind to the younger Adams's presidency, citing his aloofness and his inability to build coalitions. Jackson defeated him soundly when he ran for re-election in 1828. Yet those who believed that the former president's career was over after his defeat were in for a surprise. Adams sought and won election to the House of Representatives in 1830, and the following year he began the final phase of his remarkable political career as the most prominent spokesman for the anti-slavery faction in the lower chamber of Congress.

Adams was not an abolitionist, but he loathed the institution of slavery, and devoted the balance of his life to opposing it. By the time he was approached to offer legal advice to the legal team representing the Amistad captives—and, eventually, argue the case before the U.S. Supreme Court—he was in his seventies, and had not represented a client in court in more than 30 years.

The closing argument he delivered was, however, the finest hour of his career.

Excerpts from John Quincy Adams' defense of the Amistad captives before the United States Supreme Court:

“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 national existence.”

“[The] American government [has] consistently adopted the design of delivering [the Amistad captives] up, either as property or as assassins.… Was this justice?”

[In reference to a treaty between Spain and the United States stipulating that recovered merchandise “be taken care of and restored entire to the true proprietor”:] “A stipulation to restore human beings entire might suit two nations of cannibals, but would be absurd, and worse than absurd, between civilized and Christian nations.”

[In response to a claim from the Spanish that they were due “merchandise, rescued from pirates and robbers”:] “The merchandise was rescued [by the U.S. Navy] out of its own hands, and the robbers were rescued out of the hands of the robbers! … [Is] any thing more absurd than to say these forty Africans are robbers, out of whose hands they have themselves been rescued? Can a greater absurdity be imagined in construction than this, which applies the double characters of robbers and of merchandise to human beings?”

“[The Spanish have demanded that the president of the United States] turn himself into a jailer, to keep these people safely, and then into a tipstaff, to take them away for trial among the slave-traders…”

“Has the fourth of July become a day of ignominy and reproach?”

Set Free

After nearly two years of abuse, delay, wrongful imprisonment, and frequent and humiliating public display, the Amistad captives finally received something remarkable: an approximation of justice from an American Supreme Court heavily dominated by Southern justices. The Court set them free.

Here is a summary of the main points of the Supreme Court's decision:

• The Spaniards had not proved their claims to ownership of the Africans. (The importation of slaves into Cuba from Africa had been illegal for some years.)
• Since the Africans were not and had never been slaves, they could not have been thieves or pirates. (On this line of argument, the court followed the defense's claim that the Africans had acted in self-defense; as a result, the court issued an implicit warning to those illegally trafficking in slaves that American courts would not protect them if their “cargo” mutinied.)
• The court also decreed the U.S. Navy's seizure of the Amistad to be “highly meritorious.” (In this part of the decision, the court chose to ignore the documented fact that the ship had sailed to Connecticut, where slavery was still legal, in an attempt to claim a price for the Amistad's human cargo.)

For the African captives of the Amistad, the ruling was the long-delayed conclusion of a prolonged nightmare. After a few more logistical delays and strategy sessions, the Africans who had survived kidnapping, torture, and the vagaries of the American legal system sailed back home for Africa on November 27, 1841.

The Other Side of the Amistad Decision

For Africans in America, the picture was not quite so appealing.

On the positive side of the ledger, the abolitionist movement had definitely gained momentum, and the sympathies of the North had been awakened, at least for a time, to some of the injustices of the institution of slavery. Also on the positive side, the American legal system had upheld the right of freed Africans to defend themselves. (Many had feared that the court would be unable to bring itself to acknowledge that freed Africans had any rights whatsoever.)

And yet, despite the apparent triumph and the victorious headlines in abolitionist newspapers, there was an ominous side to the Supreme Court's ruling. In finding for the captives, the justices had based their reasoning on their own determination that the Spanish government had failed to prove that the Amistad captives were slaves. They had not embraced Adams's argument that the Africans were free by virtue of natural law.

By following this line of reasoning, the court had actually reinforced existing U.S. law on slavery. Those who were legally slaves could be retained in captivity indefinitely—and, presumably, starved, tortured, and abused as the Amistad captives had been.

Though some white northerners had begun to look a little more skeptically at the institution of slavery, the enslavement of Africans continued in the South. With the help of able counsel, the Amistad mutineers had simply maneuvered around the human travesty of American law as it stood in the 1840s; they had not reformed it in any way.

Prelude to a Bloodbath

The question of whether to honor a Spanish claim for financial compensation for losses in the Amistad affair was a political football that remained in play from 1841 (the year the captives left for Africa) until 1860 (the year before the American Civil War began). The Amistad dispute was, in fact, a prelude to a longer and bloodier dispute that had the issue of slavery at its heart: the American Civil War.

On its own terms, however, Amistad was a dispute about a basic human requirement: freedom.

Excerpted from The Complete Idiot's Guide to African-American History © 2003 by Melba J. Duncan. All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Used by arrangement with Alpha Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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