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Captives of the Amistad

An ex-president battled a sitting president in a case settled by the Supreme Court

By George DeWan | Staff Writer

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From the weather-beaten, black-hulled schooner anchored off Culloden Point a boatload of parched and hungry black men paddled to the Long Island shore to look for food and fresh water. Their arrival on American soil at Montauk touched off a debate about slavery that would pit an ex-president against a sitting president and would not end until it reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

The date was Aug. 25, 1839. The ship was the Amistad.

The men were from Sierra Leone, West Africans who had been borne across the great ocean to Havana, Cuba, in a brutalizing Portuguese slave ship. Sold there at a slave auction and transferred to the bowels of the Amistad ("Friendship," in Spanish), where they were chained like wild animals, the 49 men and four children had released themselves through a bloody insurrection on the high seas.

The Africans' few hours on Long Island would be the last freedom they would know for 1 1/2 years. Their leader was a tall, muscular man in his mid-20s whose name in his native Mende tongue, spelled phonetically, was Singbe-pieh, but who would become known as Cinque (pronounced "sin-KAY").

It was not long before a U.S. Navy brig, the Washington, appeared and seized the Amistad and all its men and children. They were taken to New London, Conn., a state where slavery would not become illegal until 1848.

Two Spanish-speaking slaveholders, Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montes, who were being held on the ship by the Africans, told the Coast Guardsmen the story. They had bought the Africans as slaves in Havana, a Spanish possession. While in the Amistad for transport to another part of the island, the Africans, led by Cinque, broke free, killing the captain and the cook. Promising to sail the Amistad to Sierra Leone, Montes and Ruiz headed east by day and then altered course by night, without the Africans realizing that the ship was actually heading up the East Coast.

In Connecticut, the captives initially were charged with murder and piracy. But the legal issues later centered on attempts to have the captives returned to the two Spanish slavers, which landed them in U.S. District Court.

Newspaper publicity about the captives galvanized abolitionists in New York, who formed a committee to provide for their defense, a committee that included a strong Christian missionary element. The formidable Connecticut attorney Roger Baldwin agreed to represent them as chief defense counsel.

At issue in the January, 1840, trial were two international treaties. First was a reciprocal agreement of 1795 between Spain and the United States under which each pledged to return any ships or goods of the other found on the high seas. Citing this, U.S. government attorneys, supported by the Spanish embassy, argued that the U.S. courts had no jurisdiction and that the captives should be returned to Ruiz and Montes as their property.

Baldwin, however, cited an 1817 treaty between Spain and Great Britain that outlawed the importation of slaves into Spanish colonies after 1820. Thus, the Amistad captives were imported illegally, Baldwin said, and were not slaves, but free men. After listening to a week of testimony, District Judge Andrew T. Judson sided with Baldwin and ordered the captives freed.

This should have been the end of it. But President Martin Van Buren, supporting the Spanish position, ordered the decision appealed to the Supreme Court. He was seeking re-election and did not want to lose the votes of the slaveholding South.

The president's actions angered former President John Quincy Adams, then serving in the House of Representatives. He agreed to assist Baldwin with the Supreme Court appeal. For the 73-year-old Adams, it would be a platform for him to attack Van Buren.

On Feb. 22, 1841, the Supreme Court arguments began, and the attorney general and Baldwin laid out the same opposing cases that had been made in New Haven. Then Adams turned his oratorical guns on Van Buren. It was, he said, nothing more than a question of justice vs. injustice. The Supreme Court upheld the District Court decision.

The Amistad Africans were free. But the abolitionists who supported them wanted to save their souls as well as their bodies. For almost nine months the Africans studied the Bible, hymn-singing and the English language, so that they could return to Africa to spread the Christian faith. On Nov. 27, 1841, Cinque and his friends, along with some Christian missionaries, sailed for Freetown, Sierra Leone, on the ship Gentlemen.

Adams, a meticulous man, had one more detail to attend to. He asked the marshal of the District of Connecticut to amend the 1840 federal census so that the Africans would appear as free men, not slaves.