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'Amistad' Fact, Fiction

By George DeWan | Staff Writer

Steven Spielberg's movie "Amistad," while powerfully evocative, is flawed by questionable history.

The movie leaves the impression that this case laid the legal groundwork for overturning slavery, awakening Americans to its horrors and leaving political Washington searching for a solution. It did nothing of the sort: Amistad came and went, while the illegal international slave trade prospered and slavery remained embedded in the social system of the South. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court's Amistad decision affirmed that slaves were property; the Amistad Africans were free to leave because they were not slaves.

And there are other discrepancies as well:

The movie says that seven of the nine justices were southern slaveholders. Fact: Five of the Supreme Court justices were southerners, and four of them were slaveholders.

When the Africans land on Long Island, they see ice forming on pools of water. Fact: They landed on Aug. 25.

Cinque visits Adams' house in Quincy, Mass. In Adams' greenhouse, he is moved almost to tears by seeing an African violet. Fact: Cinque never visited Adams' home, and the African violet is native to East Africa but not Sierra Leone in West Africa.

In the Supreme Court scene, Cinque sits right behind Adams. Fact: Cinque was never there, being still under arrest in New England.

The movie leaves the impression that the U.S. government paid to have the Africans returned to Sierra Leone. Fact: President John Tyler, Martin Van Buren's successor, refused such a request.

Roger Baldwin, the lawyer who first defended the Amistad captives, is represented as a young, inexperienced real estate lawyer. Fact: He was almost 50, highly successful both as a lawyer and a politician, and would become Connecticut's governor in 1844.