" Adams Letter on Amistad Africans"

November 19, 1839

Dear Sir,

…The restitution of fugitive or rebellious slaves never can be claimed under any general stipulation for the restitution of property. The Treaty of Peace concluded at Ghent did stipulate that the British forces should evacuate all places in the United States without carrying away slaves or other property. Here, in the first place, was no delivery up. The stipulation only was that they should not carry away; and in the second place, although slaves are recognized as property, yet it is property of a peculiar character, which would not be included under the general denomination, and was therefore specially named. Had they not been specially named, Great Britain never would have listened for a moment to a claim of indemnity for carrying them away.

The Africans of the Amistad were cast upon our coast in a condition perhaps as calamitous as could befall human beings: not by their own will…not with any intention hostile or predatory on their part, not even by the act of God as in the case of shipwreck, but by their own ignorance of navigation, and the deception of one of their oppressors whom they had overpowered, and whose life they had spared to enable them by his knowledge of navigation to reach their native land. They were victims of the African Slave Trade, recently imported into the Island of Cuba in gross violation of the laws of the Island and of Spain: and by acts which our own laws have made piracy…punishable with death. They had vindicated their natural right to liberty, by conspiracy, insurrection, homicide and the capture of the ship in which they were embarked... For this act of homicide and capture they were accused by the two Cuban Spaniards embarked with them in their ship, of murder and piracy…and they were claimed by the same two Cuban Spaniards, accessories after the fact to the slave-trade-piracy…by which they had been brought from Africa to Cuba, as their property, because they had bought them from the from the slave-trade-pirated. They knew nothing of the Constitution, laws or language of the country upon which they were thus thrown, and accused as pirates and murderers, claimed as slaves of the very men who were then their captives, they were deprived even of the faculty of speech in their own defence [sic]. This condition was sorely calamitous…it claimed from the humanity of a civilized nation compassion…it claimed from the motherly love of a Christian land sympathy…it claimed from a Republic professing reference for the rights of man justice…and what have we done? A naval officer of the United States, seizes them, their ship and cargo, with themselves; tramples on the territorial jurisdiction of the State of New York, by seizing, disarming and sending on board their ship, without warrant of arrest, several of them whom he found on shore…admits the claim of the two captives to the fifty masters as their slaves; and claims salvage for restoring them to servitude. They are then brought before a Court of the United States, at once upon the charge of piracy and murder, upon a claim to them as slaves, and upon a claim against their pretended masters for salvage, by kidnapping them again into slavery. The Circuit Judge decides that the United States do not exercise the right of all other civilized nations to try piracies committed in foreign vessels; that he thereupon cannot try them for piracy or murder, but that the District Court may try whether they are slaves or not and as it is doubtful whether this trial will be held in Connecticut or New York, and it must take time to ascertain in which, they shall in the mean time be held as slaves to abide the issue. Is this compassion? Is it sympathy? Is it justice? But here the case now stands.

Truly yours,

J. Q. ADAMS