The Amistad Story: Introduction

In 1839, in waters off the coast of Cuba, a group of forty-nine Africans ensnared in the Atlantic slave trade struck out for freedom. They had been captured, sold into slavery, carried across the ocean, sold again, and they were being transported on what was, for millions of Africans, the last leg of the slave trade when they found the chance to seize the initiative. One of them, a man the world would come to know as "Cinque," worked free of his chains and led a shipboard revolt.

The vessel they won was a schooner that had been named, in a grim bit of irony, the Amistad ("Friendship"). The Africans tried to force two Cuban survivors to sail them back to Africa, but the Amistad wound up instead in U.S. waters, just past Long Island Sound, where the Africans were again taken into custody. Spain promptly demanded their extradition to face trial in Cuba for piracy and murder, but their plight caught the attention of American abolitionists, who mounted a legal defense on the Africans' behalf. The case went through the American judicial system all the way up to the Supreme Court, where former president John Quincy Adams joined the abolitionists' legal team. Finally, in March 1841, the Supreme Court upheld the freedom the Africans had claimed for themselves. Ten months later, in January 1842, the thirty-five Amistad Africans who had survived the ordeal returned to their homelands.

For more a more detailed narrative and document links, you can open up this story at these stages:

1. Enslavement: in the interior of Africa, they are kidnapped, or stolen, or condemned by trial to slavery ...
2. The Baracoons of Gallinas: they are sold to European slavers set up on the coast, on the Gallinas River ...
3. Middle Passage: they are loaded onto a slave ship and carried across the ocean ...
4. American Slave Market: they are landed in Havana and sold to sugar planters ...
5. Revolt: they take control of the schooner Amistad ...
6. The Black Schooner: they make their way into U.S. waters and are recaptured ...
7. Africans in America: in the U.S., they become media sensations and an abolitionist project ...
8. Trials: their case makes its way through the federal courts ...
9. Return to Africa