The Trials

As a legal case, the Amistad incident quickly became a tangle of competing claims and contradictory legal issues. Ruiz and Montes filed suit to recover their "property," including the cargo and the Africans, citing a commercial treaty the U.S. had struck with Spain in 1795 and renewed in 1819.

But these claims were contested: sympathetic New York abolitionists hired New Haven attorney Roger S. Baldwin to argue on the Africans' behalf. He assembled a case claiming that the Africans had been illegally kidnapped and enslaved # illegally because Spain had outlawed the African slave trade # and that they therefore had had the right to free themselves by whatever means they could muster.

Court proceedings opened in September 1839. The abolitionists pressed the judge to issue a writ of habeas corpus, which would have freed the Africans pending any formal charges against them. Associate Justice Smith Thompson of the U.S. Supreme Court denied the writ, though he also refused to indict the Africans for piracy or murder, and returned the case to the federal district court in Connecticut.

Meanwhile, the government of Spain formally demanded to take custody of the Africans so that they could stand trial in Cuba for murder and piracy. The Africans, in other words, were being described under the law as both property and pirates # thieves who had stolen themselves. It was just the kind of tension, of paradox, that American and European law worked itself into as it tried to sort out the legal status of slaves.

President Martin Van Buren, after consulting with his cabinet, decided to throw the Administration behind the Spanish claims. In Connecticut, U.S. District Attorney William S. Holabird handled the case.

In District Court proceedings in November 1839, the abolitionists began to make their case. After issuing several preliminary rulings, Judge Andrew Judson postponed the trial to January. Meanwhile, expecting that the court would turn the Africans over to Spanish justice, the Administration dispatched a U.S. naval vessel to New Haven to whisk them away before their defense team could file an appeal.

The trial resumed in New Haven in January 1840, when several of the Africans testified before a packed courthouse while the U.S.S. Grampus waited in New Haven harbor. But Judge Judson ruled that the Africans had in fact been illegally enslaved, and ordered the U.S. administration to return them to Africa.

The White House and Spanish authorities immediately appealed Judson's ruling to the U.S. Circuit Court, which took up the case in April 1840. Here, Justice Thompson preserved Judson's findings. The Administration then appealed the case up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Before the Supreme Court, Congressman and former U.S. President John Quincy Adams joined Baldwin on the abolitionists' team. On the other side, U.S. Attorney General Henry D. Gilpin presented the administration's case.

The U.S. Supreme Court took about a month to reach a decision on the case. Associate Justice Joseph Story read the court's ruling. The court reversed Judson's order to the executive to return the Africans to their homeland, but essentially upheld Judson's finding that the Africans had been illegally enslaved and had thus exercised a natural right to fight for their freedom.

Documents from the Exploring Amistad Library:

John Barber's 1840 pamphlet reported on district court hearings, including Cinque's testimony;

Adams's diaries describe his feelings leading up to and during the Supreme Court hearing. After the verdict,

Adams published an extended version of his arguments;

Baldwin's Supreme Court arguments were also published;

Justice Story's decision resolved the case;

for a detailed account of the legal path of the Amistad cases visit the Court Timeline;

and for step by step newspaper coverage of the trials, visit the Amistad Timeline.