Mutiny on the Amistad:

'All We Want is Make Us Free'

Howard Jones

The year 1989 marked the sesquicentennial anniversary of the mutiny on the Amistad, the only instance in which African blacks captured by slave dealers and brought to the New World won their freedom and returned home. In commemorating that event, it is important to remember that the central issue is timeless and universal: the conflict between human rights and property rights, a controversy which was then fueled by inflammatory arguments concerning the relationship of race and slavery to liberty. America's abolitionists asked disturbing questions: Was the Republic not open to all persons? Was color not compatible with freedom? When positive or manmade law condones a great moral wrong, should natural law not take precedence? The mutiny became the basis of a court case that wound through the lower tribunals in Connecticut before reaching the United States Supreme Court in 1841.

The outcome inspired the founding of the American Missionary Association (the first of its kind in Africa), which aided the abolitionist movement and later provided funds for black colleges and universities such as Atlanta, Dillard, Fisk, Hampton, Huston-Tillotson, LeMoyne Owen, Talladega, and Tougaloo. The entire story has brought together present-day groups, such as the "Friends of the Amistad," in places as far east as New York and as far west as California; and has led to the establishment of the Amistad Research Center, first at Fisk University, then at Dillard, and now at Tulane. There were other assaults on the institution of slavery, most notably the Nat Turner slave rebellion of 1831, which also stimulated the growth of abolition. But because of the issues involved in the Amistad affair, many scholars consider it the most significant slave case to appear in the American courts before the Dred Scott decision of 1857(1) The questions raised by the mutiny and its aftermath are as provocative now as they were in the nineteenth century.

Drawing by O.C. McCrillis, 1989.

Copyright, The New Haven Colony Historical Society.

The Long Voyage

The Amistad affair began with the capture in 1839 of Joseph Cinque and hundreds of other blacks in Africa, followed by the long and horrid Middle Passage between Africa and America and their clandestine importation into Cuba–all acts in violation of Anglo-Spanish treaties against the African slave trade. Once they were on the island, however, a strange metamorphosis took place. Slavery was legal in Cuba, and the captives were assigned the status of slaves and taken to the Havana slave market. Two Spaniards purchased fifty-three of them–including Cinque and four children–and boarded them on the Amistad for a 300 mile voyage to a plantation in another part of the island, at Puerto Principe. En route, the mulatto cook spread rumors that the blacks were to be cut up, boiled, and eaten as dried meat. Cinque and others, horrified by the prospect, sought a means of defending themselves and found long bladed sugar-cane knives in the hold. On the night of July 1-2, Cinque led the captives in rebellion, killing the captain, cook, and crew, but sparing the Spanish slaveowners to act as pilots in taking the blacks back to Africa. (2)

Thus began a strange odyssey. The Spaniards deceived their captors by sailing back and forth in the Caribbean, hoping for rescue by the British. Failing that, they were soon carried up the Atlantic coast by the Gulf Stream. The northward trek drew attention as rumors spread among Americans that desperate black pirates were at the helm and preparing to raid and pillage everything in their path. Sixty days later, this phase of the saga came to an abrupt end. Just off Long Island, Lieutenant Thomas Gedney, of the USS Washington, seized the almost derelict vessel, its nearly starved and desperate black occupants, and what cargo was left, and took the entire cache as salvage to the admiralty court in New London, Connecticut, for adjudication. Only forty-three of the blacks were still alive (including the four children); ten had died of disease and exposure or from consuming medicine in an effort to quench their thirst.(3)

Drawing by O.C. McCrillis, 1989.

Copyright, The New Haven Colony Historical Society.

Abolitionist Intervention

At this point, Christian abolitionists, led by Lewis Tappan, a prominent New York businessman; Joshua Leavitt, a lawyer and journalist who edited the Emancipator in New York; and Simeon Jocelyn, a Congregational minister in New Haven, learned of the Amistad's arrival and decided to publicize the incident in an effort to highlight the brutalities of slavery and the slave trade. In their view, slavery was a deep moral wrong and so not subject to compromise. Indeed, those who participated in human bondage and those who condoned it by voicing no opposition deserved equal condemnation. Amalgamation of the races was not the issue. In the "present system of bleaching," Tappan wrote a friend, both blacks and whites would someday be "copper colored, the original color of this climate." The issue was slavery. It was evil in both a spiritual and a temporal sense. Above all, it was a sin: enslavement of a human being obstructed a person's free will, granted at birth by God, and it therefore constituted a rebellion against God. Slavery, Tappan wrote his brother, was "the worm at the root of the tree of Liberty. Unless killed the tree will die." (4)

Tappan soon emerged as the central defender of the blacks, organizing the "Amistad Committee" to coordinate efforts in behalf of the captives; preaching impromptu sermons to the blacks, who were impressed by his sincerity though unable to understand his language; writing detailed and moving newspaper accounts of the blacks' daily lives, stories that emphasized their humanity for a fascinated public; and searching the docks of New York for black Africans who could translate the language of the captives–that of Mende, their homeland, located about a hundred miles inland from Sierra Leone along the West African coast. A professor of religion and linguistics at Yale College, Josiah W. Gibbs, joined the search and eventually found two Africans familiar with the Mende language who were employed on board a British warship in New York: James Covey, from Sierra Leone; and Charles Pratt, from Mende itself. At last the Amistad blacks could tell their side of the story. (5)

Litigation

A long court battle ensued. The abolitionists took a surprising first step: they filed a claim for the Amistad and cargo as the blacks' property, in preparation for charging the Spaniards with piracy. Then they filed suit for the captives' freedom on grounds of humanity and justice: that slavery violated natural law and so provided its victims with the right to break their bonds in self-defense. By evangelical arguments, by appeals to higher law, and by "moral suasion," Tappan and his compatriots hoped to erase the color line that constituted the racial foundation of slavery. The Spaniards meanwhile brought suit for their property, attracting their government's support by citing the reciprocity provisions in Pinckney's Treaty of 1795, which stipulated the return of merchandise lost for reasons beyond control. To prevent a return to Cuba and what many observers feared would be a certain "judicial massacre," the abolitionists hired an attorney–Roger S. Baldwin, of Connecticut, a descendant of Roger Sherman, who had signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution but who, like numerous other Revolutionary figures, had approved Constitutional protection of slavery. Baldwin intended to prove that the captives were "kidnapped Africans," illegally taken from their homeland and illegally imported into Cuba, and thus entitled to throw off their captors. As for the certificates of ownership carried by the two Spaniards, Baldwin argued that the papers were fraudulent and that the blacks were not slaves indigenous to Cuba. (6)

Presidential Intrusion

In the meantime, the case posed such a serious political problem for President Martin Van Buren that he decided to intervene, and did so in a manner that actually amounted to an obstruction of justice. At stake, or so he believed, was his re-election to the Presidency in 1840. A public dispute over slavery would divide his Democratic party (built on a tenuous North-South alliance) and lead to his unceremonious departure from the White House. Working through his secretary of state, John Forsyth, a slaveholder from Georgia, Van Buren disregarded both American law and the Constitution in an attempt to quiet the Amistad issue by complying with Spanish demands. The White House did not investigate the validity of the certificates of ownership, even though the blacks did not answer to Spanish names on their papers and none of them spoke the language. Presidential spokesmen blandly asserted that the captives had been slaves in Cuba, despite the fact that the international slave trade had been outlawed there nearly twenty years earlier and the children were no more than nine years old. In addition to political considerations, Van Buren feared that failure to return the blacks to their owners would constitute a violation of Pinckney's Treaty, as well as being an infringement of the Anglo-Spanish treaties against the African slave trade: if Spain failed to substantiate its claim that the blacks were legally held property, England could proclaim a Spanish violation of their treaties and thus gain a pretext for intervening in Cuba (a longtime American interest). As the story unfolded, the President interfered in the judicial process and violated the blacks' rights as human beings. (7)

A circus-like atmosphere pervaded the court proceedings, which opened in Connecticut in September, 1839. To some Americans, Cinque had become a black folk hero; to others he was a barbarian who sought the favors of white women and deserved execution. Poet William Cullen Bryant extolled Cinque's virtues as an African chief, numerous Americans sympathized with the captives as "noble savages" while drawing the line at personal association or racial equality, and pseudo-scientists somberly attributed the blacks' behavior to their skull shape. While Tappan and his two associates on the Amistad Committee (Leavitt and Jocelyn) raised money for court costs and various other financial needs, others offered their own solution: a mass hanging.(8)

To establish the fact of the blacks' humanity, Baldwin led his team in delivering an impassioned defense based on securing a writ of habeas corpus, which would compel the court to free the blacks unless formal charges were filed against them. The abolitionists seemed to be in a no-lose situation. Issuance of a writ would recognize the humanity of the blacks and thus rule out the treatment of them as property by both Spanish and American governments. If charges of murder were then filed against the blacks, they would be persons, and entitled to self-defense; if not filed, they would go free. The strategy carried with it this special bonus: whatever the judge's decision on the writ, the abolitionists could explore in open court the entire range of human and property rights relating to slavery. As Leavitt later told the General Antislavery Convention in London, the purpose of the writ was "to test their [the blacks'] right to personality." Baldwin insisted that when positive law came into conflict with natural law, major changes were in order–even in the U.S. Constitution. One of his associates in the case, Seth Staples, concluded his peroration with a ringing reference to John Locke's stand for the "inherent property of liberty." (9)

But despite the defense attorneys' dramatic and moving pleas for justice, the public's expressed sympathy for the captives, and an ill-advised attempt by the prosecution to use the children as witnesses against their countrymen, Associate Justice Smith Thompson, of the U.S. Supreme Court, denied the writ. The tall, strong-willed justice opposed slavery but just as fervently supported the laws of the land. Under those laws, he declared, slaves were property. Even though he found the evidence insufficient for a grand jury indictment for murder or piracy, he could not simply assert that the blacks were human beings and grant freedom on the basis of natural rights. Only the law could dispense justice; and the law did not provide for their automatic freedom. The district court would have to decide whether the blacks were slaves and, therefore, property. They now were neither slave nor free.(10)

The case was then to go before the district court in Connecticut, where also prospects were dismal: the presiding judge was Andrew Judson, a well known white-supremacist and staunch anti-abolitionist. Baldwin attempted to have the case moved to the free state of New York on the grounds that Gedney had seized the blacks in that state's waters and not on the high seas. He hoped, if successful, to prove that the blacks had become free upon entering New York and that the Van Buren administration was trying to reduce free men to slaves. But Baldwin's effort failed; the confrontation with Judson was unavoidable. The abolitionists' concern was justified. Judson had been involved in the Prudence Crandall case of the early 1830s, during which she, a white teacher, had been brought to trial for opening an all-black girls' school in Canterbury, Connecticut. Judson lived across the street from the school and would have none of it. Though his argument revealed racial prejudice, it was also legally sound: Since many of Crandall's students came from places other than Canterbury, she had broken the "Connecticut Black Law," which did not permit blacks from outside the city to attend its private schools. Judson, serving as counsel for the state, argued that the school would promote abolition and the "disgusting doctrines of amalgamation" while making New England "the Liberia of America." He claimed that although "the professed object was]to educate the blacks, . . . the real object [was] to make the people yield their assent by degrees, to this universal amalgamation of the two races, and have the African race placed on the footing of perfect equality with the Americans." Crandall was tried and convicted twice, although the state supreme court reversed the decisions on a technicality regarding the information brought forth in the trials." (11)

If Judson's verdict seemed predictable, there were complications. Whereas the people he associated with wanted the captives freed, he was under even greater pressure from the White House to send them back to Cuba. The Spanish government, in addition to calling for the blacks' return as property under Pinckney's Treaty, was appealing to the principle of reciprocity between nations in demanding the return of "slaves who are assassins." The Spanish minister to the United States, Pedro Alcantara de Argaiz, was blunt: the "public vengeance of the African Slave Traders in Cuba had not been satisfied." If the blacks went unpunished, the precedent could incite slave rebellions all across Cuba. To avoid the impression that Spain had violated its anti-slave-trade treaties with England, Argaiz had to demand the return of the slaves as assassins. Indeed, to facilitate their rapid departure for Cuba, the White House followed Argaiz's suggestion and dispatched a naval vessel to New Haven to transport the accused felons out of the country–after the expected favorable court decision and before they could exercise the Constitutional right of appeal. The White House was prepared to subvert the due-process guarantees contained in the Constitution.(12)

Judson searched for a politically safe middle ground. He was ambitious, and he knew that a decision in accordance with White House wishes would help his judicial career; yet he was under great public pressure to free the captives.. He tried a solution: he ruled that the blacks had been kidnapped (thereby satisfying friends and neighbors) and, offering no legal justification, ordered their return to Africa (thereby hoping to appease the President by providing for removal of the blacks from the United States). But the strategy did not work. The White House was stunned: Judson, the President's son bitterly complained, had ignored the "great & important political bearing" of the case. Although the abolitionists would have preferred unconditional liberty, they were relieved that the blacks were to be free and the ordeal about to end. The captives, of course, were ecstatic: five long months after the mutiny, they would finally be going home.(13)

But the travail was not over. The White House, in its unholy alliance with the Spanish government, immediately filed an appeal to the U.S. Circuit Court, where Thompson presided and where, of course, he repeated his earlier judgment. The case would now go before the U.S. Supreme Court, where five of the justices, including Chief Justice Roger Taney, were Southerners who were or had been slaveowners. The outlook was worse than in the dark days following Thompson's initial ruling of September, 1839. (14)

Meanwhile, the captives had become a public attraction. The abolitionists had made sure that the blacks became the subject of many human-interest stories, particularly the "discovery" that they were human, with a civilized background. Some of the most poignant stories derived from Professor Gibbs's search on the docks of New York and New Haven for a native African who could speak the captives' language and so permit their story to be heard. Other moving accounts came from the attempts by professors and students at Yale College and the Theological Seminary to instruct the blacks in English and Christianity. But the most compelling attraction was Cinque, who was from Mende and had conspired with Grabeau and Burnah in leading the revolt. In his mid-twenties, Cinque was married, with three children, was taller than most Mende people and, as seen in the contemporary portrait by New England abolitionist Nathaniel Jocelyn, was charismatic, majestic, lightly bronzed, and strikingly handsome. In the course of the district-court trial, he had aroused widespread sympathy by emotionally proclaiming in English, "Give us free! Give us free!" Then there were the children–three females and one male, the last of whom was Kale, who had learned enough English to become the blacks' spokesman.

Crowds of curious townspeople and visitors would gather to watch the blacks as they exercised daily on the New Haven green; long lines of Americans paid admission to file past the captives, who were kept first in the New Haven jail and later in a warehouse-like structure in Westville; pencil sketches were circulated of the adults, as well as of the children. Newspapers and poems contained many references to the blacks; museums in New York and Boston displayed wax likenesses (those in Boston adorned with hair from the captives' heads); numerous plays dramatized the mutiny and succeeding events. Yet not all public expressions were favorable to the blacks. In New Haven they were portrayed as murderers and cannibals in a 135-foot mural entitled The Massacre on Board the Amistad. (15)

Adams into the Fray

The Supreme Court began hearing arguments in early 1841. (Van Buren had meanwhile lost the election–partly, and somewhat ironically, because his Amistad policy was so blatantly pro-South that it alienated Northern Democrats.) The abolitionists had sought someone of national stature to join Baldwin in the defense. Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate had both turned them down, the former because of the political liability that would come from associating with abolitionists, the latter because he considered the affair dangerous to the Union and because he wanted to quiet the slavery issue. The abolitionists nonetheless found a nationally known person: former President John Quincy Adams, who at 73 was now a member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts. Adams was crusty, headstrong, and self-righteous to the point of martyrdom; but he was fervently antislavery, though not an abolitionist who demanded immediate emancipation without compensation, and he had been advising Baldwin on the case since its early days. Adams implored God to grant him the strength "to defeat and expose the abominable conspiracy, Executive and Judicial, of this Government, against the lives of those wretched men." His effort became even more a personal crusade when Kale wrote him a moving letter, which the Emancipator later published:

We want you to ask the Court what we have done wrong. What for Americans keep us in prison? Some people say Mend[e] people crazy; Mende people dolt, because we no talk American language. Merica people no talk Mende language; Merica people dolt? . . . Some people say, Mend[e] people got no souls. Why we feel bad, [if we got no souls? . . . Dear Friend, we want you to know how we feel. Mend[e] people think, think, think. Nobody know what he think; teacher he know, we tell him some. Mend[e] people have got souls.... All we want is make us free. (16)

Before the Supreme Court, Baldwin opened the defense with another lengthy and dramatic appeal to natural law, and then Adams delivered an emotional eight-hour argument that, stretched over two days, was reminiscent of Jonathan Edwards's fiery sermons about the abyss of hell. Adams movingly challenged the Court to gaze back in history to the time of the Founding Fathers and grant liberty on the basis of natural rights doctrines expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Attorney General Henry Gilpin was no match for Adams. Gilpin, methodically arguing the government's case, was as tedious and unimaginative as Adams was inspiring and visionary. Gilpin rejected any legal basis for questioning prima facie evidence regarding the slaveowners' certificates and insisted that Pinckney's Treaty required the U.S. government to intervene in an effort to promote the blacks' return to Spain as property." (17)

Key to the persons in Hale Woodruff's Amistad Murals at Talladega College, Talladega, Alabama. Probably originally published in "The Talladegian". Copyright, The New Haven Colony Historical Society.

The Decision

Adams and Baldwin were eloquent and persuasive in their pleas for higher principles, but the Court calmly and even sedately ruled solely on the basis of law. In March, Associate Justice Joseph Story read a decision that could not have been surprising to those who knew anything about the man. An eminent scholar and jurist, Story was rigidly conservative and strongly nationalistic, but as sensitive to an individual's rights as he was strict in adherence to the law. Though himself finding slavery repugnant, he supported the laws protecting it and opposed the abolitionists as threats to an ordered society. Property rights, he believed, were the basis of civilization. Even so, Story handed down a decision that freed the mutineers. He declared that if the Court suspected fraud, it could go beyond prima facie evidence in examining documents. After an inspection of the ownership papers, he ruled that they were fraudulent, making the captives "kidnapped Africans" and not slaves, and so entitled to use any means in striking for freedom on the basis of the inherent right of self-defense–what Story called the "eternal principles of justice." Further, he reversed Judson's decision ordering the blacks' return to Africa, because there was no American law authorizing such an act. Finally, he made no reference to Adams's charges against the President, which later drew Leavitt's caustic remark that Van Buren's executive order attempting to return the blacks to Spain should be "engraved on his tomb, to rot only with his memory."(18)

The captives were free. American law had triumphed, and so had the blacks–if in a roundabout way. Justice had come from within the system if only thanks to a technicality: the prosecution had failed to prove that the blacks were the rightful property of the Spaniards.

The Amistad decision was hardly a victory over slavery, but the abolitionists could argue that the entire affair had moved the nation into the direction of antislavery by bringing into focus several explosive issues relating to race and slavery. Even though Story as early as 1822 had found slavery contrary to Christian morality, he nonetheless affirmed that legally bound slaves were property. His use of the term "eternal principles of justice" was undoubtedly responsible for much of the confusion arising from his verdict. According to Story, justice emanated from the law, despite the character of that law. When blacks were illegally enslaved, they could achieve justice by invoking the inherent right of self-defense, even to the extent of killing their captors. But, if legally held, the blacks must remain slaves, no matter how reprehensible the institution of slavery. Adams, of course, insisted that justice emanated from the higher law of natural rights, which transcended positive law. Thus, when a man-made law violated a natural right–especially that of individual liberty–the law was unjust and therefore not binding on its subjects. Story recognized what the abolitionists were about. He wrote his wife that Adams's argument was "extraordinary . . . for its power, for its bitter sarcasm, and its dealing with topics far beyond the records and points of discussion." (19)

The abolitionists pronounced the Amistad decision a milestone in their fight against the peculiar institution. To them, and to the interested public, the "eternal principles" Story alluded to were the same as those extolled by Adams. The abolitionists printed thousands of copies of the defense arguments of Adams and Baldwin in pamphlet form, hoping to stir up a nationwide outcry of righteous indignation against what they considered a profound moral wrong. (20) In a real sense, the abolitionists had delivered a threatening blow to slavery by making more Americans aware of its cruelties. They had attempted to awaken the public to the sordid character of slavery and the slave trade. They had tried to establish the human quality of the captives.

They had kept the institution's peculiarities before the American people for almost two years, and they had condemned social injustice by registering a call for racial equality in the highest public forum of the land.

The Struggle for Return

In the end, however, after the captives were freed, few Americans showed concern about what would happen to them. Baldwin was perplexed: "What shall be done with them now that they are free?" he asked Adams. The blacks' freedom "was a barren gift," for "they were here, separated from their homes by the distance of half the globe and in a state where they might be pitied but were not wanted." Tappan feared that if the abolitionists did nothing, the Amistad's blacks would become "worthless vagabonds" and thereby negate the good press that had been accorded them. Tappan's concern was warranted. Many Americans now recalled the anti-abolitionist riots of the early 1830s and again became disenchanted with the abolitionists as fanatics who were endangering the social calm by pushing too hard and too fast for the dispersal of liberty. To these Americans, the blacks were entitled to freedom as individuals but not as a race. In a vain effort to show the disinterested nature of the abolitionists' attempt to free the captives, Tappan published information about the small disbursement of funds related to the case. He had convinced Baldwin and the others to accept as little recompense as possible for their legal services: for at least seventy days of work on the case, for example, Baldwin received only about $700.( 21) But the abolitionists' efforts had only a marginal impact on Americans' attitudes toward race and slavery, as evidenced by succeeding events that led to the Civil War.

The only corrective to the situation, in both a practical and a moral sense, was to return the blacks to Mende. The abolitionists first sought to win damage compensation for the blacks; but even Adams had to agree with Baldwin that, despite more than eighteen months of captivity (the courts had denied bail), the "regular" judicial process had detained the captives, and liability for false imprisonment could turn only on whether the officials' acts were "malicious and without probable cause." Adams had a suggestion. Perhaps, in an effort to achieve equity, the federal government could finance the blacks' return to Africa. But President John Tyler (a Virginia slaveholder) refused, on the ground that there was no law authorizing such action.(22)

In the meantime, the British foreign secretary in London, Lord Aberdeen, told a delegation from the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society that he probably could arrange for a British warship to effect the blacks' safe voyage to Africa. But Tappan opposed waiting another winter. Increasing numbers of whites were turning more violently against the abolitionists, which would endanger the Amistad blacks' welfare. The growing despair of Cinque and his fellow countrymen became evident when Kale's first reaction to the Supreme Court decision was to question the newspaper account: "Paper lie sometime." When one of the blacks (Foone, a good swimmer) drowned in a canal in August, 1841, it was feared that his despondency had led to suicide. Would others follow?

Hoping to charter a vessel for the long trip to Sierra Leone, Tappan worked with other abolitionists to raise enough money from private donations, public exhibitions of the blacks, and contributions from the Union Missionary Society, which black Americans had formed in Hartford to found a Christian mission in Africa. The following November, the surviving thirty-five Amistad blacks, accompanied by Covey and five missionaries (three white and two black), boarded the Gentleman, a small sailing vessel that soon departed New York for Africa. In accordance with Aberdeen's assurances, British naval commanders along the coast of Africa safeguarded the blacks' passage through the slave-trading waters, and the British governor of Sierra Leone facilitated their entrance into the continent in early 1842#almost three years after their initial incarceration by the Portuguese slave traders.(23)

The Aftermath

The aftermath is hazy. One of the girls#Margru (renamed Sarah Kinson)#returned to the United States to enter Oberlin College (at the expense of the American Missionary Association, established in 1846) in preparation for mission work back among her people. A student at the AMA's Mende Mission in Africa, Thomas Tucker, also attended Oberlin and, after receiving a law degree from Straight College in New Orleans (now Dillard University), in 1887 became co-founder and later first president of Florida's State Normal College (now Florida A & M University). Another student at Sierra Leone, Barnabas Root, also studied in the United States and became pastor of a Congregational Mission Church for freedmen, in Alabama. Indeed, these same American missionary schools in Africa nurtured a group of nationalists who later pushed for African independence#including Sierra Leone's first Prime Minister, Dr. Milton Margai, and its first Executive President, Siaka Stevens.(24)

What happened to Cinque? The record is unclear. Some historians have claimed that, after returning home, he participated in the slave trade against fellow Africans. But the director of the Amistad Research Center, Dr. Clifton H. Johnson, investigated the matter and found no evidence for the charge. The only records touching upon Cinque show that when he returned to his homeland, he discovered that wars had destroyed his home and killed most of his family. The last years of his life remain uncertain.(25)

The Amistad case has lasting historical importance. The abolitionists had adopted an intriguing approach to the slavery issue which, had it been pushed relentlessly in the courts and public forums, might have changed the law and taken the fire out of some of the events that led to the Civil War. Was Story sending a signal to the abolitionists to use existing provisions of the Constitution to dismantle slavery? That is impossible to determine. But if slavery was the basis for the Civil War–and many historians believe it was#the abolitionists' methods in the Amistad case, had they been further pursued, might have worked to prevent the war. Indeed, the abolitionists might have helped their cause even more by embracing the Constitution than by casting it aside. Article I of that document empowers Congress to "define and punish . . . Offences against the Law of Nations." Since natural law was the foundation of the law of nations, the abolitionists might have used the broad definition of international law to expand the narrow definition of black freedom while nibbling away at slavery. In this fashion they might have repeatedly aired its true nature until the cruelties of the institution were finally laid bare. Tappan and his associates used the Amistad affair to emphasize the horrors of the slave trade in order to demonstrate the evils of slavery itself. They could claim a victory in knowing that, even though the captives had gone free on a technicality, the fact remained that they were free. But the abolitionists ignored the legal opportunities involved in the Supreme Court decision and simply proclaimed a victory for liberty. Nonetheless, the Amistad case takes a rightful place among the pivotal events leading to the eventual demise of slavery.

The Amistad affair contained the ingredients of a national melodrama: the ugliness of the slave trade in Africa, followed by the infamous Middle Passage; the secret and illegal entry of the black captives into Cuba; the dehumanizing nature of the slave-market auctions on the island; the mutiny led by a handsome and daring young man, whom Tappan likened to Othello; the bizarre and nightmarish voyage up the Atlantic Coast; the cast of dynamic and colorful characters on all sides of the issue; the courtroom antics, high drama, and philosophical inquiries into the relationship between law and morality; the compelling human-interest stories; the conspiracies by the abolitionists and the American government, each against the other, with the blacks as pawns between the great protagonists; the spectacle of a former President battling a lame-duck President in a climactic appearance before the Supreme Court; and the emotional return home. A novelist telling this story would be accused of taking an excursion into fantasy.

NOTES

1. See, for example, R. Kent Newmyer, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the old Republic (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1985), 368. The archives holding the most helpful documentary collections of Amistad materials include the following: Amistad Research Center,Tulane U.; Sterling Memorial Library, Yale U.; New Haven Colony Historical Society, New Haven, Conn.; Federal Archives and Records Center, Waltham, Mass.; Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass.; National Archives and Library of Congress, Wash., D.C.; Archivo Historico Nacional, Madrid, Spain; Public Record Office, Kew Gardens, England.

This essay was delivered as the keynote address before The Amistad Symposium at Yale University on October 21, 1989. The author wishes to express his appreciation to Joni Barnett, Sylvia Ardyn Boone, Bernard Heinz, Floyd M. Shumway, and Gaddis Smith.

2. For Africa and the Middle Passage, see Basil Davidson, The African Slave Trade: Precolonial History, 1450-1850 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 84 (originally published as Black Mother); Daniel P. Mannix and Malcolm Cowley, Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1518-1865 (N.Y.: Viking, 1962), 107-8; William H. Smith, A Political History of Slavery, 2 vols. (N.Y.: Putnam's, 1903), 1: 53-60; Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (London: Oxford U. Press, 1962), 184, 220, 229. On Cuba, see Arthur F. Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817-1886 (Austin: U. of Texas Press, 1967), 39; Philip S. Foner, A History of Cuba and Is Relations with the United States, 2 vols. (N.Y.: International Publishers, 1962),1: 189-91; Hubert H.S. Aimes, A History of Slavery in Cuba, 1511-1868 (N.Y.: Putnam's, 1907), 125-28, 133-35; David R. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge U. Press, 1980), esp. chap. 13. On the Amistad affair, see Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (N.Y.: Oxford U. Press, 1987); Howard Jones, "The Mutiny on the Amistad," Constitution I (Fall 1988): 46-50; Edwin P. Hoyt, The "Amistad" Affair (N.Y.: Abelard-Schuman, 1970); Arthur Abraham, "The Amistad Revolt: An Historical Legacy of Sierra Leone and the United States," pamphlet published by the U.S. Information Service, Freetown, Sierra Leone (1987); John W. Barber, A History of the Amistad Captives (New Haven, Conn.: E.L & J.W. Barber, 1840). Of the popularized versions, see Fred J. Cook, "The Slave Ship Rebellion," American Heritage 8 (February, 1957): 60-64, 104-6; and William A. Owens, Black Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner "Amistad" (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1968), originally published in 1953 as Slave Mutiny. A recent novel by Barbara Chase-Riboud, Echo of Lions (N.Y.: William Morrow, 1989), is too creative to be considered a faithful rendition of the story.

3. Jones, Mutiny, 3-7, 2~29.

4. Ibid., 8-9, 11-12, 33-35, 38-41, 43; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery (Cleveland: Case Westem Illinois U. Press, 1974), 129-30; Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830-1870 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge U. Press, 1982), 48; Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U. Press, 1973), 45, 47-48, 50-51, 57; James B. Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 1976), 53; Louis Filler, The Crusade against Slavery, 1830-1860 (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1960), 61 n.28; Russel B. Nye, Fettered Freedom: Civil Liberties and the Slavery Controversy, 1830-1860 (East Lansing: Mich. State U. Press, 1949), 5-6; Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Cooperation (Urbana: U. of Illinois Press, 1972), 223; Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1978), introd. and n.1; Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850 (N.Y.: Random House, 1967), 29, 207, 264-65 n.22, 270-71 n.55; Lewis Tappan Papers, Journals and Notebooks, 1814-69, May 2, 1841, p. 26, and Nov. 14, 1839, pp.105-7, in Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Wash., D.C.

5. Lewis Tappan to Benjamin Tappan, Nov.14, 1839, Papers of Benjamin Tappan, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress; R. Earl McClendon, "The Amistad Claims: Inconsistencies of Policy," Political Science Quarterly 48 (Sept., 1933): 386-412; Gilbert H. Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830-1844 (N.Y.: American Historical Association, 1933), 35, 164; Roland H. Bainton, Yale and the Ministry: A History of Education for the Christian Ministry at Yale from the Founding in 1701 (N.Y.: Harper, 1957), 87, 153-54; Rollin G. Osterweis, Three Centuries of New Haven, 1638-1938 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale U. Press, 1953), 299; K.L. Little, The Mende of Sierra Leone: A West African People in Transition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951), 72.

6. Jones, Mutiny, 9, 35-37, 44, 168.

7. Ibid., 12, 22, 47, 49-50, 53-58, 138-40; Alvin L. Duckett, John Forsyth: Political Tactician (Athens: U. of Georgia Press, 1962), 33-34, 182-84. Among those few studies that raise questions about the Van Buren administration's actions during the Amistad affair, see Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (N.Y.: Knopf, 1956), 393-94 n.22; Smith, Political History of Slavery, 1: 57; John R. Spears, The American Slave-Trade: An Account of Its Origin, Growth and Suppression (London: Bickers, 1901), 188; John Niven, Martin Van Buren: The Romantic Age of American Politics (N.Y.: Oxford U. Press, 1983), 467.

8. Jones, Mutiny, 42-43, 65~6, 84; New York Morning Herald, Oct. 1, 1839, p. 2; Oct. 3, 1839, p. 2; Oct.4, 1839, p. 2. Bryant's poem appeared in the New York Emancipator, Sept.19, 1839, p. 82. For racial prejudice in the antebellum North, see Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1961).

9. Jones, Mutiny, 44-45, 61-64; William M. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760-1848 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U. Press, 1977), 157 n.24; Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven, Conn.: Yale U. Press, 1975), 183-87; Harold M. Hyman and William M. Wiecek, Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835-1875 (N.Y.: Harper 8r Row, 1982), 240-41; The African Captives: Trial of the Prisoners of the "Amistad" on the Writ of Habeas Corpus before the Circuit Court of the United States for the District of Connecticut, at Hartford; Judges Thompson and Judson, September Term, 1839 (N.Y.: American Antislavery Society, 1839), 36-37; N.Y. Advertiser & Express, Sept. 25, 1839, p. 1. Leavitt's address before convention, June 15, 1843, in Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention, June 13-20, 1843, p. 122, located in Amistad Research Center, Tulane U. The third member of the blacks' defense team was Theodore Sedgwick, of New York. Staples was also from New York.

10. Jones, Mutiny, 65-66, 74, 76-77.

11. Ibid., 96-98, 100-4. For the Crandall affair, see Bernard C. Steiner, History of Slavery in Connecticut, in Johns Hopkins U. Studies in Historical and Political Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1893), 45-52; Jarvis M. Morse, A Neglected Period of Connecticut's History, 1818-1850 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale U. Press, 1933), 193-96; Edmund Fuller, Prudence Crandall: An Incident of Racism in Nineteenth-Century Connecticut (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan U. Press, 1971); Philip S. Foner and Josephine F. Pacheco, Three Who Dared: Prudence Crandall, Margaret Douglass, Myrtilla Miner#Champions of Antebellum Black Education (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984), 5-46. Judson quotes in Dwight L. Dumond, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in America (Ann Arbor: U. of Mich. Press, 1961), 214.

12. Jones, Mutiny,112-16, 119, 159-63.

13. Ibid., 122-23, 129-35. John Van Buren quote in Staples to Baldwin, Jan. 21, 1840, Baldwin Family Papers, Box 36, Yale University.

14. Jones, Mutiny, 135.

15. Ibid., 29, 42-43, 49, 122-23, 149-50, 157-58, 197; Cinque quote in Abraham, "Amistad Revolt," 15.

16. Jones, Mutiny, 152-58; Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848, 12 vols. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1874-77), X: 373; Kale and Kinna to Adams, Jan. 4, 1841, Adams Family Papers, Mass. Historical Society; Abraham, 25-26; Kale letter in New York Emancipator, March 15, 1841, quoted in Horatio T. Strother, The Underground Railroad in Connecticut (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan U. Press, 1962), 74-76.

17. Jones, Mutiny, 171-88. On Van Buren and the election of 1840, see Niven, 470-72; Donald B. Cole, Martin Van Buren and the American Political System (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U. Press, 1984), 373; Major L. Wilson, The Presidency of Martin Van Buren (Lawrence: U. Press of Kansas, 1984), 207; Robert H. Gunderson, The Log-Cabin Campaign (Lexington: U. Press of Kentucky, 1957), 255, 256 n. 14; James C. Curtis, The Fox at Bay: Martin Van Buren and the Presidency, 1837-1841 (Lexington: U. Press of Kentucky, 1970), 190. On the Supreme Court, see Carl B. Swisher, History of the Supreme Court of the United States, vol. 5: The Taney Period, 1836-64 (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1974), 11-13; Charles G. Haines and Foster H. Sherwood, The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government and Politics, 1835-1864 (Berkeley: U. of Calif. Press, 1957), 96-110. For Adams's argument before the Supreme Court, see Adams, Argument of John Quincy Adams, before the Supreme Court of the United States, in the Case of the United States, Appellants, vs. Cinque, and Other Africans, Captured in the Schooner Amistad (N.Y.: S.W. Benedict, 1841). Reprinted in The Basic Afro-American Reprint Library (N.Y.: Arno Press, 1969). See also manuscript of Adams's speech in Lewis Tappan Papers, Correspondence, 1809-72, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

18. Jones, Mutiny, 188-92; Leavitt quote in William Jay, A View of the Action of the Federal Government, in Behalf of Slavery (Utica, N.Y.: G.F. Hopkins, 1844; originally published in 1839), appendix; Newmyer, Story, 355-58, 36869; Swisher, History of Supreme Court, 5: 194; U.S. v. Amistad in Richard Peters, ed., Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States, 15 (1841): 519-98. Story's decision ibid., 519-20,592-97.

19. Jones, Mutiny, 171, 191-92; Story quote to wife, Sarah, February 28, 1841, in William W. Story, ed., Life and Letters of Joseph Story, 2 vole. (Boston: Little & Brown, 1851), II: 348. Story expressed his opposition to slavery in his decision of 1822 involving the La Jeune Eugenie.

20. Jones, Mutiny, 197.

21. Ibid., 197-98, 203; Baldwin to Adams, March 12,1841, Baldwin Family Papers, Box 37, Yale U.; Baldwin to Leavitt, March 12, 1841, ibid.; Lewis Tappan to Benjamin Griswold, January 30, 1840, Lewis Tappan Papers, Correspondence, 1809-72, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. For the anti-abolitionist riots, see Leonard L. Richards, "Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (N.Y.: Oxford U. Press, 1970).

22. Jones, Mutiny, 199, 204-5; Kale quote in N.Y. Commercial Advertiser, March 20, 1841, p. 2; Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (N.Y.: Oxford U. Press, 1969), 78-79; Robert S. Fletcher, A History of Oberlin College from Its Foundation through the Civil War, 2 vols. (Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College, 1943), 1: 258; T.J. Alldridge, A Transformed Colony: Sierra Leone (London: Seeley, 1910), 260; Baldwin to Leavitt, March 12,1841, Baldwin Family Papers, Box 37, Yale University.

23. Jones, Mutiny, 197, 203.

24. Ibid., 255 n. 27; Abraham, 20-22; Charles A. Dinsmore, "Interesting Sketches of the Amistad Captives," Yale University Library Gazette 9 (January 1935): 55; Simeon E. Baldwin, "The Captives of the Amistad," Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society 4 (1888): 364; Fletcher, History of Oberlin College, 1: 259-60; Alldridge,Transformed Colony, 261. On the AMA, see Clifton H. Johnson, "The American Missionary Association, 1846-1861: A Study of Christian Abolitionism," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, U. of North Carolina, 1958.

25. Jones, Mutiny, 255 n. 27. Johnson's assurances were expressed in several conversations with the author, both personal and by telephone. The uncertainty regarding Cinque's fate was confirmed by the author's discussion with several scholars at the Amistad Symposium.

[HOWARD JONES is University Research Professor of History, University of Alabama.]