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 take
back their freedom. One of them, a man the
world would come to know as "Cinque,"
worked free of his chains and led a revolt
onboard the ship.
The vessel they overtook was a schooner that
had been named 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, NY, 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.

Enslavement
Sengbe Pieh was seized on the road -- nabbed
by four men who secured him by tying one
hand to his neck and led him to a neighboring
village. Within a few days his captors sold
him to another man, Bamadzha. Sengbe's new
owner was not Mende as Sengbe was, but
Vai. In fact, Bamadzhu was the son of a Vai
king, Siaka, who was a key figure in the slave
trade on the coast. A month later Sengbe
traded hands again, this time to a European
slave trader at Lomboko, on the Gallinas
River. So the man who would become known
as "Cinque" was sucked into a powerful,
international, transoceanic vortex. His long
journey was just beginning.
At least nine of the other Africans who would
find themselves on the Amistad were also
"stolen while walking in the road." It was a
common story throughout the hinterland of
the Gallinas River, not only among the
Mende but the Bolem, Kisi, Temne, Kono
and other peoples of the interior. This was
dangerous country to travel in 1839. The
Gallinas had become a watershed draining
men, women and children out to the ocean.
The man who would eventually translate the
Amistad Africans' story for Americans, James
Covey, had himself been captured from the
same country several years before; his Mende
name, "Kaw-we-li," signified "war road,"
meaning a road frequently raided by slavers.

hired by rival chiefs or kings. Fuliwa, for one,

fell into slavers' hands when soldiers
surrounded his town, put down an effort at
resistance, and marched the survivors on a
month-long trek to the coast.
A handful of the others were condemned and
sold as punishment for committing crimes
within their villages -- three of these for
adultery. And several others were sold to pay
off debts. Grabeau, for instance, was sold
after another slave that his uncle had sold to
pay off a debt ran away. The slave trade was
not just a series of violent seizures. It had
insinuated itself into the everyday workings
of law and business along the coast of West
Africa.
Some of the Africans served in African
households before coming into the hands of
European slavers. Pugnwawni, for one, was
sold by his uncle (to pay for a coat, he
reported), and spent the next several years
with an African master, Garloba, working in
rice fields alongside his master's wives and
children, before changing hands and entering
a very different kind of servitude.
Fatefully, though, these Africans ended up in
the hands of Europeans, set up in slave
"factories" on the Gallinas.

The slave trade was not all banditry-scale

kidnapping. Of the 36 other Amistad Africans
who survived long enough to tell Americans
something of their story, six were seized
when their villages were raided by larger
parties of slavers, most often by "soldiers"

The Middle Passage

The ship that carried the Africans
across the Atlantic was the Teora, a
slave ship sailing under a Portuguese
flag, bound for Cuba. The ship was a
brig, specially built for the slave
trade, with a narrow, clipper-shaped
hull and a sharp bow-- built for
maneuverability and above all speed,
to evade British anti-slave trade
patrols. The voyage -- the "Middle
Passage" across the Atlantic -- took
two months....
After weeks or months of waiting in
the baracoons at the river mouth,
embarkment happened in a sudden
rush: the slaves were herded out of the
baracoons, marched to the water's edge and
forced into large wooden canoes to be ferried
out to the slave ship looming beyond the surf.
The European slavers and their African
workers, members of a coastal tribe, the Kru,
worked rapidly; if a British cruiser suddenly
appeared on the horizon, the venture was lost
-- and the slaves likely thrown into the surf to
drown.
None of the captives had ever been to sea
before, in all likelihood. Many, convinced
they were going to be killed and eaten by
their captors, tried to plunge into the surf and
drown themselves; slavers and Kru men had
learned to watch carefully for that.
Once loaded, the slave ship quickly weighed
anchor and sailed off. Africa would have
dropped out of sight within a few hours, if
any of the slaves were on deck to see it. The
Middle Passage had begun.

The slaves were packed into a dark,

stooped space called the slave deck, about
four feet high, built below the main deck,
above the hold. In the testimony later given
by the Amistad Africans about this
nightmare voyage, the most vivid aspect of
the experience was the cramped waiting,
tossing in the waves, in suffocating,
darkness. Both Cinque and Grabeau
reenacted their confinement by getting
down on the floor and curling into hunched
balls.
Periodically they were brought up on deck
and fed rice. If some of the captives tried to
starve themselves, as often happened, they
were whipped and forced to eat. Few
managed to starve, but over the two months
they were at sea, water supplies ran low, and
disease spread through the close-packed,
unventilated slave deck. By the time the
Teora had crossed the Atlantic, a third of the
Africans had died
.The Cuban Slave Market
As the Teora neared Cuba, the captain had
the surviving slaves brought up on deck,
bathed, clothed and fed extra rations. They
were being prepared for sale, made to appear
as healthy as possible. Just out of sight of
land, the vessel waited for the cover of
darkness. Here again the risk of British naval
patrols became particularly dangerous. The
Teora stood in for shore at night, landing the
slaves by small boats in a secluded inlet a few
miles from Havana. The Africans huddled on
shore until the entire group had been offloaded, then marched three miles into the
jungle. They had reached America.

In the jungle, they spent several weeks in

warehouses before being lined up again one
night and marched several miles to the walls
that surrounded Havana. At daylight, they
were led into another pair of baracoons,
oblong, roofless, already teeming with several
hundred fellow captives. They had reached
the slave market, where imported Africans
were auctioned off to Cuba's sugar and coffee
planters.
These baracoons were set at the end of the
paseo, or avenue, linking the city with the
palace of the Captain-General, the imperial
governor of the island. The Africans were
now carried into the heart of Havana, out into
the busy, open glare of Cuban society. Train
tracks ran right by the baracoons. Visitors
were often taken to see the slave sales. Slave
merchants lined up the captives to be
examined by potential buyers, who inspected
the Africans' bodies and teeth. After ten days,
a young sugar planter, Jose Ruiz, bought 49
of the Africans, all adult males, paying $450
for each. A companion, Pedro Montes, had
already purchased a few slaves of his own -three young girls and a young boy, who had
been imported in a different slave ship.
Next the two Cubans made preparations to
transport their new slaves to their plantations
near Puerto Principe, several hundred miles
away. They procured passports from the
Captain-General's office -- documents
claiming that the slaves were "ladinos"
(Cuban-born, and so legally owned, since
importing Africans was illegal in Cuba) and
giving each of them Spanish names: Sengbe
Pieh became "Jose Cinque." And they
chartered passage on the Amistad, a coastal
schooner. Several nights later they led the 53
slaves through Havana to board the vessel.

The Revolt

two potatoes, and a small cup of water a day.

Some of the Africans tried to drink more than
their ration. Ruiz had them strung up on deck
and flogged by the crew, and their wounds
rubbed with gunpowder and vinegar.
Cinque was still fighting to find out what was
happening to them. He approached the cook,
asked in sign language, and got a horrifying
response: the man gestured toward a barrel of
beef, signing that the Spaniards planned to
slaughter and eat the Africans.

The Amistad put off from Havana for Puerto

Principe on June 28, 1839, for what appeared
to be a routine voyage. Puerto Principe lay
several days sailing away. In addition to Ruiz
and Montes, the ship carried Captain Ramon
Ferrer, his cabin boy Antonio (a sixteen yearold slave), two crew members, a mulatto cook
named Celestino -- and of course the 53
slaves Ruiz and Montes had purchased
illegally in Havana. The vessel also carried a
cargo of assorted merchandise -- wines,
raisins, medicines, cloth, crockery, cane
knives....
The Amistad was a schooner, narrow,
maneuverable, built for coastal trade. On deck
the vessel was only about 65 feet long: these
60 people were traveling, living and working
in a space roughly the size of tractor-trailer
truck.
The slaves were kept in the hold. From time
to time they were permitted on deck, in small
groups, to escape the stagnant heat of the
hold. The weather was stifling. And on the
second day out the wind shifted. Now facing
a longer voyage than he had anticipated, the
captain cut the slaves' rations to one banana,

Then came the turning point. On the third

night out, Cinque found a nail on the
schooner deck. Once back in the hold, he
used the nail to work open the lock securing
his iron collar, then turned to free his fellow
captives. Above them, a storm was occupying
the crew; no-one on deck picked up on the
activity in the hold, where the Africans were
arming themselves with steel sugar cane
knives from the schooner's cargo.
At 4:00 a.m., the Africans struck, bursting
from the hold and quickly overpowering the
captain and crew. Captain Ferrer gave some
resistance, and managed to kill one of the
Africans before he went down. The Africans
also killed Celestino, the cook. The two other
members of the crew either died in the melee
or escaped overboard. Ruiz and eventually
Montes were captured and brought to the
quarterdeck, where the Africans ordered them
to sail the vessel into direction of the rising
sun -- back to Africa.
The Black Schooner
The Africans had taken control of the
schooner, but their situation was extremely

precarious. The vessel was low on food and

water, and thousands of miles from Africa.
Most critically, it was drifting, and the
Africans did not know how to operate the
schooner or navigate their way back across
the Atlantic. In fact, though they couldn't
know it, the prevailing winds and currents
between them and Africa ran right in the face
of a return voyage.
Under Cinque's leadership, they tried to force
Ruiz and Montes to sail the schooner east,
toward the rising sun, which they had marked
as the direction homeward during the Middle
Passage. But the Spaniards, equally desperate
and bent on a very different course, slowed
the sailing by day when the vessel pointed
eastwards, and brought the schooner about
during the night, fervently hoping they would
attract the notice of other vessels. These
tactics kept the vessel in Caribbean waters
and then among the Bahamas for some
weeks.
Eventually, the schooner worked its way
through the Bahama Channel into the
Atlantic, picking up the Gulf Stream, which
carried the Africans north, towards the U.S.
Atlantic currents carried the Amistad past the
slave states altogether, up the coastline into
New York and ultimately New England
waters.
By August, after several months at sea, the
situation aboard the schooner was growing
dire. The Africans were parched, ill, some
had died and others were near death. In
desperation, Cinque and the others decided to
land another shore party. They had reached
Culloden Point, on the eastern tip of Long
Island. It was August 25.

Ashore, the Africans encountered a small

group of white men--Henry Green and four
other local seamen. Wary but desperate, the
Africans tried to engage the men to sail the
schooner back to Africa, promising to pay in
gold they claimed to have on board. That
meeting was broken up by the arrival of the
U.S.S. Washington--a naval brig surveying
the coast, commanded by Lieutenant Thomas
Gedney--which brought this leg of the
Africans' voyage to an abrupt end. They were
taken into custody and brought into New
London, just across from Long Island. Once
again the Africans were in captivity. Their
fate now depended on American authorities.
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.
Return to Africa
The Supreme Court ruling upheld the
Africans' freedom but revoked their tickets
home, striking down the District Court's order
to return them to Africa. The administration
refused any assistance, and so, elated at the
affirmation of their freedom but supremely
frustrated at still not being able to return
home, the Africans relocated to Farmington,
Connecticut. The Amistad Committee turned
its efforts to raising funds to pay for the return
voyage, organizing a series of appeals in local
churches where the Africans told their stories

and demonstrated the results of their

education and Christian conversions.
Meanwhile, the Committee sent out inquiries
to locate Mende country -- Americans still did
not know specifically where these people
came from. Finally, in October 1841, Lt.
Governor Fergusson of Sierra Leone
responded with information about Mendeland
and an offer to receive the Africans. With the
fund drive at $1,840, the Amistad Committee
was able to charter the Gentleman to
undertake the return voyage. By November,
they were ready to sail.
The Gentleman carried more than just the
African freemen. By this point, their story had
become bound up with a larger American
project; the Africans' abolitionist allies
envisioned not just the abolition of U.S.
slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, but also a
missionary transformation of African society.
Accordingly, several ministers and their
families accompanied the Amistad Africans,
including Mr. and Mrs. Raymond and Rev.
James Steele (who were white) and Mr.
Henry Wilson and Miss Tamor Clark (who
were black). They planned to set up a
"Mendi" mission near Cinque's town,
establish themselves, and teach not only the
gospel, but American habits of commerce,
dress and morality.

ravaged by slaving wars, and that his village

and most of his family had been wiped out. It
must have been a heavy blow.
Once back on home ground, most of the
Amistad Africans drifted away from the
American missionaries, though ten adults and
the four children remained. Reduced in
numbers, the Mendi Mission was in no
position to establish itself in the interior.
Sengbe himself was one of the Africans who
dispersed. Apparently he invested in a store
of goods and took it into the Sherbro region to
trade for produce to bring back to the
Freetown market. After a few sporadic visits,
he lost contact with the mission, disappearing
into the African interior.
So thirty-five of the Amistad Africans
managed to make their way back to Africa.
Thirty-five survivors, of the fifty-three
originally loaded onto the Amistad. Thirtyfive, of the hundreds off-loaded from the
Teora, most of them by now dead or toiling
on sugar plantations in Cuba. Thirty-five, of
the untold millions wrenched from Africa and
lost to the sea or forced into American slavery
in the United States, the West Indies and
Latin America.

The Gentleman arrived in Freetown, Sierra

Leone in mid-January 1842 -- just about three
years exactly after Sengbe had been
kidnapped into slavery. The Africans'
reception was festive and excited, and some
of them found acquaintances in the crowd that
greeted them. But they also found grim news:
Sengbe learned that the interior had been