Amistad Rebellion Archives

The Amistad Mutiny

Amistad. The event became the basis for one of the most significant court cases in US history and a defining moment in the development of the abolition movement in the United States. Sometime in April 1839 Clinque, a 26 year old man from Mende in Sierra Leone, was captured alongside hundreds of others from the West African tribes by Spanish slave merchants. With his wife and three children still free and living in Sierra Leone, Clinque and 500 other slaves were taken, chained hand and foot, aboard the Portuguese slave vessel Teçora to the Caribbean. Teçora finished its voyage by entering Cuba under the cover of night. The secretive approach was because of Anglo-Spanish treaties which had made the trade of slaves from Africa a capital crime. Slavery was legal in Cuba however, meaning once smuggled ashore it would be possible to trade the slaves on the Cuban market. Highlighting the horrendous conditions endured by the captives aboard Teçora, a third of the slaves had died by the time the ship reached Havana. Clinque and 53 other slaves, including four children, were bought by two Spaniards: Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montes. The slaves were collected aboard the Amistad, a small schooner built in Baltimore especially for the slave trade. It set sail on a 300 mile journey to transport the slaves from Havana to Puerto Principe, on another part of Cuba. The mutiny started three days into the voyage. Clinque used a nail to pick the locks of his chains and free the other captives. The escapees, armed with machete like weapons they had found in the vessel’s stores, stormed the ship, killing the Amistad‘s captain and cook, and injuring Montes and Ruiz. The lives of the two Spaniards were spared for their navigational skills, and they were tasked with sailing the ship back to Africa. Montes and Ruiz deceived the captives and had the ship sail back and forth along the coast of the Americas. After two months at sea the vessel was spotted by the USS Washington off the coast of Long Island. The difficult voyage had seen around a dozen of the slaves perish. The US Navy ship escorted the Amistad to Connecticut, where Montes and Ruiz were freed and the Africans were imprisoned pending an investigation into the mutiny. Quickly the mutiny escalated into an international issue which engaged directly with the long standing controversies over slavery. A group of evangelists, led by Lewis Tappan, worked to publicise the incident as a means to expose the evils of the slave trade. A key turning point took place when they found two other men from Sierra Leone who could serve as translators for Clinque, allowing his side of the story to be publicised. Increasingly, abolitionists painted and spread a vivid depiction of the horrendous conditions endured by the slaves. They launched a case, arguing that the Africans had been enslaved illegally and had thus broken no laws in trying to escape from bondage. On the other side, Montes and Ruiz sued the slaves, on the basis that they had been deprived of their property. They demanded the return of the slaves, which they fraudulently claimed had been born in Cuba. The Spanish government was eager for the slaves to be returned to Cuba to stand trial for piracy and murder. Tremendous diplomatic pressure was therefore placed on US President Martin Van Buren to find a quick solution to the mutiny which would appease the Spanish demands. An interesting sub-plot to the case was the Spanish awareness that if Mortes and Ruiz were found guilty of having kidnapped the slaves from Africa, Spain’s infringement of the treaty banning the African slave trade would be revealed. This, in turn, would provide the British with justification to intervene in Cuba. An initial trial, in January 1840, ruled that the slaves had been imprisoned illegally. As such, they would not be forced to return to Cuba to stand trial but instead freed and returned to Africa. Shockingly, Van Buren and the Spanish government both intervened in the case, and appealed the verdict to the Supreme Court. In March 1841 the Supreme Court confirmed the original verdict, ruling again that the slaves had been imprisoned illegally. With financial assistance from the abolitionists that had backed their campaign, the Africans from the Amistad set sail for West Africa in November 1841. For the United States, the verdict of the trial was pivotal. It revealed the growing momentum of the abolition movement, and the growing contradictions between US law and the moral principles supposedly embodied in the country’s Declaration of Independence. The event became a public as well as political spectacle, highlighting the divisions between slave owners and abolitionists. The result set an important legal precedent concerning the importance of ‘natural law’ over the property rights of the slave owners and as such, the outcome of the Amistad trial was a crucial step in the process which ultimately culminated in the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.]]>

th anniversary of the Amistad Slave Rebellion. In 1838, on the 2^nd of July, about 53 Africans aboard the Amistad, a slave carrier, managed to break out of their chains, kill two crew members and disarm the rest of the crew. After seizing control of the vessel, the slaves tried to sail all the way back to their homeland, but ended up sailing North instead. These slaves travelled approximately 1400 miles from Cuba all the way to Long Island in New York, where the navy finally picked them up. This rebellion was termed as the Amistad Rebellion and despite its popularity, it was just one of the thousands of rebellions that have been recorded. About 12 million Africans were forced to become slaves as they were shipped off to the New World between the 16^th – 19^th centuries. It is believed that almost 1.5 million Africans perished even before reaching land, due to the horrifying conditions present on-board. At the time of the Amistad Rebellion the United States, as well as most other major slave destinations in North and South America, had abolished the process of importing slaves. However, since slavery itself was legal unlawful activities were the norm. For example, a Spanish slave trader by the name of Pedro Blanco was believed to live like an aristocrat along the coast of Sierra Leone and was said to have continued the slave trade with the help of a local leader. The 53 Africans who found themselves aboard the Amistad were rounded up at Lomboko, Blanco’s slave depot. They were then marched all the way through the interior and kept in slave barracks where diseases and beatings were common. According to the testimony of these slaves, they were also shackled around the neck, ankles and wrists and were forced to sleep in contorted positions without even being offered enough room to stand straight. Whippings and beatings on flimsy grounds were common and dead bodies were thrown into the ocean almost every single day. What made this rebellion so famous was that despite being from 9 different ethnic groups, the slaves joined hands towards a common cause – freedom. This was something that was relatively unseen in Africa. The rebellion was led by Cinque, a rice farmer before he was turned into a slave. The captain of the ship was slashed to to death and two other crew members threw themselves overboard. However, to the dismay of the slaves, they had to depend on the Spaniards to set the course since they had no idea about charting out directions on the sea. The Amistad stopped on a number of islands in the Bahamas before it finally reached the United States. It was on August 26 that a US Navy brig entered the ship and imprisoned the Africans in Connecticut, a slave state at the time. These Africans received immense media coverage and thousands of locals also paid “entry fees” to look at them. A few influential people against the slave trade helped them to set up a trial in Hartford. In what became a historic ruling, the Hartford Court ruled that since the Africans were brought in illegally, they were not slaves. Despite having lodged an appeal with the Supreme Court, the decision could not be overturned. Thus, these slaves were finally made free after spending 18 months in the US. During the journey back to Sierra Leone, the number of surviving Africans fell to 35 who at last arrived home on 26^th November 1841. This is just one of the many stories of the horrors of the slave trade and the efforts of a few individuals who played a huge role in abolishing slavery and making the world a much better place to live in.]]>