Amistad Captives Revolt and Win Freedom in Supreme Court, Exposing Slavery's Illegality

Fifty-three recently abducted Africans being transported aboard the Spanish schooner Amistad from Havana to Puerto Príncipe, Cuba revolt under the leadership of Joseph Cinqué, killing the captain and cook while sparing the Spanish navigator to sail them back to Sierra Leone. The Africans had been illegally kidnapped from Sierra Leone in February 1839 by Portuguese slave hunters and shipped to Havana in violation of all existing treaties, then purchased by Spanish plantation owners Pedro Montes and Jose Ruiz for transport to Caribbean plantations. The navigator tricks the captives by sailing generally northward instead of eastward to Africa, and after two months the U.S. Navy seizes the Amistad off Long Island, New York, towing it to New London, Connecticut. This initiates a legal battle that becomes the most important court case involving slavery before Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857.

The “Amistad Committee” led by abolitionist merchant Lewis Tappan raises funds for the Africans’ defense, eventually enlisting former President John Quincy Adams to argue their case before the Supreme Court. Adams, then a 73-year-old congressman who has fought tirelessly against the congressional “gag rule” banning antislavery petitions, speaks for nine hours before the Court. The district court rules that the Africans were illegally enslaved since they were kidnapped from Africa where they lived in freedom rather than born into slavery in Spanish territories, and therefore the Spanish plantation owners’ property claims are invalid. President Martin Van Buren, under pressure from Southern slaveholders and the Spanish government, orders the case appealed to the Supreme Court in an attempt to return the Africans to slavery and avoid diplomatic complications.

On March 9, 1841, the Supreme Court rules 7-1 in favor of the Africans’ freedom, with Justice Joseph Story writing “There does not seem to us to be any ground for doubt, that these negroes ought to be deemed free.” The Court accepts the argument that the Africans were never Spanish citizens or legal slaves but rather free people illegally kidnapped, and therefore have the natural right to use violence to secure their freedom. Donations from abolitionists and missionary societies fund the return of 35 surviving Africans to Sierra Leone in January 1842, accompanied by five missionaries and teachers who establish a Christian mission. The Amistad case represents a rare instance where enslaved people successfully use both violent resistance and legal appeals to win freedom, demonstrating that when slavery is forced to defend itself in court under international law and treaty obligations rather than domestic slave codes, its illegitimacy becomes undeniable. The case exposes how American slavery depends on state-level legal frameworks that deny enslaved people access to courts and testimony rights: the Amistad captives win precisely because they are treated as foreign nationals subject to international law rather than as property under Southern slave codes. The decision provides abolitionists with powerful legal and moral arguments while embarrassing the Van Buren administration, which had attempted to use federal power to return clearly illegally enslaved people to bondage to appease slaveholder interests and Spanish diplomatic pressure.