The Amistad, Freedom on the Long Island Sound

On a clear August morning in eighteen thirty-nine, a United States Navy brig spotted a strange vessel drifting erratically off the tip of Long Island. The ship was the Amistad, a Spanish schooner, and on its deck stood a group of Africans who had seized control of it two months earlier in the waters off Cuba. The story had begun in West Africa, in the Mende-speaking territory of present-day Sierra Leone.

Fifty-three men, women, and children had been illegally captured, the Atlantic slave trade had been banned for decades by this point under international treaty, and transported to Cuba. There they were given Spanish names, falsely documented as Cuban-born slaves, and loaded onto the Amistad for transport to a plantation. On July second, eighteen thirty-nine, a man the historical record calls Joseph Cinqué led the captives in revolt.

They killed the captain and the cook. They ordered the two surviving Spanish slaveholders to sail them back to Africa. The Spaniards sailed east by day and north by night.

For two months the Amistad zigzagged the Atlantic before the Navy intercepted it near Montauk Point and brought it into New London, Connecticut. What followed was a legal and political battle that reached the United States Supreme Court. Former President John Quincy Adams, then seventy-three years old, argued for the freedom of the Amistad Africans before the court in eighteen forty-one and won.

The surviving thirty-five Africans returned to Sierra Leone in eighteen forty-two. New Haven, where the Africans were held during trial, became an organizing center for American abolitionism. The Amistad Committee that formed to defend them helped establish the American Missionary Association, which would later found Fisk University, Howard University, and dozens of other institutions for freed Black Americans after the Civil War.

A full-scale replica of the Amistad, built in Mystic, serves today as a floating museum and ambassador vessel.