The Amistad

In the early morning hours of July second, eighteen thirty-nine, a man named Sengbe Pieh broke free from his chains in the hold of a Spanish schooner called La Amistad. He was Mende, from the interior of what is now Sierra Leone. He had been kidnapped, sold to Portuguese slavers, transported across the Atlantic in the hold of a ship called the Tecora under conditions that killed dozens of people, and transferred to the Amistad in Cuba for sale in Havana. He was designated legal property under the documents the ship carried, though the international slave trade had been prohibited for decades and the Africans aboard had never been enslaved under any lawful process.

Pieh freed himself, freed others in the hold, and led an uprising. The captain and the cook were killed. The two Spanish navigators who survived were ordered to sail east, toward Africa. They sailed east by day and north by night. The Amistad drifted up the American coast through July and August, stopping at Long Island for water. On August twenty-sixth, the United States Revenue Cutter Washington intercepted the vessel near Montauk and took it under tow to New London.

The Africans were brought to New Haven and held in the jail on Elm Street while courts sorted through competing claims: the Spanish government said they were property under treaty; the president, Martin Van Buren, quietly sought their return to Cuba; abolitionists said they were free men who had done what any person would do when kidnapped.

The case moved through federal district court in New Haven and then to the Supreme Court. Former president John Quincy Adams, seventy-three years old, argued for the Africans before the Court on February twenty-fourth, eighteen forty-one. On March ninth, Justice Joseph Story delivered the majority opinion: the Africans had been illegally kidnapped, they were not property, they were free.

In eighteen forty-two, thirty-five survivors returned to Sierra Leone. Pieh was among them. What became of him afterward is not fully documented. Allegations that he later engaged in the slave trade himself appear in some accounts, but historians who have examined the evidence consider the claim historically inaccurate.

Lewis Tappan, the New York abolitionist who organized the legal defense, used the network he built around the case to found the American Missionary Association in eighteen forty-six, five years after the verdict. The committee that formed to defend the Africans had grown into an institution. The institution outlasted the case.